SPECIAL FEATURE
Innovative Fiction 21 Writers
Amy Hempel, Guest Editor
Introduction
Innovative fiction – that is what AQR editor Ronald Spatz invited me to solicit for this special fiction section. I looked for work to include that was not only new in some important way to a reader, but also work that was new to the author. And in fact, there is something new in everything featured here. For poet Timothy Liu, the act of writing fiction at all is new – see the excerpts from his novel, House of Mirrors. For National Book Award-winner Lily Tuck, writing a story in the form of a memoir is new for her.
Christopher Kennedy contributed pieces that can be called, accurately, prose poems or short-short stories. Julia Slavin’s thinking is never tired, always new and unlike anything anyone else is coming up with; I’m thrilled to have two stories by her.
There are writers here who are being published for the first time, including Breanna Deforest, Megan Mayhew-Bergman, and Nick Falgout – a range of voice and territory. And a particular pleasure: a story from Patricia Lear that is a prequel to her prize-winning contemporary classic, “After Memphis.”
Of course “new” is not enough. We were looking for fiction that was visceral and visual (Mi Ditmar), that joins nerve and insight (Michael Ahn), that is darkly funny (Joe Stracci), that does not back away from compassion. This last brought John Rybicki to mind. A poet writing prose, he is often my model for bringing one’s heart to the page. And all of the writing in this section amplifies the possibilities of what a story can be.
Amy Hempel
Amy Hempel has been a contributing editor to Alaska Quarterly Review since 1989. She is the author of four influential collections of short fiction: Reasons to Live (1985); At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990); Tumble Home (1997); and The Dog of the Marriage (2005). Her short story, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” is one of the most extensively anthologized stories of the last quarter century. Hempel is the recipient of a wide range of literary awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a United States Artists Fellowship. She won the Ambassador Award for best fiction of 2007 for her Collected Stories, which was also named as one of The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year. In 2008, she won the Rea Award for the Short Story, and in 2009, she won the PEN/Malamud Award for the Short Story. She teaches writing at Bennington and at Harvard.
No One Will Ever Marry You, You Know by Patricia Lear
Even as Kathy Klyce and I sat sprawled out in the backseat of her mother’s Studebaker car, I knew something. Even with us smelling of horse sweat, saddle leather and hay, and slathered over with that essence of summer, Coppertone, it was there. Looking out the car window at the many cotton fields and filling stations and shacks and unpainted, weathered country stores that we were passing by on our way from the polo field to the Country Club, red clay gritting our teeth, what is true is that no one would have concurred with me about whatever it was that I was feeling even if I could have found words to put it to, and I could easily have been talked out of it had anyone had the interest to address these kinds of things with me, but those that were close in my life rarely went further than to comment on how minuscule the blips were that constituted the workings of my mind, and anyway at this particular time it was subtle, it was barely there, this thing I am talking about, faint to non-existent, so I am only bringing it up to pinpoint to myself when this particular thing was first noted.
Riding the horses, that’s all we wanted to do, go and ride the horses. All that morning we had been running Kathy Klyce’s dad’s polo ponies up and down the polo field out in Germantown, and after us making hairpin rights and hairpin lefts on those soft-mouthed ponies, soon enough the day got blistering, the horses’ coats blackened, sweat trickled down our temples and made rivulets in the middle of our chests, and where we wanted to go next was to the Country Club swimming pool which was fine with Mrs. Klyce who was used to driving kids all over the place, and so she swung back to get us on her way from the grocery store to the beauty shop, us leaving our steeds heat-crazed and heaving to be walked and watered by the stable boys in loopy circles in a little leaf-fingering breeze.
But even parched, sunburned, and limp, and with that thing intimating itself, I felt full, full to bursting – with the morning, with the horses, with the afternoon we were going to have, and no matter what else, I felt like I had really done something with my life that morning. I felt that this was a day that counted, me with K. K. slouching down in the leather seats knotting our shirttails above our belt buckles, it was one of those fine moments in time when I had really experienced something. I had gotten up and out of bed and been out while the dew was still on the ground and I had really experienced something (not everybody does), and with us thundering up and down the polo field on those horses, with their tails flicking up and down, with our rears slipping around on those polished saddles, hooves throwing mud clods up in the air, I had put another notch on the times of my life that I could draw on forevermore. All I am saying for now to you is that there was a time.
When we began our sweep up the long swooping driveway of the Memphis Country Club, Kathy Klyce and I lolled skin-on-skin against each other with each gentle switchback curve, sprinklers throwing ropes of water on the grounds misted us thankfully through the open car windows.
Now we could swim, now we could have our Cokes, now we could work on our tans. We could order lunch and sign for it with our dad’s club membership numbers – and my dad, the one thing he always felt good about was seeing my brother and me living the Country Club life, and all that went with the Country Club life – us having tennis lessons with the pro, playing gin rummy around the pool, having shrimp cocktails in the main dining room, and drinks up on the large terrace after a day in the sun. It gave him satisfaction, was a marker on the trajectory of what course he had set for himself while bombing the Germans in the war, and so, good for him! And we did live that kind of life, my brother and me, as if we were born to it. We took to it all – poolside cheeseburgers delivered on trays with onion rings, chocolate malts – and not like we had slunk in like a couple of imposters either, but like we were born to it.
We were signing in with the pool guard and getting our towels when I saw my older brother sitting in a wrought iron chaise blaring to the sun his soft puffy nipples. Sitting next to him was my Cousin Henry who sat with his lower lip pushed out, chin on chest, looking out at the world from under the bill of a cap with a Confederate flag on the front.
A transistor radio, (“There’s a summer place, a summer place, where we can go – la, la,”) (it would not have been theirs) perfumed the air with teenage romance over the din of swimming pool noise as is at every swimming pool I have ever been to.
They both said, “Aw, no,” in “aw, no voices” when they saw us, holding us in their sights with disgust simply because of our existence. Either one of them would just as soon drop me with a fist to the stomach as say, “Hello, young miss, how was your morning on horseback?”
They had likely been out at a dance the night before dancing girls in net strapless dresses around at the University Club, something that was new to them but something they were doing more and more of as they were at that stage of life. And all that morning, they had probably spent working on some steps they had started digging with shovels in the big hill behind our house that went down to the train tracks, or making their own bullets for their 22’s – melting lead over a Bunsen burner, pouring it into the wooden molds, and filling each bullet with gunpowder, and then putting them into their rifles and shooting squirrels.
I might want to do these things too. At one time or another I had tried most everything my brother did, but they were too hard.
Kathy Klyce and I looked “aw, no faces” back at them and stomped on through the gate with our blister-manufacturing boots, although truthfully to be told, there was sort of a thrill always at seeing my older brother – the tangles, the fights, the scuffles, the wrestling, the punches, the you stinks. There were the times when he would pull me out from where I would be hiding under his bed and squeeze my arm to hold me down and lean his lips over mine, escaping saliva threads dangling cold, and I would have to thrash to get an arm free to get hold of one of his fingers to bend back – it was all great, all consuming too, with our mother trying to keep us apart, or me, just keep me away from him.
We sat down on the pool tiles and pulled our boots off, then fought ourselves out of our riding pants all the way down to where we had on our Jantzen swimsuits. We then kicked the detritus out of the way into the swimming pool shrubbery and got our Bandaid-covered feet as fast as we could down the tiled steps and into the pool, not stopping until we could bend our knees and seaweed our hair out from our heads and feel the icy cold pinprick itself deep into where each strand was stuck into our skulls.
There was no such thing as too cold for us right then. We would have wished for icebergs to be floating in that pool, that would have been fine with us right then, icebergs to wrap our burning arms and legs around and lean our foreheads up against.
Kathy finally surfaced long enough to wave her arm for the pool boy to go and get us some Cokes, her hair turned a merlot by the faceted water, and after a while of us standing around and waiting for our Cokes, we actually got cold so we water-walked our way over to the steps and climbed out of the pool, our Jujube-nipples loudly broadcasting to the lifeguards: soon enough, you will be rubbing us with the stubble of your chins.
Sway-backing our stomachs flat on the tiles, the sun thoughtfully settled baby-girl coverlets over us, and nearby pool water slapped reverberating gentle pats on our backs. Friendly lifeguard feet stepped over us whispering, “heartbreakers for sure,” smiles smiled at us, and a narcotic blend of chlorine and jasmine provided aromatherapy as my brother bull-horned from where he was sunk deep into his chaise, “Move, you morons, before somebody breaks their neck falling over you,” and all this by then had us drooling out the sides of our mouths with contentment.
Now that I think back on it, here’s how it should have gone. One or the other one of them could have dropped down beside my bed at night when I was snuggled in, riding clothes hanging from the bedpost, one or the other of them, I mean I might have taken my dip shit brother for this, and they could have said something like, “Taylor, since you are a full-fledged member of our family, with rights, I will tell you some things you should know.”
Then some easy stuff, but stuff that I had always wanted to know just to lock in my interest and impart confidence. They could have started off with something such as our house cost $58,000 and might go now for $70,000. I weigh (my mom speaking) 122 pounds but I am going to get back to 118 like when I was at my best since my Jimmy Galanos has been pulling at the waist. My diamond wedding ring is just a little under a carat but the stone is very, very good. We went for quality. Frankly, I will have to look it up in my important papers if you want to know its value, and I am sure it has appreciated from what we paid for it, which will be very nice for you one day.
But another way it could have gone would have been . . . how about this? My dad taking me to the movies – it would have been a war movie, or maybe this once, he could have taken a break from the war movies for something I might be interested in, and he could perhaps have said en route to our first stop before the movie, the mirrored purple store front of Mrs. Stover’s Candies, he could have said, “I will explain what’s going on because I understand your antennae are super sharp, you being my off-spring and all, and not the nincompoop I see most young people are everywhere these days, and I will explain, ad nauseam, I will explain, you got me for as long as you need me, kiddo, until all of your questions are answered, and of course, Lord knows, you have a say in these sorts of things because you are our darling angel and we wouldn’t want you to be confused or have any anxiety about anything that is avoidable and might scar you for life.”
After a while, Kathy made me roll over on my towel to see where our Cokes were. “I can’t move a muscle,” she said, and while looking all around for the waiter I caught sight of my mother clip-clopping in spectator pumps across the flagstone terrace up by the main clubhouse. Up there with her was my Aunt Peg dressed in white linen and jawbreaker-sized pearls. She had winged-back hair like Queen Elizabeth. They were heading towards the open French doors that led into the card room where the ladies held their bridge club luncheon.
I was drawn upright by the sight of them, a stunning visual, and was drawn to studying my mom – what she was wearing, how she looked picking her way across the flagstones in her high heels. I had forgotten she was going to be here this day though that is something she would have told me. Usually to me, it was just my mom I would see, as in, there goes my dumb old mom, but sometimes, like this one, I would actually get weak in the knees with love when I would catch sight of her in the distance on the clubhouse terrace in her Bill Blass dresses, or Norman Norell or B. H. Wragge from the Helen Shop in Memphis.
This one day she really caught my attention and, “There’s my mom,” I murmured to Kathy Klyce, trying to hide how incredibly struck I was by her up there on the terrace.
“She cleans up well,” mumbled Kathy, gelled and sienna’ed from some aluminum-tubed sunscreen somebody had forgotten next to where we were. Rolling an eyeball up towards the terrace, she said, “Isn’t that your aunt, too?”
Actually this day I was weak in the knees for both of them, my mom and my Aunt Peg, as they both picked their way across the terrace carrying calfskin handbags in the crooks of their arms.
“Mom!” I yelled up over all the pool racket, and how she heard me I don’t know, but she did, and she turned and started searching the faces down around the pool area, mostly in the pool to see if it was my face that she would now have to save from drowning like she had to do one other time, and not that long ago either.
“I am going to brain you,” said my brother from where he was lying now with a towel over his face.
“Shut up, stupe,” I said, which is what my dad called him when he wasn’t pumping my brother up about his amazing future. “Stupe, hey stupe,” my dad would say, so that is what I seized upon to yell back at him at the Memphis Country Club swimming pool . . . stupe, stupid, stupe, stupidy, stupe.
Kathy groaned, and I knew she was about ready to tell me to go do my yelling over on the other side of the pool area, maybe by the baby pool. Sometimes some of the things I did were beginning to bother her.
As my brother pulled the towel off his face to come and brain me, the pool waiter shoved a luncheon menu in his hands, then swiveled off to some other duty.
My mom waved, short beauty shop hair moving just a little, and then she inclined her head to Aunt Peg for a moment, then turned back towards me to start picking her way down the wide stone staircase her lightly curving fingers sliding on the carved marble banisters, and down she came on the flagstone walk to the pool area where she unlatched the little iron pool gate. With each step, pride expanded the ribs of my chest. She was wearing a Trigere, and Kathy, she immediately was on her feet with good manners until my mother was right on top of her saying, “Kathy, sit down, dear, go on now, sit down,” and then my mom, her Shalimar riding air currents up my nose, ran her hand down the back of her skirt and lowered herself down in a chaise beside where Kathy and I were settled.
They went back and forth on the topic of Kathy’s family for a while, then came the bowling ball. “Taylor, I have a feeling we might have some news for you but I can’t tell you yet. I shouldn’t be saying any of this, so in fact, now that I think of it, forget I said anything.”
That was it. I knew it. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew. I knew I knew. I didn’t know exactly what I knew, but I knew.
My mom reached in her purse and pulled out a Chesterfield cigarette and glanced back up at the terrace to see if she was holding up any of the bridge ladies. A pool waiter snapped to attention and whipped out a lighter. My mom then waved over at my brother and cousin, quickly blowing out smoke from the side of her mouth. He made her smile since he was for some reason irresistible to her, utterly irresistible – my brother with his Civil War acumen, trumpet playing talents, bus-transferring knowledge, the way he looked in his white tux jacket, and all that he could build in his room out of balsa wood, dope and airplane glue.
“Did you boys have a nice time last night? Put a towel over your shoulders, come on now, boys, do it. If you get burned again, you are going to blister and we remember what that was like,” said my mother. Some minor shifting and white terry cloth flapping went on over there.
“What’s going on?” said my brother, vaguely alert while still engrossed in the snack bar menu.
“You know a little something about this, son,” said my mom.
“I thought that was over and done with,” said my brother, rolling over so he could see us.
“Nothing’s settled so let’s just drop it,” said my mother.
“Let’s do,” said my brother.
“Let’s just say, for fun, that it’s over and done with,” said my mother.
“It better stay this way,” said my brother.
A large lady started jerking her chaise around struggling to reposition the slant without getting up. A lifeguard was rushing to her aid.
All of a sudden behind my brother, unbeknownst to him, like a giant stealth bomber, was my dad standing in tennis whites, bouncing a tennis ball up and down with the flat of his racket. There was a power struggle going on between him and his partners down at the ice cream factory. We heard about it driving around in the car, at the dinner table, saw it in the phone being torn out of the wall, in how he became poor old oppressed him when he had to be alone with us, all of which was just part of how it was for us, my brother and me, and so we stayed as far away from him as we could and went our own ways, which was fine with us, us leading happy lives in Memphis, us being happy campers in Memphis.
The pool waiter was now back standing in front of my brother who was ordering two double cheeseburgers with everything, yet I knew his big fat satellite ears were still twisted in our direction in case my mother tried anything else about the thing we were dropping. My dad just stood behind my brother, my dad who had the kind of condensed fat spackled all over him that served only to bolt him to the tennis court more so he could better smash balls back across the net and down the throat of his opponent.
“Where are our Cokes?” I said, vaguely unnerved by this whole circus. “Why’s he over there taking their lunch order and not even brought our Cokes yet? What’s wrong with the help around here anyway? You did order the Cokes, didn’t you?” I said to Kathy.
I could hear my brother saying, “And I want the large chocolate malt, and an order of French fries. And we’ll be ordering dessert later. I will take the malt right away though, okay? Don’t wait with it. Now, tell him what you want, Hank?”
“Oh, so it’s my turn now?” said Henry. “Do you think there will be any food left out there in the kitchen for me after they use it all up fixing yours? They’re going to have to make a trip to the store.”
Spotting my dad, my mom (who was such a girl!) touched her collar to see if it was lying like Pauline Trigere intended it to be, and she then smiled like there was nobody else in the world she would rather see at this moment in her whole life than my dad – although she acted like that with almost everyone she saw.
My dad went over and gave my mom a shoulder squeeze, and then said a completely tickled hello to some people he knew sitting around the pool, and then he came back to all of us, acting like we were as delight-worthy as anybody. “I have a game now, but who wants to go to the Pig ’n Whistle later for dinner? I feel like some barbeque. Anyone else like that idea?”
He looked much like Cary Grant.
The waiter arrived with the first course of my brother’s order, the malt, which my brother grabbed and immediately slapped his lips around the straw to suck hard pulls, all the while he and Henry had turned around their big heads and were nodding, yes, they would, uh-hmmm, yessir, they surely would like to go to the Pig ’n Whistle, when?
“When do you think you will be done,” said my mom. My dad, seeing her there looking like she did, coral nails cupping her knees, must have been glad that she had spent $800 on that Pauline Trigere. I knew because I was at the Helen Shop with her when she bought it.
“Oh, I would say – ,” he said, darkening, I watched, as he was actually focusing long and hard on my brother who was busily making room on his side table for his lunch order the waiter was holding in a line of plastic waxpaper-lined lattice baskets that balanced up his arm, “ – oh, let’s say, around dusk?”
“You think you know who might be there?” I said while Kathy was already showing crazed enthusiasm with her eyes.
“Yeah, and if he catches sight of you two, he will call his bodyguards and beat your brains out,” said my brother, maneuvering a French fry into the cavern of his mouth without so much as stabbing himself in the cheek. Then he switched gears and was poking and sucking on his straw around to where there was still some snow-banked malt in the bottom of his malt glass.
“Girls, you are pipe dreaming,” said my dad, winking at my mom. “I can tell you right now he won’t be there. But listen, be that as it may, I’ve got to go and even up the score with Walt up there. We’ll gather up on the terrace at 5:00.”
My dad turned with one more glance back at my brother (poke, suck, suck, suck), wheels turning, and then hitting the racket up alongside his thigh, he did a dash up the lawn towards the tennis courts.
“Is he gone?” asked my brother.
“Seems so,” said Henry, scrunching together the bill of his cap.
“Thank you so much for the dinner invitation,” said Kathy when she came back from using the pool phone. “But mama’s got her college roommate from Randolph Macon in town tonight and she has a daughter I have to be at dinner with.”
“Wha-a-a-a-a-t–?” I said to her. “Whaaaaa-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-t?!!”
“Shut up,” said my brother. “I can’t stand you.”
“The pits,” Kathy cup-handed over at me, and with that our Cokes arrived. And the Cokes, they were so perfectly chilled, they had ice shards inside the bottles. And even though the waiter left glasses and a bucket of ice, I shot my hand out for an open bottle and threw my head back and downed half of it in one gulp.
“Give me that!” said my mom, who took a glass off the tray and poured my Coke in it, stuck a napkin under it, and handed the whole thing back to me. “Now, what do you say?”
And then my mom stood up, and went back up the staircase to the terrace and on into the room where the bridge club was starting their bridge club luncheon.
In the Cadillac, at dusk, with tennis rackets and cans of balls and towels and headbands and wristbands rolling around loose in the trunk, we were driving down Union Avenue heading for the Pig ’n Whistle. Cicadas had hooked their tiny claws into the bark of the arcing trees over the parkway and they were chanting a layered Buddhist chant, and nothing was lovelier than that hushed time of day, in summer, in Memphis, with its shadings and shadowings and fragrancings and softnesses and caressingnesses.
In the backseat, my brother and Henry and me, my brother was wearing his tux jacket over an old Confederate flag t‑shirt.
Unfortunately my dad had gotten called off the tennis courts and had to go back down to his office at the ice cream factory to put a stop to whatever thing his partners were about to try, something sure to tank the whole business and send us to the poor house.
When we pulled over for gas on our way to the Pig ’n Whistle, something told me the minute I saw the gas station attendant and his buddy standing over by the pop machine that this wasn’t going to be good. Neither one of them was doing anything about coming over to ask us what we wanted. I was watching my dad who was firing up to throw open the car door and go over there and tell the imbecile and his buddy that they were imbeciles, and I knew all this from the first deep exasperated sigh coming out of him as he gripped the steering wheel up there in the front seat. It wouldn’t have hurt any of us if that gas station attendant had hustled over when we first rolled in and said, “Yes, sir, what can I do for you, sir?”
“He’s probably in Las Vegas anyway,” said my brother.
“Can we bother you for some help over here?” said my dad out the window. The gas station attendant waved a hold-on-a-minute in our direction which caused my dad to drop his head on the steering wheel and breathe out an exasperated breath.
My mom said, “That’s awful, but what are you going to do?”
After an uninspired stroll over to our car, the gas station attendant nodded at my dad while staring at a Loeb’s dry cleaning establishment across the street. Nothing made my dad madder than someone not making eye contact with him, but my mom leaned across and said, “I think he wants it filled up, please. Isn’t that right?” she said to my dad. My dad snapped his head up and stared straight ahead, glassing up his eyes.
While the gas was pumping, I felt a rumble of fear at the caliber of job that was being done on our windshield.
My mom said, “Well, that’s a lick and a promise if I ever saw one, but what are you going to do? I swan.”
