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Table of Contents

L e o n a r d O w e n s I I I

T h e C h i l d h o o d o f H a r o l d J e b e d i a h K e s t r e l | 3

A l e x E n d e r

T h e W e e p i n g W o m a n | 1 1

A l e x a n d e r C e n d r o w s k i

H o t S h i t G e t s H o t | 1 7

R a c h e l l e G a r z a

A n d T h e n H e T o l d M e A b o u t T h e N i g h t | 2 1

J o e y T u f a n o

A N i g h t i n t h e F i r s t S n o w f a l l | 2 5

A l l i s o n W a l l a c e

A R e d C o o l e r w i t h B i r d H e p a t i t i s | 3 1

Copyr igh t © 2014 Team Ke s t r e lAl l r i gh t s r e se rved .

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The Childhood of Harold Jebediah Kestrel

An Account by Leonard Owens III

Harold’s parents, both of whom were

whiter than WonderBread inside and out and

wore soda bottle lenses to see with, cranked blue-

eyed soul music over the hi-fi all weekend every

weekend, late into Saturday nights, shimmying

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hips asynchronously across the l iving room rug

as Harold and his best friend, Jorge, sipped

Fresca cans on the loveseat and didn’t partake in

the fondue.

If the two young lads happened to chance

upon a moment to slip out, Jorge would search

out an empty metal garbage can and thick palm

fronds and teach Harold the secret drum rhythms

of Venezuela as mangy cats prowled for scraps or

another’s heat. Their syncopated clanging would

compete against Harold’s parents for noisiest

nuisance on the avenue, and one night the police

came and wrote a citation on a pink square that

Harold’s father tore up in quarters—promptly

following a peek through the blinds to ensure

officers Melendez and Cruzé had turned the

corner in their squad car.

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Harold’s mother, Anastasia, grew up with

three brothers (two older and one her junior), all

very fit and masculine boys, two of whom earned

endless honors for football while the other led

the tennis team to nationals, thrice. Whether

veracious or not, rumors abounded that the

brothers would swirly the heads of any boy who

flirted with her and saw off the gonads of the

brazen chap who so much as hugged her, even

purely platonically, as was the case when she and

Jim Wentley won 2 n d place in the debate against

Moose Tracks Prep, and Jim simply wanted to

demonstrate his gratitude at her adept handling of

the unexpected topic “To Nuke Now or To Nuke

Later,” and so he hugged her—a half-hug to be

exact—then wasn’t seen in the halls for a week,

and poor Anastasia, stricken with guilt and

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disquiet , biked across town to his house, where

Jim’s blue racing bike lay in the yard and no one

answered her 97 knocks.

Needless to mention, Anastasia met

Harold’s father, Gregory Kestrel, during t ime

spent at an infinitesimal l iberal arts college,

which she chose based on two criteria: i t was

1,437 miles from her hometown and there were

zero athletic programs, not even intramural

badminton, leaving her brothers with li ttle to no

interest in ever visiting her there.

Gregory was the first boy with whom

Anastasia knew carnal relations; he was also the

first to ask her out, during her second week as

they exited their Microcosms of Humanity Class.

Harold doesn’t know much of this. In fact,

his mind is privy to rather li ttle biographical data

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regarding his parents’ pasts. While he swayed in

the warmth of his mother’s womb, she read a new

age book about mothering that instructed, above

all others, two simple rules: “1) Don’t give

answers until they ask questions, thus fostering

an ever-inquisit ive mind from the earliest ages,

and 2) don’t answer the questions ever, thereby

reinforcing the harsh reali ty that solutions to the

great questions are highly unlikely and not to be

expected so easily.” What Harold does know

about his parents he gleaned from a closeted

shoebox late one evening after his mom and dad

experimented with laced margaritas for the first

(and final) time. The supposedly relevant details

he discovered are as such: the .271 lifetime

batting average found on the back of a baseball

card for one Conrad Quizkowlski; the chamomile

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scent which still clung to the tattered

