FALL 2012

John sits in his darkening living room and watches the sky bruise. The clouds seem to hang low enough to touch the second floor balcony before him, and he very nearly gets up, opens the double doors, and sits there, but his legs have become rock. The paralysis creeps up his spine, pushes him deeper into the leather sofa’s plush, and he cannot look anymore at his living room, his own view of Casper Mountain’s foothills. He faces west, the wind and the reservation, and though it is a hundred miles out, he cannot look. He can only remember.
           
The judge said that John is an experiment in social grace, letting him walk that he might mend his ways, become a triumph of the human spirit in the face of a real tragedy. John knew and knows this is no experiment. This is a long-quantified result: same country club plus twenty-three years of private practice law plus white Western aristocracy equals a courtroom in John’s favor and not in favor of a skinny, almost-eighteen Arapaho kid from the res or his dead parents. Flint Yellowknife had sat in the courtroom, his head down and face veiled by long black hair in need of a washing, and he hadn’t looked up more than once or twice during the quick trial. Not that John had been looking at him much; he didn’t know how to look at him, had been focusing on his broken nose. And his nose still hurts, broken by the steering wheel when the cars collided. He didn’t feel it that night—wasn’t feeling much of anything, that night, save the wash of gin in his stomach and a pleasant September sweat. But in the courtroom, it throbbed. Tonight, too, his blacked eyes ache and the merry hell of humidity (storm coming tonight, and let it come) leave him aching. He will not let himself have so much as Tylenol. This is punishment. Punishment worse: his sister came earlier, and he is nearly a thousand dollars poorer in liquor, the cherry cabinet echoingly empty. His fingers itch for a chill-wet glass, but there is nothing for it now.

His charge had been commuted to reckless driving, community service, speeches at local high schools. Quietly, off record, twelve steps and some time off from work. But “someone crossed the double yellow,” his law partner had said before the court, and, unspoken, let us not blame the dead. Gary Yellowknife was a known alcoholic (while John had prided himself on being one unknown), and Yellowknife’s ancient grandmother, someone told John, had come to the morgue right away, taken the bodies of her grandson and his wife home for burial. Refused autopsies. Refused everything. He can’t say whether they were drunk or not, but he knows he was when he got into his car. Knows he didn’t remember how he’d gotten there when he woke up in the hospital, when the county sheriff said that he’d been in an accident, that there was a body count.

“Not that you could have told the before or after for their car,” the sheriff said, and John does remember that he had laughed. He laughed. He clenches his empty hand and gets up. He is halfway to the bar when the emptiness of the cupboard re-registers. Georgia’s cold fury in the clinking bottles. She took the bag of them along, too.

“I hope some group pickets in front of the driveway,” she said. “Justice system, my ass.” The door slammed so hard something fell off the wall in his office, he thinks. He hasn’t been back to look.

That’s when it started to sink in, the echoing quiet after his sister’s noise. The way the pulls and thumps of the accident started to seep from his skin. He’d been wearing his seatbelt. The Yellowknifes’ car hadn’t had seatbelts. His own chest is a thick purple bruise, but nothing is broken save his nose. He puts his head back and breathes as shallowly as he can.

A lightning flash wakes him from dreaming the courtroom again, where Flint Yellowknife has no face, only a fall of black hair all the way around, and the startle snaps him forward hard enough to make his nose ache again. It feels like it’s bleeding, though it probably isn’t. Still, he gropes for a tissue, tips his head back, and watches for another flash to come. His mother said not to sit beside the window in a lightning storm. Even his sneakers wouldn’t save him.

He wonders why he doesn’t turn on the light—everything is dark enough without the lack of tungsten glow—but the sky’s electricity is enough for him. Well, it’s not enough, but it’s something. His eyes unfocus and he tries not to think of any liquid save the water that isn’t falling from the sky. The air is dry as dust, bristling in his throat, and the hair on his arms prickles up with static. John tries to keep his focus on the play of purple-white forks against the black of Casper Mountain, but he is so tired. His eyes flicker closed until he cannot tell what of the lightning he is actually seeing, and what of it is only the flash through his eyelids. He sees without seeing, and he is convinced that he’s asleep again when some shape breaks the paler background of his balcony. By the time his eyes open far enough that he feels that he can see what he’s seeing, the dark crouch elongates, turns into a man, a slim shadow. The sky cracks whitely again, and John would rub his eyes if he could be absolutely certain they were fully open. Maybe this is a dream in a dream, the kind where waking up is a compound fracture. Flint Yellowknife stands on John’s balcony, and they both see that they are seen. A dark smudge runs down the boy’s face, and there is some kind of spill around the neck of his pale shirt.

John scrambles for the light and the telephone at the same time, and the receiver falls from its cradle. He is dialing before he picks it up fully, watching the young man on the porch watching him. He is not entirely certain who he is even calling—he thinks it might be the police, but he cannot hit the buttons without looking at the keypad, and he is hitting more than one at once. The recorded message of “cannot be completed as dialed” pings in his ear. He does not know the number for the police station, and he cannot make himself dial the emergency number. This is not an emergency. Yet, his brain says, yet. At all, he says. This is not an emergency. Emergencies are surprises, and this should not be a surprise to him.

He swallows the prickling air and puts the handset down. It doesn’t sit square, the dialtone humming up. Flint stands beside the balcony railing still; he has not come closer, but he moves: his forearm scrubs once over his face. He stares, and though there is not enough light to see his eyes, John can feel their target.

His knees unbend before he can stop them, his feet carry him to the many-paned French doors. There isn’t a reason he can think of that there isn’t a brick flying through the glass, and his yard has been exceptionally full of dogshit these past days.

“Young man,” he says. The door is still closed, but the movement of his mouth was enough, maybe, because now the boy moves, moves fast and crosses the wooden slats so quickly it is as though he is the one made of lightning, not the sky. But Flint Yellowknife is not slicing lavender light. He is brown and his face is slow. Even his upper lip curls slowly enough for John to take in the unveiling of his teeth. The left front tooth is crooked, slanted enough to overlap the right, but his teeth are as white as the boy’s shirt is not. The dark smear is blood, and blood rings his snarling lip: his nose bleeds. Then the boy’s arm lifts, and the narrow side of his fist, something dark caught in it, rocks one pane’s glass. It sounds like a gunshot. John jumps, and the fist lands again. This time the glass spiderwebs like the delay of forming frost, then caves and splinters free, a strangely wet sound at John’s feet. Flint Yellowknife reaches through the opening for the door handle. The door swings open, and John braces. The boy, though, shuffles forward now, his eyes as hard as his fists, and he doesn’t pass the wooden threshold for the carpeted room.

John wonders still—again—if he is dreaming this. “Your nose is bleeding.” It’s all he can think to say.

Now Flint spits, toward the carpet, and it spatters dark. “Like yours did.” His voice is higher than John remembers it from the courtroom, but then he remembers, also: he never heard him speak there. His demeanor was deeper, then, his hunched shoulders so much more broad-looking against the wooden benches.

“You broke it.” Flint shoves his thumb beside his own nose, mimicking the crookedness that, yes, the steering wheel had done. It’s straight now, though, fixed at the hospital, and he sees that Flint’s is not, that it sits slid-right above his left-cocked tooth, and the whole of it moves just a little at the press of the boy’s finger. Another small rush of blood trickles out, and Flint sniffs it back hard. This time he doesn’t spit, and John’s stomach curdles. “Looks bad, doesn’t it? Feels worse. But you know.” He lifts the hem of his shirt to wipe his face, baring his flat brown stomach, and now the red smudges cover most of him.

John wants to get him a paper towel or a washcloth, but he can’t bring himself to move, to offer him anything. “What happened?”

A shrug. “The porch supports.”

John startles. The kid fell, probably on the first attempt at climbing the square posts. The kid fell off his porch and now he can sue the hell out of him. It’s happening all over the country. There was the woman who spilled her coffee in her lap last year, and litigation exploded. The knowledge brings strange relief. “You didn’t fall far? Didn’t hurt anything else?”

Now he spits again. “I didn’t fucking fall.” He puts his hands out, grips something between them, and snaps his head forward into air. His sneer returns.

He didn’t fall. The gesture makes John feel slow and dense, thick as cotton, because if the answer is the obvious one, he doesn’t know how to manage it. “You—smashed your face into the post on purpose.”

“You drank yourself into a stupor on purpose. You got in your car on purpose.” His fingers clench.

Now John knows why he is here, and again, he feels oddly calm. “I didn’t kill your parents on purpose.”

“Accidentally is worse,” Flint says, and his throat sounds bloody-wet.

“Let me get you some ice.” John is already turning for the kitchen, taking a step, and the shove propels him nearly into another bookshelf.

“Fuck your ice.” The words are barked, and when John turns, Flint has a knife. It is a folding knife, a hunting knife, the kind the people in Casper wear on their belts to the grocery store and even to the bank and no one thinks to blink. John can’t blink now.

Though his mouth is dry, John puts out one hand. He had a training course on conflict resolution, once, long ago, before he passed the bar. “Easy,” he says.

Flint laughs, and he coughs. He doesn’t respond to the gesture or the word, though John keeps some attention on his own fingers, lest they be cut. The knife isn’t pointing out, though it is out, and that is enough. The knife points west, parallel with the line of the mountain behind him, and Flint is dragging his own forearm across the blade before John can think to move.

“I know what you feel,” he says, and he sniffs again, his voice shaking, but John doesn’t think it is from the pain of the cut. Blood wells from the split muscle. “And this is how I feel,” he says, and his thumb and forefinger leave the knife, spread the flesh so now it gushes. “No,” he says. “This.” The knife rakes again, and Flint Yellowknife’s blood drips and pools on the hardwood.

“Stop.” A corner of reason says this is not a boy ready to kill himself in front of John—the knife strokes across the top of the arm, not on the thin-skinned underside, but still—so much red.

“Fuck you.” Another splitting line. “Does it hurt you more than it hurts me?” His face is proud, unflinching.

John thinks first that he must be on something, but perhaps not. Perhaps this is only his way of showing that he cannot be broken by this hurt because he shows no sign that his body feels anything. He is deliberate, not manic, and John wonders what all he killed in the courtroom.

“Please.”

“What do you care?” Now Flint swallows, and John thinks of the sour-copper taste of blood; the air is thick with it, and it pools in Flint’s stomach.

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

            “This doesn’t hurt. Not like here.” His hand lifts, and John feels his throat catch, but Flint reverses the knife so that its handle thumps his chest. “Do you know?”

The only thing he can do is shake his head. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know at all. “Give me the knife.” He holds out his hand.

The bony fingers tighten. “So you can call the cops?”

“No.” John doesn’t quite know why he’s asking. But it’s not so he can call the cops. He isn’t sure what he would even say to them; yes, the one pane of glass is broken, yes, the boy is trespassing. Yes, he has a knife. But he isn’t threatening John with it, and part of John nearly wishes he would. Then there would be a response to this: he could call the cops. Or he could accept the threat, take it into himself with the blade, and be done with the shame and knowing. But Flint Yellowknife, for all of his sullen silence in the courtroom, is not helping him in that way. Some wry corner of his brain says that perhaps Flint has studied law, because this is so far only a misdemeanor, and he is young, and he is distraught. There is no sane jury to convict on that. But again: there ought not have been any sane jury to let him walk, no judge who ought to have given him fines and community service. John shakes his head, and Flint looks at him, puzzled. There was nothing to shake at, nothing spoken into the air.

“What?” He stops cutting. There are four two-inch lines on the top of his forearm.

“The knife,” John says. He hardens his voice. It is not a request. And the savage light pricks behind Flint’s eyes again. The handle slaps into John’s palm, and Flint’s arms hang steady at his sides.

“Yeah, fine.” Red rivulets drip. His chest sticks out behind his stained shirt. “Yeah.” And then he waits. His gaze never drops, and John holds the knife, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do with it. He should fold it, maybe get some duct tape from the garage, and wrap it closed. Then get antiseptic and towels and bandages. He should call someone to take the boy to the hospital, because stitches might not be a bad idea. He can’t tell for certain, but still, the red spots gather on the floor.

But John doesn’t fold the knife. He looks at it. He thinks he is looking for initials—is this his dead father’s knife? But there is no indication; the handle is only molded, textured plastic. Despite the blood, the grip isn’t slippery. He turns it over, back and forth, but the flat dull blade tells him nothing, except that the brand name etched into it is one he hasn’t heard of. Flint puffs air through his mouth, and then his teeth grit, bared and brash. He is not looking away again, and if he is waiting for John to turn the knife on him—

“Do it, pussy.”

John startles, and the knife shakes. “Do what?”

Now Flint says nothing, and his lips sew themselves closed. His head jerks sharply, half an inch to the side. There’s no reading it. John has never been good at reading people. He reads reports and precedents, and those are the things he is good at. He reads labels and alcohol content and is good at ignoring those. Was. He can’t do that again. He wants to do that again. He wants the scotch his sister upended in the drain, the gin alongside. He should be thinking about the money, about the cost of those things, but money is beyond him right now. All he wants is moisture in his throat. Outside, the sky is still as dry as sand, a black blanket cut by threads of lightning. He misses the darkness, before the lamp came on, because the yellow light is too clean, too real. This moment is not at all real. John turns the knife again and holds up his own forearm. When the two connect, he cannot believe how much it hurts, the slice of it sharp and stinging. He drops the knife, and it lands tip-first in the wooden floor, stands for a moment, and then is borne down by gravity. “Fuck,” he says. “Fuck.” It doesn’t even feel like a word. It’s just something.

Flint Yellowknife kicks the blade with his sneakered foot, and it scutters until it touches the carpet. It leaves a red point in the cream-colored nap, but so has the spit.

“You don’t deserve to live,” Flint says. John doesn’t understand how it is not angry-sounding. But it isn’t. The voice is as flat as the ground outside.

“No,” John says. He hopes Flint will understand that it’s an agreeing kind of no. Somehow he seems to.

The boy turns his back, and John doesn’t want him to leave. The feeling sparks hard and fierce, but he cannot summon any kind of gesture to go with the feeling. He only closes his hand tighter over his bleeding skin and hunches. Flint spits again, this time through the broken glass, and it’s too dark to see where it lands on the patio. He steps, and it is not toward the open French door. He steps onto the cream-colored carpet, walks toward the hallway, where other rooms branch off. John doesn’t say anything to stop him before he reaches John’s bedroom and the guest room, though he leaves spot-spot-spot trails from his fingertips. Flint disappears into a doorway, and in a few seconds, he reappears. He crosses the width of the living room—past the couch facing the mountain, past the armchair and the television. When he passes that, he drags his fingertips over the screen, and they smear. He is gone into the kitchen—knives, larger knives, for chopping and boning—but there is no rattle of drawers. The light flips on in the bathroom, though, and water runs, and the boy comes back with the whitest of John’s towels. There are dark blue ones, hanging on the bar by the shower, by the sink, folded in the cupboard beside the toilet, but these are ivory and have hardly seen use. They had lain under the blue ones, and John pictures the red hand-prints across the cabinetry. A wet washcloth hits him and is followed by a dry towel. Flint covers his own arm with one, wraps it tight.            He is wiping his face with the towel around his arm, and the blood smudges away less and less, until there’s only something like a shadow under his nose. Flint sits on the couch, tilts his head back, and holds the towel to his nose.

“Ice—” John says. Ice. No, an emergency room.

“Shut up.” There is so little heat in his voice. The wind picks up, though, and swirls through the open door, the ruined glass.

John dabs at his split skin, and he knows it’s not as deep as it feels it is. The cut is not as deep as those on the boy’s arm. He could not even do that much. His breath comes out through his nostrils, and the scene makes him angry. “You need stitches.”

“No, I don’t.”

“We need a doctor.” Infections, scarring, the permanent crook in the boy’s nose.

Flint raises his head just enough to look John in the eye. “I don’t need one, and you don’t deserve to take up one’s time.” He settles back again, his black hair rucked up against the cushion. “Might be one of them that actually helps the people who need it.”

John thinks hard. He can’t remember the accident, not clearly, but he thinks he remembers seeing body bags. They don’t put people in body bags who aren’t already dead. He doesn’t remember the EMTs helping anyone else, there on the side of the road. “I don’t think—” he starts, but he can’t finish. He doesn’t know, and he can’t talk about the dead.