The gas station attendant’s friend brought him a Nehi, putting it down on the hood of our car, saying, “Seeya, wouldn’t want to be ya,” and then went wandering off across a vacant Union Avenue.
My mom, said, “Oh well, that’s the way it goes.”
“Yeah, he could be in Las Vegas,” said Henry. “But if he’s not, he can’t stay away from the old Pig. He can’t. He’s got to have it. Monday Momma was there and saw his people come in and pick up untold boxes of barbeque.”
“He eats in his big bed. That’s his favorite place to eat,” I said.
“Shut up,” said my brother.
“Nobody’s talking to you,” added Henry.
“I can talk if I want to,” I said.
“That screechy voice! You see what I mean about her voice? No one will ever marry you, you know.”
“What kind of a nincompoop do they have working here?” said my dad. “Hey, could you get that blasted pop bottle off my car?” The nincompoop stopped wiping on the windshield and took up his Nehi from the hood of our car for a long pull. Then he threw the bottle into an empty oil barrel.
“Okay, it’s off, whew,” said my mom.
“Why’s he staring at the dry cleaners like that?” said my dad.
“Maybe he has to pick up some dry cleaning and just remembered,” said my mom. “You know Mr. Barrett at the Club owns that place.”
“Of course I know Mr. Barrett from the Club owns that place,” said my dad. “John’s done a bang‑up job with that little business. This do-nothing’s probably going to knock it over as soon as we leave. Look how he’s scoping it out.”
“Where else would he look? There’s nothing around here at all,” said my mom.
“At me! At me! I am the customer!” said my dad. “You are supposed to be attending to your customer if you want to stay in business.”
“You can tell from the cars in the parking lot if he’s there or not. There’s always at least four or five of the sweetest little Caddies if he is there,” said Henry.
“Caddies aren’t little,” I said.
“Shut up,” said my brother, and Henry made a fist full of knuckles in my direction.
“Who in their right mind would want to be seen in one of those tacky pastel things?” said my mom.
Us three back here, I thought, happy as a clam to be in the backseat with the boys.
“Darn it all but I can’t stand this!” said my dad, sticking his head out the window and reading the stitched name on the imbecile’s shirt. “Do that windshield over and do it right this time,” he said. “Leonard.”
“Leave Elvis alone if he is there,” said my mom. “I mean it, you kids. You’ll get those bodyguards on you and nobody can help you then. They don’t call them the Memphis Mafia for nothing.”
“Here’s your money. Len-o-yard,” said my dad. “I am calling your boss as soon as I get to a phone by the way.”
Len-o-yard just chewed on a toothpick, and took the money.
At the Pig ’n Whistle, the cars we could see in the parking lot all looked normal. There was no fleet of pastel Cadillac’s sitting out in front with cones placed around them by the car park attendants. No gold wheel spokes, snakeskin steering wheels, mink seat covers, initials on the door or TCB lightning bolts. There was no fleet hidden way back in the back corner either.
Still our eyes were bugged out on their stalks as we were led to our table which was still wet with wipe marks on the oil cloth. My mom and dad badly needed to order their highballs since they had missed cocktail hour up on the club terrace and their life hadn’t been the greatest since then.
The bustling waitress came over, gave us a cheerful once over and then started in with the appetizer list. Elvis was there in a way I guess, as he was uh-huhing from the Whirlitzer as the fans from the pressed tin ceiling played with our hair like somebody who loved us. The waitress was going on about chicken wings and dipping sauce and pork rinds, and I was glued to her lips since they were coated in what probably was Tangee, the kind of lipstick that turned the right shade for each person’s skin tone. If I put it on, it would be a different color than her, and if my mom put it on, it would be a different color than either one of us.
“When was Elvis here last?” I asked.
“Two days ago, sweet pea. Right in this room too.”
My brother and Cousin Henry darted fast looks at each other. “Which table was he at?” said Henry. “I want to lick all over it.”
“Oh, they changed the arrangement so it is hard to say,” she said while looking around and trying to get a fix on things. “This place is turned upside down when that bunch comes in.”
Then palming her order pad at me, she said, “They leave gigantic tips though. It sure makes it worth living in Memphis for. Otherwise I would be back in Mississippi faster than a rabbit gets out of his britches.”
My dad had been watching the waitress similar to how he had been watching my brother earlier, and also how he had been watching the gas station attendant who was doing a lousy job of attending to our car’s gas needs. He suddenly said to my mom, “What is this woman saying? I can’t understand a word of what she is saying. Can anyone understand what she is talking about because I sure cannot?” He was using his just before he tore-the-phone-out-of‑the-wall voice.
“The acoustics are terrible in here all right,” said my mom. “But que sera sera.”
The waitress, I had heard her. The boys heard her, and she was writing down that they wanted those chicken wings that came with that dipping sauce.
Moving his water glass in a figure eight, my dad said, “She sounds like bluh, bluh, bluh to me.”
Nobody said anything to that. The waitress said, “Now sir, we have some cheese stuffed green fried tomatoes you could have to start with. They’re brand new. People are just going crazy over them.”
Long silence. I flipped over to the dessert side of the menu. Actually she did sort of sound like bluh, bluh.
The waitress stood tapping her pencil on her order pad. “You want me to come back in five?” She was wearing the kind of waitress uniform that was of a mighty kind of fabric that molded her body into a waitress shape.
Then my mom finally said, interpreting the waitress, “She wants to know if you want to start with something? Would you like an appetizer to start with, such as those green fried tomatoes?”
“Oh really? Is that what she is saying? Well, tell her I want a bourbon and sweet soda for my appetizer, and why don’t you ask her why she isn’t asking for our drink order first? All I can hear out of this woman standing here is something about bicking wings and cork rinds, or was it dripping gauze that’s all ricey?”
This cracked me up.
The lunatic waitress then barreled on, “I didn’t say anything about pork rinds, honey. Where’d you get that from?” And then she winked!
My dad then started saying in a low rattle of a voice, there was a lot of noise in there, but still, I heard it, “Scotch and water and a bourbon and sweet soda, scotch and water and a bourbon and sweet soda, scotch and water and a bourbon and sweet soda–”
“I’ll be back in five,” said the waitress. “You all be thinking over what you want to eat, and just let me know in a bit. Take your time.”
“Stay right there,” said my Cousin Henry. “He’s not done with you yet.”
“You just flag me down, hon,” she said. She said this even though we were by now sitting there getting ready to gang up on her, to tell her things about herself she might never get over.
“No, we are not flagging anybody down,” said Henry.
My dad laid his head down on the table and cradled it with his arms, and kept mumbling over and over, “Bourbon and sweet soda, bourbon and sweet soda. Tell this fool woman here to get me a bourbon and sweet soda. How in the world am I supposed to . . . “
Pretty soon she was going to have it confirmed within herself what she must have already known, which was that everything about her was a mistake, that she should probably never have bothered to have been born.
“Oh! Well, why didn’t you say so! We have a full bar here,” said the waitress.
How she could stand being her. If I was her, I would kill myself.
My dad pushed his chair back and turned his head towards my mom and said in an exasperated monotone, “I am going to go and find the manager and put our order in. I’ll get your chicken wings for you, boys.”
“Sir . . .” said the waitress, finally changing, finally sober, serious and business-like.
“He wasn’t talking to you,” said my brother to the waitress.
“That’s it,” said my dad, as he stood up to go and find the manager.
It was pretty funny, the way people would slump down low in their stupid lives, a world of hurt, when they were shown themselves to themselves, their inferiority complexes showing up under their skins. And you knew it was always again. Maybe she would knock off the smiley stuff and get right to the drink orders from now on. Maybe she would enunciate clearly when she spoke and would maintain good eye contact with the customer.
After he came back to the table with the highballs and after food had been delivered by the manager himself, my dad pushed his plate away, put his face to my mom’s, almost over her shoulder actually so they were like two cars passing each other going different directions on the road and stopping so the drivers can talk out the driver’s side windows to each other. Whatever he said to her, she nodded her head, and kept nodding her head, and kept nodding her head, and then she looked into his face, and said the only thing I could hear which was, “Sounds good.”
I knew it, I knew it. I was a damned psychic.
On the way home, the boys were quiet and thinking about things each to themselves. We had had barbeque and free hot fudge sundaes for the lousy service we were subjected to, and the manager had taken special care of us since he and my dad both knew about running businesses, and my mom, she had had a salad with a scoop of cottage cheese and a hard boiled egg, instead of old greasy barbeque, so she was okay.
Suddenly my brother said, “I am not leaving Memphis.”
“Take that tux jacket off, take it off and fold it up behind the seat. I feel like I am driving around with Rodolfo, the cheesy headwaiter from over at Justine’s in the backseat.”
“And isn’t that t‑shirt Henry’s?” said my mom, smiling back at my brother.
“Something stinks,” I said.
“A bandleader,” said my brother. “How about you’re driving around with Tommy Dorsey? How about that? Use some imagination, will you?” If the word “dumbass” had been invented back then, he would have made the mistake of using it just then, but instead, with a lot of spit going everywhere, he used his mouth to make some horrible trumpet sounds.
“Do you mind?” said Henry, wiping at his cheek.
“There are lots of ways of looking at things,” said my mom. “It’s all in how you look at it, isn’t it, Taylor?” She gave me a wink. “If you are a happy person, you can be a happy person anywhere.”
“We need some fumigation back here because of that stinky shirt Rodolfo is wearing under his waiter jacket,” I said, cranking the handle to roll my window down more than it already was.
“What’s that?” I screamed, seeing something outside squiggled in the middle of the parkway.
My dad yanked the wheel hard out of reflex. “For Christ’s sakes, Taylor,” he said as he recouped himself and saved us from running into a tree.
“You couldn’t shut up for five minutes if you had to, could you?” said my brother, leaning in on me with superior male physical power. “You just don’t have it in you, do you?”
“That snake is long dead, Taylor. It’s been run over a million times,” said my mom.
“Goochy, goochy, goochy, here comes the snakey,” said my brother slithering his arm across the armrest in the backseat then knuckling me in my upper arm muscle.
I screamed again so he grabbed the back of my neck and stuffed my face under his jacket into his armpit and then threw me back on my side of the car.
“Stop it,” said my mom. “Both of you, stop it.”
“God, I am glad I don’t have a sister,” said Henry.
“You get anything on this jacket, I’ll kill you,” he said.
“Keep him away from me,” I yelled.
“God, that voice. Who could take that voice? Nobody will be able to stand you with that high-pitched screechy voice of yours,” said my brother.
“Taylor, he’s right, how you come across is something to think about. You are going to be meeting new people,” said my mother, blindly holding her hand over the seat with one of those little square candies she seemed always to have in her purse that had a history of getting wedged in my throat. “Take the Charm, Taylor. My arm’s going to sleep holding it out for you.”
“Do it,” said my dad to my brother about getting back on his own side of the car, instead of which my brother grabbed my head again.
I would have thrown up if my dad hadn’t pulled over and ripped open the back door and pulled my brother out and spun him around, actually spinning him right out of that tux jacket. My brother had to stagger to keep his balance. Then my dad wadded the tux jacket up and threw it in the trunk on top of all the tennis gear.
After we dropped Henry off (seeya, wouldn’t want to be ya), we swung by a Rexall drugstore and my dad went inside and came out with a case of Metrecal under his arm, my brother haw-hawing non-stop on the way home about the Metrecal.
My dad just turned the radio on, serenity personified, and he drove while whistling along with the music. As we pulled into the driveway under the port cochere, he said to my brother, “You are going to be drinking this stuff too, fats.”
“Fatty fattyrooski,” I said.
“I’ll take a couple of the chocolate ones to go with my cheeseburgers,” said my brother. “Put them in the refrigerator for me.”
My dad put the case under his arm and went in the house through the side screen door.
Later that evening, instead of watching TV, I hid out under my brother’s bed. My brother was downstairs being lectured to (and screamed at and browbeaten) by my dad. Pretty soon he came upstairs and laid down on his bed, and I could hear a myriad of snarling emotions hurricane-ing up above me. One thing I could tell for sure was that my brother felt that this great injustice was being done to him, which was to be the ruin of his whole life, like he was being sold into work-until-you-die or become-a-man slavery. All that was going to happen was we were leaving Memphis, and as my mother said, the best is yet to be, and that he was going to be spending the summer working at my dad’s ice cream plant and mowing the lawn before and after dinner and bagging up the grass clippings on a diet of Metrecal.
My brother got up off the bed above me to go and get a glass of water and then he came back, and suddenly I thought of something I could barely stay still for even though when it started, I tried to force it to stop, I tried to squash it with everything I had in me but what was in me wasn’t enough. I thought about a joke I had heard the boys tell while hidden under my brother’s bed, a time when he had friends over.
There was this burlesque dancer they had gone to see in the bad part of Memphis who had a giant red fan to hide behind so to reveal to the boys her “flapping titties” and her “spongy fanny” and her “hanging, balding twat” that they were saying they loved to look at, har, har, har, and with the way they were talking, I was thrilled and I was guffawing right along with them, but quiet, under the bed, but all our sides about killing us about this burlesque dancer, as I, unbeknownst to them fell completely in love with being one of the boys, hidden away underneath them, yet a girl.
“Roger even went up to her and asked did those things float? And she said, what do you mean? And he said, like Ivory soap does, in the bath? Yeah, he did that, didn’t you, Roger?”
Roger was up there above me with the rest of them. When he had come into the room, I had seen the cuffs of the pants that he belted up too high.
Suddenly, though, as I was me guffawing, hidden away, this story became about the scariest thing I had ever heard. Finally, not soon enough either, they left, and I stayed under the bed for a long time scared they weren’t really gone and would come back and catch me as I was half in and half out from under the bed, trying to get away. For some reason, I knew that I really, really knew not to want that.
The next morning, I woke up early in my bed and lay there under the sheet. I heard the vacuum going and felt there was a whole hot day ahead of me. I felt spiritually sick and grindingly alone. I heard the phone ringing and I heard my mother’s footsteps going across the linoleum floor of the kitchen to answer it.
This was the time when that not faint to non-existent thing was first noted. I wished that at that time there had been someone to explain to me, to drop down by my bed and tell me some of the things I should have known, to answer my questions ad nauseam. But I want you to know, that no matter what, there was a time.
Patricia Lear is the author of the collection Starlight, 7‑Eleven, Route 57, A&W, And So Forth: Stories.
My Music by Lily Tuck
The only song my father, who could not sing, sang was one he learned while he was in the French Foreign Legion. He sang it with his fellow legionnaires as he marched in North Africa during World War II. The brisk pace and repetitive lyrics roused his spirits and helped him endure the oppressive heat of the Sahara Desert.
Auprès de ma blonde,
Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon.
Auprès de ma blonde,
Qu’il fait bon dormir
Later, my father claimed that his time in the Foreign Legion was one of the happiest in his life. He reminisced about drinking the cheap yet good Algerian wine and his friendship with Josephine Baker – a lifelong one as it turned out – whose lover was also a legionnaire. Later, too, when he tried to sing Auprès de ma blonde to my mother, who was in fact blonde and beautiful, she did not pay the song or my father much attention.
Briefly, when I was seven years old and living in Paris – a gray Paris, suffering the deprivations and food shortages that resulted from the war – twice a week, I had piano lessons. I don’t remember very much about those lessons except that I learned how to play the scales and read a little music because soon, my teacher, whose name I long ago forgot, in her blunt French way told my parents that they were wasting their money and, she, her time. Instead, the person I remember best from that period was the one-armed elevator man at the Hotel Raphaël, where my parents and I were staying temporarily, and whom my parents had engaged to walk me to school every morning. Maurice was a tall, thin, dignified, gentle man who had lost an arm in the First World War and who always wore his high-collared, gold trimmed, hotel uniform, the empty sleeve neatly tucked inside the pocket. As we walked together down the Avenue Kléber where the hotel was situated, past the Trocadero and up the Avenue Georges Mandel where my school, Les Abeilles, was located – I holding his one hand – Maurice taught me to sing:
Malbrouk s’en va-t-en guerre,
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine.
A few years later, when I was living in America, and during my school holidays, I was sent to visit my stern German-born grandmother. Determined to improve me, she set herself the thankless task of giving me a classical music education. For an hour every afternoon, she had me sit in the modest living room of her Cayuga Heights apartment in Ithaca, New York – in Bonn, where she was from, her house had been destroyed by Allied bombing – and listen to the local classical radio station. An hour that dragged into an eternity; outside the sun was shining and I could hear the boys in the fraternity house across the street getting ready for another party. But one afternoon turned out to be different. I was listening to Beethoven’s Fidelio (my grandmother had outlined the plot and told me to listen for the sound of trumpets which would signal Fidelio’s release from prison) and, to this day, I can recall the feeling of accomplishment and of triumph – especially of triumph – when I heard those trumpets.
In college, where I was delinquent in all my studies, I spent my time either in Boston taking ballet lessons – I had a sudden and unjustified desire to become a ballerina – or lying on my unmade bed, listening to records. I loved Adolphe Adam’s “Giselle,” for obvious reasons; Renata Tebaldi singing arias brought hot passionate tears to my eyes and furious banging at my door, “Turn the damn music down!” Elaine Stritch singing “Jenny” was another favorite, as was the English musical “Salad Days.” And I especially cherished a scratched recording of Noel Coward’s reedy voice singing: Someday I’ll find you, moonlight behind you . . .
While he was courting me, my former husband, who prided himself on his voice, which indeed was good, used to sing:
Anything can happen on a summer afternoon
On a lazy dazy golden hazy summer afternoon
I had never heard the song before nor have I since, but for a short while then, I fancied I would be the one to fill the nebulous and abstract role of anything which in my mind translated itself into love, happiness, and a marriage, all of which it did for a bit. For a bit, too, we lived in a large, elegant house in Charlottesville, Virginia, which had once belonged to my husband’s aunt. Along with the house, we had inherited her piano, a Bechstein. His aunt, a glamorous and charming woman, had been married to a Russian prince – one of the princes who unsuccessfully tried to kill Rasputin – and had lived in Paris. Among her many acquaintance, Colette, Coco Chanel, other exiled Russian princes, was Artur Rubinstein, who, according to one of her stories at lunch one day, announced that he was going to a Bechstein auction to buy a piano. “Of course, Artur dear, you must buy yourself the very best piano,” said the aunt, “but will you buy me the second best?” A few days later, a piano was delivered to the aunt’s Avenue Foch apartment – it was hauled up through the window – and a few weeks later, Artur Rubinstein himself came to lunch again. After lunch, the aunt asked him to play something on her new Bechstein and Artur Rubinstein sat at the piano and began to play a Bach prelude but, after only a few minutes, he banged down on the keys and abruptly stopped. “Artur, Artur, what is wrong?” cried the aunt and Artur Rubinstein answered, “I bought you the very best piano.” Once a year, at great expense, I hired a piano tuner who came all the way down from Richmond to tune the “best” Bechstein. No one, except for an occasional guest, ever played the piano and, to compensate, the piano tuner suggested that I run my thumb down all the keys once a day. I tried to do this a few times but the ivory keys hurt my thumb and mostly I was too busy raising three small children.
I used to joke – only it was partly true – that if I could have only one wish, I would wish that I could sing. To this day, I would wish the same thing. What a pleasure and what a gift, I think, it must be to open one’s mouth and have a beautiful song effortlessly come out. Unfortunately, I cannot carry a tune. Nevertheless, when my children were small, to put them to sleep, I sang to them in French:
Il etait un petit navire,
Qui n’avait ja-ja jamais navigué,
or my favorite, the less soothing:
Malbrouk s’en va-t-en guerre,
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine,
Ne sait quand reviendra,
Ne sait quand reviendra.
Thanks to Maurice, I still knew the lyrics and, of course, I knew that Malbrouk’s wife was waiting for him in vain, and the reason he did not come back at either Easter or at the Trinity was:
Monsieur Malbrouk est mort,
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine,
Monsieur Malbrouk est mort,
Est mort et enterré.
The reason, too, I sang to my children in French was I believed that anyone who might be listening to me – including my then husband – knew neither French nor the songs and therefore would not know whether I was singing off key, which chances are I was.
One of my favorite paintings is “Rest During the Flight into Egypt,” by Caravaggio. At the center of the picture, an angel, his back to the viewer, stands naked, except for a swirl of white cloth, his wings – wings as startlingly black as a crow’s wings – gracefully outstretched. The angel is playing the violin for the holy family as they rest. Sitting on the ground, an attentive but weary-looking Joseph is holding up the sheet music for the angel to sight read while, next to him, Mary is holding the baby Jesus in her arms and both are asleep. The painting speaks to the power of music. This notion is taken a literal step further since, once a year, a concert is held in the Palazzo Doria Pamphili where the Caravaggio painting hangs and the notes on the sheet music Joseph holds up to the angel are played.
My second husband also had a good voice which makes me wonder whether I am drawn to musical men – and aren’t opposites said to attract? He loved to sing and he was clever at making up lyrics (in his heart of hearts, instead of being a lawyer, he wanted to write songs and be a lyricist). He loved Ira Gershwin, Richard Rogers, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin; he knew all the old show tunes by heart. The singer Carly Simon, too, was one of his favorites. Driving in the car, with his children, they all knew the words by heart:
Anticipation, Anticipation
Is making me late
Is keeping me waiting
They sang so well that, momentarily silenced and excluded, I was envious of them – of their talent and of their happiness at singing together.