handkerchief; and one letter penned with

incomprehensible cursive, which Harold still

presumed was of a romantic nature and bestowed

upon his mother. Following these discoveries,

Harold reformulated his origins thusly: his

mother clearly found employment sell ing

cigarettes at the stadium where Conrad

Quizkowlski played, enchanting his eye and,

subsequently, driving his batting average beneath

the league median; one night, after bunting home

the winning run, Conrad, ripe with vigor and

vitality, found the nerve to approach Anastasia,

in the ladies room, where he seduced her in quick

order before taking her out to tea, during which

time he offered his kerchief so that she may wipe

the dribbles from her dimpled chin as they

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giggled at passersby and locked fingers in his

lap. As for the letter, Harold deduced that it came

sometime after his mother had revealed her

impending pregnancy and Conrad only felt it

honorable to, in his own writing with battered

baseball player fingers, inform of his immediate

request to be traded to a team in Hawaii, where

coconuts are hit instead of baseballs. Of course,

Harold’s line of thought led to just one logical

outcome: that he was, without doubt, the

illegit imate son of the great Conrad Quizkowlski

and that the man who drove him to school daily

was the buffoon his mother had baited after

Conrad followed his manly urges far westward.

With this newfound information, Harold

soon gleefully regaled his playground pals with

his new and exciting l ineage. Above all else and

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all odds, Harold Jebediah Kestrel was a very

creative boy.

And the shoebox belonged to his father, by

the way.

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The Weeping Woman

An Account by Alex Ender

Living in Corpus Christi squelched much

of Harold Jebediah Kestrel’s eager 20s—

construction jobs were scarce, and Harold

bounced from couch to dorm to apartment to

basement to alley to couches again.

Rather than the body of Christ, Jeb

developed the other six pack—Lone Star, the

national beer of Texas, to be exact.

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At a hopefully female laden soirée turned

stag party, Harold slammed thirteen cans of Lone

Star. There, Harold met a young Latino named

Manual, which was later corrected 10 times

between the man himself and friends at the party.

Manual was an expert junkyarder and jury rigger

who could read very well, much better than Yeb,

but his speaking voice confused Harold and the

other Texan stags.

Despite annunciations, Manual informed

Harold there was work to be had, not too far

south, to which Harold slurred that he’d dahoo

urrthin ta urn tahrucks n semwuhr ta suhleep .

Tiny rays of heat scorched his eyelids. He

could make out purple and red and orange

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members drawn on his forearms and sprayed his

limbs with lit tle room to kink out.

The latch of the trunk popped open. No one

was there. The car door would not open.

Harold spouted the name Jorge to several

folk—they pointed down the dirt road or tugged

at their clothing or thumbed at restaurants and

shops or shrugged in despondence.

Harold stumbled upon a small playhouse.

He fumbled over words to the waiter, somehow

ordering churros. He lamented the lack of

cinnamon sugar but found their dulce de leche

extravagant.

The cheap floor l ights dimmed. A man with

a purple velvet suit and lispy utterances gave an

introduction speech. Harold ignored him and

ordered another round of churros, and a tequila.

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The stage hosted a dirty bathtub and a few

children playing in cellophane water. Harold

scoffed at the man playing their father who

rejoiced the happiness of his family and sang

with a low baritone.

A slender woman with heavy eyebrows

takes his place. Murky makeup caked her skin,

and her white dress fi t too t ightly around her

waist. She drowned all of the children in the

cellophane and sang about i t.

Harold stood up, knocking the churros to

the ground. He nearly drowned in the one year

he was a boy scout and went on a canoeing trip.

When leaving the river bank, the canoe t ipped

over into swampy waters. He could not see the

sky or even his own arm. His hands splashed

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above the murk until his father pulled him out

and called him a pussy.

He screamed about crocodiles in his sleep

for the next two weeks.