“That’s fucking right.” Flint Yellowknife stands, and he walks out of the room, not through onto the balcony, but through the kitchen, down the stairs, through the front door. John hears the door open, but he doesn’t hear it close. What he hears is the wind chasing rain down from the mountain, the sound of it rasping the brown prairie until the rain scours the wood, rough as wire. Minutes pass, and he is sure Flint Yellowknife is gone, and the wind slams the front door closed.

John doesn’t know what to do next. So he sits, where he is, on the edge of the carpet, the broken glass scattered at his feet, the drops of blood settling into the carpet, becoming permanent.

Holly M. Wendt teaches writing and literature at Casper College in Casper, WY, where she is also the co-director of the Equality State Book Festival. She serves as the assistant fiction editor for Drunken Boat: an online journal of art and literature. Her short fiction has appeared in Memorious and Gray’s Sporting Journal.

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Nobody knew where Jason came from. He just started showing up, exotically gritty and broke, flattering the women, goading the men, grinning with disordered yellow teeth, his pale eyes watching everything and communicating nothing.

Chris hadn’t known him long, not to talk to. He’d seen him at the Entry and one time at a party where everyone watched in apprehension and envy as Jason danced bare chested in wild convulsive fits, leering like a hopeful sacrificial goat.

Two years out of college, Chris was the least feckless of his brothers so far, the golden boy looking at graduate schools, clerking in a law firm, the one who still might possibly do something illustrious in a tie. His parents tried to view these years as a natural breather. To him they felt more like a paralytic drift with no end in sight. Friends told him that his linoleum prints were artistic, he should sell them, that his fresh pasta was incredible, he could open a restaurant. He stole bar glasses and fumbled women. Each night after work he went out hoping for the sudden grasp of an undertow.

One late night, Chris was sitting half-wasted in a receptionist’s crowded apartment with his tie off and the sleeves of his fine gray office shirt rolled up, when Jason dropped down next to him for the first time ever and said,

“Hey. Nice shoes. Man, this music sucks.”

His breath was rotten with cigarettes and beer, but his presence, his casual voice, the glances of people around them, made Chris score a few points for himself. Jason leaned back against the wall, folding his arms, jacket sleeves riding up his thin white wrists, and said,

“See that guy over there? I think he wants to kill me.”

Chris looked across the room, met the grim eyes of a stocky blond stranger in a sweatshirt, and quickly looked away. Then he looked back, sizing the guy up, hoping for a little excitement. But the stranger was now staring at the top of the kitchen door frame with deep moral disgust. Annoyed, but not on his way over.

“Party’s winding down,” said Jason. “Want to get some fresh air?”

“Maybe,” said Chris. “Where?”

“I don’t know,” said Jason. He sat up and jiggled his leg, tapping the heel of his sneaker on the floor. “Go for a drive. Maybe down by the river. I got a six pack outside. You got a car?”

When Jason dropped into the passenger seat and shifted himself comfortable, the thick hammy smell of him mingling with his rank breath made Chris roll the window down at the first light. Jason cranked his down too. An icy wind roared into the car as they merged off the ramp onto the highway.

“Nice car!” shouted Jason.

“Thanks!” said Chris. It was a little red Honda, about 12 years old, with stained upholstery and a meandering crack in the bottom of the windshield.

“You had it long?”

“Yeah, a little while.”

“Yeah,” said Jason, rolling up his window halfway, “my wife took off with my car about a week ago.”

“Oh. Took off?” Chris didn’t even know he was married.

“Yeah,” said Jason, holding his hair back from his forehead, “we had a fight and she took off, probably went home.”

“So where’s home?”

“St. Cloud. I been stuck here ever since.”

“Can’t you call her?”

“She’s not answering the phone, man.”

“That sucks,” said Chris vaguely.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve been trying to figure something out. So where you want to go?” asked Jason. He seemed out of character now, tediously polite.

“I thought you had a plan.”

“Sure, I know an interesting spot. You afraid of heights?”
Under Jason’s direction, they drove across the river, over the bridge with a full view of downtown, a glittering coronet of office space tipped and footed with nightlife, fenced by spotlit billboards for jewelry, perfume, insurance, and beer. On the other side, before the crouched night mystery of the neighborhoods beyond, there was a slender new outpost of wine bars, boutiques, and red brick condos along the high river bank. They parked uphill from it on a dark side street, walked down and turned onto the bright strip.

Jason shrank into himself again, shoulders hunched, walking fast, the partial six-pack held a little behind his thigh. Popcorn fragrance wafted out of a glaring cinema. Muffled shouts and shrieks of laughter over a dull regular thump echoed down the road from a sports bar, and piano notes sounded faintly from a restaurant as they passed. He led Chris across the restored cobbled street, under the faux-Victorian street lamps on the far curb, over the darkening margin of lawn, and pushed into the brush at the top of the river bank, under a line of high twisting bare-limbed oak trees. Near-blinded in the dark, skidding after Jason down the muddy bank through a lashing network of twigs, Chris saw a massive limestone piling loom up and there was the old iron deck bridge, a black multiplying cat’s cradle stretched out across the river. Jason didn’t look back.

Chris hadn’t done anything like this since high school when friends dared each other up the rusting ladders of abandoned grain elevators and water towers on the other side of the river, far downstream. He zipped his keys securely into his jacket pocket, and scrambled up the piling after Jason.

The first touch of the iron shocked him alert. He threw himself forward along the catwalk in a surge of energy and excitement, gripping the holds with strong and capable hands, strong enough to save him if his foot went through. They laughed and chattered affirmative mocking nonsense to each other, winging over the breath of fear.

Then Jason swung a leg over the railing, got a grip on a truss, and started crawling out and down. Chris stopped and stared. Jason looked back and yelled “you coming?”

Minutes later, Chris sat clutching a death-cold iron truss with both hands and legs as the Mississippi River roared underneath, a monstrous gleaming dark flood heaving and pitching big gray-white chunks of ice down toward the dam. The bridge thrummed faintly, as if the ghost of an ore train were thundering towards them, miles off. Jason was a phantasm in the gloom, a few trusses closer to the center of the bridge and one level down, whooping at the river and laughing a high forced laugh, his white face visible in flashes by the light filtering through the splintered wooden deck above.

Chris felt brave and chosen here, more daring than he’d imagined himself to be. But the warmth of the spring day was long gone, and the iron around him felt like January. Working his way out on this truss in his slippery lace-ups, lowering himself to a secure position facing outward with a clear view of the river, had left him shaking. He still had to do it all again in reverse, though up should be easier than down. He would wait another minute, and start back before he started to stiffen up, before he felt too tired.

Three seconds from here to the water? Maybe less.

Jason had climbed down a diagonal I beam to get where he was, beer and all, using nothing but friction. Chris didn’t see how he could get back up.

“You okay over there?” shouted Jason.

“Yeah!” Chris yelled back.

“Want a beer?”

“Sure!”

“Catch!”

It came hurtling up toward him, end over end. Chris shot out a hand, but snatched at the air, and turned to see the can arc down toward the torrent and vanish.

“Ah, you loser, that was my beer!” cried Jason. “You owe me one when we get back in!”

“Okay, let’s do that!” yelled Chris. “I’m freezing my ass off!”

“Come on, try again! Heads up!”

Another beer soared toward him, a dull silver meteor through the roaring darkness. Chris reached out for it, double-handed this time. He caught it, but his hands were slippery with flakes of ancient black paint and rust dust. It shot from his grasp, plummeted down, and this time he felt a shock of sickness, as if it had plunged into the pit of his stomach. He gripped the truss tight and tried to steady himself. A flash lit up Jason’s face, bright with derision.

“I’ll get the next one!” Chris yelled, “I’ve got it now!”

“You owe me a burger for that! This is the last one! You miss this one, I’m sleeping at your place tonight!”

This time, Chris saw the throw, tracked the can through the air, and put out his hand just in time. He smacked it out of the vibrating air, clamped it tight to his chest, felt his pulse pounding through it, and for a moment had the dizzy sensation of gripping his own cold metal-skinned heart.

Done with this now. He snapped the beer open, and drank it for appearances. Then he set down the empty can, grabbed the slanting beam above him and cautiously swiveled on his seat, feeling the dirt grind into his good office pants, struggling his legs over the beam to face himself toward the catwalk, shaking harder every second. He walked his hands up the I-beam next to him, reached for the railing of the catwalk, slid his feet along the beam, and stepped over.

“You going in?” shouted Jason. “I’ll meet you back there!”

Chris looked back, to see Jason, lined with light, grapple the beam over his head, get his leg over it, and start inching back up. Scared to watch, already thinking how he’d explain to the cops, his friends, his mom, he saw Jason’s foot skid, a desperate little scrabble for a purchase, and felt a sudden overwhelming jolt of nausea and animosity. He turned away, put his head down, gripped the railings and followed the catwalk back. Edging across to the piling and lowering himself to the slope were the final bad parts, he hated the feeling now, and resented even the chance that he might twist an ankle. He scrambled up the eroding path carved by all the other nutjobs, grabbing for any flimsy branch or sapling he could reach, until he was back on the lawn, the lights of fashionable nightlife across the road.

The knees of his trousers were wrecked. Sweat had soaked through his shirt. He wanted to go, but he grimly pulled out his phone and checked the time. Standing there in a posture of nonchalance, facing the dark trees, he told himself, ten minutes. That’s it. If he’s not back in ten minutes, you call 911, and go home.

Jason reappeared in less than five. He scrambled out of the bushes like an animal, or a child, glancing around rapidly, and was obviously relieved when he saw Chris still standing there. Chris put his phone away and made himself laugh.

“I can‘t believe you got back up that thing.”

“It’s no big deal,” said Jason, pulling himself together, hovering a few yards away. “I’ve done it before. If I want to fall in, I can jump.”

“So Jason,” said Chris. “I need to get home, I’ve got work in the morning. Where can I drop you?”

“Hey now,” said Jason. “You still owe me a burger.”

“It’s too late now, everything’s closing. Maybe some other time.”

“You know, I never got dinner.”

“Serious? I can drop you at the Embers uptown. Or there’s a McDonalds two blocks from here. Here, look, I’ll give you five bucks for the beer. Even?”

“Sure,” said Jason. He stepped forward, took the money, and crumpled it into his jacket pocket.

They walked back toward the lights, side by side. A crowd of disheveled people spilled out on the street in crumpled business wear and glinting jewelry, wrapping up their second eight hour shift. Chris hoped they were all strangers, and stayed on the river side, walking the curb until the end of the strip, where they turned uphill into the neighborhood.

Halfway up the block, a neon sign flashed: We Cash Checks, We Check Cash, 7 Days. The storefront underneath was dark, as were all the storefronts, the apartment doorways, the shuttered warehouse on the other side of the street.

“Can you give me a lift to St. Cloud?” asked Jason.

“St. Cloud? You kidding me?” said Chris, and picked up his pace. Long blocks in this area, this one stretched away up the hill, his car parked across the street by the distant intersection, colorless in a pool of yellow light.

“Thing is, you know man, I’ve been here for a week. I’d take the bus, but I don’t have the cash.”

“You’ve got enough friends, somebody could loan you bus fare.”

“Yeah. Remember that guy back at the party?”
“The guy who wanted to kill you.”

“He loaned me forty bucks three days ago. But when I got to the ticket office, it wasn’t enough. I thought I’d get more, but then I had to spend it.”

“You had to spend it.”

“I got hungry, asshole. And now he wants it back so I still don’t have bus fare and I owe him forty.”

“I’m not lending you money, if that’s what you mean.”

“You could run me back. Won’t take long. You know, you owe me man,” said Jason, grinning at him again, shaking Chris by the elbow. “And you know,” he said, holding on, hesitating, “you want me to do you a favor, I’ll do anything you want. Whatever you’re up for.”

Chris made eye contact, and got the gist. He pulled both elbows in.

“Not tonight,” he said, “I gotta go.”

“You gonna drop me downtown?” said Jason.

“I think I’m dropping you here,” said Chris, casually backing away toward his car. “Got to get home. Work in the morning.”

He had almost five yards between them. Jason wasn’t grinning anymore. The edges of his mouth were tight. He stared down at the peeling frame of an empty old store window with his hands shoved into his jeans pockets, his white throat and wrists gleaming out of the darkness between the flashes of orange neon like the flash of a fish’s underbelly turning over in deep water.  Something was shifting in him, something grievous and suppressed rising up.

“Okay then,” said Chris, “see ya.” He turned up the street, and walking fast, called back, “Thanks for the beer.”

He was about to cross over, when Jason hauled off and punched the old plate glass window. An alarm shrieked up into the night. Jason shrieked back and punched the window again. This time it shattered. Jason fell over, hugging himself, rolling in the glass. Chris turned around and ran. He thought he heard Jason shout something, but it wasn’t his name.

When he got to the intersection, he looked back and saw Jason, hunched, struggling down the sidewalk away from him, out of the lamplight, out of sight. Chris clenched his teeth and crossed the street to his car, glancing down to see if he looked suspicious, his dirty knees, he could always say he had to check his muffler. Car door open, getting in, door slammed and locked, key in the ignition, engine turned right over. He drove a big circle out of his way, listening for sirens, and then back across the river to his duplex, his front door, his silent living room, his rumpled bed, the alarm clock beside it on the floor.

The next night at the party the group was drinking Kirs and waiting for a late movie to start on TV. Chris was wedged deep in an armchair, grateful for the crowd of familiar strangers. At work that day he’d had a good talk with a partner about law school, the guy had taken him seriously. That felt like confirmation, progress, a patch of firm ground where he could rest. Then someone said, “Hey, did you hear about Jason?”

The vertigo came over him again, as if the floor was opening up beneath his feet. He didn’t let it show. “Something happen to him?” he said.

“Almost killed himself, man,” said the guy. “Put his fist through a window over by Riverplace.”

“What the hell for?” said another guy.

“I don’t know, probably trying to steal something. Cut himself bad though, up by the elbow, right in deep there.”

“Wow,” said someone else, with horrified relish.

“Geez,” said Chris.

“Didn’t you leave with him last night?” a woman asked him.

Chris shook his head slowly. “I gave him a ride. Dropped him off downtown. Must have happened later.”

“Cops found him by following the blood,” said the first guy. “Left a trail all along the sidewalk. Said if they hadn’t found him, he probably would have died.”

“Where’d you hear all this?” asked the woman, tucking up her feet on the couch.

“He called a friend of mine this morning, totally random,” said the guy. “Wanted her to bail him out, but she hardly even knows him. She told him not to call her anymore.”

Sara Catterall was born in Ankara, raised in Minneapolis, and lives outside Ithaca, NY with her family. She has a BFA from NYU, and an MLS from Syracuse University. Her work has been published in Eclectica magazine and The Sun magazine, and she recently completed a novel. Sometimes she is on Twitter @SaraCatterall.

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The news on his car radio isn’t good. In Louisiana, state officials have announced that Butte La Rose, a small town of around 800 homes situated on a river basin, will be intentionally flooded at noon by opening a spillway to divert water from the already overflowing Mississippi. The measure will, these same officials contend, steer the oncoming deluge away from the more populous cities of Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

“The residents have been forewarned,” the governor announces, “and every effort is being made to move them to safer locales.” He adds, “Unfortunately, the state will not be able to compensate them for any losses, but FEMA is already on the ground giving whatever aid they can.”

Fifteen hundred miles away, as he pulls into the faculty parking lot, Albert Vance pictures the scene. Impoverished people, living on crawfish and welfare, thrown out of their homes without so much as a fair warning. They’ll leave without much complaint, just as the powerless always do, grateful for anything the government might dole in their direction. They’ll wind up, the lot of them, in some high school gymnasium among a universe of folding cots, the food line stretching outside the cafeteria and down the hallway as if it were leading to a Ferris wheel at a county fair. There will be men in overalls and waders, women with babies riding their hips, additional children standing a hand’s distance away.

In fact, though, Vance has no idea. He’s never been in Louisiana, let alone Baton

Rouge, but he’s seen enough of life in forty-eight years to make what he considers valid generalizations. It’s what we call inductive reasoning, he might tell his Argument and Persuasion 111 class. Making a judgment call based on repeated observation.

Like when his wife left, claiming there was nobody else in the picture. Claiming that Vance needed help with his drinking and his lying and his broken promises. He knew there was somebody else—there’s always somebody else—but he forced himself to hope. He went to A.A. and got sober, and at the same time started seeing a therapist. Six months later he drove two hundred and fifty miles, knocked on his mother-in-law’s door, and asked to talk to his wife. To Marie. She finally came down from upstairs and they had lunch at T.G.I. Friday’s. Vance told her he was seriously trying to work things out. Marie told him that she was happy he was progressing so nicely, but that there was somebody else.

