In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • A Partial Inventory of Things That Didn’t Work
  • Eric Severn (bio)

In first grade I tried to have sex with Linda Paine but it didn’t work. Her dad stood six foot eight. His name was Tom Paine. That’s not a joke. That was his name. He passed his colossal genes down to Linda and at seven years old she looked like a giraffe, lanky, awkward, a neck that suggested foraging from high places. We were in her room. We had the door closed. I came up with a game and called it prisoner. The rules were simple: I played prisoner and she played guard. She sat on my chest and held my arms down while I tried to get free. Higher, I kept telling her. You have to sit higher or I’ll get away. She did. She was an excellent guard. Then Tom Paine walked in and towered in the doorway asking us what, exactly, we were doing.

Around that same time I tried to make friends with Andrew, a special needs kid in the third grade, but it didn’t work. It’s hard to say what, exactly, his special needs were, but something in his head wasn’t right, I can tell you that. At lunch, he ran around alone in the cafeteria, throwing crayons, pretending they were tiny, colorful bombs. He didn’t know he had special needs, and that, somehow, made it worse. I felt bad for him. The thought that someone might not be aware of his or her own head not working made me feel alone. They know not what they do, that biblical correlative. Andrew invited me to his house, which was a trailer, at the edge of town, like a Bruce Springsteen song. He owned a number of rats. In his room, he showed me how to throw them in the air like small bombs. To Andrew everything was a bomb. His mom’s name was Barbara and she taught Andrew about the female body by letting him touch her own body. I know this because it was the reason Mom said my friendship with Andrew just wouldn’t work.

Mom was always trying to make things work. She had a boyfriend named Tom, who, at thirty-three, still lived in his mom’s basement. He found God, was reborn, and stopped wearing shoes. When he gave Mom an engagement ring, she said yes, thinking if she tried hard enough, if she committed, it might work. Three days later she gave the ring back. Next came a boyfriend named Mark, a geologist, handsome, but dense as the rocks he studied. It would never work, but Mom tried anyway, for two years. He drove a Jeep without a top and always had stubble. That’s what I remember about Mark. Then came Paul. Smoking, [End Page 153] drinking Paul. Sometimes Paul would drink so much whiskey he’d sit cross-legged on the couch and channel a dead Indian chief, speaking in tongues. But Paul was kind so Mom tried to make it work. Sometimes I would sleep on Mom’s floor and Paul would read Of Mice and Men out loud to us. Everyone seemed happy, or at least content. Paul did Lenny’s voice so well. You should have heard it, full of longing and sadness and confusion. And at the end of the story, when Lenny kills the rabbit, when he accidently strangles it, I felt something so powerful that I asked Paul if I could call him Dad. Tentatively he said yes. I knew then it wouldn’t work.

Basketball didn’t work.

Baseball worked sometimes, but not very well.

Swear words, at first, didn’t work. Once on the playground I heard one of the older kids chanting a captivating song. It went like this: Mother fucker, titty sucker, two-balled bitch / sitting in the corner eating red hot shit / daddy’s in jail, mommy’s sitting on the corner saying titties for sale. I repeated it on the bus to a kid named Gabe, thinking I would feel older or smarter or stronger, but it didn’t work. Instead I...

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