When my husband died, I chose the music for his memorial service. For the prelude and the postlude, to be certain, I chose Bach; for hymns, I chose ones my husband had liked, “Love Divine” and “Jerusalem.” For myself, I chose Henry Purcell’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary, the last part, the canzona, played by two trumpeters.
I spend the summers on an island in Maine and each summer, obsessively, I listen to a single CD: last summer it was Fabrizio De Andrè; the summer of 2006 it was Leonard Cohen; the summer of 2005 it was Mariza Nunes singing Fado; the summer of 2004 it was the Pink Martini; k.d. lang was in either 2003 or 2002, I forget; the year I did not listen to k.d. lang, I listened to the soundtrack of Lars von Trier’s movie “Breaking the Waves;” the year before I listened to the Buena Vista Social Club. I am not a particularly sanguine person but when I listen to music, I can easily be transported. Also, I play the music as loud as I can and except for a bunch of seals who at low tide lie not far on an exposed reef, my nearest neighbor is a mile away. I listen to music at the end of the day, at sunset, and although my house faces east, I can watch the clouds turn from bright orange to pink and mauve, then purple streaked with gray – the colors reflecting on the water below them – and finally go dark; then, still to the sound of music, I can watch the moon rise.
Lily Tuck is the author of a collection of stories, a biography, and four novels including The News From Paraguay, which won the National Book Award.
Fire in the Taxidermy Shop by Mi Ditmar
You can’t imagine the smell. Burnt feathers. Wet fur. Burnt wet fur and feathers. The chemicals, the glues and epoxies, the tanning agents: accelerants, all of them. Of course the sawdust batting and balsa wood frames were just kindling really.
Disconcerting, how the eyes, the falsest and most lifelike parts, were all that had survived, complete and intact. They are not round, the eyes, you know, or even ovoid. They are aspheric, convex. The marbled veining, the dark blended auras, all I do by hand. I paint the pupil smaller for display in rooms with more light present.
My artful preservation and lifelike presentation had made the ibex, and otter, the Shetland pony and kudu, the lioness and Romney Marsh sheep, the zebra and peacock, seem still alive until now. I have never so much questioned the soul. Now those glittering glass eyes stare out from charred and sodden bodies, regarding me with sad ferocity. As if this, and not the careful separation of hide from sinew, the stuffing and mounting, were the greatest indignity. I worked my craft too well. I fooled even myself. When the flames shot out the window, I expected a stampede to follow the shattering of glass. For a fanciful moment, I heard the noise of hoof and wing, avian shrieks and baritone bellows from the larger beasts. If you had seen how the cases had been smashed, the glass exploded outward, their inhabitants strewn about, as if making their escape, you might have thought the same. Hard to believe the fire wasn’t what killed them. Hard to believe some were antiques that had died before I was born.
The horns and antlers of the larger beasts, these remain. Their white is a revelation in the ashes, like the teeth of mummified Peruvian virgins. The effect is of a king’s crown toppled in the soot. The skulls, of course, were replaced with sculpted manikins, some I tooled myself. Much worse, it would have been, to look upon searching empty sockets than a blank-faced form.
It might surprise the layperson, how fanciful this profession is; the vision required. We are artists who take up this vocation. We are not zoological undertakers. The mortician’s touch is hardly deft. Loved ones accept a facsimile on a satin pillow for an hour before the slapdash coloring and clumsy contours are interred or incinerated. Our works endure. They are not buried, nor save this tragic chiaroscuro, cremated. Our creations fail if they appear in repose. We learn early to bear the fang and claw and angle the head aggressively. It would trouble the bereaved, if the undertaker evoked the slightest sense that the departed were merely paused, about again to move. This is our ideal.
But perhaps this fire is a sign. Perhaps it is a message. It may be time to retire my fleshers and sewing stands, time to put up my tail stripper, my ear openers. Pack up my cape stretcher. Truth be told, I will not miss them. The scraping of stubborn flesh, the fingers numbed, working over the hard-to‑get-at places, the tails and the like, the shaving of the hides on frames, all of that I will not miss. It isn’t that I don’t love them. Once I have finished with a piece, I have it with me always. I am the keeper of a quiet menagerie. I don’t wish to remember them broken and blackened.
Would it surprise you to know I was afraid of animals? Particularly the fish and fowl? The setting of scales, the degreasing of plumage were testaments to my devotion to the trade. Had I been born with another name, I might have been a butcher, dressing carcasses piecemeal for consumption. Imagine the freedom!
The zebra’s wilted head will haunt me, I know. Her face burned away from the hobby-horse head I sculpted for her. Her hooves still poised as though she’s stepping lightly through dewy grass at the edge of a watering hole in her own dream place.
Mi Ditmar’s fiction has appeared in Stone Canoe.
Girl by Peter Markus
Us brothers, we love the sound of that word girl so much that one day, out of nowhere, we start calling everything that we see, girl. Let’s go, girl, we say, to each other. Let’s go down to the girl, one of us brothers will go to the other, and to the river is where we go. Let’s catch us some girl, the other brother will then say to this, and we’ll grab us our fishing poles and a muddy bucket of worms and into the river us brothers fish. Girl sure is girly, one of us will point out, pointing with a finger at the muddy river flowing past our feet. After a while, after we fill our buckets up with a whole mess of girl, one of us brothers will say, Sister, I’m hungry. Let’s go fry us up some girl. Like this, us brothers, we go back and forth between us, girl this and girl that, until it is raining girls and girl. The moon in the sky is girl. The sky and the mud is girl. It’s us girls walking round this girl town with girl dripping from our lips, girl this and girl that, until bottles and buckets and rusty trucks and trains, until hammers and fish heads and bent-back nails – all of these things come rushing up to us brothers, all of them drawn to us by the sound that those four letters make: G-I-R‑L. But girl the way that girl was meant to be spelled: with twelve r’s, thirteen u’s, and twenty-thousand 1’s at the end of girl, stretching across the earth.
Peter Markus is the author of the novel Bob, or Man on Boat: A Novel. His stories have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, and New Orleans Review.
The Woman with High Heels by Paola Peroni
The boulevard was lined with tall trees on either side. A light breeze brushed the leaves and the sun glared in the blue sky. It was a day like any other day, but most days were like any other day in Los Angeles. A man and a woman waited for the light to turn green and then crossed the boulevard. They held hands. The man was wearing his best suit. It wasn’t much of a suit, and it was too big for him. He had short blond hair and washed blue eyes, and despite his fit frame he looked ordinary. The woman was tall in her high heels, and walked with ease. There was grace and confidence in her step, and a dormant violence that made her sensual. A photographer holding a camera followed a few feet behind.
“Are you happy?” the man asked.
“I’m happy you are,” the woman answered with an Eastern European accent.
“I was hoping for something more.”
“You are always hoping for more.”
Her hand rested loosely in his and he squeezed it tighter. He always felt inadequate next to her; today was no different.
“I will make you happy,” he said.
“Don’t try too hard.”
“I will try as hard as it takes.”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
With her free hand the woman straightened her hair swept aside by the wind.
“That’s what people talk about when they get married,” he said.
She laughed and said nothing. He felt a familiar pain deep in his chest. He had seen this coming. And now he was relieved because he didn’t have to anticipate it anymore.
“What a stupid town,” the woman said.
“You used to like it.”
“It makes me want to be somebody else.”
“It’s a town like any other town.”
She shook her head. “For you every town is like any other town.”
“I know. You deserve better.”
“You’re the best I could do,” she said without bitterness.
He turned and glanced at the photographer, stumbling along behind them with his camera. The cars were speeding past them and they were alone on the sidewalk. Nobody walked here; it was desolate.
“There is nothing I wouldn’t give you.”
“There is only so much you can give,” she said.
“If only you gave me a chance.”
“If only you stopped asking,” she said.
She had beautiful hands. It moved him to watch her hands. But now he felt nothing. He let her hand go, and as they walked he could hear the sound of her high heels.
“The wind has cleared the sky,” she said.
“Tomorrow will be a beautiful day,” he said.
“It’s one day away.”
“It’s always one day away,” he said in a wistful tone that stripped the future of promise.
They had reached the city hall, an ugly box of cement. They started up the steps, the photographer behind them.
“Would you like a picture?” asked the man.
“Whatever you like,” she said. “It makes no difference, as long as we have one to show Immigration.”
“Let’s wait until after we’re married, then.”
He reached for her hand, raised it to his lips, and kissed it. Today he intended to be happy; nothing could prevent it. Tomorrow it would be different. There was nothing he could do about tomorrow, but today he would be happy and this picture would remind him that he had been happy.
Paola Peroni has published recent stories in the Bellevue Literary Review and Antioch Literary Review. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
El Paso by Daryl Scroggins
It was Easter and he had killed a man.
“Wasn’t your fault,” Frank said. Coffee steaming in early light. “They shouldn’t be over here anyway. Crossing roads like rabbits in the dark. Too drunk to go back to do anything but pick out a light in Juarez and head straight for it.”
Bud nodded, but he watched the mountain. He had unwrapped his breakfast taco on the picnic table but hadn’t touched it. Finally he looked down and said, “He had goose bumps on his arms. When I checked for a pulse.”
“Hell, a body does a lot of things after it’s dead. Beard grows. Fingernails.”
“I’ve heard that,” Bud said.
On the mountain’s west side, a red swath of minerals in the shape of a thunderbird was emerging from the gloom. “Thanks for coming,” Bud said. “I couldn’t think. Couldn’t decide what to do.”
“You did right. There’s no sense in making it worse for everybody.” Frank checked his phone.
“But his family,” Bud said, “he must have a family.”
“They’ll just think he lit out for something better. Got tired of a dirt floor and went for more.”
Bud shoved his food back in the paper sack that still held a plastic fork, wrapped in a napkin, and a packet of salt. “No,” he said. “I think they will always think he’s coming back.”
Daryl Scroggins is the author of This Is Not The Way We Came In, a collection of flash fictions and a novel, published in 2009 by Ravenna Press.
How the Past Returns by Daryl Scroggins
Waiting for the cold window to sift an answer from snow, I read by flashlight of arctic sailors killed by lead in poorly canned meats. More than a century later a tent is pitched above a graveled grave. Opened in shifts, permafrost exhales the same cold, the same arrested motion caught in flat fish-eye glint – a man still hastening to look into himself one last time.
The sash rattles in wind and my light dims, as if wind and light have joined; I close my eyes to white pages, but nothing is banished.
A white owl, flying across snow, is seen only when stubble beneath it begins to flicker. Indecipherable letters like whiskers, anarchic on drained skin.
Light off, I have to look before sleep will come: on the sill, at the north corner, a white drift of the finest powder. Snow getting in through the dead of night.
For the Record by Daryl Scroggins
The man of a million hand-written pages stopped in mid-sentence – pen Rorschaching on paper – and realized that he held an unfounded assumption: he believed that someday somebody would open all of his files and muse over each sentence, each turn of phrase and delicately selected word, in spite of the fact that he himself would find it physically impossible to do so. Shifts of people, perhaps? A team of diligent archivists? A box sent to each state of the Union . . . ?
When his ashes hit the breeze in the garden behind his house, the man’s children remarked that there was a certain sparkle to the bits as they flew. A neighbor closed her window abruptly. Then the cleaning crew went to work, filling a metal dumpster with box after box of paper.
That night at the city dump a rat stayed very warm, and for several years so did all of her progeny.
The Ride Home from Church by Daryl Scroggins
When I was seven I killed a spider with a Bible. In the car’s back seat, a flurry of legs near my own. I jumped toward my shrieking sister and let fly with the only weapon at hand.
The years since have brought trouble: as my father taught me, not much in the past can be cleanly wiped away. It was stupid, it was asking for it, making my own bed to lie in – it was fouling my own nest and bringing doom down upon my head.
Christ, everybody knows it’s bad luck to kill a spider.
Influences by Daryl Scroggins
I tried to read in a tree, because I had seen a magazine illustration of a boy lounging on a great oak limb, reading in dappled light with a faint smile on his face. But I lived in a suburb of tract houses, built on a site that had been a cotton field three years before – so even the largest trees had limbs no thicker than my wrist. I worked my way up a good eight feet into a sycamore in the back yard, dropped my copy of Call of the Wild and had to start over. When I got settled I opened the book to the part where a man whispers curse words into his dog’s ear while petting the animal roughly, as a means of encouraging it to move a great weight in a sled-pulling contest. This struck me as an odd detail. Why would curses be used as a sign of love? Why would the dog be encouraged by such a thing? I was only about five minutes into my reading when the sliding glass door leading to the patio was jerked open, and a shout issued from it. “Get out of that damn tree! And get your nose out of that book. If you’ve got time for that you’ve got time to mow and edge, so get to it.” I got down and got the mower out of its painted tin shed. It was a hot day, no clouds and very little shade. I pushed the mower, whispering to it the whole time. “Fucking piece of shit mower. Dumb ass loud son of a bitch. . . .”
What Remains by Daryl Scroggins
At the cemetery – two acres cleared in a thin forest of wispy green mesquite trees – the most notable thing is a horse. He leans in against barbed wire, stripping leaves from the cemetery side of a tree growing on his side of the fence. He switches his tail lazily, and seems not to notice the barbs in the wire at his chest. Great Aunt Ruby leans over Uncle Carl’s grave to place flowers, and breaks wind loudly. But she is deaf. I yell at the kids, tell them not to walk on the graves and to stop throwing horse apples at the headstones. When they still won’t behave, I show them the deep web of cracks in the dry ground at their feet. I tell them that people are buried six feet down, and cracks like these go down at least that far. They are skeptical, but when I get down close to the ground and start talking loudly to Uncle Carl, the kids pile into the car, ready to go. So we go, relieved to be out of the heat and bright sun. But the horse is what I remember.
Footnote by Daryl Scroggins
I am writing a book with a lawn mower. The field is so green my assertions about it are a mere buzzing. That’s me there – a drone, a hat and shoulders moving above words. I work amid mechanical constraints that tend to favor some letters over others, and since there are so many round-about ways of saying the same thing, I turn to that path. Birds follow me. They eat even in those places I have had to erase.
When I am finished I put the machine away in its shed and look out toward the far wire fence. Already the stubble is springing back to its own language, and I can scarcely see what I have said.
Compost Conversion by Daryl Scroggins
Dirt, the great cleanser, took all the scraps I could give it and smoldered through winter. Left the bones, but then took them too: chalk turned to a smear of white powder by the fork, earthworms sliding down new avenues opening beneath them. And any of the creatures unfortunate enough to meet the thrusting tines directly were simply lent new speed toward bacterial haze – the very home they knew and sought. Oddly, odors disappeared as well: sour sluice of vegetable parts and rank scraps of meat absorbed into loam that smelled faintly like baking bread. A dark rye bread, perhaps. Good with soup. I guess all appetites come round to being what they seek.
Daryl Scroggins is the author of This Is Not The Way We Came In, a collection of flash fictions and a novel, published in 2009 by Ravenna Press.
Quarter by John Rybicki
I place a quarter on the street where it pools and spreads. Then I go swimming inside silver. Some days I slide my quarter under a burning house so the house sinks into water and the fire hisses and pops. The books and mattresses all get sopping wet. Children swim to the windows with little bubbles rising from their mouths as the house goes down and drowns. I play scuba diver inside my quarter. I swim down with the moonbeams and wave to the children waving back to me, easy on their elbows near the window, gazing out at their new street. Their mother’s at the stove flipping sodden pancakes with her hair floating up. Now the neighbors gather with their flashlights along the wet edges of my quarter. I can see among their beams the round lifesaver on a string they cast over the water for us to swim our necks up into.
I am snapping slow rocks with my underwater slingshot trying to break the glass so the children can swim back up with me. I show them how to grip a fat beam falling from a fat flashlight, grip it rope-like so they can haul themselves up. When they do their heads pop like champagne corks across the surface. One girl points underwater where some of her siblings have stayed with their mom and the house. When I swim down again, I find bits of glass around the edges of the window like shark’s teeth jutting out from the wood. I stick my neck in its mouth, and see a boy skipping up the staircase. I am swimming after him all breaststroke inside this house bubbling down into deeper waters. I tell him, chugging vowels into his ear, we’ll dry the quarter out later so your house pops out of the earth like in a pop‑up book. He won’t have it.
He’s bubbling his mouth from under his bed – no – and jabbing at my skull with his underwater drumsticks. I pass his mother on the way out. I point up through the chimney I’ll swim through since she already has the windows boarded up. I beckon to her to follow me, but she shakes her head no, I’m not leaving. She reaches to fold the T‑shirts and blouses and blue jeans floating all around the room.
The boy and his mother came to live inside my wet quarter when my quarter dried itself up. Sometimes I hear the boy drumming inside my pocket, drumming his little sticks in George Washington’s head.
John Rybicki is the author of the poetry collection We Bed Down into Water (TriQuarterly Books). This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Sell It Back to Me by Katie Arnold-Ratliff
This friend of mine told someone once, If you aren’t from California, I’ll never really know you. That was when I started being proud of where I was from.
For a year, that friend lived in the studio alongside his welding torch, never passing a dumpster by. Until it was finished: a life-sized replica of an elevator car, its interior lined with burgundy velvet, its metal shell left jagged to rust. The opulent floor turned out to be stained plywood. He could do things with his hands. We were finishing college, so he called this his thesis. The professor stood inside it, holding his chin. I get it, the professor said.
I just like elevators, my friend said.
To celebrate we rode the glass ones at the St. Francis Hotel, up and down a dozen times, feeling sick; the rapid fall pained our ears. Below us, Powell Street was a Christmas diorama – people skating on false ice, being belched from shops into sixty-degree winter. Outside the hotel, my friend’s phone rang. It was his mother. His father had died in bed. We spent a long time looking for a ride. You’re not coming, my friend said, once we’d found one.
In a dream last night, he and I hung long, draped signs from overpasses, engaged in a type of conversation: I’d hang a question, descend the ladder and drive, and find his answer affixed to another bridge a few miles up. The signs were white and billowing, hung as though advertising a party, or a fair, or something going out of business. I asked, How are you? His answer was nonsense. It read, I’m in Baltimore, doing science. In real life, that isn’t true.
Or maybe it is – I only know what I hear. The year he built the elevator he told me, We love one another. I was never one to argue. Later, there was a stock unraveling; we spent a week shaving off bits of the other’s happiness. When it isn’t the saddest thing I’ve got going, it seems funny now. Then he did something unforgivable. In a coffee shop he said, I almost killed myself the other day, lifting his cup for a sip.
In life, he has no aptitude for science. Though his hands were skilled, he wasn’t; he never measured, only cut. He had an instinct. It took him further than he expected it to – he spent a lot of time being surprised when people returned his calls, cooked him dinner. In life, he’s not in Baltimore; he’s fishing in Alaska, which is dangerous but lucrative; he’s bartending near SF General, pouring drinks to men dragging IV poles; he’s a carpenter owed staggering backpay. Or he’s a salesman like his dead father, who broke pencils in half, handed the pieces to prospectives, and said, Sell it back to me and you’ve got the job. His father begged every Christmas for one of those spider-shaped head-scratchers, and every Christmas my friend failed to find one. The week after his father died, my friend saw one in a shop. He took out his wallet, but the clerk said they didn’t even carry those. But it’s right here, my friend said. They told him to take it. He melted it into solder to forge one last piece, previously forgotten: the elevator’s lone button.
In the coffee shop, my friend’s sleeve fell away from the wounds. They were long and deliberate, and they were my fault. People don’t like who they are when they’re around me. I almost did it but then I thought about my mom, he said with a sinister look, emphasizing the final word. We’re both from California, so I knew him pretty well. How does it feel, the look said, to not even rate?
Not that I’m so presumptuous; I don’t need to be anyone’s reason. But it would have been polite to lie. The wounds were a compromise, I guess, but to me it was simple cowardice. I have never forgiven him for being a coward. A schoolyard girlfriend of mine studies cancer at Johns Hopkins, so I guess my wires were crossed about Baltimore. But the rest of the dream – our silence but for the signs – confounds me until a later graceful moment: I’m rising up, nearly at the sixth floor, when I recall that my friend’s last name was Banner.
This is Katie Arnold-Ratliff’s first fiction publication in a national literary magazine.
Bricks by Robert Lopez
I am out the window today.
The dog is behind me eating the raw chicken back I fed him for lunch. The woman I share the house with brought the dog home one day after work. She didn’t say where she found him or what his name is.
This is my wife we’re talking about, so none of it surprises me.
It’s my job to feed the dog and take him for walks during the day. Today, though, we’re going nowhere. I don’t even want to fetch the mail.
There is no trace of life out the window.
This is when an old lady drives up and parks her car in front of the house. She has no business parking her car there so I know she’s trouble. I watch her walk and sweat, the way old people do when they are about to fall over and die in front of your house.
She opens the back door of her car and picks up the three bricks that were lying on our front walk and places them, each one, in the backseat. How she does this is by cradling the bricks in her arms like a baby. I don’t know how the bricks got to our walk but they’d been there a few days. This is the kind of neighborhood where this happens. Bricks. Last week it was an air conditioner. Another sort of person would’ve taken the bricks and thrown them away or maybe built something with them but I am not another sort of person and neither is my wife.
We don’t know what happened to the air conditioner, but it’s not out there anymore. Maybe this same old lady took it. Maybe she drives by here all the time, scavenging like a vulture. Maybe we should thank her.