There’s always somebody else. Inductive reasoning.

Vance first considered suicide shortly after the T.G.I. Friday’s lunch. It was mid-August, his summer vacation was winding to a finish, his wife was most definitely gone, his uncommunicative daughter was married and living in Toronto, and the job he despised was waiting like a bully crouched behind a parked car.

Ironically, he’d pursued his profession since he himself had been a college student. Vance remembered getting out of the Navy, enrolling in community college on the GI Bill, and falling into the world of academia like Alice had fallen through the rabbit hole. He’d started off in General Studies, moved on to a bachelor’s degree in American Lit, then a master’s in English, and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Composition. He attended colleges in New York, Colorado, Vermont, and Utah. There were dinners at professors’ houses, foreign film festivals, discussions of art and sex and life that stretched far into the morning.

Somehow, though, things had changed. The students where he taught—Our Lady of Mercy College in suburban Connecticut—were stupid and apathetic. Where as he and some classmates had stayed up all night one St. Patrick’s Day in his junior year reading aloud the work of William Butler Yeats, the undergraduates at Our Lady of Mercy had, just last March, held a Frosted Lucky Charms eating marathon. His peers weren’t much better. Tenured professors had become lazy and, worse, predictable. And adjuncts worried about their crappy paying part-time jobs like farm pigs feared not getting their share of slop.

Vance had, some years back, purchased a 12-gauge shotgun. It wasn’t some heroin crazed home invader he feared, it was students he had failed. Not so long ago they’d have gone to work painting houses or working for the phone company. Now, through their parents’ ability to write a check, they were expected to graduate. More than a few, faced with the D or the F, became surly, even threatening. Vance’s car was “keyed,” his computer virused, his office door swastikaed in red Magic Marker despite the fact that he wasn’t Jewish.

It would be so easy, he though after Marie brushed him off like sand on a beach blanket, to take this gun I’ve never even shot, load it, walk into the woods behind the house and pull a Hemingway.

But he hadn’t. That form of death would be too messy. What if he was discovered by some poor kid taking an innocent Saturday morning hike? Or worse. What if he survived, the top of his head blown off, destined to walk through life like a freak in search of a circus.

In his office, Vance diagnoses his symptoms for the umpteenth time. The periods of high-pitched breathing, the neck pain, the sore throat and cough that won’t go away. He factors in a quarter century of cigarettes and scotch. “Throat cancer,” the Mayo Clinic site tells him, “has a 90% cure rate if detected early. But if the disease has advanced to the surrounding tissues, that rate drops to 50%.”

The last thing Vance wants is to die while standing in front of a room full of students. It happened two semesters ago to a colleague, a middle-aged guy named Ray Fashetti, who had a heart attack in the middle of his Academic Writing class. From a PowerPoint lecture on “Analogy,” to a crumpled heap on the floor. His class, all first-year students, sat silent and motionless for ten minutes until one of them finally broke classroom policy, turned on her cell phone, and called campus security.

At home, Vance watches television while eating a Hungry Man Meatloaf Dinner. It’s Good To Be Full the box had declared, right under a picture of what resembled two flattened, gravy-covered turds backed up by corn, mashed potatoes, and a brownie. The back of the box was a bit more intriguing, identifying the meal as a 680 calorie, 55 percent saturated fat, 41 percent sodium feast. Like a saltlick covered in grease, Vance had thought while his meal microwaved, but who cares.

The flood-ravaged state of Louisiana is in the second slot on Six News Six, right after the story of a slutty-looking rock singer who shoplifted a ruby and sapphire ring from Kay Jewelers, but claims she’d simply forgotten to take it off and return it. “I do have other balls in the air,” she reminds her audience.

In Butte La Rose, a husband and wife who look to be in their fifties, watch as water fills their backyard like a bathtub. Behind them, in the driveway, is a packed station wagon with an upsidedown rowboat bungee-corded on top. The woman, who wears a t-shirt that reads THIS IS MY CLONE, is telling a reporter that in her “not-so-humble opinion,” the intentional flooding was not as much to save Baton Rouge and New Orleans as it was to save the oil refineries down river. Following the report, an anchor woman, dressed as if she’s on her way to divorcees’ night at the Ramada, smiles and says to the weather guy next to her, “Honestly, Paul. If I live forever I’ll never tire of hearing those drawling dialects the folks down there use.”

Vance switches channels and watches as other families, carrying all they can, crowd highways in a slow motion stampede. They take laptop computers and photo albums. They transport the elderly, some on mattresses, across the back seats of their cars. They leave behind furniture and bicycles and pets. Some lock their doors, some turn off their lights.

Vance finds the entire thing extremely depressing and wishes he could do something to help. But he knows better. He can’t drive down there; he’d never even get close to the place. If he sends money to a relief fund, it’ll wind up in the pocket of some fat bureaucrat who’ll spend it on male prostitutes and cocaine. It’s hopeless, all of it. It is, in the words of some actor from one of those old Billy Jack movies, “just one big shit-brick.”

Vance watches Classic Fight Nite on ESPN, grades a few papers, smokes the e-cigarette his daughter sent him—without any written correspondence—for Father’s Day.  He has a coughing spasm and for the first time notices blood on the tissue. He envisions himself six months, a year from now, in some hospital bed. He’ll weigh under a hundred pounds and have to be fed through a clear plastic tube. He’ll shit into a bag. People from the college will come to visit, not because they want to, but because it’s protocol. They’ll bring him dumb books like, If Cats Could Talk, and stay as briefly as possible. In the parking lot they’ll congregate and discuss what bar is closest and the quickest way to get there. When he dies, an email will circulate throughout the college. Subject line: Condolences. It will be sandwiched between Change in Library Hours and Document Shredding Service.

Vance thinks again about suicide. Maybe hanging. A cafeteria worker at Our Lady of Mercy, finding out she was pregnant while her husband waited two years for her in Mexico, had gone that way. She was discovered by her landlord after the rent was a couple of weeks past due.

But Vance worries the method might not be thorough enough, and the last thing he wants is to be swinging there, totally conscious, his neck broken, his TV—which he neglected to turn off—playing endless reruns of That ‘70s Show.

****

In the middle of the night, after zero sleep, Vance figures it out. It’s been raining for hours and the roads are slick. An accident, some might say, waiting to happen. At

9 AM, as he does every Thursday morning, he’ll get into his car and drive toward his 9:30 class at OLMC. At the entrance to I-95, where the north-bound traffic is relatively light, he’ll pull onto the Interstate, swing a U-turn, avoid oncoming traffic until he spots an 18-wheel tractor-trailer, close his eyes and floor the accelerator. At eighty miles an hour, his car—a Ford Focus—will fold like a Wal-Mart lawn chair. The driver of the 40-ton truck will be annoyed, but otherwise uninjured. He must have lost control of his vehicle, people will say. A man (some will even say “young man”) with so much to live for.

Vance pictures the scenario over and over. It excites him. He thinks about what he should wear. If he needs to get gas. Whether or not he should finish grading his papers. He decides not to alter his usual routine; this should look like an accident. He doesn’t sleep. He knows if there was a drop of alcohol anywhere in this apartment, it would be gone.

But what he doesn’t figure on is actuality. Hours later, when he yields on the entrance to I-95, he sees that traffic is barely moving. He spots flashing emergency lights in the distance, an accident that has surpassed his own. He edges onto the Interstate, creeps along for two miles, passes the car which has flipped onto its side, and finally gets off at the Park Avenue exit south of the college.

Butte La Rose, the morning news guy on WXW-FM informs him, is a ghost town. Flood waters have, in some places, reached fourteen feet. The last evacuated resident is identified as an eighty-two year old man who decided to leave at the last possible minute. “I don’t want to go down with the ship,” the man is quoted as saying. “Not when there are other ships.”

Vance stops at a red light, considers turning around, calling in sick. The rain has intensified, the wind has picked up, the sky has turned the color of Guinness Stout. It’ll have to be the shotgun, Vance thinks to himself. Mess or no mess.

Except then he sees it. It’s nothing particularly noteworthy, nothing that would attract much attention under other circumstances.  It’s simply a girl—she’s maybe twelve at most—rushing up the granite steps in front of the middle school. Perhaps she’s just been dropped here by a parent who, late for work, has already taken off. The girl wears a hooded red vinyl raincoat. Flip-flops on her already wet feet. She shoulders a backpack the color of a traffic cone. Under one arm, a manila portfolio which the girl, hunched, tries to protect. She’s a few steps from the school’s entrance when the portfolio falls—perhaps it’s dislodged by the wind—from her grasp. Papers fall from it—color printouts, maps perhaps—a school project due today. She quickly collects a few, stomps on others. Vance, even from a distance, can see colored ink on what appears to be a pie chart blending into some nondescript shade of brown. But the kid doesn’t give up. She losses a flip-flop, expertly regains it, collects each smeared and soaking sheet of paper, returns the whole sodden mess to the portfolio, hurries up the rest of the steps and disappears.

Damn, Vance thinks.

Behind him, a car horn shrieks.

Vance parks in the faculty lot, but stays in his car. His hands are shaking the way they used to when he first stopped drinking. He considers calling the middle school, asking about the girl, maybe telling the principal the entire story and pitching a plea for the poor kid to be allowed to redo her project. But he knows how creepy this will sound, a grown man leering from an unmoving car. Beside, this child seems capable. Able to stand her ground, as the old saying goes.

He decides instead to call his doctor.

Z.Z. Boone lives in Connecticut. His fiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, Tulane Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Pank, Weave, Eclectica, Annalemma, The MacGuffin, Underground Voices, Third Wednesday, Word Riot, and others. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, and teaches writing at Western Connecticut State University.

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I looked back and saw the face in the window. I was fourteen. Already, I could feel the world’s tolerance straining. I replaced the latch and headed into the woods behind their house. “My desire is innocent,” I protested. (I coveted only underground chambers (pools all my own, tunnels, secret water to swim in).) I would be forced to return this way many times again.

Eric Burke works as a computer programmer in Columbus, Ohio. More of his work can be found in elimae, decomP, Thrush Poetry Journal, kill author, PANK, qarrtsiluni, A cappella Zoo, and Weave Magazine. You can read his blog at http://anomalocrinus.blogspot.com/

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Poor Elmont—the first, but certainly not the last person—accused of cooperation with police against the excesses of the hunt. Six feet tall and built like a blob. Could have been a linebacker if he didn’t have the soul of a Muppet. Just big for nothing. Those guys worked him over pretty good. Blows to the ribs, legs, kidneys. All that. Then they slammed his tongue in a car door. They didn’t have to do that, but they did.

It all started with George who one morning tossed Elmont a plastic shopping bag filled with a bunch of assorted junk and said, Hey, Elmont could you take this to the dumpster for me. Thanks.

Elmont shrugged and walked 500 feet, tossing it all into oblivion, never to think about it again until that next week when the police questioned him. They had the bag, the soda cans and balled up tissues and cotton balls from inside it.

Do you know a George Cooper? How do you know Mr. Cooper? Did you throw this bag into the Lovely Hills dumpster? The one on Lovely Street and 4th Place. About what time? Did you know the contents? How did you come into possession of the bag? Are you sure? Did you receive payment for tossing the bag? Are you sure? What time did you say you first saw George that day? What were you doing that morning? Did you have any contact with George in the two weeks prior to receiving the bag in question? How could you not know? Do you know of a woman who goes by the name jane? How do you feel about her? Are you sure?  What’s you opinion on the Wolf Liberation Front? Are you sure? Are you sure?

Elmont answered dutifully before the detectives presented the bloody clothes they said were balled up at the bottom of the bag.

Does this look familiar to you? Are you sure?

George’s wife, it turned out, had gone missing. Unbeknownst to George she had joined the resistance, becoming one of jane’s main forest puppeteers. Her husband, the archer—a wolfer of distinction and prosperity, in a fit of passion fired an arrow into her neck as if she were a common forest wolf. Then, in a fit of panic, he chopped the woman to pieces and stuffed her body into a furnace that he tried and tried and tried to light.

Elmont, so oblivious. So confused all the time. So trusting of everyone and everything. So maddening to the police in his lack of detail. His blank, happy face, which to them was a silly put on.

When the police chauffeured him to his front door deep in the heart of the Lovely Hills Apartment Homes, they knew exactly what they were doing. Drove down the block and picked up George as if to underline and then highlight their point. The wolves were out, the human ones who watched this big-for-nothing giant waddle slowly to his apartment, dazed and weary, desiring sleep, but whole, thinking nothing of his tongue, taking for granted that it would always be safe and there for him when he needed it.

Rion Amilcar Scott has contributed to PANK, Fiction International and Confrontation, among others. Raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, he earned an MFA at George Mason University and presently teaches English at Bowie State University.

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& the fidgeting of the fan & the heightened ceilings & the thick wooden beams & the basic counter post & the joists & toggle bolts & steel frame & the fan fidgety & silent & moving with the heated air & the bodies & the bodies & the bodies she recalled the bodies swinging & the woman’s breath moving in the air beside her breath & the barn doors held fast to their frame & the moveable air & the sharp intake of the moon &

her mind moveable but not like the air not like the short hairs that move on her arms under a small fan not

like the woman in the center fainting not fainting falsetto feet rising rising rising rising ris–now propped on the balls of her feet the obedience of arms follow their predictable arms there they go pressured to rise rise rise not unlike the pressure of air to predict movement beneath the voiced fan now the hands open off the woman goes apocrypha step casuistic fingerprints inventing a tongue by which to speak the what centered in the room moving invisibly around her the word –

a moth flies close to her mouth she wants to speak but the centered woman has the right to voice not her sitting there cringing from the 1/2-inch wingspan of the moth back & forth so close to her mouth where did it come from this assiduous attention thief & where has its wings been what fifth of its memory waits

to recall her breath deliberately harsh filtering into the room her breath invisible flutters this moth’s wings the power she feels every time the moth dips against the breath that is hers struggles to right itself in the room’s air which is not hers she breathes hard pushes air through her nostrils harder harder

harder she opens her mouth and sighs & catches sound her sound & tension line her back shoulders raw beams her neck steel rod & in this tension she purses her lips draws the sound her sound back into her mouth silently she sucks the sound her sound down her throat through her lungs & further the breath she wants to push it to L5 then sacrum then coccyx let the sound her sound reside there where other sounds reside biting agonizing sounds each fight for reversal coccyx sacrum L5 L4 L3 L2 L1 T12 & so on until they reclaim their sacred space larynx–cricoid thyroid cartilage arytenoid vocal folds glottis epiglottis hyoid intrinsic & extrinsic laryngeal muscles all waiting for these sounds to move upward to reclaim their shapes to sit on the tongue until the mind can claim its right to speak–years of sounds accumulating in her coccyx

