SUSAN HENDERSON is the Managing Editor of the Massachusetts-based print magazine, Night Train. Her work has appeared in Oakland Review's 25th Anniversary Anthology, Zoetrope: All-Story Extra (December 2000 and September 2001), Today's Parent, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Eyeshot, Alsop Review, Happy, Opium (January 2003 and October 2003), Carve Magazine, Monkeybicycle, Hobart, The MacGuffin, Zacatecas: A Review of Contemporary Word, Word Riot, Pig Iron Malt, Mid-South Review, Eleven Bulls, Ink Pot, Moondance, North Dakota Quarterly, The Edward Society, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, as well as in a number of pamphlets and training manuals used at Pittsburgh Action Against Rape.

She is a recipient of an Academy of American Poets award and won an Honorable Mention in the Green Hills Literary Lantern 2003 Fiction Contest as judged by DeWitt Henry.

                                                                                  googling


Sometimes I Google the names of girls who used to torment me in middle school.  I don't really care how they turned out--whether they're happy or in rehab.  I just want confirmation that they're no longer 13. That they’re not giggling around some corner with a pair of scissors and a new scheme.

My first love is still single.  Why does this make me so happy?  His address is right here.  I won’t write, but he’ll be current in my book like we haven’t lost touch.

I see that my cousin who, for the past decade, has been making ceramic birds with bodies made of cast penises has written a description of his artwork, the themes and such.  Whose dicks are these, anyway?  It shouldn't take 40 minutes to read this description.

I Google myself, of course, but my name is so damn common.  Real estate agents and directors of things and someone who’s taken lots of pictures of her Bernese Mountain Dogs.  Here and there some of my stories show up on the search, but never my favorites.

The other day, I was typing a new short story on the computer.  I use details from friends I’ve lost touch with, forget to change their names.  I’m typing away when I get an email from a childhood friend, the very girl I’m writing about.  She said she’d Googled me, read some of my stories and feels like she knows my mother-in-law.

I e-mail her back, laugh about what a good thing it is that my mother-in-law is a techno-phobe.  After I push "Send," I go through my latest story changing her name to some other person I used to know.  Fictional names always sound so made up.

Something about being years away from her makes all of those humid summers playing 7-Up in her front lawn and daring each other to drink the water from her father’s car washing bucket seem like good fun. But honestly, it’s better looking back on it, condensing it into stories and emails, like the fun wasn’t so spread-out.

These days, you can click around and fill in the empty spaces, the times you want to just sit around doing nothing and spying on people you’ve lost touch with, and it’s like you’re doing something.  It’s like you’re back in that blue barn your first love used to live in with his parents--all the colors from the hanging glass ornaments in the windows, where you’d rather have sex than fresh air.  You can spend an entire day living in the past, laughing at how uninteresting the bullies turned out and believing your first love never married because he never got over you.

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© 2003 Susan Henderson