After she finishes loading her car full of bricks, she wipes her forehead with a green sleeve and falls back into the driver’s seat. Then she drives off and leaves me out the window with the dog still eating behind me.
When the heat breaks I will find myself some bricks and maybe an electric fan and place them out on our walk for when she comes back.
I tell this to the dog. I tell him it’s a good idea, that something will come of this. He agrees by hovering over his bowl and lapping up blood.
Hell on Church Street Blues by Robert Lopez
This is one that if you skipped to the end you wouldn’t miss anything. What takes place between here and there is both no one’s business and beside the point at the same time.
The middle part concerns a round woman whose dog died on a transcontinental flight. The dog died in the woman’s arms right there in business class. It was very sad.
What happens next is the woman tells me the news in a delicatessen two weeks later. I was there for a turkey sandwich and French fries. I tell her I’m sorry and that it’s awful.
The real story, of course, takes place over those two weeks.
I find it helps to imagine the worst and work your way down.
For my part, I spent each day of those two weeks waiting for the next to come and go gracefully. Then I attended the wedding of two friends. I overheard people talking about the chicken and fish, the oysters Rockefeller, the centerpieces, the hall, the bride and groom.
Everyone said they were a lovely couple and everyone was probably right.
Chop Suey by Robert Lopez
Blind Betty says people in New York City used to call Chinese food chop suey instead of calling it Chinese food like everyone else in the world. She says one New Yorker would say to another you want to go for chop suey and the other one would say sure and they both knew what each other meant. Blind Betty doesn’t say when people would say this, but I don’t ask about it because Blind Betty doesn’t like it when you interrupt her. Blind Betty’s fingered all the Braille books on Chinese food and New York City so she knows about these things she says. Why Blind Betty is talking about Chinese food is because we are in the cafeteria for lunch and she is sick of the food here. It’s my job to take these blindsters to the cafeteria and feed them their lunch every day. Time was it was only Pity Jimmy I had to feed, but now it’s Blind Betty I have to feed too because of how she cracked her head open that one time. She did this on Pity Jimmy’s roller skate which he probably shouldn’t have had because out of all these blindsters he is probably the blindest one of all. This is why people say pity Jimmy was born the way he was and why I say it like that now too. This is not what we pay you for is what they told me when Blind Betty cracked her head open but they haven’t paid me once yet. I think what it is I do here I do for free. So every day I take Blind Betty to the cafeteria and sit her down next to Pity Jimmy. This is when I take their trays up to the counter to fill them. How these blindsters know which is chicken and which is potatoes and vegetables is I always have to put the chicken and potatoes and vegetables in the same spot every time. This is one of the first things they taught me how to do when I first came here. The chicken goes in the slot they call six o’clock and the vegetables and potatoes go at ten and two. After I fill their trays full of food I bring them back to the table and set the trays down right in front of them. The first time I brought Blind Betty her tray full of food I made the mistake of telling her what food was in what slot. What she said back to me was curse words because Blind Betty doesn’t like to be told what she already knows. The thing about Blind Betty is she thinks she knows everything so you shouldn’t talk to her at all is what I think. This is why nobody here likes Blind Betty much, myself included. So if they ever did have Chinese food up at the counter I wouldn’t fill up Blind Betty’s tray for her regardless. I wouldn’t put the chop in the six o’clock or the suey at ten and two. I wouldn’t give her chop suey even if they gave me what for about it because what does it even matter here. Maybe if they ever paid me I’d do it but probably not even then. Even then I think I’d give her the chicken and potatoes and vegetables instead of chop suey.
The Turn Worming by Robert Lopez
Last night when they sent me to the shed for wood to burn I almost didn’t come back. I stayed out there in the shed and wondered what would happen if instead of going back inside I kept walking in another direction home. I’d already had a pile full of wood in my arms and was halfway out the shed door. This is when I heard Pity Jimmy screaming from his bedroom window and when I thought I should maybe run away and what difference would it make if I did. Pity Jimmy was screaming the turn has wormed the turn has wormed which is what he always screams when he knows I’m out in the shed. Time was you knew what Pity Jimmy had to say before he even said it and that it had nothing to do with you, but those days are over now. I told him one time about the maggots or the faggots or whatever it is Blind Betty calls them and how that’s why I hate going out to the shed for wood to burn. These blindsters always remember whatever it is you tell them, Pity Jimmy included. Must be because they don’t have to remember what anything looks like. Me, I don’t know if I can remember what anything outside of this place looks like anymore. Blind Betty says this is what happens to you when you don’t eat your vegetables. She fingers all the Braille books on vegetables and memory so she knows about these things she says. She says by this time next month I’ll probably forget how to tie my own shoes. I have never forgotten how to tie my own shoes but have always had trouble keeping them tied. Sometimes I’ll look down and find the laces loose and have to bend down to retie them. This is why I don’t think I’ll forget how to tie my own shoes because I probably do it three or four times a day. But if Blind Betty says I’ll forget about home then she might be probably right given all the books she fingers. What I think I can remember is how the TV it squealed like a wounded bird and the refrigerator light never turned off. I took out all the racks and squeezed myself in once to make sure. I remember doing that as sure as anything. I don’t tell this to Blind Betty because why bother but I’m almost totally sure about the TV and refrigerator. I don’t know if it’ll be the same when I get back there but if it is then I’ll likely be home when I get home.
Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World (Calamari Press) and Kamby Bolongo Mean River (Dzanc Books). His stories have appeared in Bomb, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, Nerve, and New York Tyrant.
Flesh by Michael Ahn
The middle-aged man sat at the bedside of his dying mother, reading to her from a yellow notebook.
He had recently made vice president at a travel company. He was now responsible for a service that helped people reserve rental cars over the Internet. He was confident that he knew more about the Internet rental car business than anyone in the world.
When he was twenty-two, he confronted his father over Thanksgiving dinner about being beaten with a belt. Alcohol had been involved.
His father denied the abuse. His mother supported his father. They were that way, his parents.
He was reading to his mother a detailed description of the sexual act of inserting an entire hand into a bodily orifice.
His father once fought in an overseas war. He died a few years ago of an aneurism while the ambitious son was in Chicago attending a convention about renting cars, absorbing knowledge from his peers.
This year, the son was invited to speak at this same conference.
His father entertained guests by playing comedy records on his hi-fi. During the racier parts he’d look around, make eye contact and grin.
His father confided in him that he’d indirectly killed many Asians during his foreign war tour. The son had doubts about that because he believed a thing like that changes a man.
For the past few years, his mother had been steadily losing her ability to determine what was real. It had been a slow process. For a while she was convinced he had stolen her money. Each time she brought it up, which was often, he patiently reminded her that she no longer had any to steal.
In his latter years, his father, in his pride, had squandered their retirement savings by moving from town to town looking for the ideal community. Each time they moved they sold their house at a loss. They moved because his father always became angry or insulted by their new friends. He moved to punish them by denying them his company.
Nothing triggered the fatal aneurism. It happened, like rain.
Precipitation can cause havoc in the car rental business because convertibles, which yield the highest profit, fall out of favor.
Another high-margin rental are sports cars, which often have rev limiters installed to hamper performance, thus making them accelerate more slowly than midsized sedans.
Sports cars, convertibles and cars with intense paint schemes can be very appealing to customers who would not ordinarily make such choices in their daily lives.
The man read: if done properly, the practice is painless. Some describe it as fun. It can take a long time to complete. The goal is a high yield and complete satisfaction.
His mother had asked him after becoming bedridden in the assisted living facility if he would mind fetching the yellow and black notebook. She asked him in a rare and sudden moment of lucidity, which was shocking and cruel to witness. It was like watching a beautiful place being ravaged by a storm, then becoming calm and sunny as the eye passes over it, only for the storm to later plunge the beautiful place back into dark chaos.
The yellow and black notebook was in a lower drawer of her waist-high jewel box that no longer had any jewels. He had given them to his female cousins who were disappointed to discover that she had no taste.
In the yellow and black notebook was neat, closely spaced handwriting.
His mother asked him to read from it. So he did.
The notebook was tightly filled. The margins had been ignored. There was only one topic. The descriptions were vivid, precise and somewhat clinical. The narrative was neither flowery nor self-conscious. He could not determine if the content was derived from meticulous research or the authority of experience. Each word in each sentence appeared to be necessary.
As far as he could tell, it was filled with unvarnished truth.
The notebook was the kind sold in drugstores. Its simple design was reminiscent of the 1970s. The pages were slightly brittle and yellowed; the blue ball-point ink ghostly.
His mom used to read to him when he was a child. It was when she was the most tender and least distracted. Those moments pulse in the epicenter of his love for her, and as long as he existed they would exist within him.
As the man read, his mother closed her eyes. He read in the voice he would use to deliver his speech. He enunciated with a calm, measured cadence, a rehearsed, deliberate authority calibrated to project complete and total confidence.
His mother’s closed eyes tightened. He could not tell if this indicated bliss or discomfort. When he stopped reading, her restlessness returned.
He continued.
Such acts, because they are extreme, should be premeditated, with the expressed consent of the parties involved. Consent can be implied as long as it is acknowledged.
Mutual respect is key.
Vice presidents in his company have a kind of tenure. They are given contracts. It was his intent to make the company more profitable. To do so, he would spend more waking hours at his company than with his family. He was certain that everyone would directly benefit from this. It was financial stasis: a dim, steady light growing stronger at the end of a long tunnel.
But his secret was that it wasn’t really so long, nor so dark.
It was neither pleasure nor pain, nor endurance. It was what it was.
His mother would die, as all mothers do. Bouquets from family signifying condolence and mourning would be present at her funeral. The largest bouquet would be sent by his Internet travel company, accompanied by a note written by an assistant and signed by a president.
His mother’s father had come over from another country on a ship. His family told him he was crazy to do so. In his home country, to which he would never return, they followed him down to the dock to bid him farewell and to remind him that he would be sorry.
As he boarded the ship he told them to go fuck themselves.
The suggestion that an individual should attempt to fuck him or herself is an expression common to many cultures.
He once heard his mother refer to a woman his father knew as having round heels. He had to ask his aunt what this meant. She told him it meant the woman was such a slut her heels had been rounded from crawling in and out of men’s beds.
The father of his soon-to‑be-dead mother had gambled and drank. Most immigrants do; taking risks is in their nature. They enjoy the limitless potential.
There are no known quantifying statistics for such behavior. No percentages, nor medians. No ranges, scales nor averages. No metrics at all. Any existing data is purely anecdotal. At best.
It had been implicit that his father would die first. Then his mother would live off his insurance and pension with her sister. His father did his part but in that awesome way that life surprises, she lost her mind instead.
Lubrication is critical although it’s often neither requested nor provided.
When it was time for his mother to move to the assisted living facility, he set up a trust for her and packed her dwindled possessions. What she no longer needed he gave to her sister, who herself would soon not need it.
But that would not be his responsibility.
Petroleum-based products tend to perform best.
He knew the margins could be thin. He was planning for a future that he was no longer sure would arrive.
He read for her as she had for him. It was an authentic expression, the most anyone could aspire to. Blood flows, then flesh yields. The enterprise, some speculate, is about totality.
Michael Ahn’s short fiction has appeared in The Quarterly.
Up 58 South by Jamie Quatro
Dying, I tell Neil, is like driving south up a mountain.
“58 South,” I say as we start the ascent on the way home from the clinic in Chattanooga. “We’re going south and driving up.”
“Sandwich walks into a bar,” Neil says. His hands open and close around the steering wheel.
But the metaphor is too good to let go. “Like me. Uphill climb, body heading south all the while.”
“And the bartender says, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve food here.’ ”
Thirty seconds later Neil says, “And by the way. You’re not going to die.” His timing is off – it sounds like the punch line.
We moved from Phoenix to Lookout Mountain, Georgia, eight months ago, so Neil could teach economics at Westminster College. You can see the tower on the north end of Carter Hall from anywhere on the mountain. Most people think the tower is some kind of theological statement: aspiration toward God, beacon-on-the-hill. But back during Prohibition, Carter Hall was a luxury hotel and speakeasy. The tower was built to keep a look out for the authorities.
Unless there’s a truck in front of you, it takes seven minutes to drive up from Chattanooga to the top of Lookout. When you cross the Tennessee/Georgia line, the trees open up so you can see the view beyond the rusted guard rail. “Welcome – we’re glad Georgia’s on your mind,” the sign says. But Georgia isn’t on my mind. What’s on my mind is the cliff on my left and the sheer limestone wall on my right.
At the top is the town of Lookout Mountain, Georgia. Turn right, drive four blocks, and you’re in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Two states, one town. Population, just over 5,000. The two state thing was a selling point with the kids. “You can trick-or-treat in Georgia and Tennessee,” we told them.
Some houses straddle the border. In these cases, state of residence depends on the master bedroom: if it’s in Georgia, then you live in Georgia, even if the rest of the house is in Tennessee. The story goes that one man spent a year converting his garage into a master suite because he wanted to live in Tennessee, where there’s no state income tax. After he’d changed his address and moved his furniture, he found his property taxes had doubled.
It doesn’t matter which side you choose, our realtor said. It all evens out.
Our realtor also said the master bedroom rule isn’t accurate in the scientific sense, since statistics show that, assuming an average lifespan, when you die you will have spent only a third of your time asleep. State of residence, he said, should depend on the room with the television.
A third of the time asleep. So what I’m losing is only two-thirds.
We decided to move to Georgia last March, before I found out that my melanoma had recurred. By June – when I found out – the house in Phoenix had sold and the car was packed. The contractor had installed French doors in the new house; Maddy had picked Petal Pink for her walls.
I had surgery the day after the diagnosis. What I was hoping to hear, what I’d heard the first time, was in situ. This time, Dr. Planer didn’t say in situ. She said stage four. It was Neil’s last day at work, and the day before the first leg of our drive, and the last day on our current insurance. How could I help thinking the timing was perfect?
While the surgeon scooped out tissue in my lower arm, he talked about increased family risk. “You need to contact your siblings. Do you have siblings?” Right, siblings. There are four of us. Of whom I am the eldest. The one who is supposed to take care of the elderly parents – when they become elderly. My parents are in their late fifties.
“And we’re not just talking sunscreen with the kids,” the surgeon said. “We’re talking indoors.”
I said, “We’re moving to a mountain near Chattanooga. It’s shady there.”
“You’re lucky,” the nurse said. “I’d give anything to get my boys out of this sun.”
I closed my eyes against the smoke from the cauterizer. “I know,” I said. “The whole thing is really providential.”
Acknowledging you are dying is the first step toward living the rest of your life.
I have not acknowledged anything to anyone but Neil. Moving was hard enough. I wear long sleeves, and I’ve been lucky with the hair. Hyperthermic isolated limb perfusion – where they cut off the circulation in my arm with a tourniquet and inject the warmed chemo – does not involve hair loss.
But at the clinic today, they implied it might be time to start acknowledging. There are, they said, satellite tumors.
And they gave us – Neil and me – the helpful booklet. Even before you show signs of serious illness, people may have a different look in their eyes when they talk to you. And, Don’t be afraid to ask to be alone.
We pick up the kids from school on our way home. Connor throws his backpack into the car before he climbs in. “TGIThur,” he says. Tuesdays he says TGIT. This is what happens when you teach a five-year-old his days of the week and his consonants at the same time.
Maddy keeps her backpack on. “How come you’re driving us?”
“Hey, you two,” Neil says. “I forget. What’s the guy’s name with no arms and no legs, hanging on the wall?”
“Art!” Connor yells.
“No arms, no legs, swimming in a lake?”
“Bob!” he yells again.
“Don’t you have classes?” Maddy asks.
“Cancelled,” Neil says. “On account of ice cream.”
Our realtor did not tell us about the leash laws. The Tennessee side has a leash law; the first run I took on the Georgia side, three dogs followed me home. The Georgia dogs have amazing stamina.
Every time I hear that another dog has been hit by a car, I know which side it lived on.
Last week, a big mixed breed scratched at my back door. His tag said “Bo, 5874 Cinderella Circle,” a cul-de-sac twelve blocks from our street. Twelve blocks used to be a warm‑up. I looked for my car keys.
Bo’s tail slapped the insides of my thighs when I rang the doorbell. A lady I recognized from church opened the door. I said, “Your dog came to my house and I thought I’d bring him home.”
“Oh, he runs everywhere,” she said. “But thanks for bringing him. Call next time – I’ll come to you!”
Dogs are the kind of worry I can manage.
My kids worry about a tiny white terrier that crosses the street to meet us on the walk home from school. Yesterday, Maddy screamed when a passing truck brushed the dog’s tail. His fur is matted and he has a shrill, rapid-fire bark. He won’t let me pick him up. The kids want to adopt him, but I tell them he already has a home. “Yah! Go home!” we shout, and stamp our feet at him, but this doesn’t work. We decide our best bet is to ignore him. “Don’t pet him, Connor,” Maddy says. “If you do, he’ll follow us.”
Yesterday, with the terrier barking at their shins, Maddy took Connor’s hand. “I bet you can’t walk as fast as me. Come on, try to walk fast.” She pulled him along and his mitten came off in her hand. Connor took off the other mitten and pitched it back across the street into the dog’s front yard. “Get it, doggy!”
“Go pick up your mitten,” Maddy said. “Your fingers will freeze.”
But I said to leave it. I said, “Connor, that was brilliant. Trying to save the doggy like that. You are a brilliant little boy.”
When we get home, Neil runs the helpful booklet through the shredder and goes online. The NCI website keeps an updated list of clinical trials by state and region. There’s a new study in Birmingham the oncologist thinks I’ll qualify for. The drug is Interferon Alpha. Primary interference? Is this what I want to do, interfere primarily? It’s something I’d say to my teenaged daughter: I have a right to interfere! I don’t like the sound of it. Interfering is only rifling around in someone else’s business. Interfering is not ending.
“We’d have to drive down three times a week,” Neil says. “We could ask Sandra to walk the kids home from school.” Be grateful, and accept help, from whatever source, graciously. But would Sandra let Connor pet the terrier? Would she make him go back for his mitten?
In bed, Neil wants to stroke my skin. He tells me it’s soft as butter. Like feathers. Like fluffy clouds.
And I say things I never used to say. Why don’t I dance naked for you. Why don’t I lick you, suck you, sit on you. Why don’t we do it on the dresser. In the rocking chair. Why don’t you have your way with me.
You won’t hurt me, I say.
Our next door neighbor is a widow from Savannah. Her name is Anita, and she calls me darlin’. From my bedroom window, I always see her putting out leftovers on aluminum pie plates for the squirrels. Sometimes I go out back and we chat over the cedar fence that separates our side yards while she walks back and forth with her metal detector. She puts the things she finds in a cake pan on her deck, then sells them to the Point Park museum. Since I’ve known her, she’s found half a rusted canteen and three broken Confederate belt buckles.
Point Park is on the Tennessee side, where the east and west brows of the mountain come together. Billboards along 58 South have photographs of actors dressed in Civil War uniform: Come visit Point Park, where the battle begins every 30 minutes! This is false advertising. You think you’re going to watch a live reenactment, but it turns out to be an electronic battle map presentation.
We took Maddy and Connor to see the battle map our second week here. We sat in theater chairs in front of a room-sized model of Chattanooga, with lines of toy blue and grey soldiers in formations around the city. I thought the soldiers would move, but once the presentation started a series of tiny lights underneath them – red for Confederate, blue for Union – blinked on and off in synch with the narration. We watched the rows of lights ascend and descend Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. Connor fell asleep until the rebel yell woke him up and made him cry.
After the presentation, you have to exit through the gift shop, which is divided the same way the mountain is: Tennessee souvenirs, Georgia souvenirs. We bought strictly Tennessee, since that was the state we were visiting. Connor picked a bag of cast-iron soldiers; Maddy chose a mug that said “American by birth, Southern by the grace of God.” Neil bought a tall shot glass with three fill-lines. Fill it to the top, you’re a Rebel; fill to the middle, you’re a Southern Belle; fill only to the bottom line, you’re a Yellow-Bellied Yank.
The Georgia side of the gift shop was all garden gnomes, birdhouses, snow globes with forest animals posed in front of cottages, handmade quilts and fudge. Walker County has chosen to highlight the natural beauty of the mountain. The only tourist attraction on the Georgia side is a fairytale-themed park called “Rock City Gardens.” Our subdivision is called Fairyland Farms; Maddy and Connor go to Fairyland School. They pronounce it “feh-re-lind.” Even the streets have fairytale names: “Robin Hood Trail,” “Tinkerbell Lane,” “Mother Goose Avenue.” My favorite is a nod to Shakespeare – “Puck Circle.” You can imagine the graffiti.
On the Tennessee side, the streets are named after Confederate generals.
Friday morning, Connor wants to take his plastic Enfield rifle for show-and-tell. I am certain I read no toy weapons in the kindergarten handbook.
“Ned brought in a broken bayonet and some musket balls,” Maddy says. “His dad found them in his backyard.”
“I don’t think you’ll have show-and-tell,” I say. “Today’s the Valentine’s party.”
On the way to school, Connor picks up a cone-shaped magnolia seedpod and shoves it into his backpack. “Grenade,” he says.
In the ’70s, back in Phoenix, our parents put zinc oxide on our noses so we wouldn’t freckle. In the ’80s, when people started worrying about ozone, we were teenagers. Our mothers said skin cancer; we turned up the radio.