& she always weighted rooted to pasts hung by the words noosed around her larynx the words hanging from the wooden t-beam she’d made of her throat she suiciding the words the sounds coughing falling backwards self-protective these sounded words crashing back into her lower body weighted & rooted light moveable her brain’s disparate particles recounting the same stories the same images voiceless bodies looping around the currency of her throaty mind mined not for shareable sounds serviceable images surrealable touches smells starched

in the thinning night air bodies hanging shocked tongues hanging the living panting the dying panting the engines panting idly dogs in whitened night air panting unstill night air as all winged bodies she wants to arch away above the scene to see the winged air open its feathered arms now the arms close now open over & over the mothed minds’ warble & the trees warble & the spring blossoms falling from sudden jerking weights warble before crashing into living bodies soft earth horned cars no one here is silent treed birds no longer nestling here under this series of wrecked weights they cannot warble this night’s warring limbs the thick-limbed trees crackle against concealable stacked headlamps & the irrepressible dance of shadows collude & collapse into the unfrenzied adumbration of bodies the agitation of voices spasmodic unwords umph she remembers sssssrrrroooo she remembers ggggg she remembers from the trees ggggggg the paroxysm that brought this bevy of unwords here the yuuuuuhhhh of cloaks the hiss of hoods the trees braying what to do with these sounds collecting in the uncontained air she wants to morph into a ghost moth open her mouth & collect fumed sounds & there the sounds burrow into her tongue & now her tongue pregnant these minute-old sounds round on her tongue each discrete egg hardening finding temporary comfort in their new muscular home she closes her mouth & presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth lets the sounds feed on the hard palate runs her tongue side-to-side then presses harder & runs her tongue up-and-down the sounds massaged nurtured by the moth-woman as far away from herself as imaginable she retreats into her mind & mistakenly comes back for her heart & explosions of gratification & the imploded muffles of surrender the men pull their hoods back sweat is all the face she can make out sweat for eyes sweat for noses sweat of foreheads and & the sweaty sweaty mouths mouthing yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes gratification on their sweaty teeth nearly she feels the underside of empty:

where she wants to rest beneath her father’s Chevy sleep she wants sleep until the evening is dream the night a series of implosions cloaks peeled from faces faces peeled from night night peeled from earth earth from the universe & now nothingness no present no sounds holding her tongue culpable simple she wants simplicity the night freed from the enslavement of stars puncturing

the unfree sky

pure black night scarred scabs of headlights :: lunar globes :: flashlights :: waist-high stars :: new moon :: dark moon :: fat white clouds in the full black sky :: on the other side of the world

there is a night utterly black a forest much like the forest the woman shivers in unfettered by men their dogs their women & cars

their desires for purity :: hanging not like fruit :: the woman the night stutters repeat :: tree-heaving evenings eclipse of moths stretch of fresh death night’s glycerin air :: what reprieve in repetition :: she wants; she imagines; the mind curled into nap; agita of sound; pregnant tongue; coccyx swollen with the pasts the pasts sweltering the pasts swinging the pasts bodiless ::

dropped infinitives the pasts dangling participles the bodies alive & dying & dripping & dancing & howling & guttural & now & now sounds sickle slumberers in her coccyx rows of crescent-shaped hammocks holding them the woman

adjusts herself in her seat moves her hips right right left right rocks the sounds to sleep she cups her hands captures the moth locks it into the unfamiliar life love lines of her sinfully soft hands the past is put to bed now & the present rises in front of her in the form of an unhooded woman, leaving the stage

Metta Sama

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You get it all at my DMV, man. I call it “my DMV” because I got the keys to the double-doors that open up at seven o’clock on the dot, letting in the flood of sleepy-eyed men and women with kids, most of them here to get or renew their driver’s licenses. They stumble in and snake up against the length of the white wall with their own strings of keys or lidded Stripes’ coffees or flaky Pop Tarts in their kids’ hands, each of them ogling my Texas State Trooper uniform and Beretta and Stetson as they pass me in silence, even though I know they got questions. I never say a word, just hawk them as they come in, and none of them ever asks me a thing. When they come in they slouch against the counters by the wall instead and pretend to read the flyers on the walls with the instructions in English, even though the Spanish ones hang just beneath. I chuckle seeing that. Shit, one look from me and any kid straying from his or her parent against that wall knows I mean business. I brush two fingers over my State Trooper badge above my left-breast pocket right after that, proud, then flick dust off my name tag on the other side, making sure “GARCIA” is shining bright. I walk over to my spot by Rita’s booth and wait for her to get set up and call the first client of the day.

Like me, Rita doesn’t let these locals give her any shit. Like me, she likes things to run smooth. She’s got the toughest job at my DMV, I think, tougher than me even, in charge of giving all peoples the correct information, both in English and Spanish, on all the forms that need to be filled out, as well as any fees. But what Rita hates most is having to answer the same stupid questions twice, and that happens a lot where we work. She yells at anyone who doesn’t understand her when she knows she’s right, even sends people to the back of the line if they get to arguing with her too much. She winks at me whenever one more victim makes his or her way to the end of the line and does that thing with her fake-blonde hair where she curls it behind both of her pretty little ears. Mmm.

The first time I fucked Rita was on top of the desk in my back office that one night after everyone had gone home. She grabbed me by my badge and threw off my Stetson and straight out told me that she’d had a hard day and to go and lock the front doors and hurry back. I rushed back and pumped while she puffed, and after two sets of that and the sight of her wobbly thighs, I figured we were all but done.

I pulled up my pants, tucked my shirt back in. Rita stayed naked, though, spread out on my chair, put her feet up on my desk, and I liked that she felt comfortable. I liked it so much I reached into the bottom drawer and pulled out a well-rattled pint of bourbon and unscrewed the top. She took the first swig, tossed me the bottle, and began to tell me about what had happened during my lunch break that got her so riled up.

“These people, Johnny. I get so irritated.”

“Yeah,” I said, the bourbon burning nice and slow.

“I mean, I’m Mexican, too. My parents crossed over from Reynosa and worked in the fields when I was a kid. But I took the time to learn to speak proper English. These people, they switch the English and the Spanish every other word, butcher the language. Drives me crazy.”

I stole another swig, nodded with my eyes glued to her thick, dark nipples, then imagined both of her parents as sweated clumps under the hot south Texas sun, pulling out onions by their long green hairs on someone’s orders, Rita sitting in the Plymouth with all the windows rolled down, her feet hanging out, reciting her vowels and consonants. I thought of my own father, too, for some reason, Saturnino García, as my mother referred to him on those rare occasions she even mentioned him, somewhere up north in Illinois or Michigan or Ohio, thinking incessantly about me, working, she’d say, and so anxious to get back home to us.

“That one kid, Johnny,” Rita went on, “he just got on my last nerve. I mean, with the sign right in front of him, he asks if he has to stand in line to renew his license. And worse, he asks me flip-flopping the English and the Spanish—Do I have to stand in the linea to renew my licencia?—like that, sounding as dumb as he looked.”

“But that’s every day here, Rita,” I said, swapping her the bourbon. “It’s where we live and work; it’s McAllen. Thought you’d gotten used to the Tex-Mex by now.”

“I thought so, too.”

“So you sent the dumb fuck to the back of the line, right?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I answered his question, Johnny.”

“But didn’t you say he irritated you?”

“He did. Right down to my core.” She sat up, curled her hair behind her right ear in a rush. “But I answered him anyways, before I realized what I was doing. And in Tex-Mex, too, of all things.”

I half-chuckled, stopped. Rita took her longest swig yet, leaned back with tears cutting a path down the mascara on both her temples, and I wondered if the liquor had gotten the best of her already. I stood there in uniform, in charge of nothing, though, my confusion as thick as the smell of our sex still hanging in the air.

Rita slammed the bottle on the desk finally, wiped her eyes and cheeks, slapped her feet back down to the ground, stood up.

“Hey, Rita. Listen. Maybe we should—”

“Get your ass over here, now,” she said commandingly.

She grabbed me by my tie this time, pushed me down on my chair, undid my pants, and there we went again. Rita clawed into my corduroy all through it and yanked on my badge so much I thought my shirt would tear. I let her do it anyways.

When she’d had enough she got up off me and dressed and finished the rest of the bottle all by herself. “I feel like some Low Mein,” she said, tossing the empty bottle in the trash, so we headed for the House of China on Tenth and I paid for two dinner buffets. While I munched on some fried tilapia and shrimp, Rita slurped up her mound of steamed noodles. “I’m so hungry right now, Johnny. I don’t know why. So hungry. We going to your place or mine?” I smiled. I told her we’d go wherever she wanted once she was done. She winked at me while twirling her fork into the web of her low mein, flicking her wrist, spooning it delicately into her mouth.

The front and the around the two oak trees for $200, the tubby Mexican said. For that I’d get the toughest weed fabric around, good quality red mulch, and some Texas lantanas and red-orange and yellow ixoras to make it all look real nice. I happened to mention the sprinkler system that had come with the repo originally, and after crawling over my lawn and messing with all eight of the heads, he said he’d replace the four defective ones for an extra hundred. Everything, he said in Spanish, for three-hundred dollars. You can not beat that price, señor. Anyone with a license will charge you double. Not me. Not me, señor. Never. Never.

The Mexican hunched before me, waiting for my answer with his veiny, yellow eyes stuck on my State Trooper badge, tugging on the oval of sweat between his man boobs on his faded grey t-shirt.

I thought about his offer, hard. I looked down at the hard dirt and rocks and dry stumps that currently made up my “sorry excuse for a garden.” Those had made up some of Rita’s exact words on Friday night right after telling me “Go fuck yourself, you selfish asshole” just for poking her in the back with my stiff, six-inch license when she didn’t want to, right as she peeled the pavement from my driveway, so that the Mexican’s Monday morning arrival seemed the luckiest coincidence in the world. What better surprise for Rita than to come back home to bright Texas lantanas and ixoras on top of mulch on top of fabric that crushed weeds? She’d love it. She’d love me. Again. Even if I was an asshole (which I wasn’t; just horny). For three-hundred bucks, this Mexican was gonna patch things up for me without even knowing it.

Esta bien, I said.

I held out my hand to seal the deal. Still stuck on my uniform, the Mexican straightened up, wiped his right palm on his jeans, and shook my hand.

My name is Carlos Pérez, he said in Spanish.

And I’m Juan-I mean, Johnny, García. Call me Johnny.

Yonny, I will do a good job for you, just like I did for your neighbor last year. Ask him about me. I did his front garden. See, señor?

He pointed over my mailbox and across the street at a two-story brick home with a wide front garden filled with roses and shrubs and other brilliant plants that I couldn’t name. Being new to the neighborhood, I couldn’t name my neighbor either.

So, Yonny, I will need a hundred to get started. The rest when I am finished. Is that okay?

I nodded and forked over five twenties from my wallet.

Gracias, Yonny. I will go buy all things now. Come right back to get started. Adios, señor.

He climbed into his beat-up Ford Ranger, waved at me as he drove off. I imagined Rita coming up the walkway in awe later that day, my arms wrapped around her from behind, both of us made up, the lantanas and ixoras bowing out to meet their new masters, the red mulch on the fabric just heavy enough to keep down all those stubborn weeds.

That day, that day everyone suffocated all along that postered wall at my DMV, me included. With the a/c down, with Rita still pissed at me, I took up shop closer to the everyday clientele near the trash bin, a good distance from my regular place next to the booth of the woman who would love me again. From where I stood in sweat (I’d helped put up the cheap fans on all four corners of the office, but they only served to toss around the same hot air), I looked over at Rita every now and then. She ignored me like she’d planned it, pretending to give the next guy or gal her full attention, answering every stupid question like she cared, not sending anyone to the back of the line even, and not caring if any of them pocketed the pens she lent them to fill out their forms. So I let the pens go, too. I took off my Stetson for an instant to wipe the sweat from my brow with my handkerchief. I fit my hat back on as a kid’s voice sounded “Wow!” and I knew it was all because he’d gotten a sight of me.

Those kids, man. A sight to see that day, especially since the heat had stolen their eagerness to tussle beneath the counters or run up and down the length of the cordoned area where they usually yanked on the thick rope and rattled the poles on their bases up until I stared them down. They sat droopy-eyed and Indian style on the cool tiles at the foot of their mothers and fathers instead, tugging on pant legs and flip-flop straps and asking why my DMV wasn’t cold like Wal-Mart or Best Buy. Whenever Rita was ready for the next person and the time came to move up the kids seemed to roll over where they were, reminding me of that legless Vietnam vet by the train tracks on the corner of Inspiration and Frontage whenever he spotted a dollar bill hanging out of a car window. The kids dragged their asses over the lines of dirt-colored grout and onto the next set of off-white tiles, waiting for the fans to cool them down some.

That day, that day I spotted the two white women just as they came in through my doors. To say they were up there in age would be an understatement. One helped the other by the elbow as they both ambled in in short steps, and their foreheads quickly imploded as they surveyed the long line of sweaty, brown bodies. Their popcorn hairdos trembled as the hot air from the fans wisped by. With the heat, at the end of that line, to me, the two women could be nothing else than the whip cream frothing on top of one of Rita’s white chocolate mocha frappuccinos from Starbucks. I looked over at Rita again. At her loose hair falling down over her left temple, wishing I could curl it around the back of her ear for her one more time.

And I swear that’s when the plan came to me, honest. I made my way down the line, getting my fair share of stares, shooting my own back, up to the end of the row where the white women clung to each other by the first pole in its base.

“Morning, ladies,” I said. “Can I help you?”

“Not unless you can cut this line in half, sonny,” the one holding the other’s elbow joked. She had a twang in her speech that reminded me of my old academy instructor, spitting out his orders.

“I can’t even fix the air in this joint,” I said playfully, which set them both into tired chuckles.

“It’s seething in here,” the elbow supporter commented.

“I’m here to renew my license,” said the other one and with the same twang. “I lost the paper. The one to do it in the mail. On the phone, they told my sister Jolene I had to come down here to do it. I have trouble standing for long periods of time because of my ar-thur-itis, I told them. But no, they said, no. You got to come down if you want your license. So here I am.”

The sisters looked away from me for a moment, and I had to turn to see what had stolen them from my charm. Down the length of the line all eyes were on the sisters, at least until they caught me noticing them noticing us. Then all eyes fell down in an instant to study cell phone screens or renewal applications or their slumping kids on the tiles. All eyes stumbled on anything else but us.

“Maybe I can help you ladies out,” I said to the sisters. “Come with me.”

I grabbed the free elbow and slowly led the sisters past the front of the line to Rita’s counter. I flashed a clear palm at the next woman in line and waited for Rita to finish with a zit-faced teenager wearing Jesus hair, a Danzig t-shirt, tight jeans. The woman who would love me again finally looked up at me, so I took my chance.

“Rita,” I said calmly, “this woman has problems with her legs. Can’t stand in line for long periods of time. We should help her out.”

Rita listened and curled her hair behind her ears as beautifully as ever. She looked over at the tired, brown woman and her two kids at the front of the line, then back at the sisters, then finally set her eyes on me.

“Sonny,” broke in Jolene, “you know, we don’t want to cause any trouble. Shawna and I can wait in line, that’s all right. You’re very kind to try and help us, both of you, but that’s all right. Help the lady there who’s next, sweetie. Really. That’s all right. Come on, Shawna. We need to go back to the end of the line.”

Jolene began to turn Shawna carefully. My head shrunk slightly in my Stetson, and I could feel the sweat running down the back of my neck. I kept my eyes on Rita. The woman who would love me again didn’t buckle from my stare, the sweat building in soft beads on her upper lip, tapping her pen on her desk over and over.

“Wait,” Rita finally said. “It’s okay, ma’am. You can be next.”

Jolene stopped with her sister, turned back around. “But, sweetie, are you sure? We don’t want special treatment. Don’t want to cause any problems. Will no one mind?”

“No,” Rita answered. “No one.”

“Well, all right. If you say so. Look, Shawna. These nice young people are going to help us out after all.”

“Booth Number One. Jesus’ll fix you up right over there.” Rita pointed out the booth closest to the front of the line. “Make sure to have your old license and social security card available.”

“All right, sweetie. And thank you too, sonny. You’ve both been extremely kind.”

The sisters slowly melted past Rita’s counter and into the designated booth.

“Rita,” I said on impulse, “I’m sorry. Let’s bury it, no? This ain’t the time or the place, I know it, but I don’t like us fighting. Wait. Listen first. I got a surprise for you if you come home tonight. You’re gonna love it, I’m sure. What do you say? Will you come home tonight?”

The woman who would love me again half-smiled, shook her head, and for a moment it felt as though she would send me to the end of the line.

She said “Next!” and I had to move out of the way as the woman with her two kids approached Rita’s counter. I stayed in my regular spot and could hear old Jolene and Shawna chatting it away with Jesus as he readied to take the photograph for the new license. I’d done a good deed, I thought, so why was Rita still mad? I was trying to figure that one out when a Tex-Mex cowboy in a wreck of a black western felt walked in with a sideways glance, sucking on his teeth at the sight of the line at my DMV.

Them planes make o’s like there’s no tomorrow, man. That old bat Sellers from across the street sits in the middle of that soccer field behind my house with a Marlboro between his lips, flicking on his remote control and chuckling to the sky each time one of his model barons—he’s got two; a blue one and a red one, the rich fuck—goes into a set of loops that please him. He’s usually sprinkling ash like that when I’m getting home from my DMV, surrounded by lines of wide-mouthed neighborhood kids all hanging their arms over the chain link fence and taking in the show. When Rita was here, it’s what we did too. We used to stroll out there before opening our front door and she would surprise even me by climbing up and over the fence and casting off her flip-flops and sitting herself comfortable on the cool Saint Augustine grass. “Come on, Johnny,” she’d say each time, leaning back and putting one ankle on top of the other. But I’d always picture a Texas State Trooper getting his pants caught on a stray wire and falling over in his Stetson as the whole of the audience brought their eyes down from the sky to watch and laugh. “I’m good, baby,” I’d say, just as one of old Sellers’ barons flew down low enough for everyone on our side of the fence to hear its engine roar, or pulled up fast into a wide, fantastic set of loops, or just edged the tips of one of the tall, sagging palms along the length of the avenue. Rita would partake in the collective “o-o-o-o-h!” when one of the barons came down on the field with a thud and forced old man Sellers to hobble out of his lawn chair to make sure his plane was all right. We’d leave the kids and the planes with the sunlight falling back off the western rooftops, Rita’s arm hooked in mine, the short snaps of her flip-flops losing to our laughter at old man Seller’s horrible toupee.