The woman left the stage. Her once-

stricken lover returned and shouted La Llorona,

La Llorona, La Llorona! Harold flipped the table

over, scaring the locals and sending the actors

away.

The owner and some waiters threw Harold

face down into the dirt road. He looked up into

the cloud of dust to see the tight white dress, her

face peering down at him. She took him home and

undressed him, herself. Her curves folded each

other at the waist . Harold, stil l hungry from the

fallen churros, felt hungry for her saucy butt, and

took a soft bite.

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Manuel barged through the front door and

screamed at her. When Harold hailed Manual, his

face washed over with relief. Manuel put his arm

around Harold, shook him favorably, and left out

the front door. His hermana? Good enough for

Yeb. Everyone on the dirt road heard Harold yell

La Llorona, La Llorona, La Llorona!

He and Manuel went on to build wells and

other utili ties for the people. He stayed on

Manuel’s couch—and sometimes his sister’s bed

—for two years before going back across the

border to Texas—in Manuel’s trunk, of course.

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Hot Shit Gets Hot

An Account by Alex Cendrowski

Despite his admittedly custodial

occupation, Harold Jebediah Kestrel is humble

master over approximately 37-million American

dollars. I only say “approximately”, because he

still has not converted it from Japanese yen, and,

to be frank, conversion rates between these

countries are turbulent at the best of times. It is

not currently the best of times.

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In 1992, Harold was, naturally, in Tokyo,

following his forced removal from the Guns N’

Roses stage crew (he had, truly, never been a fan

of Axl Rose, finding him too aggressive for his

taste—Slash was cool). Tokyo seemed the ideal

place to be in 1992, especially for those sane

human beings who did not know the language. He

found the people far more accommodating to an

acceptably Kestrel l ifestyle than America had

ever been, and, besides, the food was fantastic.

Sushi, gyoza, yakitori, all accompanied by hot

soba. Soba, of course, was served near-boiling—

at least the kind Harold appreciated—leading to

more than a few burns for his over-eager tongue.

This created a kind of vicious cycle of burning

for Harold: with a swelled tongue, he could no

longer adequately blow on the soba to cool i t,

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and yet he stil l wished to eat it quickly, resulting

in, at its worst , near second-degree tongue

damage.

In a haste to solve this issue, he purchased

a handheld fan from a tourist attraction’s

streetcar, and proceeded to tape it to his wrist in

such a way that a simple flick of a switch would

blow cool air towards his hand, and thus, the

soba at the end of his chopsticks. As fate would

have i t, a Japanese businessman seeking to drown

his own failure-sorrows in Soba, noticed the

trick. He struck up a deal with Harold to create a

prototype and submit it to a patent board. Harold,

who, again, did not speak the language, merely

nodded and eventually handed over his telephone

information. Of course, the simplistic wrist-fan

became the inspiration for the now-explosive line

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of Wrist-Food-Coolant Products ™. Overnight, i t

seemed, his invention became a success, and

Harold found himself seemingly drowning in yen.

Overwhelmed by his sudden wealth, and by what

promised to be a complication of an otherwise

happy life, Harold returned to the states with

over four bil lion yen in his bank account, where

he took up custodial work as a way to “get away

from it all .”

Over these twenty-two years, the yen has

been building interest, piling up in his bank

account, where it remains untouched, aside from

the continued cut of profits from his Japanese

business partner (whose name escapes Kestrel’s

mind). Harold lives in a humble, single-story

abode on Jax Beach, where he sti ll enjoys an

occasional hot soba.

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An d Th en He To l d M e A bou t Th e N igh t

An Account by Rachelle Garza

For a short time in his forties, probably

around forty-four, or maybe forty-seven, he took

up residence outside of Washington, D.C. Jeb

would eat dinner at J.Gilbert’s, the local watering

hole. He had a standing reservation, Thursdays at

7:25 P.M., with the same server, and the same

order. Harold Jebediah Kestrel prefers his steak,

bone in rib-eye, served well done alongside

seared scallops, scampi style, with extra garlic

and lemon.