When my parents call to ask how the treatment is going, I want to tell them it’s not their fault: You tried to make me wear sunscreen and I refused. But the type of melanoma I’ve developed is genetic, with no proven link to sun exposure. So the truth is, it’s my parents’ fault after all.
What I do blame my parents for? Burying my cat before I came home from school so I never saw the body. Lying about the boy down the street who put a desk chair through his bedroom window and opened his wrists on the broken pane. For presenting me with a world devoid of tragedy and calling the cover‑up love. How am I supposed to talk about loss with Maddy and Connor, when my own childhood experience is only half the story?
My first boss out of college, a woman twice-divorced and living with a younger man, once told me You lead a charmed life. I thought: But where can I go from here? Lately I’ve been thinking I should call the woman. I feel I owe it to her.
Tonight Neil is taking me out to dinner for Valentine’s Day. He always has students lined up to babysit; some of these girls are graduate students, only a few years younger than I am. Watching them lean their elbows on our kitchen counter to read the instructions I’ve written, or coming home to find them asleep on our couch, I analyze their hips, the skin on the backs of their arms, the angles of their shoulder blades. I am sizing them up for Neil. Which one could have children that would look the most like Maddy and Connor?
My favorite, the one who’s coming tonight, is a senior named Meg. She has a wide-open face, large breasts, and thighs that are too big for her calves and ankles. I am small-chested and have great legs. Meg is desirable in a way that won’t remind Neil of me.
The doorbell rings and the kids fight over who gets to open the door. “I’ll get it,” I say.
Meg is standing on the front porch, holding up her left hand. “Ta da,” she says.
“Congratulations,” I say. “Neil didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend.” I examine the ring, a single emerald-cut diamond set in platinum. I notice a pale freckle just above the ring. I notice Meg’s French manicure, her long nailbeds, the dozen-or-so silver bangles on her wrist.
“Yeah, he’s in school back home.” She pulls a thick bride magazine out of her backpack. “Can Maddy stay up to help me look at dresses?”
“How come Maddy gets to stay up?” Connor says.
Maddy says, “I get to wear my mom’s dress when I get married.”
My wedding dress is dated: the sleeves puff and the train gathers underneath an enormous blush-pink bow. Maddy loves it now. But I know the only way she’d come to wear it would be as a tribute.
Neil takes me to Tony’s. They serve garlic bread with whole cloves baked in, and pastas like pumpkin gorgonzola ravioli.
“You need to eat,” Neil says. “Force yourself.”
But I’m thinking about Maddy at the end of some flowered aisle, holding Neil’s arm, wearing my wedding dress. “Make sure Maddy knows she doesn’t have to wear that dress,” I say.
“You make sure,” Neil says. “You’re going to be there.”
“She’s been coming in to sleep with me during the night,” I say. “This morning I woke up and found one of her hairs in my mouth.”
Neil pulls his chair around to sit next to me. It’s an awkward arrangement. The waiter stumbles on Neil’s chair leg when he brings us the dessert menus. Neil pulls me to him, cups his hand around my upper arm, a single parenthesis. “Tell me what to do,” he says. “How to act.” Against my back, his arm is shaking.
“I don’t know. Take it seriously. Help me tell the kids.”
He puts his lips to my ear. “What’s thin, brown, and sticky?” he whispers. The sensuality of his lips and breath is startling, incongruous. I don’t answer. “A stick,” he says. He takes off his glasses. Then, sliding his wine out of the way, he leans over the table and rests his forehead on the tablecloth. He reaches for my hand. I can tell he’s crying by the way his shoulder blades keep contracting beneath his shirt.
I lean into him, press my breasts into his back. Before, I would not have believed that it’s possible to feel arousal and despair at the same time. That you could want to straddle your husband across a restaurant chair, open your blouse, rock in his lap and cry with pleasure, cry because now you know, you know how much you love your body and his. Only they’re less and less yours every day. You cry because this last raw thing – fucking – has become a consolation. You cry because when your husband first makes love to another woman, it will be a consolation. And then, later, it won’t.
On Sunday morning I wake up early – there’s a chocolate Lab barking at a squirrel in the Bradford pear. I go out front and check its tag. “Missy, 406 Peter Pan Rd.”
Anita, still in her nightgown, is sitting on her front porch. She waves and pats the chair next to her. “Wouldn’t you like to come sit?”
It’s warm out for February; Anita’s barefoot. We talk about the Georgia dogs. Her husband used to be mayor on the Tennessee side, and were he still alive he’d push for a leash law. “The way they get things done in Tennessee,” she says. “Tennessee’s a man’s state, Georgia a woman’s. Well just look at the names.”
I mention all the monuments in Tennessee, the obelisks engraved with “Ohio,” “New York,” and “Illinois.” I ask, “Why do they hold on to the whole Confederate thing? When it’s all defeat?”
“Well now,” she says. “But isn’t that just like a man, to ignore his own surrender?” Her feet are smooth and white against the porch’s brick floor.
“I’m dying,” I say to her feet. “I have skin cancer and it’s spreading. Neil wants me to do a clinical trial in Birmingham.”
“Oh darlin’,” Anita says. I feel her hand on my back. “Your husband told me you had cancer when you all moved in. I was wondering if you might not mention it sometime.”
Beneath the pear tree, Missy has not stopped barking. She circles the trunk until the squirrel leaps onto the limb of an oak and climbs out of sight.
When you’re young, no one ever tells you that underneath everything you’ll ever do – school, job, parenting – is appetite. That someday you will look at a 72‑year-old widow in her nightgown and think, She is the winner; I am the loser. And you would come out of your skin, you would crawl up into the sweaty warmth of her armpit just to be inside all that pulsing life.
What would you think of me if I told you that I’m jealous of my own daughter – the ropy muscles in her legs, her thickening hair, her becoming? Can you imagine what it would be like, at 32, to be finished becoming? What if you knew that if we met somewhere – in the produce aisle, at the ATM – I would imagine cutting your insides out and sticking them into my own body? Would you think differently about me if you knew I would do this in order to breathe the scent of Connor’s skin for another morning?
When the pastor announces a death in our congregation, he uses Saint Paul’s metaphor: “Eva Reynolds finished her race last Wednesday.” As a runner, I have always liked the image. That would be the thing to think, on your deathbed – that at the end of yourself, you still had control. But now I see the metaphor only works for people who live to old age. They get to run the whole course.
I have started writing out my prayers, word for word, in a journal. Yesterday I copied down a psalm because it was easier than coming up with my own words. “Unite my heart, that I may fear your name,” is what the psalm said. But when I opened my journal this morning, I saw that I’d written “Untie.” So what does that mean? Am I coming together, or splitting apart?
Sunday evening we tell the kids.
From small children, the question “Where do dead people go?” may not be a question about the afterlife, but about the physical body. First, try to answer with “They go into the ground at the cemetery.”
We take Maddy and Connor to the downtown aquarium. A shipment of penguins arrived two weeks ago, and we stand in front of the new plexiglass, shivering. The penguins jostle each other. Some shimmy through the water like silk. The children laugh at the way the penguins walk. They pull their arms inside their sweatshirts and waddle, shouldering one another into the rail.
When we come out, the sun over the Tennessee River is lowering behind a haze of shifting clouds. Filtered this way, it looks like the moon. “Bright for nighttime,” Connor says. We don’t correct him. We walk down to the riverfront and sit on a flat rock next to the Watertaxi. “Rides, $3.00.”
“Can we ride it?” Connor asks.
“Okay,” Neil says. “But first Mommy and I want to talk with you guys about something.”
“It says No Fishing.” Maddy is pointing to a shirtless man fishing halfway down the bank. Three poles are wedged between rocks, lines cast out and dragged sideways in the current. The man casts and reels a fourth line. “Here, kitty kitty,” we hear him say. He looks up. “Goin’ to catch me a big cat,” he calls up to us.
Neil pulls Connor into his lap. Maddy sits cross-legged, facing us. “Remember last summer, when Mommy had to get stitches in her arm?”
“Lemme see the scar,” Connor says.
I pull up my sleeve to show him, and he traces the pink line with his index finger. I cannot feel his touch.
“That was cancer,” Maddy says. “They took it out.”
“Well, last Thursday the doctors found some more. And this time they might not be able to take it out.” Maddy’s eyes go wide.
“There’s a doctor in Alabama who wants to try some new medicine,” I say. “Daddy and I are going to drive down three days a week. We thought we’d have Sandra walk you home from school.”
I’d assumed it would be Maddy who asked the question, but it’s Connor: “Are you going to die?”
I think of everything I could say. I knew a lady once who beat it. Breast cancer, stage four, lived fifteen years longer. I think of the story of Hezekiah, God prolonging his life, making the sun retreat up the steps.
Neil tells the truth. “Anyone here who isn’t going to die, raise your hand!” Both their hands shoot up. Then Maddy pulls hers down. “That’s not the right answer,” she says, and starts to cry. I take her onto my lap. We hold them and watch the man bring in a fish. He twists out the hook with a pair of pliers, then tosses the fish into a bucket.
Tell me if you think this is true: it is easier to accept defeat and try to make the wreckage look beautiful than to keep fighting and lose. It feels true to me.
“Battling” cancer is only a small, daily choice you make to live with dissonance, the melody of your life running one way, the bass of your thoughts running another. Someone says tomorrow, you hear if. Forgetting is a blessing you have to manufacture.
When I blow them kisses at bedtime, Maddy and Connor snatch them out of the air and tuck them under their pillows to save till morning. And on our drives home from Birmingham, I make Neil take the back way up the mountain. Nickajack Road starts in Flintstone, Georgia and winds up behind the college. It takes twice as long as 58 South. But there are no signs about battles. You’re in Georgia the whole time.
Jamie Quatro’s work has appeared in The Antioch Review, The Hopkins Review, Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, and McSweeney’s.
The End of Something by Nick Falgout
Come winter, I am done. I make weepy boxes of the things gathering dust in the garage and set them to the curb, where they collect snow. I knock over the corded wood stacked out near the shed and then lob each piece down the scrubby hill behind my house. Soon I am using both hands; the wood cartwheels down in a graceless way, bits of bark chipping off like teeth. I roll my haze-blue Honda around from the backyard and begin to junk it for parts in the driveway, pulling cords and plugs at random from the engine, unscrewing the doors, hubcaps, chiseling off the bumpers.
I take down the curtains, the drapes, and heap them in the foyer. There is enough perishable food to last a week and enough non-perishable left to live, creatively, for another month. I take it all out, all that can go without refrigeration, and stack it in the living room, on the couch and on my armchair, on the coffee table and atop the TV, more and more until the floor is a minefield, playroom, of Bisquick, canned pear halves, oatmeal, Budweiser, ketchup, soup and soup and soup.
I sleep in the drapes for weeks and, eventually, gravitate between two poles – the foyer, where I sleep, and the living room, where I cut the same paths between glass and aluminum and cardboard containers and touch and touch them. The other rooms are home now only to the shadows of trees that sweep through them like clock hands. The carpet from the house is laid over the lawn like fertilizer, like a second skin. Through the windows I watch the majesty of season: the snow-limned evergreens, the blue tint of air shocked through with cold.
Soon, everything is skeletons: the few deciduous trees make knotted many-fingered fists in their attempts to clutch on to life, the car is a rusting wire frame, like something burned. When the snow thins there are only the stems and veins of pitiable brown leaves. The world tastes like the belly of a woodstove. My things are mine no longer; they are bleached by the cold and rattled by the wind and look angular and sinewy in their boxes, foreign. One morning, I open each window and door in the house and let the hard air scour the wooden floors. The cans on the carpet in the living room blunk against each other like the tops of heads. There is a chorus of whinnying, the way air sounds in old radio broadcasts, and it comes from all sides, all directions – I catch myself breathing as well.
This is Nick Falgout’s first fiction publication in a national literary magazine.
The Social Life of Mice by Megan Mayhew-Bergman
We had one rule at the dinner table. We could have complete honesty if we talked through the dog. We could speak without consequence. But when Jack died, our marriage stalled out like my father’s ’47 Dodge project truck.
Jack, I’d say. Tell Brad that when he comes home late without calling, I think about leaving him.
Jack, Brad would say. The thing is, when Breck thinks about leaving, she’s already been thinking about it for other reasons. For example, the fact that I like cold weather. She holds it against me. That’s what she won’t tell you.
Jack’s clouded eyes were attentive, framed in the white fuzz of old age, and looked just past our faces to the food on our forks.
Afterwards I’d smile and pat Brad’s leg, and we’d talk about the surgeries we’d done that day. He’d have done a few spays and neuters. I might have removed a kitchen sponge or sock from the belly of a Labrador. We would talk about strategies for cauterizing ligaments or applying a bone graft, and the wine would go down, and we’d move to the couch, Jack easing himself onto the cushions like an arthritic gorilla.
Jack was a co‑conspirator, a conduit. He smelled like a salty bag of chips, slept for twenty hours a day. He kept our feet warm. He donated his blood to sickly clinic dogs. He had a stuffed hedgehog without a head he took to bed each night. He let us shave his stomach when we needed to demonstrate our ultrasound machine.
The week he went down we were due east, at the bear hunt in Fairfield. He’d come with us in years past, plodding around the mobile clinic we set up to treat hounds lacerated in bear fights. As the sun rose he howled with the Walker Coonhounds, which were already deep in the forest flushing out bears.
I could still imagine Jack’s call filling the silence outside, the way he seemed to roll the howl around in his mouth, his felty lips pursed and attuned to duty.
As we prepared for the trip, Brad and I stopped talking. We packed the trailer like assembly workers. Vet wrap, vaccines, scrubs, catheters. Tupperware boxes of threadbare blankets and rags. Steel tables face down, legs up, with coolers of IV packs on top. Brad pulled out Jack’s fleece bed from the trailer and put it in the garage. I picked it up and smelled it. I rolled it into a cylinder and placed it in my closet upstairs.
* * *
The drive to Fairfield was flat and fast. The ground was so level that farmers cut ditches into the land for drainage. The horizon was lined with pine trees, Wal-Marts, crumbling farmhouses. It was all familiar to me – the sand in the soil, the cotton blowing along the side of the road.
Fairfield was wild with hunting fever. The restaurants and bars flew orange flags – Hunters Welcome. Camo-painted SUVs and ATVs took front row in the car show lots.
We stayed at a friend’s doublewide within walking distance of our clinic site. I took a short walk to Lake Mattamuskeet in an orange mesh vest. The tundra swans and snow geese sailed in overhead, ready to land for winter. The flatness of the land continued onto the water and gave the place a sense of smoothness only interrupted by jagged husks of loblolly pines. Sometimes, when I was alone like this, and could see nothing manmade on the horizon, I felt primal, humbled by a sublime force I could not name. I thought about Jack that way. I tried to respect the natural course of life.
The trailer was poorly insulated, a place you didn’t walk around barefoot or leave your toothbrush out. But it was a central location just outside the hunting zone, and free.
Brad unloaded and I showered. I held back from inspecting the sheets, knowing the gesture would irritate him. It’s people dirt I don’t like, I would tell him. Dirt dirt is just fine.
We got in bed quietly. By two A.M., six mouse traps had fired. We could hear the mice moving in the walls. They moved in spurts, as if they were doing drills.
What do they do when they pass each other in there? Brad whispered, tapping on the wall. High five? Go nose to nose? Give directions to a route around the trap?
They mate, I said, so there must be social order. Or do they fly by each other in the night, too busy to stop?
I know nothing about the social life of mice, Brad said. A girl brought a mouse in last week with pneumonia. I neutered it. She said it was a nice mouse, had a wheel and two friends at home.
As small animal vets, we would treat anything. I had a colleague who gave mouth-to‑mouth to a goldfish after peeling it off the kitchen floor with a spatula. I had clients that kept a declawed raccoon in their guest room, a tame doe in the dog run.
I buried my face into Brad’s armpit so I couldn’t hear the traps. He stroked my hair. In the morning, neither of us was sure we had slept.
* * *
By noon the next day, we were knee-deep in hounds. The pickups pulled in with networks of steel dog cages in the back, dry dirt blowing up from the wheels. These were country dogs without leashes, but some could no longer walk.
Brad managed triage in the barn, palpating for hernias and trauma, while I began the process of stitching lacerated necks and backs. Brad’s canvas pants were tucked into the back of his work boots. The trucker hat a friend had given him, which advertised Henry’s Sport Lodge, sat stiffly on top of his head. We tried our best to look like country folks here. If you wanted to treat the hounds, the trick was keeping quiet. Don’t look like you’re judging nobody, a local had warned us the first year.
I love this dog, one of the hunters said to me, tears in his eyes. If Soup Bone’s gonna go I want to be right here with ’im.
That kind of love was hard to understand, but I nodded, looking at the hound’s exposed muscle. The hunter stood behind me in his denim jacket, lip quivering as I sutured his dog’s back end.
You can hold the blanket over his front end, I said, placing my hand over his. Help keep him warm.
We didn’t stop for lunch. By sunset we had twelve pens of baying hounds in various stages of sleep, anesthesia, and hunger. My fingers ached from suturing at breakneck pace.
For dinner, locals brought over a pot roast in a crock pot and plugged it into the barn wall with an extension cord, but I wasn’t interested in meat.
* * *
That night, after Brad had cleared the mouse traps, humanely breaking a few necks, we lay down. Shortly after, we heard the sounds of tiny feet moving through the aluminum walls.
One mouse says to another, I started.
Whatever you do, Brad warned, do not name the mice. It is always harder to let something go once you’ve given it a name.
* * *
You can only call something a sport, my mother had said, if both things are equally armed. She had been holding a half-dead squirrel my brother had shot with the bb gun. It was suffering. She twisted its neck and handed it to him.
Something you weren’t man enough to do, she said, gritting her teeth.
We had buried the squirrel, its body still warm. We had touched its soft tail, the crown of its head, mumbled some butchered prayers. From then on, my brother and I were the only country pacifists I knew. When I jogged dirt roads in the fall, orange cap low over my forehead, and passed the hunters climbing down from their pickups, I had to keep myself from screaming into the woods: Run!
I knew whose side I was on.
* * *
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I watched a gray mouse cross the coffee table. The furniture in the doublewide was hefty and garish, a deep brown with a dark sheen and gold knobs.
Mouse, I said, say for example you thought you might want to live in Hawaii, or some place in the Deep South with Spanish moss hanging from the trees.
Mouse, Brad said, say we compromised and lived in North Carolina for a few years.
Mouse, I said, understand that we have put money down on a clinic of our own in New England. Tell your friends we are bringing a barn cat.
* * *
Brad and I woke every morning to the sound of gunfire, howling dogs. I could not look at the mice, pinned tragically to the wooden wedges, their tiny black eyes bulging.
What if we got rid of the traps? I asked, fastening my coveralls.
Our bed would be teeming with mice, Brad said. It’s November. We’re in a cotton field. They’re cold and hungry.
I can’t do it anymore, I said. I’d rather sleep outside. I’m gonna put cotton in my ears to drown them out.
Be rational, he said.
* * *
Brad and I had gotten to know each other during birthing season in veterinary school. We’d had the meat goat shift one night, watching the sturdy twin kids drop into the hay. With each successful birth we marked the chalkboard. We ended up making out in the back of the covered John Deere ATV, which smelled like feed and fermentation.
I’m really a horse person, I’d told him, approaching graduation. I’d helped him through therio, where we’d gone in, helmet-clad like warriors, to collect semen from horses.
But when it came time to settle, we’d decided to stay together and applied for work at a small animal hospital in eastern North Carolina. We could understand each other in ways our families did not, why our laundry could not be washed with street clothes, what it was like to spend an hour inside the prolapsed uterus of a cow. But after a few years, we both felt the eventual sting of compromise, the nagging voice that reminded us neither was where we really wanted to be. I gave in to New England. I felt like one of us should win.
* * *
Our fourth afternoon I stood in front of the dog pens before dinner time, hands on hips. Brad came and put his arm around my shoulder.
Dogs, I said, above the baying and howling, will you please tell Brad that this is a place where I could run forever, if I had the energy? That I could start down that flat country road and keep going?
* * *
It rained that morning, and the dry dirt turned to a foot-sucking field of muck. A neighbor drove his cotton tractor up and down the dirt road, looking to pull people out of trouble. Our muddy footprints turned the mobile clinic floor black. You could smell the wet earth out here, and I liked it.
When the hunting stopped, we took time to drink coffee and vaccinated everything people dropped off. Dogs, cats, ferrets, rabbits.
I could get back into this life, I told Brad. I grew up like this. I understand these people. I had an uncle who used to spoon deer stew over ramen noodles when we ate dinner at his place.
You may feel at home, he said, but that doesn’t mean you are.
A couple brought in a beagle that afternoon. He’s a rock eater, the wife said. Got that beagle wanderlust but instead of chasing deer he goes out and eats rocks.
I palpated his abdomen. I’d like to get an X‑ray, I said.
He’ll need to stay the night, Brad said, interrupting.
Fine with me, the woman said. She wore a down vest unbuttoned so that her tanned cleavage was visible, as was the array of necklaces lost within it.
Bob’s done had me at the bear hunt every day this week, she said. One bear per person, she said, and winked, her mascara-matted lashes crushing against each other like fly traps.
* * *
Our last night was cold. We ate macaroni and cheese. Brad mixed frozen peas into his dish.