But I don’t get out there much no more. I come straight home instead and hang up the belt, badge and Stetson for the night and usually cook me up a can of Bush’s baked beans, settle it into my gut with a cool Weiser out on the front porch before getting to work on my garden. And that’s what I was doing that evening when the Mexican finally showed up after two weeks and explained he was really sorry and that his wife had been in the hospital and his Ranger had broken down and that he had plans to travel up north to catch up with his kid working construction in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Your money, Yonny, he said in Spanish, offering me a set of sweaty, rolled-up bills.

Keep it, I told him, surprising even myself, as if I was sure he’d meet my father up there, an old fart by now, still planning to come meet his kid someday.

Keep it, Carlos. Y buena suerte.

Gracias, Yonny, he said, getting teary-eyed.

I waved at him as he drove off.

I wish Rita could see it. Yesterday I pinned the weed fabric down, and today, today I’ll take a pencil and pad and make sure of all of my measurements first, just like the Home Depot guy said, and poke holes with my pencil where each of the plants will go. I’ll do the ixoras, no, the lantanas first, five in total, all spaced out around the outer edge where the sun splashes best in the mornings. By the time old Sellers limps home with his planes tonight I’ll have cut crosses into the fabric, spooned out some dirt, and packed in the young lantanas good. Tomorrow I’ll do the orange-bulbed ixoras (seven total) and the red mulch, $2.67 for each ten-pound bag (I bought ten). Including the hundred to Carlos, I spent around two-hundred bucks overall. Not bad. Not bad. Maybe I’ll do the backyard next. Fit in some guajillos, torchwoods here and there. I need to. It’s a real mess.

Robert Paul Moreira is an English Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas-San Antonio. An award-winning author, his fiction, interviews, criticism, and scholarship have been published in a variety of venues, including Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature, Storyglossia, Breakwater Review, Emprise Review, Metazen, and the anthologies SOL: Vol. I (SOL, 2012) and New Border Writing (Texas A&M Press, 2013). He is currently editing an anthology entitled Arriba Baseball!: A Collection of Latino/a Baseball Fiction (VAO Publishing, 2013). He serves as a Contributing Editor for Dark Sky Books and head intern for American Letters and Commentary.

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I was sent to live to with my grandfather the summer my mother tried to kill me. She was a career manic-depressive, ping-ponged between normalcy and insanity her whole life. I understand she was quite the beauty when she was younger, but by the time I arrived on the scene her looks were muted, tragic. It was something about the eyes. They looked burnt out, like old Christmas tree lights. It didn’t help that she drank.

Her drink of choice was beer, and her favorite beer was Budweiser. She drank so much she had a bottle opener tethered to her wrist with a leather lanyard. A brewski was never far from reach. She challenged anyone—neighbors, the mailman, me, the lamp—to drinking contests. We always lost—not that we ever actually competed.

There are different kinds of drunks, and my mother was the meanest-bitch-on-wheels kind. Whenever she got worked into a tizzy, she hurled bottles on shattering trajectories with walls and heads. She concussed me more than once. Jigsaw pieces of shattered glass covered the floor and worked their way between the sofa cushions. They stabbed my ass every now and then when I wasn’t careful.

*

Some ladies signed up with the League of Women Voters or volunteered at the library or joined the Order of the Eastern Star. My mother’s civic activity entailed shooting squirrels with a BB gun.

On weekends she sat outside our house in an Adirondack chair still dressed in her seam-stretched nightgown. She cradled a Daisy model 1894 in her lap. She looked like a bonnetless pioneer woman in a Conestoga wagon keeping an eye out for Indians. She’d wait like that for hours. Eventually the little critters capered out of their nests to dig up a nut, and that’s when she opened fire. The nonexistent kick of the BB gun was almost enough to knock her out of the chair.

One time I was scavenging worms from the muddy corner of our backyard to use with my jerry-rigged fishing pole when I heard a pop. Not unusual. Then I heard two more. It was my mother, shooting squirrels. She was missing whatever she was aiming at, but that wasn’t a surprise. She drank a six-pack of Bud for breakfast that morning. Also not unusual.

The firecracker chain of pops continued. I walked around the side of the house and looked up. A bushy-tailed, bucktoothed target leapt from limb to limb in the magnolia outside our house. BBs and bark danced around him while pulp rained down. Her right hand was a blur as it operated the lever-action. Teeth bared, face a glob of wrinkles, my mother was determined.

I curled into the smallest form I could to avoid ricochets. The squirrel meanwhile lived for a second more on a crooked branch above us, had a thought or two, then a BB lodged itself in his eye socket. The half-dead squirrel scurried along the branch that lead out over the street before slumping off the side and landing on the windshield of a pickup truck.

The driver clamped his foot on the brake pedal. The wheels smoked and screeched. A station wagon had been tailing the truck at the time and rear-ended the truck when it stopped short. The driver of the station wagon hadn’t worn his seatbelt and was ejected from his car. He broke through his windshield, rammed the truck’s tailgate, vaulted over it, and rolled end-over-end like a bowling ball until he was stopped by the truck’s cab.

When the police asked my mother if she saw what happened—she’d showered and hidden the air rifle by then—she said, “Why no, officer.”

*

            Things went on that way for years. My mother was always in flux. Sometimes she could be a regular person, but other times she’d sit buck naked in front of the TV, cursing this and decrying that, carrying on like the host of her own talk show.

To call her crazy doesn’t do her—or the word—justice. It’s like calling a cloud white. It doesn’t capture the nuances, the variations. She binged then dieted, dyed her hair then let it grow out gray, brought men home then cursed the whole damn sex, got a job, liked it, then lost it and signed up for Welfare. Her mind was a tangle of confusions and obligations.

It all came to a head one night when my mother failed to monitor the humidifier she deployed in her room to combat her congested sinuses. The water tank ran dry. The heating element overheated and sparked. Some bed linens caught fire. Soon the whole hose was going like a horror out of Dante.

I woke to flames. Autumn colors rippled here and there. I smelled smoke. Blood coursed through me like lava. I could hear my banshee mother ranting and frothing like a Pentecostal preacher. I threw off my sheets and blundered through the house teary-eyed, blinded by the smoke. I ran my hands along the walls then felt the cool night air on my blistered face. As I cleared the building, I luckily didn’t need to stop, drop, or roll.

Some well-intentioned adults tried to get me to look away, but I stared at the fire. Heat pressed against my face. The blackened shell of our house was kith and kin to those in Blitz London and nuked Nagasaki. I hadn’t had time to save anything, but I realized there was nothing I wanted to keep from that place.

The fire simmered down, my mother did not. She punched and kicked and bit any lawman that came near her. They asked her kindly to keep calm, but she refused with her fists.  Faces were bruised, lips busted. So they cuffed her and put in her in the back of a cruiser.

When all was said and done, they took her away to an institution. I can only guess she forgot about me, befriended the dust motes and the padded walls. She died there. I never visited. I had enough bad memories.

*

            I would’ve gone to live with my father had Social Services been able to find him. Knowing my mother, she henpecked the hell out of him and scared him off. Then again he was always described as a wild-oats type. In either case, I don’t blame him.

I don’t know much about my father, but in a way I do. Whenever I made a mess of things or sassed my mother, she said, “You’re just like your father.” I didn’t have any evidence to refute her claims, so I took her word for it.

As for my mother’s side of the family, they were all dead or might as well have been. That left only one person.

*

When my grandfather swung by the police station in his rust bucket, he didn’t even come in to collect me. He stayed in his idling hunk-of-junk and honked the horn. Turns out he brought Murray, his golden retriever, with him and didn’t want to leave him unattended.

The last time we saw each other I was dressed in a christening gown, and he was a lean, middle-aged man. I was somewhat bigger now, and he was fat and old, his forehead lined like a music staff. He kept his boots laced loosely to allow circulation to reach his toes, his wolf gray hair high-and-tight. He had five o’clock shadow so heavy it could grate parmesan cheese. The smoldering bowl of a corncob pipe hung from his mouth.

I stood outside the wood-and-glass doors of the police precinct. I was still dressed in my pajamas. I got that sink-or-swim feeling in my gut. It knew what my head refused to believe. I was going to live with this stranger whether I liked it or not.

My grandfather must’ve thought I was afraid of Murray because he said, “Get in. He won’t bite.” So I walked down the steps and climbed in the cab.

I was greeted by cherry-scented smoke. Murray sat between us on the bench seat. My grandfather reached a sunburned arm around his fleecy, panting friend. His handshake was firm.

“Any luggage?” he asked, letting go.

“Fire,” I said and closed the door.

*

            We didn’t say anything as we drove out past any landmarks I recognized. He didn’t ask me anything about his crazy daughter-in-law, wasn’t curious about me. This was in keeping with how he’d acted toward us for the previous twelve years. He was as tight-lipped as a coin purse.

The rocker panels shook like maracas, and warm air blew in through the open windows. The fertile reek of manure slapped my nose. I bit my nails and ran my fingertips along my lips, unsure what to say or do. My grandfather looked straight ahead at the road, and Murray gave me an encouraging lick on my cheek with his sandpaper tongue.

We drove through miles of woods and pastures. Cows and horses swished their tails in the shade, some standing, some sitting. We crested a bend in the road that counted as a hill in those flat parts. Below us was my grandfather’s sorry-looking farm.

The two-story clapboard box was penned by a white picket fence. It rose out of the grass like the backbone of a dinosaur. Zigzagging triple-rail fences compartmentalized the grounds. There was a lean-to, a chicken coop, a barn, but there were no animals or machines. In the distance trees bore down on the place like a handsaw.

We straddled the rutted and sinkhole-dotted driveway. We rolled to a stop. My grandfather cut the engine and did his best to exit the truck in a timely fashion. The sun was still out. Volcanic clouds moved across it. Shadows whipped the ground. Murray heeled.

My grandfather rubbed his whiskered face, cracked his neck, and said, “Let’s get you settled in.”

*

            There wasn’t much to get settled seeing as I hadn’t brought anything but myself. My grandfather put me up in what was my father’s old room. It was small, boxy, and low-ceilinged like the rest of the house. It had a smothering quality. No wonder my father abandoned that place, too.

My grandparents had kept the room the way he left it. Aside from the usual furnishings—a bed, a dresser, a desk and chair—there were a few comic books, a beat-to-hell Louisville Slugger, and an unstrung acoustic guitar. What struck me was his clothes were still there, shirts on hangers in the closet, pants folded in drawers, socks rolled like hay coils. They kept everything he left behind, as if they expected him to come back and magically be a boy when he did.

The house hadn’t been cleaned since my grandmother died. Ash smudges, crumbs, and stains of all stripes covered the unfinished floors. Encased in wood, the TV set was more furniture than high-tech appliance. It was good for static and little else. The drapes and occasional rug were moth- and mouse-eaten, the upholstery split at the seams and elsewhere. My grandfather had fashioned himself a cinderblock-and-plank bookshelf in the living room to hold his numerous issues of Field & Stream. There were no photographs, and the telephone never rang.

*

Living with my grandfather was never comfortable, but it was interesting. We did our best to get along which meant staying out of each other’s way. My grandfather spent a lot of time engaged in manly rituals. He tamed his shaggy lawn with a push mower then collected the trimmings with a toothless rake. He tinkered with his starter solenoid, topped the truck off with oil.

I, on the other hand, did nothing. The immobilizing heat was uniform throughout the house, and my father’s clothes sweat-stuck to my skin. It was a bit cooler at night, but even then, when I closed my eyes, it was hard to tell where my body stopped and the air began. I often laid on the floor and thought of icebergs and snowflakes, a delta of sweat pooling at the base of my spine.

My grandfather didn’t seem to mind the inferno temperatures. He stayed hydrated with coffee, chugged it like it was iced tea. It was the instant, freeze-dried crap all the cream and sugar in the world couldn’t improve, and sweat pearled on his face with each swig.

When I tired of doing nothing, I spent long afternoons looking through my grandfather’s vintage postcard collection and boxes of 78s and the Remington 870 he kept above the fireplace in the upturned hooves of a deer.

Murray kept tabs on me, shadowed my every move. He wasn’t very stealthy. I heard him come and go, his nails gently scratching the floor. He sometimes sat with me, his tail swishing like a feather duster when I petted him. He poked my free hand with his wet nose, barked, and turned up his head whenever I ignored him.

*

            One day my grandfather said he was going into town to run some errands and wanted to know if I’d come with him. I said yes, and we loaded into the truck.

At each stop, the dust catching up with us, he said he’d only be a sec. He was usually longer than that. He apologized about the wait, said the guys who ran the stores had saved up a bunch of good jokes or what have you. We hit the bank, the tobacco emporium, the hardware store, the grocer, and sometimes when he came out, brown paper bag in hand, someone tagged along beside him.

“That him?” they asked.

“He’s gonna be living with me for awhile,” my grandfather said.

Then they introduced themselves. I shook their hands, and hearing that, hearing my grandfather say I was going to be around for awhile, made me smile.

*

            My only real complaint was my grandfather’s cooking skills, or the lack thereof. Mostly we ate sandwiches. Peanut butter and jelly. Bologna and cheese and mustard. It was bachelor food, the kind you eat alone in your underpants in the kitchen late at night. One evening my grandfather spiced things up with a dinner of beans and Shake ’n Bake chops, and it was during that dinner my grandfather asked if I’d ever been hunting.

“No,” I said, looking to Murray for guidance. He sat on his haunches by the stove, sniffing the molasses-heavy air. He licked the barbs of his teeth and was no help at all.

My grandfather wiped his hands on his grass-stained overalls and puffed his pipe. He thought a minute then moved the shank and bit to the corner of his mouth and said, “We’ll go tomorrow.” It sounded like his mouth was full of cotton balls.

“Okay.”

“Good.”

He tapped the embers out of his pipe into an ashtray, planted his elbows on the table, and started eating again.

*

            My grandfather never slept in, and the morning of the hunt was no exception. At 5:00 a.m. he shook me from dreams I don’t remember. Outside, a distant tractor sputtered. Backfires cleared away the last of my sleepiness, and I changed into a denim shirt, olive pants, and boots.

I slunk down the staircase, my hand on the scummy banister. My grandfather and Murray were waiting at the door, shrouded in wisps of smoke. Murray trotted back and forth, but my grandfather stood there as if chiseled from granite.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

He wore a bright orange shooter’s vest with quilted shoulders. Epaulets lined the front and were filled with 12 gauge #8 birdshot shells. He held the Remington in one hand and a leash in the other. I stopped beside them and stroked Murray’s head.

“Here,” he said and handed me Murray’s leash.

I fastened the brass clip to the D-ring on his collar and looped the leash over my wrist. We headed out. The screen door mousetrapped behind us.

There were no clouds that morning. Weeds bloomed waist-high. A bath of pollen coated everything. As we walked, my grandfather fed four shells into the magazine and pumped one into the chamber. It was dark, but I could see, and we headed out past the rundown corncrib, all the way to the tree line.

*

            The trees were as round as cathedral pillars, and they closed in behind us as we moved deeper into the mix of dead and living things. It was quiet. Neither one of us made a peep. Even the crickets didn’t play their strange music.

Murray pulled against his leash, practically strangled himself. His nose twitched, overpowered by a million different smells. The way my grandfather held the shotgun, the barrel dangled just above the dead-leaf floor.

Footpaths crisscrossed the forest like worn-out shoelaces, and we studied the undergrowth. The smell of decay was stronger here. Heavy dew soaked the cuffs of our pants and Murray’s fur. My toes grew cold. Sunlight sliced through the leaves and cooked the moisture into mist.

Then my grandfather’s two-ton footsteps fell silent, and he touched my shoulder. I stopped, too. He shouldered the Remington.