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J.Gilbert’s was rumored to be the hangout

for not only CIA operatives from just down

Dolley Madison Boulevard but a favorite for

Russian KGB operatives who liked to keep tabs

on said CIA folk. You can imagine the tension in

the room wondering if your buxom bartender was

more l ikely to be Betsy Fulcher from Jersey or

really undercover operative Varinka Aslanov

from Moscow.

One evening after eating his surf and turf

and drinking far too many amaretto sours, Jeb

took it upon himself to dismiss the regularly

scheduled lounge singer and belt out his best

version of Purple Rain into the microphone. He

made it from I to rain without a single protest ,

from patron or management.

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His voice was a perfect cross between

Michigan J. Frog and Lionel Richie. The long

banquet table full of vodka’d Ruskies really dug

his performance. That group never liked

anything. The head of the table invited Jeb over

for a few shots, a few women, and some travel

stories. Brought up in the conversation were the

few months he had spent in Osaka, eating Soba

and frequenting Japanese brothels. Jeb had

befriended a businessman by the name of Daisuke

Inoue; they enjoyed the same type of women.

Jeb told the Russian about the machine that

Inoue had invented: a simple box consisting of an

amplifier, microphone, and an eight-track car

stereo. That night at J.Gilbert’s Jeb struck a deal

to begin importing the first Karaoke machines to

the United States.

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On any given Thursday you can find

Harold Jebediah Kestrel wrapping up Karaoke

night at his local Dick’s Wings with the same

rendition of Purple Rain.

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A Night in the First Snowfall

An Account by Joey Tufano

In an effort to see more of the world and

connect with old friends from his favorite local

restaurant, Jeb bought two round-trip tickets to

Zhukovsky, a city southeast of Moscow. Neither

ticket was for him. The first t icket was for the

waiter that attended the dinner orders of his two

acquaintances across the restaurant—a Polish

gentleman that hung his head over his notepad from

the weight of his glasses, who spoke Polish fluently

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and knew more Russian than English. The second

ticket was for a friend of a friend, someone Jeb

knew through Jorge. Whereas the Polish waiter

resembled a man well-versed in the intricacies of the

world—Jeb often imagined that the man’s glasses

pinched at the poles of his globe-shaped head—

Jorge’s friend believed himself the very first envoy

between modern-day Homo sapiens and the next

human link on the evolutionary scale. Whenever this

friend recalled his great success double majoring in

Polish and International Studies (honoring his

heritage), he would sway his coattails back and

forth, lost in his proud thoughts—earning him the

nickname Rat. With prompting, Jeb bought the

waiter’s confidence, and the opportunity to visit

another country for the first time was incentive

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enough for Rat. Jeb bought a one-way ticket for

himself.

The three men sat down with the two Russian

men and ordered drinks. The tavern was a makeshift

home turned haven for off-duty pilots, and rumored

to have been the favorite watering hole for famous

Soviet miner Alexey Stakhanov. As Rat tried to

order a pint of Smirnoff, Jeb and the waiter tapped

glasses with the familiar-faced Ruskies, turning the

heads of two older men playing chess near the door

and one bug-eyed young man clicking furiously at

his typewriter by a dwindling fire. In a kind of

happy stupor, the Russians exchanged stories with

the three men. Jeb listened to them as they spoke in

a tongue he didn’t understand, where every word

seemed like an interjection, debate, or a passionate

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display of ideas. From here, the waiter would

translate their words into Polish (or English

whenever they spoke of things he recognized from

his years in the service industry: namely, food and

drink. And women). If Rat wasn’t too flushed or

caught up in tapping his foot to an unheard rhythm,

he would translate the waiter’s reliable Polish into

questionable English. And just like in D.C.,

regardless of whether he understood the pokes and

prods of their stories and words, Jeb bought the

Russian men drink after drink to prompt an ease

with speaking.