That strikes me as self-righteous, I said. Monastic, even.
I’ll be right back, he said.
I microwaved the flat disks we left in dog crates on cold nights and slipped them beneath our own sheets. I missed the sound of Jack’s dreams, the warmth of his white stomach across my feet.
Brad arrived with the rock-eating beagle in his arms and placed him at the foot of the bed. The dog looked at me with kohl-lined eyes and thumped his tail on the quilt.
There, Brad said. Now start talking.
Megan Mayhew-Bergman’s recent fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review, Carolina Quarterly, The Oxford American, and Mississippi Review.
I Had It Out by Anna DeForest
I’d soaked in so much give and take that when winter and the divorce came, not in that order, I still had the smell of the marriage about me. It pulled a rude crowd, the sort of worst-is-over men who liked their women pre-battered. There was a joy to all this courtship, but it didn’t happen to be mine. I waited out their pleasures, slept through their departures, drank instant coffee. I bought a two-headed spatula, as seen on TV, with which even an amputee could make the perfect omelet. I made all kinds of breakfast, but I didn’t eat. I took on the wistful half-squint of someone who wasn’t waiting for anything.
I was bleeding then, but not in the way I meant to be. Pregnancy was going around. My sister caught it from some husband she’d been consistently, covertly borrowing. She called me the day before she had the thing sucked out. It was nice not sleeping alone, she said of the zygote, but she wanted to be the kind of woman who didn’t want that. “You’d think this would be a wake‑up call,” she was saying, her warm voice brittle from painkillers and the long roll across the country. “But I don’t want to wake up.” It took two weeks for her to heal up enough to have the husband again, three weeks to stop doing things for two. It’s a joke, they say, the way women want sex to mean something. But we bear the consequences. Of course we cry after.
Around then I started dreaming I would win things, but the cash prizes came synopsized and were delivered as handfuls of loose change. “Just tell me where to point myself,” I asked the men, one by one, in my bedroom. They kept still, hands pocketed, until I took the passive posture they’d signed up for. Not that I was the only one asking. My body had given up on something, and despite the passion I gestured up, it never found what I was looking for. “Tell me how you like it” became my least favorite command. And their harsh guesses were just as good as mine. When, finally fed up, I stopped trying for sex, it was less like quitting than forgetting.
I couldn’t even shit, I’d grown so pleasure-shy. Or there was nothing inside me to have out. But seltzer, a mingling of two kinds of nothing, grew to a place of affection in my slack and subtle heart. I picked it up largely at the deli, and gained a steady fascination with a red-haired man I’d see there, always buying instant oatmeal and ruddy, anonymous root vegetables. I couldn’t pin his face down in my memory, all light-toned and satisfyingly vague, with a beard that flickered in and out of things. He had chalk-white grandfatherish hands that made my stomach turn with sex and envy. But I never said anything.
The marriage. I didn’t miss it, but the concept made me lonely. I’d broken it all by myself. Some evasive quality of the marital bed had me hands out searching for a quantity that could supplement. I explained it so well, and so often, to the husband that I honestly believed I was in the clear until the day I came home to a houseful of absent things, him chief among them. I cried, maybe, but was tidied up by the distinct pleasure of getting, just once, what was coming to me.
I was two weeks chaste when my sister flew in for some holiday. She had enough cash, she said, to buy out her desire. But Christmas is a terrible time to be a mistress. My sister had a beautiful way around pretending and was pretty at all angles. The near-baby rounded her out a little, so my cheekbones had a narrow advantage. But when we went out, and we did, drinking hard as men, all the attention was fumblingly hers. She couldn’t move without a halo made of sharp-chinned, hard-laughing boys about her. She laughed around it, passed it off. I took down uncounted whiskey sours and twitched my fingers around the idea of the red-haired man. “They don’t like it,” she told me, “if you seem angry from the get-go.” But I was just spinning my wheels, warming it up for the anger of the end.
She was older than me and always had been, but I knew my way around a blow-job when I was fifteen and she still didn’t. In the bar she was drunk and sad as we wore out the night, and I chanced my hand through her hair, nerved by the soft of it. There was a week in college where we both went gay, a hijink she fearlessly bested me in. It’s true I don’t like women, but the slickness with which she passed through their affects straight to their mouths shot me humble, and I never doubted her again. Not that I mentioned it. The mistress thing was another one up. So was the abortion.
She got on a plane after New Year’s and was gone again, and I’d resolved to do all kinds of things. The red-haired man, for instance. At the deli I asked him one day what all the turnips were for. “Oh, you know,” he said, and his eyes were slight and happy, so I laughed because I didn’t know at all. We worked up a banter so slowly it was hard to say when we were friends. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” I ventured some weeks in, bold beyond capacity and shaking faintly, “if we ran into each other someplace else?”
“I’m not sure I would recognize you,” he said.
This is Anna DeForest’s first fiction publication in a national literary magazine.
The Last Day of Summer by James Donovan
I’m out back with Don. The picnic table is set up. There’s a cooler of beer, the good kind. I’ve got a CD in the CD player but I’m going to wait to turn it on. The sun’s setting. A few pink lines are left in the sky. It’s pretty. Don has a newspaper open. He’s not reading anything on account of the light. Just keeps it on his lap as a reference. Talking about the same stuff he discovered hours ago.
“When did you say she was coming?” he asks.
“I already told you when.”
“Not like it’s not getting chilly out here.”
“You must be about dead if you think it’s chilly out here.”
I met her in the soup aisle. It was two cans for three bucks and we both only wanted one. We checked out together. Turns out she works at the library on Sundays reading to kids. So one Sunday I happened to go to the library. I’d wanted to check out a book on the moon landing anyway. I found the book I wanted and I waited for the kids to leave and I went up to her. We didn’t talk about the moon landing. We talked about reading to kids and buying soup and when her birthday was. Turns out she was born the same month as me except two years later. That makes her a wartime baby and me a prewar baby.
“Found parts of a bomb in New Hampshire,” says Don.
“Already knew about it.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Did.”
I hear a voice out front. Not the kind of voice I’m waiting for. I get up and walk through the house and open the inside door.
“You guys lost?” I call out.
It’s four guys and a girl. From the college. They don’t hear me. I open the storm door and stick my head out.
“You folks need directions?”
I hang my head there.
“Is there a party here?” says one of the guys. He’s in a striped shirt with the collar popped. “Because if we’re early we can wait.”
“Okay,” I say. “I get it.”
I shut the storm door. Another guy holds up a big can of beer, as if he’s toasting me. The girl turns and walks down the street.
“You mind telling us where the party is then?” The guy in the shirt continues, “You look like you might know where it is.”
The other kids don’t pay him as much attention as he seems to want. They gradually follow the girl.
“Alright,” the guy says. “We’ll see you there.”
“I get it,” I say again.
I leave the inside door half open and go out back. Don’s still in the lawn chair.
“Was that her?” he asks.
“Some kids,” I say.
“Isn’t she a lot late?”
Before I can sit down, I hear the storm door open and shut. I look in through the back door. Someone’s in the house.
“See,” I say.
“About time,” he says, pretending to read the paper.
She approaches the back door. From outside with the light almost gone I can only see a kind of silhouette of her. She’s smaller than I remember.
“Hi,” she says through the screen.
Her voice has a bounce to it. The door opens. Two clunky shoes and bare legs step out onto the dirt. It’s another girl from the college, packed into a skirt and a tank top. For honesty’s sake, I avert my eyes.
“Hi!” says Don.
“Party’s down the street,” I say.
“Nonsense,” says Don. “Party’s right out back here.”
He gets up as quickly as he can and puts the newspaper on the picnic table.
“Boys,” she says, “Boys-boys-boys-boys-boys.”
She’s drunk, or worse.
“Alyssa,” she says to herself, like she’s funny. “What do you think you’re doing?” Then she looks at the picnic table and says, “Nice!”
She walks out of her shoes and leaves them in stride by the door. She works at the baggy around the stack of red cups and pulls one off the top. It takes Don about ten minutes to get to the cooler. Next thing I know, he’s pouring a beer into her cup, and I hear the beginning of my CD.
“Hold on,” I say. “I’m saving that for later.”
“How come?” asks Alyssa.
Once she has the beer in her hand she seems sober.
“I’m waiting for someone,” I say.
“You mean this isn’t her?” says Don. He brings up one of his laughs that rumbles up from the core of the earth. “This isn’t the woman you bought soup with?”
“Is this Frank Sinatra?” asks Alyssa.
“No,” I say.
“Sure it is,” says Don.
“It’s Bobby Darin,” I say.
“What’s the difference?” asks Don.
“I like this music,” says Alyssa.
“Exactly,” says Don.
Then I hear some other music messing up my music. Alyssa digs into her bag and pulls out a cell phone. “Are you serious?” she says to the phone. She walks over to a corner of the yard and talks quickly. I can’t hear what she’s saying. I hit pause on the CD player. The light in the sky is about done for. So there’s Don, holding an empty beer bottle, and I still haven’t gotten to sit down; that’s how we are until she comes back.
“Can I borrow that?” I ask Alyssa.
“What’s wrong with the one in the house?” asks Don.
“It’s been giving me trouble,” I say.
“You can use it,” says Alyssa.
I take her phone and go inside. The CD starts up again. I’ve got Marilynn’s number on a piece of paper by the couch. It’s been long enough, I figure, to call and see if she’s okay. I get my glasses on but before I can dial I hear the front door. It’s not her again. This time it’s a skinny guy with curly hair.
“Hey man,” he says. He’s got a shirt with Jimi Hendrix screaming on it. “I’m Gary.”
“Party’s down the street.”
“Alyssa told me I could come in. She said it was my kind of thing over here.”
“Okay,” I say. “She’s out back with Casanova.”
I point him to the door and I dial Marilynn. All I get is rings. I wait awhile and I get more rings and I hang up and go back outside.
It’s brighter than before. The moon is doing a lot. It lights up Don and Alyssa. It’s one of the really good songs on the CD. They’re all good but this one especially. It’s called “Things.” It’s about things you remember that you like. Don’s swaying the best he can. He puts a hand up in the air, and Alyssa twirls underneath it. She’s got bare feet still. Gary lines up cups on the table and pours a beer into each of them. Don and Alyssa take one and keep moving. I refuse. I’m not in the mood, but I’ll listen to Bobby Darin.
Don tells Gary to step in. He gets back into his seat and arranges the newspaper on his lap.
“Tired already?” I say.
“I don’t want to show up,” he takes a breath, “our friend here.”
It’s kind of funny but Gary appears less natural dancing than Don. The song on now is slower. Gary sways like Don did. But you can tell he’s accustomed to moving faster. He holds up a hand for Alyssa to twirl under. She makes a face like, oh this again. But she’s enjoying it. They’re not listening to Bobby Darin down the street, that’s for sure. The next song is “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” They both pick up their beers and move around kind of silly. Alyssa tries to sing some of the lyrics. She gets the chorus the second time around. She sings into her cup and dances over to Don and me and sings to us. Then her cell phone rings again and she dances over to a corner of the yard again. It’s the three of us waiting there with the music until she gets back.
“That was Fredo,” she says to Gary. “They finally opened up.”
“Good shit,” says Gary, turning to Don. “That’s our friend’s band. They have the run of this bar downtown.”
Alyssa walks back into her shoes. “It was nice meeting you all,” she says, and she takes her cup into the house.
“You know you’re coming with us,” says Gary.
Don turns a page in the newspaper.
“I’ve got to stay back with grandpa here,” he says.
I look at Jimi Hendrix screaming. It’s kind of a funny thing to have on a shirt, when you think about it. Someone screaming.
“Sweet kids,” I say to Don when we’re alone again.
“They were nice enough.”
“Why didn’t you go with them?”
“And miss all the action out here?”
It takes Don about two minutes to catch his breath and get antsy again. He closes the newspaper and puts it back on the picnic table. Three cups are there, one of them still full.
“I’m getting frostbite out here,” he says. “I’ve still got summer blood.”
“You going downtown?”
“No, no. I’ll be back.”
It takes him awhile. I think about going in and calling Marilynn while he’s gone but I don’t.
“Sorry,” he says when he gets back. “Had to stop in the john.”
He’s carrying a big box wrapped in shiny paper.
“Happy birthday, old friend,” he says.
He places the box on the picnic table with everything else.
“It’s not my birthday, you idiot.”
“It’s not? Then what’s with all the hoopla?”
“My birthday’s in November, Don.”
“November,” he says. “That’s practically tomorrow.”
He picks up the gift and drops it into my lap. Again someone’s at the front door and quickly this time the back door opens and I don’t even have time to think about who it might be. Two clunky shoes and bare legs step out onto the dirt.
“I think I lost my earring back here,” says Alyssa.
She sees the big box on my lap.
“Oh my god,” she says. “What is that?”
“A mistake,” I say.
“Well aren’t you going to open it? Is it your birthday?”
“No and no,” I say.
The CD gets to “Mack the Knife.” I imagined Marilynn and I would be up and out of our chairs after a beer each by the time this song came on. I’d be singing it the way I sing it. I’d throw my arms up when Bobby says, “Eek!”
Instead I’m sitting here with this big stupid mistake.
“What is it?” asks Alyssa. “I want to know what it is. Look, it’s all wrapped and everything.”
She seems a little drunk again. She picks up the full cup of beer and has some.
“Forget it,” says Don. “Save it until November. We’ll bury you with it, if that’ll make you happy.”
“Shut up, Don,” I say. “Who invited you even?”
“Come on,” says Alyssa. “Open the present. Open it!”
I get up and plop the thing down on the picnic table.
“You open it,” I say.
“Might as well,” says Don.
“Really?” says Alyssa.
She puts down her beer and digs a fingernail beneath a fold in the wrapping. She gets part of the top exposed and peeks at it. Then she tears it all off.
It’s some kind of space ship in a box.
“What the hell kind of a thing is that?” I say.
“Captured in fine detail,” Alyssa reads from the box. “This replica of the Saturn Five Rocket is a great addition to any collection.”
“What on earth?” I say.
“That’s all you’ve been talking about lately,” says Don. “The moon landing.”
“So you get me my own goddamn pet moon landing?”
“Come on,” says Alyssa. “I think it’s nice.”
“You do?” I say. “Well it’s yours.”
The house phone is ringing. I go inside. The thing on the phone says, “Unavailable.” I let it ring one more time and I pick up.
“Would you like to sign up for three free months of Men’s Fitness magazine?”
“Yes,” I say, and hang up.
Out back, Don is helping Alyssa fasten her earring.
“Okay,” says Alyssa when she’s fastened. “I’m taking the rocket ship now.”
“No, no,” I say. “I want it. Give me the gift.”
“Bullshit,” says Don.
“While being a high skill-level kit,” Alyssa reads from the box again, “this rocket will not be difficult for you to build. The instructions are detailed and easy to follow.”
“I have to build the thing?”
“I thought you’d enjoy that,” says Don.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say.
Alyssa holds out the box for me. You’d think she went to the store and picked it out herself.
This is James Donovan’s first fiction publication in a national literary magazine.
Did You See Me See You? by Patricia Volk
You saw me. But did you see me see you? How could you not see me. I was at the head of the line. People check the head of the line. They measure the distance from their turn. When you saw me, did you think, She’s getting a latte? I know you saw me. But did you see me see you? When I left with my latte, I walked past you. I saw your hand. I saw the scrubby hairs. I saw the cuff of that blue shirt we found at the Housing Works Thrift Shop with the label that said “Lew Magram, Shirtmaker to the Stars.”
Failure to make eye contact does not mean you didn’t see me. You can see someone without that person seeing you. That’s what observing is. That’s how you learn about people. Here’s another way: When I told you replacing simple sugars with whole grains rich in fiber could make you live longer and you said, “Now she’s telling me to put oatmeal in my coffee?” When you said that, when you said “she” even though it was us, the two of us, you and me, alone in the kitchen.
Remember when you said “she”? The Sunday I made you vegetarian firepot soup with tofu skins? She. Who were you talking to? Yahweh? Baba Ram Dass? Amma, the Hugging Saint? She was when I knew one day I would see you without knowing if you’d seen me.
It’s possible you sensed I was there without physically seeing me. Cats have a Henderson’s gland that lets them taste the day. Humans, it has recently been discovered, have a sixth sense too. It’s a ganglion at the end of our noses. The Grueneberg ganglion, discovered by Hans Grueneberg. Right at the tip of your nose. Grueneberg found it working with rats. It picks up alarm pheromones. It picks up danger-scented air. Eau de Fear. I picked up your danger-scented air. Did you pick up mine? The question is: If you didn’t see me see you, was that my danger-scented air I smelled or yours?
Patricia Volk is the author of the short story collections The Yellow Banana and All It Takes, a book of essays, Stuffed, and the novels White Light and To My Dearest Friends.
An Unexpected Pleasure by Christopher Kennedy
Of course, one thing leads to other things. I asked the arrested man’s sister if she wanted to ride home with me instead of her mother. She agreed. We got high on the way. I petted her blonde, nearly white, hair. We never spoke of the trial. I felt strangely detached as if what happened a few hours before had never happened but also as if what was happening now wasn’t happening either. She seemed irritated when I said good-bye. As I don’t have a camera and am not the type to take pictures, I kept her framed in the rearview as I drove away.
When I got home, I opened the door to my house and found all the furniture covered with white sheets. There were pictures someone else had taken, placed carefully on each sheet, and a note in my mother’s distinctive, illegible handwriting. I decided it said, Don’t wait up. I slept long enough to wake up uncertain. I looked at one of the photographs. In it, a person who resembled me was smiling an inflammatory smile. There was no one else in the picture. I decided I was guilty and went back to sleep. I woke up and went to get the paper. The headlines implied the arrested man was guilty, too. There was no mention of his sister.
The term “dry hump” was familiar to me. It was all I could think of when reading the paper. I had to be very young but old enough to drive. I tried to imagine how the sister would look when she got older. I decided right then to find my way back to her mother’s house to apologize for what I’d done and what I hadn’t done. If this was a bad habit then it was one of many. The trial was famous then and now. The arrested man was also one of many. His innocence notwithstanding, I can see now the shame he felt just being there. If there is such a thing as the wrong prison, he was in it. He was also the wrong person.
If I could tell you the truth, you’d know why I wanted to fuck his sister, then didn’t, and the hint of pleasure I felt at my decision. Mostly it was the way her brother looked under the courtroom’s harsh antiquarian lights. And the fact I wasn’t ready to get serious, despite the seriousness of things around me.
And the Harps Play Us Off by Christopher Kennedy
Chris decides to get a lobotomy. Our last beer together is strained. “It’ll be fine,” he says.
“We might not even be friends after,” I say. “Think of that?”
“Might not,” he says. Usually he’ll do one of his fancy pours, squirreling the neck all around the rim of a beer glass behind his mini-bar, but today it’s straight from bottles. He cracks me another.
“This is a dumb, stupid idea,” I tell him.
I’ve known Chris since we were in second grade. His dad taught me the word “bastard.” At ten we did Scout camp together – I screamed so loud about a wolf spider in our tent that he didn’t even make fun of me, just patted me on the shoulder a couple of times and told me to go back to sleep, loud enough to cover. At thirteen we fished an irrigation ditch with twine, tried to make a Molotov cocktail out of mouthwash. At my dad’s funeral, he cried so hard he puked. This is the guy who wants a hole drilled in his temple.
“What’s gonna happen to all this?” I say, indicating the whole finished basement we’re sitting in. “Who’s gonna take care of this?”
“I dunno,” he says.
“Well, don’t think you’re gonna get me to do it,” I say.
“Oh please,” he says. “You’d love to do it.” He’s right – Chris is stacked, the house is stacked, which is my point.
“That’s my point,” I tell him. “How are you going to sit around moping all the time with how much you got? You’d think you could find a distraction somewhere.”
He sets his beer down hard so that it wobbles a little and I think it might fall over. “What do you mean?” he says.
“You know what I mean,” I say. “Find a call girl somewhere. Order a porno or something.”
“You want to know what I did today?” he says. “You want to know what I did all day?” He’s not stomping, exactly, but he’s headed toward the stairs and I follow, bottle in hand. We get to the garage and his two cars have their windows smashed in, all six glass surfaces and actually seven on the Cadillac, which had a sunroof.
“Jesus,” I say.
“Over there,” he says, pointing at the far concrete wall. It looks like a big scarred‑up knuckle: little white chips everywhere, uneven coloring pattern. “Every glass in the house,” he says, and I finally see the shards everywhere, collected at the seam where wall meets floor but not confined there by any means, the whole expanse like one of those deserts where they test nukes.
We stand in silence for a second, two, three – a whole bunch. “You done with that?” he says eventually, and I look down at my hand as if I couldn’t tell by weight.
“Yeah,” I say, real quiet, and though he takes the glass from me he thinks better I guess, sets it down on the floor and cracks his neck a few times.
We go back inside. Early afternoon light spills in from all of these windows – big bay motherfuckers in the room with the piano, dormers alongside all of the various doors, skylights in the kitchen and bathrooms.
“You want one of the plasmas?” he says. “We never needed four plasmas.”
“Chris,” I say. “Chris, what if you still remember? What if she’s still in there, kicking around, and all you can do to tell anybody is drool and piss yourself?”
“That’s not what happens,” he says.