Up from the grass came a common pheasant in a flash of dappled feathers. White, brown, orange, green. Its dorsal feathers flailed behind it like quill pens. It beat its wings and fixed us with one of its blood splatter-ringed eyes.

My grandfather pulled the trigger. I don’t know what kind of sound I was expecting, but the blast split wide the silence and perhaps something inside my ears. I was struggling to reign back Murray, so I wasn’t able to plug them. They rang for quite some time.

As it happened, my grandfather missed, and the crows of the pheasant echoed into nothingness. Gunpowder stunk up the air, tasted like metallic pepper. He stared at his shotgun with disappointment.

“You wanna go at the next one?” he asked.

“I’ve never…”

“Here.”

We traded off. I got the Remington, and he got Murray. He showed me how to stand, like a boxer, my weak side toward the target, my right leg straight but not stiff, my left leg bent, a buttress to lean forward on. He showed me how to sight along the ridge of the blue steel barrel, my cheek flush with the stock. Then, when I was ready, he told me to squeeze the trigger, just squeeze. And that was it.

My hands trembled, but I cycled the weapon and picked up the now cool cartridge. I handed it to my grandfather for safekeeping. Murray whinnied, and my grandfather grunted.

Second by second some awful feeling entered my body. It pulsed with something I had no word for then and couldn’t name now. I felt dread and wonder and power. I felt changed. If my mother or father had been there, spying, I’m not sure they would’ve recognized me.

The forest asked its question, and the three of us gave our answer. Together we wove through the ironclad trees, moving deeper into the quiet.

Spencer Hayes lives and writes in Philadelphia. His stories are forthcoming in Word Riot, The Adroit Journal, and Out of the Gutter.

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On October 15, 1946, Fritz Thyssen visits Hermann Göring in his Nuremberg cell.

They’re not alone: an American service man brings Thyssen to Göring, then seats himself in a corner of the room and lights a cigarette. He seems bored. Earlier, he’d offered a cigarette to Thyssen, who politely declined, feeling odd when he noticed that he put on a British accent to hide his German tongue behind. He saw how the American pulled up one brow when the first sounds slithered towards him and felt instantly mistrusted. He wished he had spoken in his normal English voice with him now. Mistakes of the defeated.

Thyssen turns to Göring who sits on his bed but doesn’t look at him but plays with the buttons of a small brown radio. He’s also smoking. The small window is closed and the room fills up with fumes instantly. Thyssen feels as if he has to walk through fog to get to Göring, who now looks up.

“You’re much thinner,” says Thyssen. He wanted to begin with a compliment, fearing to find Göring behind a wall of defenses and grief. But when Göring looks sad and slumps even more in his uniform, Thyssen understands that he started out all wrong.

“I had a great body once,” says Göring. Thyssen has to suppress a chuckle. This doesn’t escape the man they used to call the «golden pheasant» and he says “I really mean that. I loved my body.” Thyssen lets this go and looks around for a place to sit. There’s a chair next to Göring’s bed, but it’s covered with books. There’s another chair in front of a desk. Thyssen glides towards it.

“You can’t sit there,” says Göring, “you’ll have to stand in my presence.”

Thyssen looks over his shoulder to the American whose eyes are closed while he smokes, holding the cigarette close to his mouth with two fingers as if he were feeding through it. Sometimes, Thyssen envies smokers and their easy way with oral gratification. The soldier wouldn’t help him get seated, this much was clear. Should he simply stand?

He quickly performs a calculation in his head: he always does this to calm himself down. Computing anchors him in something solid that nobody can take away from him and then he can respond with quiet power. In this moment he takes the amount of Reichsmark that he spent on Hitler in 1932, subtracts it from the assets that Göring officially took from him before putting him into a concentration camp and multiplies the result by the hyperinflation of this day back in the year 1923, which accumulates to an annual rate of 13,000%. Though the numbers are staggering, he takes immediate comfort from the fact that he controls them or rather, as he must remind himself, controlled them once, because right now he’s but a grain of sand in the slow, steady process dubbed denazification.

What’s happening in Göring’s head is more gruelling. He immediately recognises Thyssen, remembers him as a creative finance wizard, suppresses all memory of having put Thyssen into a camp, and develops an elaborate fantasy of potential freedom: what if Thyssen had heard how much weight Göring had lost and that he’d successfully kicked his morphine addiction. Göring knows that Americans are fond of dietary schemes: they don’t have a native kitchen, of course, nothing like the Germans, and are unhealthily focused on food. What if an American food company wanted to use Göring for a product marketing campaign of their produce? They could use photographs of him between ’33 and ’45 in all his martial glory, fat as a boar, always with a friendly, oily grin, a man on a mission, flying for the fatherland, and compare them with more recent photographs which show him more serious, gaunt, slimmed by Allied prison dishes: a man whom you’d want to have over for dinner, for sure. A before and after campaign that would draw on the sentiment towards the war in Europe. Picture one: Field Marshal Göring goring a suckling pig. Picture two: Herr Göring the gentleman   converted and slender. However, this last picture lacks the lustre and tinsel that Göring has got used to. He’s put out by that and when Thyssen asks to sit down like a petitioner, he uses the power handed to him and forbids it. He remembers that Thyssen abhors smoking and lights another fag. Suddenly, it’s him and the American against the boss-man Thyssen.

Since days, Göring, who is supposed to be hanged on the next day, has wondered how much life time can be packed into a given number of hours—thirty-five to be exact until his death. He’s asked for a number of books that seem to cover this topic. Most of them seem to be by Frenchmen, like Proust, Bergson, Camus.

Thyssen doesn’t seem to be shaken by Göring’s command. He remains standing.

“I’ve come to say good-bye,” says Thyssen.

“But we’re not friends anymore, are we,” says Göring. Thyssen shakes his head, “more like foes, really,” he says.

“Follies,” says Göring, and Thyssen understands that he’s not just talking about their relationship, but about larger issues, “these were all follies of my youth. They can be excised like bad tissue, don’t you think? Don’t you think time creates tissue that enwraps us and when we want we can just take it off?”

“Like a uniform, you mean,” says Thyssen.

“Yes,” says Göring, but he’s already stopped believing in his own idea. Smart cookie, this Thyssen, who had never liked the uniform.

“I’ve brought something for you,” says Thyssen, who is only a messenger now. In the camp he had come to understand that he shouldn’t have tried to make history go faster or move in any particular direction. He should have waited for a message and passed it on, no more. He had been too impatient. But today he brings a message and that’s all.

“What is it,” says Göring, whose hands have wandered back to the small radio. Thyssen notices that it isn’t plugged in. Perhaps Göring is also waiting for a message. How does a man feel before his execution? Thyssen wouldn’t know. I haven’t had the privilege, he thinks.

“I’ve brought something for you,” says Thyssen, “from a friend.”

“Oh,” says Göring and drops his heavy hands into his lap. He bows his head and from above Thyssen can see how deep the bags are under his eye. Göring’s cheeks, once so filled with borrowed joy, are now folded against his skull bones like the leathery skin of a tired old bat.

“Who’s that,” Göring asks, “who’s my friend.”

“His name’s Robert Ballin,” says Thyssen, “I met him in Dachau.” Suddenly, Göring looks  awake. Many events come back to him in a flash: in this moment, he is granted part of his secret wish to live a lifetime before his death, and he knows it.

“Thank you,” Göring says in a childlike voice, “thank you.” Göring doesn’t even know what it is that Thyssen will give him, but perhaps he senses its importance. Thyssen pulls out a box.

“Wait,” says the American. He drops his cigarette and stomps on it. He approaches Thyssen and asks for the box. He opens it and takes out one cigarette.

“That’s it?” he says. “That’s all,” says Thyssen in a thick German accent. The guard holds up the cigarette and sniffs it.

“Looks okay,” he says, and to Göring: “you want it?” Göring shakes his head, he’s still thinking about Ballin and how he met him, about getting shot at and rescued by a Jew of all people, but Thyssen raises his eyebrows and says: “Ballin really wanted you to smoke this cigarette and think of him.” He asks for the box back but the guard, suspicious, gives him only the cigarette. Thyssen takes it between thumb and forefinger of his right hand and gives it to Göring.

“You should smoke this one later when you’re alone,” Thyssen says slowly. Göring nods. Thyssen turns and says to the guard: “I’m alright to go now.” They leave.

Göring keeps the window closed. Listens to the wind run through the prison corridors like a crazy howling dog. Picks up the cigarette and looks at it. His whole life lies before him now. It’s all rolled up in this tube of tobacco. He puts the cigarette in his mouth and feels the resistance of the capsule embedded in the filter. “Ballin,” he thinks gratefully, then he bites down on the tip.

Marcus Speh is a German writer who lives in Berlin and writes in English only. His short fiction collection Thank You For Your Sperm will be published by MadHat Press in 2012. Marcus blogs at http://marcusspeh.com

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M. looking  through a list of deaths on Wikipedia. Brain tumour. Cardiac arrest. Natural causes. Shooting. Heart attack. Cancer. Stroke. Cancer. Traffic accident. Kidney failure. Melanoma. Heart failure. Stabbing. Cancer. Suicide by hanging. After short illness. How soon do you perceive someone’s disappearance as loss? Tacked, taped to telephone poles (ones that are still standing), glued with rice paste to the granite wall of the police station, where their corners get torn off and the snow runs down them in clumps to the pavement, where it melts and runs away into sewers, joining the great underground rivers of waste and wastewater and refuse rushing into the ocean, the photographs and photocopies of photographs of missing people multiply. On the screen the list of famous dead people glows. American oboist, complications from cardiac arrest. Honduran television journalist, shot. The bodies of ten teachers float in the new rooms the ocean made for them. Their school’s footprint under water.

***

She was sitting when the earthquake happened, 2:46 in the afternoon, and the chair of its own accord popped gently into the air, casters spinning, almost as if it were a ballet dancer in a tightly controlled leap. The building shuddered. The ground below rippling. Three minutes, chair skating over the tiles. Then the window shaking, then quick steps on the floor above. Then nothing. All else normal. As if she’d only just come back from the kettle. Door still open. Small mug of black tea steaming on the desk. It was strange―not her first quake, but the first one when she’d been in a building this far off the ground―and right as it ended, the telephone rang. Just one ring and then nothing, a fault somewhere. She heard movements in the offices next door and across the hall―people under their desks. She sat in the chair, thinking almost nothing. Tucked her legs up, shoes shucked. Through the window she had seen the power lines sway and wiggle; from this far above, they looked like drawings come to life. Lines becoming snakes. Cars pulled over in orderly rows on the left hand side of the street.

Books fell and objects fell; tea spilled and the cup rolled a big semi-circle on the desk. M. held her knees and listened to her colleagues’ movements, as they texted their families and the hanging plants in the office across from hers swung back and forth. Outside, the road moved again. H., easy to startle, yelped and tripped. She listened to footsteps begin to pass. Shades being pulled down in offices.

Across the hall, K. opened his door, black coat flashing over his arms as he took the emergency evacuation disk from the wall. He was calm, no rush, ushering people out of their rooms. O., the head of archives,  walked past, also calm, her grey suede flats making a padding sound. For the first moments, it was quiet. All the doors in the hallway stood open.

M. sat in her office, the door ajar. She picked up the receiver. Too late. The call had been over for minutes. There were a few books on the floor; the others had stayed put. She had made a strong, wide elastic band around the shelf for just that, and was pleased to see that it had worked.

“M.,” K. said, sticking his head through her door. “We need to evacuate. You felt it. The radio says at least a seven. We should take this time to leave, before the aftershocks start.”

“You go.”

“We all have to go. That’s procedure. It might not be safe to stay here. There will be aftershocks, much closer. There could be another quake. We have to go.” Old buildings made of concrete and iron became accordions in big earthquakes.

Down the hallway, someone was turning off the oil heater in the common room. The familiar squeaking sound made M. think of earthquake drills in her childhood―in school, at home―and the dark blue checked apron her mother usually wore while doing chores. Strange, she thought. Here we are in the middle of something probably dangerous and the thing that’s most clear to me is the pattern on this apron I haven’t seen, or even thought about, for years.

“M..” K.’s voice was louder. “We have to go. You have to go. You don’t get to choose. You don’t get to do what you want!” On the doorframe, his hand was pale, almost grey at the knuckles. “You don’t get to do what you want this time.” Calmer. More like the K. in the hall. He didn’t step through the door. M., in the swivelchair, knees bunched up, shoes on the floor, toes curling around the edge of the seat, looking out the window. “M..”

The stairwell doors wedged open. In the dorms, the students underneath their desks, reenacting the duck-cover-hold drills from elementary school. She kicked her left foot out and used the desk to turn around to face the door.

“I’m not going out.” Sound of people going down the stairs, however many flights. Soft shoes, hard-soled shoes. Not the sounds of talking. K., looking back over his shoulder.

“Everyone else has left. You’ll be one of the last ones out―no one will look at you. No one will even care! Come on, we’ll do it together, we’ll go down and you can come to my family’s place.” K.’s mother and father still lived nearby, in a house with an apricot tree in the garden. M. looked at him.

“You don’t understand. I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here, alone. Nothing will happen. I’ll be fine. And in a couple days, when they open up the university again, I’ll be here. But I can’t go downstairs and I can’t walk around down there with you and everyone. I can’t. If I do it, I feel like my guts are going to explode. I can’t breathe. Just thinking about it makes my chest hurt.”

“All right,” said K.. “If you won’t go, you won’t go. But I can’t mark that you’ve left―I’ll have to put a non-evacuated mark on our floor’s token. They’ll come and check on you, and they’ll make you come down.” He looked at her. “I know you don’t like to go out when people are there, M.. But I’m worried to leave you here. You understand. It’s not normal. It’s probably not safe. There are reports coming from the coast―and the aftershocks are going to continue. Do you have food? Water?” M. rolled the bottom drawer of her desk open to show her kit: four litre-bottles of water. Dried fruit and fish in neat packages. Chocolate. Matches and candles and soap. Candy in a plastic box, tea bags, sugar. A roll of toilet paper in a blue-striped wrapper. Powdered soup packets tucked into an enamel cup. A small first-aid kit, its container gaudy red with a white cartoon nurse. She rolled it shut.

“I’ll be fine. Please don’t feel responsible. I have a blanket in the closet and I have my coat. I’m sure it will be normal again in a few days, and everyone will be back. If anything happens, I’ll send you a message somehow.”

“The networks won’t be working. They’ll be cut, or if they’re back on they’ll be busy. If you leave―if you don’t go home―come to my parents’ place. You remember how to get there? Or if you go somewhere else, leave a note on the door.”

She nodded. K. scanned the room. “Good thing you have that stuff.” Nodded again. “Don’t forget to let me know where you are,” he said.

“I won’t.”

“I’m going, then―” and his hand disappeared from the doorframe. Without a goodbye, M. turned back to the window.

She heard him flip the floor’s electrical breaker, and the screen on her desk went out. The office was very quiet. In the office across the hall, which belonged to a skinny girl with very big calves whose name M. had yet to learn despite having worked with her for several months, a potted fig tree nodded its leaves in some small wind.

***

That night, sirens in the streets. All afternoon house alarms had gone off, and car alarms.  Every parking place was jammed with deserted cars. She had seen people walking through campus and in the streets; they walked slowly, sometimes balancing with their arms as though they could still feel the ground moving. Campus had gradually become emptier, buildings’ doors left open to keep them from being jammed shut as foundations settled. She imagined the front door of the archives left open, and a slow wilderness growing in the space. First a gentle invasion of small plants, ivy, clovers, tiny pine seedlings. The wind would bring in dust and topsoil. Rain from the sprinkler system. Ponds in places where the foundation began to subside. Small frogs. Insects. She imagined the trilling.

Above the buildings, above the whole map of Japan, above the bubble-shaped globe she held in her mind, the frogs that Toyohiro Akiyama had brought to the Mir space station were floating. Permanently there in the past, which was forever the past. True. Safe. No longer waiting to happen in the unknowable future. The fact of those frogs in space made her smile.

The time between culms emerging from new ground and full-grown bamboo higher than her head was three months, but in the archive the growth could have already happened. In the hundred years between flowerings most of the history she could lay her hands on had slipped like small fish. The bamboo was there in the forest, eight feet tall, just out of bloom. Extinct magnolia trees with six petals and nine petals. A cedar tree. She watched it thicken and branch.

Deer walked north from Nara and entered the archives. As the building began to come apart, air and darkness crept in. She saw foxes there before she went to sleep.