When the cold night led inevitably to a

discussion about women, the Russians grew

noticeably hushed, and one had a pained look on his

face. Jeb felt that his instigation into the subject was

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too forced, and that he was to blame for the sudden

change in mood—sometimes, without realizing it,

Jeb talked about current near-and-dears when a

conversation began to lull . He made Rat and the

waiter say how he never meant to cause the men any

sorrow. When this remark made no impressionable

difference to them, Jeb took a sip of his drink,

thought for a moment, held his chest in a fashion

resembling a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance,

and said out how he only longs for a good woman,

hoping that this statement would appeal to the

unknown circumstances burdening their thoughts.

Rat’s slurred translation of “longs” became the

Polish word for “desires”, and shortly after raising

his head to say the sentence, his neck felt weak and

his head slammed onto the counter. The waiter,

overcome more by drowsiness than drink, mumbled

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into the palm of his hand that held up his head,

unknowingly turning the Polish word “desires” into

the Russian word “lusts”. The bar was silent for

several seconds. Suddenly, the two Russian men

broke into loud laughter. Jeb smiled confusedly and

the waiter woke slightly from his daze—Rat

remained facedown. One man wagged his pointer

finger at Jeb, and they both talked in Russian as they

got up from the bar to put on their coats. Out of

courtesy, Jeb did the same. But the men threw their

arms over his shoulders, pat him on the chest, and

began leading him out of the bar with smiles on their

faces. And just as the first snow of the year began to

fall on the back roads of the Russian province, Jeb

walked with the two men he considered his friends

to a place with predictably more females than the

bar would ever have.

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A Red Cooler with Bird Hepatitis

An Account by Allison Wallace

Harold Jebediah Kestrel became obsessed

with a certain type of waterfowl after visiting

Canada for the 1976 Summer Olympics.

While driving around the UNF campus in

search of his great nephew, he came upon the

creatures as they waddled across the road.

Enamored, Jeb parked his car in the middle of the

street and walked toward the flock of geese. The

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Canadian geese were different from these, less

friendly. UNF geese were unafraid of humans and

were quickly becoming the majority of the

campus’ population.

At this, Jeb knew what he must do. He

applied for an on-campus job, becoming a

custodian shortly after.

He loved to drive his golf cart to the green

and spend quality t ime with the geese. Often, he

fed them gluten-free bread (so as to save them

from leaky gut syndrome) and let water pour onto

their backs from the gaps his missing teeth left

behind.

There was a certain gosling he grew fond

of, one he finally captured and brought home. He

named her Jadzia Pinzer Kestrel . Jadzia roamed

around Jeb’s Jacksonville Beach abode, prodding

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Jeb’s feathered pillows with her beak as if they

were her siblings. Sometimes Jeb would take

Jadzia for walks down the beach while the sun

rose. He had to keep Jadzia on a leash because he

feared she’d escape into the ocean and drown in

its undercurrent. She wasn’t used to such rough

waters.

Jadzia was Jeb’s only companion for a few

months, until he noticed how lethargic she

became. Soon she showed signs of anorexia and

secreted white diarrhea. Without a second

thought, Jeb rushed her to Beaches Animal

Clinic, where he was informed Jadzia had

Derzy’s Disease, a common form of waterfowl

hepatitis with a high mortali ty rate.

Jeb brought Jadzia back to the green to say

goodbye to her family. He let her eat soba for the

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first time that night. After nibbling one noodle,

Jadzia shit across the room and onto Jeb’s sl iding

glass door.

The taxidermist did a wonderful job

preserving Jadzia’s lit tle body once she died.

When you come across Jeb at UNF today,

you’ll find a red cooler in his possession. He

carries it wherever he goes, and sets i t in the

passenger seat while driving the golf cart. During

his lunch break, he feeds pieces of flax seed

bread to the cooler while he slurps soba from a

Tupperware bowl. If you get close enough to look

inside, you’ll realize that Jadzia l ives on—at

least in Jeb’s mind.

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