“Yeah, but what if?” I say. “Say it happens to you.” He returns from the kitchen, two more beers topless and fogging in his hands.
“Well, in that case,” he says, in a tone like it settles the whole thing, “I guess I’m fucked.”
The day he does it I get suckered into driving duty, which I’m not happy about, but what’s a guy gonna do? I’m trying to remind him of things he’s not gonna be remembering on the car ride home. “You remember that time you tried to get me to get into a chase with that cop, and then it turned out it was Claire Wexler’s dad and he almost beat the shit out of you?” I say.
“Oh yeah,” he says. “Didn’t even get it on with her, is the funny thing.”
“Or how about that time you called me from New York and said that – ”
“Guy was a jackass,” he says. “Eddie, I think his name was. What a pig name. Guy just about had his cop-stick rammed right up my ass.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Ha.”
I’m not expecting a mad scientist’s lab, necessarily, but I am expecting somewhere seedy and tucked-away where not much English is spoken, but I’m wrong on all counts – the office is in a goody-goody part of town, one of those low white bungalows that you wouldn’t know was a doctor’s office if not for the insignia on the sign outside. The waiting room has three or four other patients, magazines no one reads, chairs that suck to get comfortable in. Chris’s name is on the register and everything.
“This isn’t the way to do this,” I say.
“We’re here,” he says, checking the date on a Sports Illustrated.
“Come on, Chris,” I say. “Is she worth it? Is she worth all this?”
“All what?” he says, distracted. “I got enough to cover plenty of these.” I remember the look on his face the night he used the word “love,” the one that’s hard to take back – a certain intensity in his eyes, no smile on his face at all, just true and serious fact. Grudgingly, I recognize a certain similarity to his face right now, the magazine splayed in his hands like a big fish, shiny and awkward.
When they call his name I realize that I’ve been doing nothing but watching him read since we got into the office – not talking, not remembering, barely moving.
“Well,” he says, and lays the magazine down, still open, atop the slapdash pile of the rest of them. He stands up, slaps his ass pockets. “All right,” he says. He looks back at me as he walks, just a glance, and when he gets to where the nurse who called his name is she points at me and he turns again, nodding, his whole face now lit up like moths against a floodlamp – crazy, drunken, full of life. Even after he turns, I see his face there, superimposed like boobs burned into a television screen, and I have to hand it to him – he looked like a baseball player, the kind we thought we’d be when we grew up, on a knee with a bat over one shoulder, cheesing for the camera: he looked trading-card happy.
Christopher Kennedy is the author of three collections of poetry, including Encouragement For A Man Falling To His Death.
Excerpts from Hall of Mirrors by Timothy Liu
THE CAGES
You hang a model airplane between two cages gilded gold, a doll propped up inside each cage. Sometimes the doors are open, sometimes they are closed, it all depends. An open book lies facedown on a reading table, its hero, always in search of an adventure, walking out of its pages and onto a painted landscape shaded beneath the fronds of the wall’s peeling paper. You put on a pair of white gloves and thumb through the book’s transparent pages. What’s gold about the gold in Goldsboro hum the coolies who’ve been working on the railroad all the live long day, returning late at night to reconstruct a history in which a suburban cul-de-sac is grounds for a burning cross smoldering amidst the flotsam of shredded pork in a bowl of steaming congee, boiled eggs steeped in tea, and an overworked mother who ironed shirts while trying to care for a child who looks a lot like you. These are your doves, your failed auditions, your only sense of having met another human being at all. Every cage hanging in the house you’ve left behind left open.
HERODOTUS
You find a page impaled on a branch outside the window where you write. If only you had a ladder, if only you could lean out far enough from the fire escape, you might be able to reach it. Was it there the day before? Had it been there all this time, through the dog days of late August, only to show itself now like a flag of surrender after most of the leaves are already down? You feel the need to know the message it contains before the blinding snows and the arctic blasts from out of the North claim what you have come to believe is yours and yours alone. You could dial 911, say your beloved cat is caught up in a precarious crook, has been yowling all afternoon, and when the engine company arrives on the scene, you could say that your cat got down just fine, isn’t it funny how once one calls for help, things have a way of resolving on their own, but oh, there’s a scrap of something there impaled on a branch, wouldn’t they mind since they are already here? From the vantage point of your window, you can make out what looks to be a shape resembling a cartouche, something torn out of history, a page that will dislodge itself and fall into your outstretched arms even as you sleep: In the tombs of the cats, bowls of milk were set along with mice and rats. So devout were the citizens that if a human killed a feline, intentionally or not, that person was sentenced to death. Though the exportation of cats was forbidden by law, many were smuggled out to cities along the Mediterranean. Armies were sometimes dispatched to recapture their cats from foreign lands. Herodotus tells of a Persian general who rounded up as many cats as his men could find or steal, only to set them free on the battlefield on the outskirts of Pelusium. That day, the entire Egyptian army surrendered rather than bringing any more harm to them. How the residue of your dreams become the stuff of forgotten histories, the life you lead but an echo of all that has already taken place. In the middle of the night, you pull up the blinds, knowing that even before you have a chance to look, the page will be gone.
THE ARENA
You nod as you enter the arena, unable to see the world beyond. You consider “size,” your image bigger-than-life yet smaller than life-size on want ads plastering the walls. You are all pose, the passing of the baton from an aging Hadrian to a spry Aurelius. You survey the landscape, knowing full well that the Empire has fallen, you who pose as a pugilist punk, sporting gloves and a large-sized jockstrap labeled “The Duke,” guarding as it were your duchy. Your mouth guard’s absence a silence finally broken. What remains to be said? Blood-red hues down newsprint suggest the damage already done. Sold off piecemeal, the narrative fractures further, you the rarity. There’s something tragic here, a boxed‑in boxer pathetically protecting his own “box,” and steadily losing, afflicted by the moment’s brutal ecstasies. And if you were to lower your eyes, cower behind the fanfare which was never anyone else’s business but yours, perhaps you would be left without an opponent, left to stage your own aloneness in a theater of one, here where all has been restraint-glove, jock, mouth guard, each an affront to your desired release.
THE RATS
You are kept awake all night by the sound of their vile scratching and chattering, their squeals of confused glee. Where are they coming in from? You pull the stove away from the wall and plug up the holes with whatever you can find, a greasy apron hung on a peg you tear into strips. If you had gasoline, you wouldn’t think twice. You clean the turds out of the broiler with water and bleach, you get under each and every burner, and still the acrid stench of rodent remains. By morning, there will be new holes to plug, nothing you can do about it, a hunger that will chew its way right through the plaster, the fiberglass, tufts of rat fur blowing across the vast tundra of your kitchen floor like tumbleweeds if Texas were Alaska, if someone hadn’t diddled with your private parts before you even knew how to speak. Each time you return to bed, the commotion will start up again, a party that’ll undoubtedly go until dawn, the champagne glasses clinking, the icebox raided, not a single crumb left of the Devil’s Food cake kept under a crystal charger etched with holiday bells. You’ll try blasting them with ultrasonic sound. You’ll try sprinkling bobcat piss all along the floorboards, rat traps you can hardly spring back baited with Maytag Blue but still they come unscathed, your flash-lit vigils yielding nothing but a glimpse of hairy ass and the long thick tail they drag behind. You’ll bring in professionals with rodenticide, you’ll stay at your mother’s house, you’ll check in to a motel-by-the-hour and recline on a mattress ringed with cigarette burns, rough trade strolling the halls with towels wrapped around their groins, if that, drowning in a haze of poppers, Viagra and speed chased back by a dirty martini, up. No matter where you go, the rats will follow you, always drawn to your scent, to your fears piling up like a car crash you think you can outrun, feasting on memories you didn’t even know you had, incoherent patterns woven into dreams you wish you could remember but can’t, the spiral notebook tucked beneath your bed a mockery with all its pages left entirely blank. You thought the rats were the problem, that if only you could somehow see the equation from the other side around even as you slept, perhaps you’d wake up one morning, and they miraculously would be gone. You’d finally get to sleep a sleep that you’ve never slept, not since you emerged from the womb. But you were wrong to think this. The rats were not the problem. They were the solution.
THE CHILD
You asked for bread but were given a stone! Your bankrupt quotes spray-painted on the ceiling, the edges bordered by a single cloud resembling an empty thought balloon. You’ve always said your bedroom is the best self-portrait of your self. Just look in the mirror. What a riot of duplicity parroting back your impotence masquerading as our own, for those of us who have taken you far too seriously. At war with yourself, you keep on acting out. As Reagan. As Bush. As Thatcher and the Arming of Iraq circa 1979–1990. Your body plundered like the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, the funding of a war mapped out in a meticulous flowchart etched into your headboard, timelines extending outward from each of the bank’s major branches involved. Your lust attesting to a colossal conspiracy of international greed. You re-imagine love lines drawn as a battlefield you can expand just by adding more onto the edges of whatever already exists. Your bed looks like an aerial shot of London with the mighty Thames flowing through it, two embattled armored legions trying to take control of the city’s labyrinthine streets. Aggressive tactics bolstered in an age of mechanical reproduction bordering on carnival kitsch. Like a naked man with a flying kite tethered to his cock. Or a woman with a bloody nose trailing all the way down to her bare breasts, the child you never knew you were shouldered on her back.
Timothy Liu is the author of eight books of poems, most recently Polytheogamy and Bending The Mind Around The Dream’s Blown Fuse.
Mirrors by Joe Stracci
Lucas’s new girlfriend’s got a hole in her heart. Patent foramen ovale. She’s getting surgery next week. She’ll be in the hospital for ten days. Then she’ll get out and she’ll break up with him. She’ll say, “Lucas, I don’t need you to fill the void anymore.” Lucas knows this will happen. He walked in on her rehearsing in the bathroom mirror. She was gripping the sink like she could fall.
* * *
I’m complaining to Lucas about my birthday, and he says, “I’ve decided I’m not having one this year.” I wish I’d thought of that. He says, “Twenty-one didn’t go all that well, and I’ve got no faith in twenty-two.” I say, “From what I’ve seen so far, twenty-three isn’t anything to write home about.” I’m lucky to have a friend like Lucas. I’ve got others, but I don’t keep in touch with them, and I apologize like it’s my job.
* * *
Lucas got married because he was tired of his mother telling him what to do. I told him that his mother looked like a real battle axe when I met her at his wedding. He didn’t understand what I meant. He got his bride a new car, with financing options and cash back and warranties because he thought he was supposed to. She paid for it, and she didn’t even want it. I asked him if she liked it and he said, “She’ll learn to.” I asked him how his mom was doing, and he said, “Fuck you.” I didn’t get them a gift. They didn’t last.
* * *
As a birthday present, Whitney wants to cook me breakfast. She goes out to get eggs, potatoes, a pepper, ham, and bread. When she gets back, she tells me that she drove past my car, and it looks like someone stole my mirrors. I try to kill myself by not breathing. She looks at me from across the table and says, “Milk is really expensive.”
* * *
Out the window of our apartment, I can see the hospital my mother almost died in a year ago. Some discs slipped and pinched down on her spine, and she woke up one morning unable to walk. As they rolled her off to surgery, I shook the doctor’s hand and said, “Take it easy.” And he must have thought I said “on her,” because he said, “She’s in good hands.”
* * *
I got into a fight with Whitney the other night and threw the TV remote at the wall. On the surface it was about a hockey game, but we both know I tense up around my birthday. She left and I had to put the remote back together. It didn’t work and I couldn’t turn the TV back on and there was no one to tell how let down I felt. It works now though. Whitney came back.
* * *
I can hear people on the street below speaking Spanish. Dogs barking. The people in the apartment above me are stomping back and forth in what must be construction boots. My neighbor’s four-year-old is crying in the hallway in his pajamas. I see him through the peephole. He’s holding his crotch and saying, “I’m locked out and I need to go potty.” I walk out and pound on their door for a few minutes until the mother opens up. She says, “Oh, thank you, thank you. He must have locked himself out again. I was in the shower. I didn’t even hear him leave.” I go back inside. She wasn’t even wet.
* * *
I’m out of anything to drink and the tap water is running brown, so I’m waiting for ice cubes to melt and when they do, the water tastes like plastic. I find some limes and slice a wedge into the cup. I add some superfine sugar. Then the phone rings, but there’s nobody on the line. I toss the sugar water in the toilet and chew on some calcium tablets. I’ve had heartburn since I was twelve. I sit on the floor of the bathroom and watch the lime wedge float in the toilet and wait for a roach to crawl out of the radiator cover.
* * *
Whitney says, “If you would just cut down on smoking.” I tell her that the problem is that I don’t want to cut down. I like smoking. Then I add, “And I’m not afraid to admit it.” I look at her face and I see the children we haven’t had yet, and I’m ashamed that I said it.
* * *
Tacked up on the walls are bills. Electric, Phone, Car, Student Loans, Credit Cards. There are piles on the table. Payment due dates come and go. Late fees become over-limit charges. I get up and wash my hands. For some reason, in the cabinet under the sink there’s a container of sangria. I drink some.
* * *
Whitney got scabies when she was a freshman in college. She shaved it bald at the time. They had very few places to burrow. She told the health center nurse that she’d never had sex before. “If you can’t remember it, it’s not true,” she told me. They sealed her mattress and treated her topically. I don’t have the courage to ask if she was lying.
* * *
A few days ago, an exterminator came and sprayed something that the roaches like to eat. It’s a blood thinner that causes dehydration. I don’t like it. Now when I find them they’re flipped over on their back, twitching. The thrill of the chase is gone. I don’t kick when someone’s down. I just scoop them up and drop them between the iron bars on the fire escape.
* * *
Whitney’s crying and she’s drinking sangria. Between sips, she says it tastes like kerosene. The fruit is turning her teeth red. I tell her to drink some water. Maybe eat some bread. She says, “You just want me to save some kerosene for you.” I do. The people upstairs will be up until one, maybe two in the morning. Still in their construction boots. We really both need to sleep tonight.
* * *
There’s a cut on Whitney’s finger and it’s black from cigarette ashes. From emptying my ashtrays. She bandages the cut during the day. Lets it breathe at night. She doesn’t sleep easy. She changes the sheet in the middle of the night sometimes. She drinks green tea and swallows pills. When she wakes up in the morning, she’s pissed herself. She showers and goes off to work in a skirt and nice shoes.
* * *
Then Lucas and I drive to Hunt’s Point, where all the chop shops are. He says, “Yeah, just turn left onto Gramerton, dude’ll come to us. Just tell him what you need. Tell him what you need. The PR’s will have it. They always do.” And sure enough, a guy waves us over, takes a look at where the mirror should be. He brings the piece over five minutes later. Forty bucks and I’m gone, back on the Sheridan, checking myself out in the mirror that I probably bought back from the guy who stole it the night before. Happy birthday.
* * *
Yesterday, my co‑workers gave me a birthday card. It was a day early because they knew I’d call in sick on my birthday. It’s got a Far Side cartoon on it. It’s a man sitting on a tiny island, writing a letter that says Send Help. But a coconut has fallen off a palm tree and smashed the bottle the man was going to put the letter in. Am I that obvious?
* * *
I see my father for the first time in weeks. He’s a drunk who calls a shot of whiskey dropped into a glass of beer the nasty. His pants are too big. We stand in front of his building – Hazel Towers – and he gives me some wadded‑up twenties as a birthday present. Like he’s buying his drugs, stoop-shouldered and shifty-eyed. Or like he’s paying me off to be his son. Dad says, “Here, take this. This is for you. You know I don’t know what to get you.” I don’t look at the bills, just put them in my pocket. Say, “Oh – yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thanks.” We hug and he’s scared to squeeze – scared to care – and he smells like the bathroom in a bar. I think: Here’s to another year of you not knowing what to get me.
* * *
Whenever Whitney wants to rile me up, she says, “You’re turning into your father.”
* * *
Lucas is always so happy and I’m at the point where I don’t understand happiness and so I wonder what it is that he’s hiding as we drive to go see my mother. He probably thinks the same thing about me, except in the totally opposite way. I think this is why we’re friends.
* * *
“I used to give all my friends fake names,” I say. “That way, when I stopped talking to them, I was letting go of someone who never really existed. Now they’re all gone and I can’t remember who was who in the pictures.” Think: I’ve never told anyone this, but I’ve always wanted a twin. I have severe sleepwalking problems. Once I started driving in my sleep, I knew it was time to get some help. Did I steal my own car mirrors? I say out loud, “Why do I lie to myself?”
* * *
We walk into Jimmy Ryan’s and my mother says, “This bread is burnt.” But she keeps eating it. I kiss her hello. She doesn’t wish me a happy birthday because she hates the way I say thank you. She’s ripping off hunks and chewing with a blank look on her face. If she stares at the ceiling of the bar and grill while she works her jaw, she doesn’t have to think. This is the problem. When she finally got out of the hospital, she told me that she would treat every day like a gift. But I know my mother, and all she sees another day as is a chink in the law of probability. She blames her swollen ankles and sighing knees on too much salt.
* * *
One of Whitney’s friends walks up to me and asks where Whitney is. I say, “She has no idea.” She doesn’t laugh. I want this to all be over. She curses at me and walks away. Another one who was born to never leave. I look at her. Expensive clothes. A pointless college degree. So full of men, between their cocks and their ideas, she’s hardly a woman. I can imagine her ringing people up at the local supermarket. In stunning clarity. Her parents still pray at night. She prays to be like her sister. Her sister prays to be free. Her parents pray that both of their daughters will have more than them. Everybody wants to be nothing like the people they want everything from. They’re Roman Catholic, so they all do their praying in the dark. As the night crawls on, the streets form hands and cradle them all. Onlookers can’t tell if they’re struggling or safe. I know everyone in this bar and I’ve got no one to talk to. We’ve been practicing for this all our lives.
* * *
People stop my mother and tell her that she has style. And where did she get her jewelry? She’s drinking white wine. She’s not holding the glass by the stem. We all call her Auntie. Even I do, and she’s my mom. Sometimes I pretend that I don’t know her, like when I stand next to her at the bar, ordering shots of Jagermeister and gin and tonics until my hands are full. I think about one of the days I went to visit her in the ICU and she told me that the doctor was shit because he put her on antidepressants. She said, “Do I look depressed to you?” All I could do was stare at the drops of blood on the floor from the night before. When her lung collapsed, they had to remove the air from her pleural cavity by inserting a chest tube between her ribs. No anesthesia, just slice and shove while I slept one off at home. Why wouldn’t they have cleaned that up? When I finish my drinks, I buy more and finish those too. Then I take a Xanax in the bathroom and disappear while my birthday rages on.
* * *
Sometimes I lie awake and I can feel the blackness. I can put my hand through the dark and scoop it away and see the daylight coming through the curtains and realize it’s only about noon. But other times, as rare as peace, the shackles loosen. And the ceiling comes into focus and the acid is gone and the roaches stay in for the night. Outside the sun is a red hole in the sky and the cars have frost on them, a gift of autumn arriving. Mirrors are still intact and there’s a car with two tires missing, teetering on a jack, but that’s somebody else’s heartache. The phone is silent and the water is hot and somehow there’s cold orange juice in the refrigerator. I go back in the bedroom and watch Whitney roll around in her sleep, watch her fingers tighten, loosen, tighten, loosen. Think of all the people I ignored on my birthday. All the well-wishes. Then I leave and take a different route to work because variety is the spice of life, and if you’re not living, you’re dying. This is as close as it gets: the future happening right in front of my eyes.
The Day Before Christmas Eve by Joe Stracci
Whitney and I measure our love by the level of danger in our adventures. That way, when we’re bored, it’s not us – just what we’re doing. We watch The Graduate, and when it’s over, I tell her in hushed tones that we never really do what we want. That we’ve never really been in trouble. She agrees and we decide to drive to Cape Cod for breakfast. It’s the day before Christmas Eve. I check to make sure there is film in my camera. It’s 3:30 in the morning.
* * *
We’ve been driving for a while, but I can still recognize the signs on the side of the highway. We aren’t speaking because nothing needs to be said. I ask, “You know where you’re going, right?” She says, “You just take 95 all the way there.” I say, “No turns, or exits, or anything?” and she has no response. I lean back in my seat, knowing now that she isn’t sure. She says, “There’s a map on the backseat if you really think it’s necessary.” In my head I hear: I really want you to use it.
* * *
Five minutes can’t pass without one of us touching the other. A car accident wouldn’t register. I rub my fingertips on the back of her neck. She puts her hand on mine. I pull on the ends of her short hair, just to let her know I’m alive, but she says not to, that I’ll just make it greasier than it already is. I convinced her not to shower, and not to put on any makeup. There is no traffic, no lights. In less than an hour, we cross into Connecticut. Christmas songs coming from the car speakers. New renditions of old songs and old renditions of even older songs. Bing Crosby. The Eagles. The Pointer Sisters. I put on that piece of shit, Bryan Adams, and he massacres Run, Run Rudolph to the point of criminal action, so I surrender and wind up drumming along on the dashboard. Whitney says, “Please stop that,” but doesn’t change the song either.
* * *
Whitney bought her car, a Taurus, with the leftovers of low-interest school loans. A new-used American-made machine, gassed by her parents, but only when she was in school. She’s in limbo at the moment, sewing quilts out of used lottery tickets and eating nothing that has preservatives in it. She’ll go back eventually – to studio art, or biology, or accounting. How she manages to stay on the chunky side eating couscous twice a day, I’ll never know.