***

In the morning, it was very quiet.

The square of light on the desk was inviting. It would slowly become a parallelogram, crossing the shelf of books and notebooks, the draping spider plant, the jar of pens, the coat hanging by the door, the door itself. Later that day she would begin to make the list, traveling to the unlit basement and back with folders of records, listening to the radio. Sometime in the future, the power would come back on and she would be able to find them easily, all over the internet, names she needed for the list.

On the tile floor, the light was almost white. She sat in her chair and listened to the announcements being made over a megaphone somewhere outside. In gray ink she began to record their names.

Éireann Lorsung edits 111O and co-runs MIEL, a micropress. She is the author of Music For Landing Planes By and Her Book (forthcoming, Milkweed, 2013). Recent writing appears in The Collagist, The Colorado Review, and DIAGRAM. She lives in Belgium.

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Your sky is sharp with little right angles:

with the insistence of everything

unfinished–my impulse to open my body

and take apart the heart, to replace it

with a portion of the frontal lobe.

What will it take to make me whole?

A baby’s alphabet block? A perfect oval

to fill the hole in a birdhouse? A celtic knot

of stitches? Or a wish? I am made

with unripe plums, peach pits, by which

I mean beating blood vamped up like jazz bands.

Listen to my bones and their funk: My arms

hymn with scars and dark marks.

I have no mouth to speak out

against the dark and inky sky.

My voice is this body. I speak with it:

I dance and I am not sorry.

C. Dylan Bassett’s poems and book reviews appear or are forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, The Pinch, Salamander, Christian Century, Steam Ticket, SLAB, Inscape and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2012 Morrie Moss Fellowship for poetry.

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Our postman only rings once,

then he evaporates like a feral cat.

He’s a man who sports a great totemistic tatoo,

which perhaps provides him street cred, or bar cred.

Through his nasal septum dangles a ring,

of the type we used to put in pigs

to stop them rooting.  Is he a pig,

or a cat?  I want to ask him that.

I’d like to see his penis.

Is it mesmerizing, or tapeworm-flat?

I imagine his name’s Dennis.

Touched with a soupçon of menace,

he keeps his hopeful wife guessing.

In fact, he keeps the whole neighborhood guessing

if he’s here to stay, or bound for extinction—

the United States Postal Service flown away,

or blown away, like passenger pigeons.

I think this is what makes his spirit moving.

I swear sometimes at night, about midnight,

independent of the influence of any firmament,

I see his shadow gliding from house-to-house,

door-to-door, quietly perusing:

musing.  He passes over.

But occasionally someone inside dies,

though it might take years for the salient fact

to finally fully register.

Michael Biehl has published in Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, Callaloo, Great River Review, the Comstock Review, Verse Wisconsin, Saranac Review and elsewhere. Currently he is an instructor of English as a Second Language to foreign university students and business executives.

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The monster in episode two            part man

part flatworm            a gaping hole for a mouth

makes no sound            only follows its barbs

searching the calm green water for bodies

to suckle            He’d love this I say to no one

in my apartment

about my girlfriend’s child

who comes over on weekends

I watch TV alone            sew shut the torn thorax

of the boy’s favorite stuffed ant

stupidly thinking he’ll notice the care

involved.            Could I be like my own father?

I ask and TV                 my oracle replies:

The Truth is out there.

Jon Boisvert is originally from a small farm community in Wisconsin, and now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches college writing. His  work has appeared in many journals, most recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review.

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it’s the body of no

like the body of Christ

and I’m gonna swallow it.

I’m feeling it on my tongue and

letting it dissolve, its two dull papery letters

drying up in the heat of my mouth.

you can’t be a bon vivant with me in phoenix

because they had dust storms in july

and the plumes were like an atomic bomb

to our love.

I suck on terrible words here;

you don’t like the Coyotes anyway.

each season it becomes more difficult

to lie

and then what happens

is that there is a cup full of wafers

and the cup runneth over

and it’s no time between sundays

and all the faces are like moons,

and too many –

because you’re worried about Bisphenol As in canned soup

and the woman with too many children.

what kind of harvest are you?

I figure we can take no more than three, at most,

and if you start seeing that many moon-faces,

it must mean your vision is fucked.

so let’s not refer to the seasons anymore

as a way of noting change.

we can’t live in pink tights

and without interest in politics.

if we refer to the seasons at all,

let it be as a last resort

when we’ve lost every other sense.

it’s only on the ice

that violence seems like justice.

Margaret L. Brown teaches writing, literature, and rock & roll at a community college in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where she also practices acoustic guitar, worries about her Qi, and flashes crooked-tooth smiles to all who pass.

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The bees from Idaho

were brought to the almond groves

as the Santa Ana was dying down.

Nomads arrived in 18 wheelers

looking for the valley of the sun.

They had never seen anything like it.

Box after box after box left empty.

The trees bloom in the fading

wind, dispersed colonies

collapse again.

“Colony Collapse Disorder”

echoes in the research labs

as the coded waggle dance wigs out.

Tube after tube after tube collected.

A potpourri of viruses, fungi

found in AIDS, neonicotinoids,

large single crop diets, all weaken,

everything tested under the sun,

even organic bees don’t return,

falling victim.

The Bees are not returning.

They bring in giant blowers

to simulate the Santa Ana,

pollinate the almond groves

and grapes. The bees get no

nutrition, die in a strange field.

Hive after hive after hive abandoned.

The sun on the valley floor

bakes the lost pollen, bees

that have fallen.

Hot helicopter buzzing

stirs up dust in the fields.

Farming this dirt, pesticide, toxic mix.

Cell after cell after cell unanswered.

Microwave pulses of radiation

confuse the bees in their weakened

condition, causing them to lose their way.

Under a naked sun, nomads pack

away the boxes and head

to Washington.

Satch Dobrey has a B.A. in English from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and an M.A. in International Affairs from Washington University in St Louis. He recently participated in The Summer Writer’s Institute at Washington University in St. Louis and won 1st place for poetry in the Chesterfield Arts 2012 Jade G. Bute Adult Writing Contest. He currently works as a librarian/freelance writer and resides with his wife in Southern Illinois on the old bluffs of the Mississippi River.

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Until the rain comes, I will lie here, the water

deep, my hair fanned out like a mermaid or

a floater in the Hudson, my skin mottled

like a sculpin, knobby like a starfish or the bottom

of a stony river. I will rise long enough to breathe.

I will submerge again, a boulder in a rising

tide. I will lie here watching the ceiling ruffle,

letting the water cool. It is quiet here. When

my skin begins to rise, I will drain, make room

enough to add more heat. I will breathe mist

into the cold, my hair streaming, while I wait. There

are some things I cannot control. Until the rain

comes, I will hold my breath and sink. I will wait.

Ruth Foley lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches English for Wheaton College. Her recent work is appearing or forthcoming in Adanna, The Bellingham Review, Yemassee, and Weave, among others. Her poetry has been nominated for the Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Pushcart anthologies. She also serves as Managing Editor for Cider Press Review.

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This is the part where the gut burns,

where the soul turns to ashes and

the chill is hard as the departed

frozen before burial or after confession

when you you’ve said too much.

How it’s unrecoverable information

that exposed all flaws no face can hide.

This is the part where they carve

your eyes into a thousand shards

without anesthesia. Punishment

for trying to see what you’re told

was always hidden but licks the walls

of your decomposing stomach

like a hungry dog with an incessant

bark; starved and homeless, who

once knew the softness of a satin

pillow in a hospice house amidst

the slowing of life. This is the part

called the draining of happiness

where the animal wakes to a

caterwaul howl.

Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a six-time Pushcart nominee and Best of the Net nominee. She is the recent winner of the Red Ochre Press Chapbook contest with her entry Before I Go to Sleep. She has authored several chapbooks along with her latest full-length collection of poems: Epistemology of an Odd Girl, newly released from March Street Press. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of online and print magazines including: The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Able Muse, Poets and Artists, The Foliate Oak and many more. According to family lore she is a direct descendent of Robert Louis Stevenson.

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I saw the Moon today at early afternoon.

It was a cloud-like curve, hidden from all

but seekers. The sky was summertime blue,

and a police helicopter drowned out the sound

of gentle jazz in my car, but raised my eyes

to the sky.

At night the Moon was a breast, illuminated like

a cream neon in Soho. But with my naked eyes

I could see a cancer on it, a shadow from an impact

too long ago to comprehend? I stared at the Moon so long

it actually subtly moved in my window, then it was gone.

I asked myself, with all that light is it hot?

Then I thought, nonsense, Armstrong probably

wore thermals.

Michael Holme is a 40+ year old writer who has written many poems, mainly in the last two years. He has been published both in print and online as far afield as California and Singapore. He lives with his wife Clare who is disabled and their beautiful Staffordshire bull terrier, Lucy. Since losing his job in 2010 he has been able to devote more time to Clare. Michael is learning jazz improvisation on the piano.

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Seconds click away, three to a breath

since the kiss on the cheek that never happened,

the hug goodbye I’ve imagined.

The rains are coming. Black sheep in the sky.

If the crops fail, I’m not to blame

I tell myself. If the brakes fail,

I’m not to blame. The rains come

like a speeding car and level me again,

like bad news in the morning.

Sometimes, chickens will look up at the

precipitating sky to see where the rain comes from,

and drown before they can decide.

The ones that see the clouds

bunched up like ink soaked cotton balls,

see water vapor condensing

on dots of dust and dive bombing them,

liquid kamikazes. They look back to their feed,

and avoid becoming a statistic and are eventually eaten.

Sometimes, when blue and red light mixes

there’s no regal purple, but only blue and red.

If the brakes fail, I’m not to blame.

The rains are here, they hang like burnt out

Christmas lights from the hospital roof’s overhang.

The rains are here, I’m not to blame.

Zebulon Huset recently received his MFA from the University of Washington where he was the coordinating editor of The Seattle Review. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The New York Quarterly, The North American Review, Karamu, Bayou and The Georgetown Review.

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Mansions on the hill court order, make

unwelcome advances, fall back in flames.

Always in the wrong room at the house party,

friends later ask, where did Stephen even get a monkey?

Somewhere there is a rubicon

marked by a cross, or crossed by a mark.

Injury reports bodily foreshortened,

out with a leg, but never the break.

Mood oscillations sync perfectly with awareness

of your existence, but wait that’s not fair.

My love waits for you like a dog on a work day,

perpetually poised, surprises in your shoes.

Love is easy in the coming,

but going — that leaves claw marks.

In dreams of flight I miss connections, wind up sitting

alone by the ocean, out with a heart.

Neal Kitterlin

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the mother is the only part

i will never see. the end of the book

i refuse to open and read with the lines

of a song or a prayer i want to

use but only the picture part

only the part that reminds me of inspecting

that cookie as i walked up the stairs

minding legs minding legs and watching

the faces of others as they sank

into mine bridges built halfway then

gutted under the light and the bat

that one night in the hallway. my legs

on a chair my face exploring other pages

of the internet with words writing

prickling open spaces trying to hide the

eager scientist behind the craving

that beneath me sucked the woman out.

i am a hanger facing the wall

the clothing on me chafing

the girl who walks with a muffin with hips

the girl i was and the girl i am

the girl is a woman who walks with pen

on her shirt who has a black skirt

the girl and her shoes and the girl

who sits little under the night and

begs it for dreams.

Jillian Koopman was born in Churchville, Pennsylvania and has lived in Tallahassee Florida. Currently she resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where she teaches English at Georgia Military College, Fairburn campus. Her two favorite things are being outside and meeting new people.

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Fly scowls at window

Rap, tap, muffles buzz

boring into mind.

I arm myself with swatter,

limp, green, a weapon

or salvation from incessant drone.

I feel no regret.

The damn fly had its chance,

door wide. Perhaps the eyes

confuse, no matter. I will

hunt you down, black spot,

and end your ping pong life

risking the karma doom

for silence, stillness.

Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Rhino, Nimrod, Poetry East, Seattle Review, and others. She’s also published fiction and humor as well as stories and poems for children. Among the honors she’s received are awards from the Seattle Arts Commission, Hugo House, and Artist Trust. She’s been a Jack Straw Writer, held a residency at Hedgebrook and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her chapbook, There are Crows in My Blood, was published by Pudding House Press in 2007 and another chapbook, Happy Darkness, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2011. She lives in Seattle.

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Our sun failed,

fell from its sky straight

to our hands. You can bet

we ate that big ball of joy

on a plate, knives, forks, anything

to puncture. You can bet

someone stood in the corner screaming

“do whatever you don’t want”

stood with a pocketknife

carving negative space. O we pray

to lords on high please please

give us hunger, that hunger,

so much hunger we cull our friends’ hearts

bake them at four hundred degrees. Hunger

was not and never will be a problem of emptiness.

It’s a problem of the stomach, having a body

full of organs. Across the nation

we sit in circles with mouths full of scream

so much

the churches’ foundations start in with the fire.

We come with arms cradling cash

asking friends of friends to write us prayers–

every time we watch a movie now

we go to bed and dream of falling

endlessly through a plastic sea.

No one thanked us for our kindled hair,

small head steeples, models of our

arrogance. How quietly we cursed

under our breath before cursing our breath

for its wandering into darkness. Streetlamps

remained until we began

the vomiting process. Pieces of sun

that slowly dried in a field abandoned by deer.

We recalled that our lineage lived in other countries.

This was not long ago. Let us pray

we’ll never be forced to live again.

Stephen Daniel Lewis studies and teaches creative writing in Boulder, Colorado. He edits RobotMelon and is the managing editor for Subito Press. He has a website of bad drawings at stephendlew.com.

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There is nothing more

to say about this place.

We have catalogued its comings and goings,

its hidden truths and its wide,

sweet lies.

We have put away our books, our chalk, our calipers

our binoculars and our strings.

We do not expect a second edition of this study.

We do not anticipate a change in the crucial distances—

that 12.6 inches, space between Mrs. G. Gideon Greene’s front door and her

patch of dogtooth violets, dug up every year by the Graymans’ dog and replanted one blue early morning

each year by Mrs. Grayman, wearing her imitation silk housecoat and forehead-tightening turban, who

afterwards will go back inside, smoke a cigarette and pace up and down the landing outside her

daughers’ rooms, then go back down to the kitchen in time for the whump of the paper, to

do the crossword using the gold pen her uncle gave her for her highschool graduation,

occasionally looking up at the dairy company calendar and thinking

are we so close to the crowning of the raspberry

Queen? and then hoping her girl, whatever girl

of age this year, is not too disappointed.

She has too many girls, she thinks.

These are our measurements.  We have observed

Mrs. G. Gideon Greene and Mrs. Grayman for long enough

to know that this yearly sarabande will never come to a close—that,

even after they are both long dead, they and the dogs

and the daughters, and even the dogtooth

violets, they will have performed

these motions well and finitely enough that they will continue

forever, and we

with our books, our chalk, our calipers,

are comforted by such knowledge in a way we cannot explain

in this

the conclusion to our study.

Sarah Marshall’s poetry has most recently appeared in alice blue, Haggard & Halloo, The Roanoke Review, and elimae, and is forthcoming from MAYDAY. She is currently a student in the MA English and MFA Writing programs at Portland State University, where she also serves as editor of the Portland Review and as an undergraduate composition instructor.

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Kathleen Naureckas was born in Pennsylvania and has lived in Illinois since graduating from Northwestern in 1958. She also earned an MA in English from Northwestern in 1985 and a certificate in poetry writing from the University of Chicago in 2008. She has worked for a trade magazine, a weekly newspaper group, and the Chicago Tribune. Her poems have appeared in Front Range Review, Karamu, Light Quarterly, and Willow Review, among others. Her chapbook, For the Duration, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2012.

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Melina Papadopoulos lives in a quiet suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She has six wonderful birds. Her work has appeared or will be appearing in several journals including The Adroit Journal, P.Q. Leer, Used Furniture, among others.

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Teresa Petro has publications with Modcloth’s The Written Wardrobe, Dot Dot Dash Magazine, Cave Moon Press, and Radioactive Moat, among others. Her chapbook, Tattered Ride, was published by Asleep on the 4 Train Press in 2009. She is poetry editor for online magazine, Shady Side Review, and she teaches English Composition at Montgomery College in the DC Metro Area.