* * *
I tell her that I love her. She says nothing to me or the road ahead. The car headlights illuminate the fog. I tell her that one day she’ll tell me she loves me back and my head will explode. She smiles and I can’t be positive, but it’s most likely at the thought of my head exploding.
* * *
She angles the car into a rest stop in Darien. A twenty-four-hour McDonald’s is just beginning to serve the truckers breakfast. We only go in to use the bathroom and get some money. I buy an orange juice and it tastes like vitamin C tablets muddled with mouthwash.
* * *
A fading junkie sits on the floor outside the women’s bathroom. He’s got a mustache and angled cheekbones. He needs more flesh and his sneakers are cracked and wet. Whitney says, “Wait for me while I go.” Inside the bathroom, the hand dryer turns on. A woman steps out, the might-be-junkie’s might-be-wife, from behind the door, looks at the junkie on the floor, kicks his sneaker and says, “Charlie, get up. Charlie.” She’s wearing a purple poncho and acid-washed jeans that don’t quite reach the top of her shoes. She hooks her arm under Charlie’s armpits and they stagger away together. Whitney’s disappeared into the bathroom. I stand outside, waiting, protecting her from something I can’t see, but still feel.
* * *
When she’s done, I go to piss. At the urinal and the door bangs open. It’s Charlie, and he braces himself on the sink, turns on the water. He’s cursing under his breath and his head isn’t being regulated by his nervous system anymore. He’s saying, “Fucking shit bitch – piece of fucking cunt ass mother –” I stand next to him at the sink, and look at him in the mirror. Splash recycled water on my face and say, “Why do they want to see our heads explode?” Charlie just curses, shuffles. I give up on the hand dryer and leave.
* * *
The forty bucks from the ATM in Whitney’s hand is not even enough to fold over. It’s just enough to gas the car, and she knows better than to expect any from me. She doesn’t get a receipt, which I wanted so I can remember this. I grab one off the floor. Whitney looks at me but doesn’t say a word. I tell her, “I’m addicted to situations and their memories.” What I don’t say is that I’m scared of forgetting.
* * *
I pump the gas in the rain because it feels like the right thing to do. I knock on the rear window, and turn away, whistling, something my father would do when I was a child. I pull my hood up. Eighteen-wheel rigs roar by on the highway, leaving minor storms in their wake. And here I am, at a rest stop in Darien, Connecticut at five in the morning. In the middle of all these storms. In the middle of my own little storm.
* * *
Whitney says, “I can’t see a goddamn thing.” The fog looks comfortable enough to sleep on. I ask if she wants me to drive. Whitney is stubborn, struggling, and independent.
* * *
I tell her, “If I had to look at you for the next sixty years or so, I would never get tired of it.” She leans further over the steering wheel. I tell her, “Every time I look at you, I find something new that I love.” She says. “What did you just find?” She looks at the road again, turns back, stares me down like I’m about to call or raise. I say, “Yeah, but still.” She turns back to fight the road and the fog, and I open the map. Tell her to pay attention. We should be in Rhode Island soon.
* * *
“Route 6 to the Cape. Take the Sagamore Bridge,” I tell her. I check the map every five minutes once we pass Providence. “I know,” she says. “I’ve been coming here since I was four.”
* * *
She points out everything like a tour guide. There’s the huge blow‑up insect billboard her mother can’t stand. This is the rotary where her sister got into an accident and wound up punching a guy in the face. She won’t tell me the name of the place we’re going to eat in, except that her father calls the waitresses his Irish lassies.
* * *
Falmouth. Mashpee. Barnstable. I push my head out of the car and I’m force-fed cold sea air. We drive on Route 28 for a while and finally she signals left and turns into a parking lot. A small, dull-white building. Red and green Christmas lights strung around a sign on top that reads Heavenly. She gets out, slams her door shut, and looks in through the windshield to see my reaction. I pretend that I’m working hard on folding the map.
* * *
There’s a bell that rings when we open the door and the Irish lassies shift on their stools, but don’t stop reading their newspapers. They know that we know that they’re watching. I think nothing of it. They saw our license plate. It’s an ungodly hour. We sit down at a table across from the cash register. I don’t bother with a menu. I order blueberry pancakes and ice water, and Whitney gets eggs and toast. It’s gray and raining outside and I couldn’t be happier. We eat without saying a word. The bill is twelve bucks, and I leave an extra two. All the money I have left.
* * *
We walk outside, far from holding hands, and it hits us that it’s eight in the morning in Cape Cod. And it’s the day before Christmas Eve, and we’ve got nothing to do and nowhere to go, and no real reason for being here. We can’t escape this.
* * *
Back on Route 28 and we pass a sign for Craigville Beach and I ask Whitney if she’s ever been there. She says no, so I tell her we should probably check it out. The parking lot is empty, so she stops in the middle of two spots. I lift the Do Not Cross arm so she can get under.
* * *
The beach is deserted and the air is frigid. Waves are tossing whitecaps, which are tossing little glints of light back at the white, shapeless sun. I say, “Every time I look at you, I feel like it’s the first time I’ve seen you, and every time, it’s like I fall in love with you all over again.” She puts her finger to her lips and points out at the horizon. The end of the world. No one can see us. We stagger like drunks over the rocks and make no attempt to avoid the spray of crashing waves. Steam dances from our mouths and nostrils and we’re laughing and crying. We’re the last people on earth and it’s the day before Christmas Eve.
* * *
I go back to the car for my camera. This moment has to be captured and passed down from one apathy-fueled generation to the next. I click and rewind, click and rewind, click and rewind, shooting whatever I find through the lens. I let the camera hang around my neck and grab a piece of Whitney’s skirt blowing in the wind. I pull her close and bury my face in her denim jacket. She smells of green apples and sleep. I look at her blue eyes that always show up red in pictures and there’s a ring of gold around her pupils that I’ve never noticed. I say, “This is as close to heaven as the two of us will ever get together.” For the first time in days, she agrees.
* * *
I reach in my pocket for a new roll of film. I never see her lunge forward and grab the camera. She rears back, stops and looks at me, grinning, and throws our children’s children’s emotional inheritance into the churning December seas. She slips her sunglasses on and says, “Try smiling now that you aren’t happy.”
* * *
We sleep in the car with the windows cracked. I wake up every fifteen minutes and each time, she’s snoring. Watching her makes my knees warm. When we leave, we stop to use the bathroom in a musty resort lobby. There are no junkies this time, just bored employees in khakis and jungle green polo shirts, like Scientologists. I tell her, “My stomach hurts and I want to go home.”
* * *
It’s the day before Christmas Eve and we sit in traffic for hours. I lean over to rest my head on her arm right as she reaches to change the radio station. Our heads connect. She says Jesus, and I say shit. But then we burst out laughing, and I don’t think either of us understands why.
* * *
We settle back into our seats, the radio station unchanged. The traffic is frustrating, but understandable. Neither of us knows what happens from here. And Nat King Cole and Karen Carpenter and Johnny Mathis and Stevie Nicks, they won’t stop crooning their new renditions of old songs, and old renditions of even older songs.
Joe Stracci is the author of two chapbooks: A Living Wake or I Wanted To Write A Poem About Death and The Barking, The Crying, The Screaming, The Championing: NYC Stories.
Success Story by Julia Slavin
Henson went to the city shelter to adopt a dog. Pick me! Pick me! The animals threw themselves against the cages. In block one, an angel dog spread his wings, five feet across. Henson adopted him right away. The shelter woman, who was certain to be caught and fired for rotating dogs out of block nine, the last cage before kill day, called to Henson as he and the dog headed out the front onto New York Avenue. She asked that as soon as he and the dog get settled she’d like him to send a photo for their success story wall. Henson said he would. The dog stepped up into the back seat of the gray Honda Accord, folded his wings and went to sleep. Because of the war, Henson named the dog Pax.
Pax slept a lot at first, tired from swimming through the flood waters, drowning and becoming an angel, plus the bus trip north. Henson never left his side. He brushed his fur and let him sit on the couch. He allowed him to crawl under the covers and gave him a pillow for his head. On the third day, Pax had enough energy to take a walk around the grounds of the Sommerset Apartments where Henson rented a garden unit. Some kids ran alongside and tried to touch Pax’s wings. Henson told them to step off, that the dog had survived the flood and didn’t want to be bothered. The kids said they wanted to see the dog fly. Henson said the dog didn’t fly. “Then why does he have wings, Mister?” The kids then headed down the hill to the park and threw a basketball against the backboard again and again, no one even attempting a basket.
Pax sat next to Henson on the bench. They watched the kids on the basketball court. He scratched Pax between his wings which the dog liked. Soon the dog bent to lick itself. “Stop that,” Henson said. The dog stopped. Henson wondered why none of the kids tried to make a basket and earn two points. Pax and he walked home for dinner.
In the morning, Henson dressed the dog in a halo for a photograph to send in for the success story wall at the shelter. Pax sat back and spread his wings for the photo. Later, Henson dressed the dog in devil horns and a red cape that covered the dog’s wings and walked him in the Halloween parade.
Back at the park the next day, Henson watched the kids play the backboard game. Some children approached him and asked if they could pet the dog. Henson said they could but they should not touch the dog’s wings. One of the boys could not resist the feathers. Pax spun around and bit off the boy’s finger.
Doctors were able to reattach the finger but they doubted the boy would ever regain feeling in his hand. Henson went to see the boy’s mother and bring a box of Lego. “I am a dog person,” the boy’s mother said. “So I will not contact the police. Anyone else . . . they would make you put that dog down.” Henson offered to pay the boy’s doctor bills but the mother said she had insurance.
“There is nothing I can teach this dog,” the trainer from Good Citizen Canine told Henson. “He’s an angel. He learned everything when he was alive.” The dog lunged at the trainer’s feet.
“But I cannot have a dog that bites,” Henson said. “The building association will not allow it.”
“That is not my problem,” the trainer said. “I only train dogs that can be trained.”
Henson went to other trainers but always the same answer: “No, we do not train angel dogs.”
As days passed, Pax became more agitated, growling and leaping out at all passersby. He’d bitten Henson several times, once clear to the shinbone, and he no longer got into bed with him. He barked constantly, chewed the couch and was only still when he licked himself.
“I told you, you cannot keep a dog that bites,” Henson’s landlord said. “You will have to find the dog another place to live.”
“You did the right thing bringing him back to us,” the shelter woman said. “Someone will want to adopt him, I’m sure.” One of the volunteers took Pax by the leash and led him to the kennels. Pax pranced along beside her, never looking back at Henson. “Would you be interested in another dog?” Henson shook his head and left.
One minute later an angel on a motorcycle drove up to the shelter. He wore a weathered jacket with two slits cut in the leather for his wings. The motorcycle was no particular model since it was wrenched together with a hundred different parts. He left the bike right in front of the building despite the no parking sign.
“I am looking for my dog,” the angel told the shelter woman. “And I am very tired.” The angel’s face was pockmarked and scarred. His hair hung in moldy ropes. The top of his dirty white pants failed to meet the bottom of his grimy wet T‑shirt. His wings were oily and smelled bad. The woman stepped back from him.
“Can you describe your dog?”
“He is brown.”
“Someone brought in a brown dog just moments ago.”
“His name is Frank.”
“I will bring you Frank.”
The woman brought out the angel dog. The dog dropped his head, shuffled over and leaned his body against the angel.
“You see?” the angel asked. “We are both very tired.” The woman nodded.
“We like to ask that once you and Frank get settled . . . “
“You can take that photograph right now,” the angel said. He then produced a small leather cap for the dog. He pulled down the ear flaps and attached the strap under the dog’s jaw. The shelter woman held up a disposable camera and took a picture. Then she followed the two outside. Without offering a donation or a bit of thanks, the angel climbed onto the pieced-together motorcycle. Frank jumped up in front and they drove away.
In accordance with the shelter’s rule that the cork wall was for success stories only, she took down Henson’s photo of the dog wearing the halo. Then she went to rotate the inmates.
We Are Not Shelter Men by Julia Slavin
Early Monday morning a man was struck by a white dry cleaning van as he crossed Connecticut Avenue between Livingston and Morrison Streets. He was Albert Crysallman, 87 years old, the urban planner who had designed some of the city’s memorials. He died before he hit the ground. At 7:55, Officer Robert H. Cotton of the seventh precinct lifted the dead man’s arm like a windshield wiper he wanted to clean and placed underneath a ticket for j-walking.
At 9:00, cars were backed up to the beltway. Mr. Crysallman lay on his side in dark slacks, a black cashmere coat and scarf and a Persian lamb envelope hat. And still, police stopped to tuck more tickets under his arm. People arrived late to work: “. . . we had to go all the way around. And the cops, can you believe them? The poor man had a stack of tickets thick as a book.” Kids too came to school with the story. “. . . there wasn’t any blood. We thought he was just asleep.” At evening rush hour, the body had not been moved. And on into Tuesday when traffic picked up speed, finding its way around the dam in the road Mr. Chrysallman had built with his body.
By Wednesday, police had stuffed tickets into the man’s coat pockets, under his hat, in the knot in his scarf, even rolled into his socks. Cooler air came in from the west on Thursday and the tickets began to fly. They swirled around Mr. Crysallman and hovered over the cars by the CVS. They pasted themselves to the liquor store and snuck in the doors of the theater. Children jumped to try to catch a ticket and batted them about. Some of the tickets hopped a breeze north and were found in yards as far away as New Carrollton.
Virginia Mariss took her children to see the man in the road. She explained that the man wasn’t really there, that his spirit was elsewhere, flitting around enjoying the scene, laughing at us perhaps, that what the children were seeing in the street was matter like the shoes on your feet or that big rock over there by the Safeway. Virginia and the kids discussed the man the rest of the way to school. The kids said that because of heaven they weren’t afraid to die but it wasn’t fair about Mr. Chrysallman, especially since he had designed so many of the city’s memorials.
Friday morning at 5:00, two men returning from an all-night hauling job, stopped their brown Toyota Longbed, picked up the body and buried it in the back yard of the halfway house where they lived on Jennifer Street.
Virginia Mariss, room parent of the third grade at the Dwight McKenzie Lower School, proposed that the children’s interest in Mr. Chrysallman called for putting class dues toward placing flowers on the grave. The Parents’ Association was all in favor, so every Monday Virginia brought a stack of gladiolas to the halfway house and gave them to the men. With the remainder of the class dues, she also delivered two submarine sandwiches that she bought at Pumpernickel’s.
The men’s names were Steakhouse and Waterbed. They’d been called those names so long they couldn’t remember why. After burying Mr. Chrysallman, they had stopped their hauling service in order to tend the grave. Because they felt badly for the dead man, Steakhouse and Waterbed did a lot of crying that winter. Their tears ran down and froze at the ends of their handlebar mustaches. On the front porch of the halfway house, they’d sit in low beach chairs that were hard to get up from and split a carton of Cherry Coke. One or the other would say that the old man didn’t even have a chance or that the old man probably didn’t see the end coming and the day’s weeping began.
When summer came, Virginia’s son was no longer in the class that had put the dues toward flowers, so the gladiolas stopped. Virginia was concerned about the men not getting their subs so she took a few sandwiches from the pile that the summer camp had made for one of the area shelter kitchens. Steakhouse and Waterbed looked down at the sandwiches after she left. They said, “We ain’t shelter men. And look. Condiments. We hate condiments.” As Virginia headed to her car one day she saw several of the bags of sandwiches she’d brought to the halfway house stuffed into a recycling bin. She decided it was best to stop bringing the sandwiches since the men didn’t eat them and the shelter kitchen needed them.
After Virginia stopped coming, Steakhouse and Waterbed said they wished she’d catch cancer. That her kids would catch cancer. No, her kids should catch cancer first so she could have the misery. Every day they waited on the porch for Virginia and every day she didn’t come. She’ll drop the sandwiches off, they decided many years after Virginia stopped delivering them, their mustaches straggling down to their chests, and when she’s not looking they’ll get her and inject her with a cancer serum. Soon they added rum to the Cherry Coke and the Cherry Coke got less and less and the rum they added to the Cherry Coke got more and more.
Virginia liked long walks through the city. Here and there she found some of Mr. Chrysallman’s j-walking tickets. People heard she was collecting them so they searched around too and dropped the tickets by her house. When she felt she had enough, she took them to a framer and with his help they created a triptych of pink ticket fans mounted on black felt. The piece brought in twenty-five hundred dollars at the McKenzie Lower School’s scholarship auction.
Julia Slavin is the author of the story collection, The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club, and the novel, Carnivore Diet.
Famous Last Words by Bernard Cooper
I’ve long been fascinated with last words. They seem to compress a person’s entire history into an epigrammatic diamond. I say they “seem to” because I’m not convinced that there’s necessarily more weight to last words than to any other remark one makes throughout a lifetime. Still, last words can’t be revised or repeated – a period sits at the end of the sentence like a boulder over a tomb – and this lends them an aura of deeper meaning.
If I tell you, for example, that the following statements were uttered during someone’s final moment on earth –
Is this a joke?
Here, let me do it.
Is that you, Martha?
Don’t.
– the doom-center of your brain is instantly activated and several grim fates begin to unfold. But if I tell you that each of these declarations was made by someone very much alive, all the bleakness fades away and these become the typical snippets you might overhear from a neighbor’s party on a summer afternoon. You have to admit, those sentences are more compelling when given the tint of mortality.
Consider Charles Dickens’ last words: “. . . on the floor.” He’d fallen and called out to whoever might hear him. Someone must have been there, since his exclamation was recorded for posterity. If you listen closely, you can hear the disbelief in Dickens’ voice. The wind had gone out of him. The buttons of his vest pressed against his sternum. What an inauspicious view, he might have thought, referring to the legs of his desk, pale light reflecting off the floorboards, the flurry of dust his fall had set in motion.
Goethe, on the other hand, demanded “More light!” It’s possible that he was speaking literally, that he wanted his wife to part the drapes. But this interpretation doesn’t account for the urgency in his words, which are punctuated by an exclamation point wherever I’ve seen them in print. Goethe must have lurched up in bed, every one of his ponderous longings, not to mention his inklings and whims, combined into one unbearable need. I’m disturbed not only by the claustrophobia of his demand, but because his last words remind me that there’s lightlessness ahead for every one of us, and for a very long time. That I might, at the moment of my own death, desperately yearn for light frightens me more than the prospect of death itself, perhaps because every day sunlight touches trees and buildings and people, its warmth imminently missable; whereas death, despite all the thought I’ve given it, remains a concept that’s difficult to grasp, except in tiny, disheartening doses. I’d miss the light if I were dead, though I’d possess no sentience with which to miss it – that’s about as much about death as I can comprehend, and as you can see, it’s not a lot.
In some instances, two entirely different deathbed quips have been attributed to the same person. Certain texts report that Oscar Wilde whispered, “I shall have to die beyond my means,” while others claim that he glanced at the gaudy wallpaper and said, “One of us has got to go.” Certainly Wilde was brilliant enough to improvise either remark, but he was also a man who might have given considerable forethought to a clever exit, refining one of these lines for months or even years, waiting to deliver it (whichever one it was) with his typical aplomb.
Hart Crane simply shouted “Goodbye!” The after-dinner strollers on the steamship’s upper deck looked up from their polite conversations in time to see the poet leaping from the rail. For the briefest instant, his suit jacket filled with wind and billowed. At first the passengers stood there frozen, holding their breath, thinking it might be some crazy stunt like a daredevil plunging over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel. Then the remote, sobering splash. Several people ran to starboard. Someone flung a life preserver into the choppy water. Man overboard! they yelled, and Grab the life preserver! but their cries were barely audible above the ocean’s onomatopoeia. It was simply too dark, they later told the captain, to see if their pleas were heeded.
When I was in high school, death seemed far away – another country – which allowed me to be as melodramatic about it as I pleased. I wrote poems clogged with overwrought sentiments about death. With what adolescent stamina I could daydream about the huge crowd of mourners at my funeral, or about the sarcastic epitaph I’d have etched on my headstone – I Forgot My Hat or You Can Dig Me Out Now – not to mention the amazing things I might say with my last breath, provided I died in such a way that allowed me the time and presence of mind to say something memorable.
Now that I’m over fifty, the idea of pre-planning my last words or drumming up a quote for my headstone seems like an awful lot of self-imposed pressure, like trying to decide on a pithy, unretractable message to have tattooed on my forehead. My feeling is: when the time comes, no epiphanies, please. No grandiose farewell. I’d like to end as quickly as a haiku.
“See you in the morning,” my mother said, cinching her bathrobe and shuffling off to bed. She had no idea this night was her last. Up until now, she’d reclaimed each morning like a watch from a pawnshop. Why would tomorrow be any different? Only the names of the days were different. Otherwise they were hard to tell apart.
Every death is the end of the world. And yet, if all the last words throughout human history were spoken at once, I bet their combined force would hardly stir a breeze. Even if you added moans and death-rattles and puffs of labored breath, the net effect would be something like a city bus hurtling by as you walked along the street. Your tie or scarf might flutter in its wake. You’d have to press your hat against your head. Then the gust would die down, your stride unbroken.
Bernard Cooper is the author of two collections of memoirs, Maps to Anywhere and Truth Serum, as well as a novel, A Year of Rhymes, and a collection of short stories, Guess Again. His work has appeared in Story, Ploughshares, Harper’s, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and in anthologies such as The Best American Essays.