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Patty Dickson Pieczka is the author of the book Lacing Through Time (Bellowing Ark Press, 2011), and a chapbook, Word Paintings, (Snark Publishing, 2002). She was the 2010 recipient of the Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award and was nominated for an Illinois Arts Council Award.  She graduated from the Creative Writing Program at Southern Illinois University, completing two internships at The Crab Orchard Review, where she wrote book reviews for their publication.  Writing contributions have appeared in many journals, including The Bitter Oleander, Blue Unicorn, Willow Review, Red Rock Review, California Quarterly, Green Hills Literary Lantern, and The Cape Rock.

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Mark Vogel has published short stories in Cities and Roads, Knight Literary Journal, Whimperbang, SN Review, and Our Stories. Poetry has appeared in Poetry Midwest, English Journal, Cape Rock, Dark Sky, Cold Mountain Review, Broken Bridge Review and other journals. He is currently Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

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Joseph Wilson’s poems have appeared in Assisi, Carcinogenic Poetry, Cooper Point Journal, Arnazella, Slightly West, and Between the Lines. I live in the Seattle area, where I work as a Development Assistant at a local non-profit.

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Robert Wilson is a teacher and writer living in Indiana. His essays, stories and poems have appeared in various journals and magazines throughout the years.

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Changming Yuan, 4-time Pushcart nominee and author of Chansons of a Chinaman, grew up in rural China and published several monographs before moving to Canada. With a PhD in English, Yuan teaches independently in Vancouver and has poetry appear in nearly 470 literary publications across 19 countries, including Asia Literary R, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Exquisite Corpse, London M, Poetry Kanto, Poetry Salzburg, SAND and Taj Mahal R.

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After emigrating from Limerick, Ireland, and growing up in the Bronx, New York, Mary Casey Diana worked at many jobs, lived in many places and married many men. Recently retired from teaching English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she has authored academic articles, edited a collection of women’s short stories and is presently traveling and working on completing a memoir.

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Susan Lerner is a student in Butler’s MFA in Creative Writing program. Her work has appeared in Staccato Fiction, Booth, Monkeybicycle, JMWW and Foundling Review. Susan lives in Indianapolis with her husband, three teenagers and her dog, Mischief. In her spare time she posts book reviews at http://booklerner.blogspot.com.

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Christopher Linforth is the editor of The Anthem Guide to Short Fiction (Anthem Press, 2011). He has had recent fiction published in Chicago Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, and The MacGuffin. He has a website at christopherlinforth.wordpress.com.

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My grandfather drinks a pot of black coffee in the morning, and a varying but substantial amount of scotch in the afternoon and evening.  He used to drink regular coffee until one of his doctors told him to switch to decaf.  It would help with the tremors, the doctor had said.  He uses that 50-50 mix now.  Or, rather, one of his home health aides uses it.  I can’t recall the last time I saw him drink a glass of water, and I emphasize this point often when I talk to his daughter—my mother—about how he’s doing.  “How can he be so dehydrated all the time?”  I ask, rhetorically.  Of course, I’m in my mid-twenties and my grandfather is in his mid-eighties; the only thing I know about aging is that I now need to stretch my skinny six foot frame before I run (which is rare), sometimes my back hurts when I get out of bed in the morning to attempt to teach college students the art of writing, and hangovers can last for days, not hours as they once did.

I don’t see my grandfather as often as I did when he and my grandmother lived fifteen minutes away from where I grew up in west-central New Jersey.  He sold that house ten years ago and moved to the Jersey shore, into the beach house where he and my grandmother had spent the prior five summers.  Last year, during the winter of 2011, I drove the seventy-five miles from my parents’ house to Lavallette, to go out to lunch with Poppy, my grandfather.

It was the beginning of January, cold and gloomy.  I had taken the drive on the Garden State Parkway South hundreds of times and I got lost in my thoughts, recognizing suddenly that I’d switched lanes and miles had gone by—always a disturbing kind of realization.  I remembered the trip down to the shore with my grandparents almost fifteen years earlier, on the day they had bought the beach house.  They were both happily retired, excited to live out their lives on the Atlantic coast, in the dream they had shared.

I took Parkway Exit 98, leading into Point Pleasant on the Barnegat Peninsula—a thin strip of land 20 miles long that separates the Barnegat Bay from the Atlantic.  Lavallette is near the middle of this peninsula.  In 1614, Dutch settlers named the bay “Barendegat,” or “Inlet of the Breakers,” which took into account the often rough seas marked by whitecaps.  In 1609 Henry Hudson, on a trip along the New Jersey coast, described the bay’s inlet: “The mouth of the lake hath many shoals [underwater sandbanks], and the sea breaketh on them as it is cast out of the mouth of it.”  Before my grandfather sold his bow rider, we spent long summer mornings cruising the channels of the Barnegat Bay.  When my grandmother was alive, she liked slow rides, when the twenty-two foot boat seemed to become part of the water, moving with it.  If we had traveled up the coast thirty miles, we could have been in Sandy Hook.  From there, and on a clear day, you can just make out the silhouettes of buildings in Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Three town blocks stretch from the bay to the ocean in Lavallette, with twenty-five of these blocks extending along the peninsula’s length.  Few of Lavallette’s sixteen hundred people live there year round; some of those who do call the tourists “Bennies.”  “Benny” is a belittling word—allegedly an acronym standing for the tourist’s residential origins: Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark, or New York.  These places are also stops on the train route from New York to Point Pleasant, the only train station on the peninsula.  Poppy grew up in Secaucus in the 1930s and 40s, near these cities in northern New Jersey.  When he lived there everyone called it Sea-caucus, not the Sa-caucus that almost everyone calls it now.  It had pig farms as far as the eye could see.  He had said that if your eyes forgot where you were, your nose never did.

Coming from Point Pleasant, I drove down the southern section of Route 35, a two-lane road where the speed limit is also 35.  The traffic lights blinked yellow as I approached Lavallette, and few cars were on the road.  I’ve always preferred the Jersey shore in the fall and winter: it’s the only time of year when peace is possible in this place.

I turned left onto Camden Avenue and drove to the ocean block.  If I had continued driving on Route 35 for a few more miles, I would have ended up in Seaside, the origins of the TV show “Jersey Shore.”  Lavallette is the opposite of the fist-pumping, twenty-something Benny crowd of Seaside.  Lavallette is a quiet community of street fairs that has somehow held onto the Jersey shore of yesteryear.  The small businesses are locally owned.  Iceberg ice cream sells homemade flavors, like Cotton Candy.  The Crabs Claw Inn, a bar and restaurant where my grandfather goes almost every day, sends over someone to bring a meal to Poppy on the eve of holidays.  The police telephone their elderly residents, like my grandfather, every morning.  If no one picks up, they send a car.

On the corner of Route 35 and the ocean block of Camden Avenue is Saint Bonaventure Church, a 22,000 square foot light brown gothic structure.  Poppy used to walk to church almost every day.  We used to call him The Pope.

I parked on the vacant street in front of his house around noon.  The American flag hung from a pole on the front porch, whipped by the wind every now and again.  I stepped out of my car, stomped on the cigarette I’d been smoking, and the cold, salty January breeze lingered under my nose.  I climbed the four steps and opened the front door.

His dusty golf clubs were in the corner of the small foyer.  Murphy, his eight-year old black miniature poodle, leaped from the edge of the living room into my midsection.  Mom calls him “the gay dog” because he seems to prefer humping men more than women and the groomer tends to put a bright-colored bandana around his neck that no one ever bothers to remove.  I leaned down and petted the dog, who whimpered from excitement and ran in circles in front of me.

Virginia, Poppy’s home health aide, greeted me in the living room.  She was a tall middle-aged brunette whom I always saw in blue scrubs. She had been spending the daytime with Poppy for a couple of years.  During the spring of 2010, about eight months earlier, Poppy was found sleeping in the bushes in his backyard.   Virginia got to the house at 9 AM and found him there.  The sliding backdoor was open and Murphy was asleep on the small porch just outside the door.  When Virginia woke him up, he couldn’t recall how he’d gotten there.  The walker was in the house.  He had only minor scratches, and he was cold.  After that, my mother and aunt decided that he needed someone there all of the time, or he needed to check into “the home.”  They didn’t call it “the home,” of course.  No one calls it that when they’re serious.

They researched locations in central New Jersey, close to the house my grandparents had owned for over thirty years.  My mother and aunt picked up colorful brochures with elderly people dancing on the covers, or eating a feast in a luxurious looking cafeteria—always smiling.  “I’m not going to one of those places,” he had said when we’d all gone down to visit a few weeks later and they showed him the brochures.  I sat in the living room, on the other side of the house, listening to the conversation come through his open bedrooms doors.  A month later he went on a cruise.  When he came back, a home health aide moved into one of the upstairs bedrooms to ensure he was okay at night.

Virginia told me that he was awake and sitting in his chair, watching TV.  I veered right through the living room and saw that Murphy had destroyed another screen in the window that looked out onto the front porch.  The clear glass lamp with shells inside that my grandmother had made sat on one of the coffee tables.  A photograph of my grandparents, brother, sister and me at the Cape May Zoo fifteen years earlier was in a small frame on the bookshelf near the stairs.

I stepped into the tight kitchen hallway that opened into the dining area, turning left into the exposed den.  A lingering smell of ammonia crept through the wooden sliding door of Poppy’s bedroom, behind where he sat in his chair.

He had bought the chair about a year earlier—a leather mechanical beast with a remote control that can elevate him to a near standing position without him having to use his legs; it simultaneously reclines parallel to the ground so he can sleep in it if he can’t get up.  Or if he chooses not to.

I walked over and kissed the eighty-three year old on the cheek—his inconsistent gray-brown scruff scratching my face—and gave him a long hug.

“How ya doin’?”  I asked him.

“Eh.  I’m alive,” he said with a smile.

Through big thick glasses with rounded corners, his faded blue eyes looked out at me, having turned closer to a deep glassy gray—his pupils lost in those hazy marbles.  Poppy’s inconsistent shave gave way to longer hairs that sprouted from his neck like blades of grass missed during one of the meticulous summer mows he hadn’t been able to complete in at least half of a decade.  His mouth stayed open just a tad, and small bits of saliva had dried in the corners.  He had a small contusion above his left eye from when he had fallen out of bed a week earlier.  There were puddle-sized blood stains on his bedroom carpet that I saw through the open bedroom door.

“How was the drive?” he asked.

“It was beautiful.  The Parkway was empty, and I made it down in about an hour and fifteen.”

He smiled.  “Your mother would be proud.”

“I think Princeton just came out with a study.  Apparently having a lead foot is genetic.”

He laughed.  Even as he tried to hold his hands together, they shook.

“So, are you hungry, kiddo?”

“Sure.  Do you want to go now?”

“Yeah.  Why not?  My schedule’s free,” he said, smiling.

“And so is mine.”

Virginia helped him with his jacket.  She was patient with him.  I had seen Poppy snarl at her for a scotch before: “Vir-ginia, get me a scotch, would you?”

I helped Poppy out the front door, down the four steps, as Virginia watched from the doorway.  He pushed his walker up to the Cadillac’s passenger’s seat and I put my hand over his head as he shakily sat down.  I folded up the steel walker and placed it in the back seat.

He had bought the Cadillac the prior summer, as he had done every three years since he retired—trading in one for the next.

“What are you buying a new car for?”  My mother had asked him.  “You can’t even drive.”  The last time he had driven, Virginia drove the car over to the Crab’s Claw, and he drove back after a few scotches.  When he realized he was about to miss his turn, he swerved across the two lanes of traffic without looking, making it onto Camden Avenue.

“What do you mean, what am I buying a new car for,” he had said.  “I want a new car.  That’s why.”  I had tried to explain to my parents that the car—like so many other things—was part of his routine.  If he hadn’t bought the car, it would have been like giving up.  “Who cares about the car?  Who cares about the money?” I had said.

***

I drove the five blocks north on Route 35 to the Crabs Claw Inn.  From a handicapped parking spot, I went through the process of unfolding the walker, opening his door, and guiding him up the stairs to the restaurant.  A silent couple behind us smiled toothlessly.

Poppy slid the walker along the hardwood floor of the crowded restaurant, past the V-shaped bar on the right.  When we reached our table, I could feel the eyes of the younger crowd sitting at the bar and I wanted to ask them what the hell they were looking at.  I helped him take off his jacket and sit down on his chair.  We sat at the center of the main dining room, facing the bar.  Poppy was out of breath.  I refolded the walker and placed it against the wall, sat down, looked at the fireplace behind Poppy, and up to the big screen TV over our heads.

“Dewar’s on the rocks with a twist,” he said when the pretty brunette waitress came over to take our order.  His call for a Dewar’s sounded like a man walking out of the Sahara asking for a glass of water.

“I’ll just have a water,” I said.  “Thanks.”

“Do-da-do,” Poppy half-sung, attempting to imitate the notes coming from Frank, the piano player.  Poppy’s loose translucent hands shook.  The doctor had said he might have the early onset of Parkinson’s.  I wondered if it was exhausting, if his arms ever hurt from all that shaking, if he even noticed that they shook, anymore.

“Go put this in his jar, will you kiddo?” he said, handing me a five.  Frank, in his mid-eighties, wore a newsboy hat and nodded when I put the five in his jar.  He played something, probably from Irving Berlin or Joe Bushkin.

I sat back down and looked through the menu.

“Get whatever you want, kiddo.  Okay?  Even if it’s not on the menu, they can make it for you.”

“Thanks.”

Each sip of scotch seemed to cheer up Poppy.  The pauses in conversation grew shorter.

“So how’s school going, kiddo?”

“It’s good.  Really good.  I’m just waiting to hear back from these programs I applied to.”

“Now, you’re doing a Masters, right?”

“Yeah.”

I told him that I was hoping to move somewhere south, to concentrate on writing.  I had told him this before, but he listened as if he’d never heard me say it.  He asked some of the same questions he’d asked me months earlier, and I got the distinct feeling of déjà vu, of time collapsing in the dimly lit restaurant as a drunken woman in her forties danced by herself near the bar.  I expanded on the answers to his questions because I knew he wanted me to.  I knew that this lunch was the highlight of his week, and I knew that when I remembered to call him, it was the highlight of his day.  I knew this because of the way that he smiled.  Because he said it to my mother.  Because when we remembered him, pride let him forget about everything else.

“Your grandmother would be proud of you.”  He said as our clam chowder arrived.  I smiled.

Poppy had another scotch when his fried flounder and my flat-iron steak arrived.  After we ate, I had a cup of coffee and he had another scotch.

When we got back to his house from the Crab’s Claw around two, Poppy had Virginia bring him a fresh glass of scotch, which she had probably diluted with water.  My mother and aunt had conspired for this to be the case.  MSNBC was on the TV and Poppy seemed to stare through it.  I sat on a recliner next to him.  On top of the piano a couple of dozen Christmas and birthday cards stood partly open.

“Do you ever play that thing anymore?” I asked him.

“Oh no.  I haven’t played in years,” he said.  He twisted his body to the right and moved his shaking right hand toward the side table where his glass of scotch sat.  He knocked it with his hand, which caused a small amount of the yellowish liquid to spill down the sides.  “Damn it,” he said before he grabbed hold of the glass.  The ice clanked around as he brought the glass to his face.  He took a mouthful, let go of a euphoric sigh, and then placed the glass back down.

The last time I heard him play the piano was the Thanksgiving before my grandmother died.  It was the last Thanksgiving he’d spent at his house in Bridgewater, fifteen minutes from where I’d grown up.  While the turkey was still in the oven, he sat at the piano with a lamp on above the vacant music stand, playing simplified versions of Erroll Garner songs, like “Jeannine” and “Misty.”  Then he took a sip from the Heineken bottle he’d brought with him to the piano and switched to some Sinatra songs he knew, like “It Was a Very Good Year.” He couldn’t hit the highest notes, or the lowest ones, but he had a good enough voice to occasionally sing along: “I’m in the autumn of the year And now I think of my life as a vintage wine, do-dah-do.”  When I was small, he would sit me next to him on the piano bench and place my hands on a couple of keys, and then he would try to teach me simple melodies so we could play together.

As I sat next to him in his mechanical chair, and pretended to watch MSNBC, I asked, “How’s Bud doing?  Do you still see him around?”  Bud was a drinking buddy of his that he’d gotten relatively close with since he moved full-time to the beach.

“Eh.  Not too much.  Since he had the surgery for the clogged artery in his neck, he doesn’t come around much anymore.”  Before Bud’s procedure, Poppy had had a surgery done on his neck as well.  It was supposed to be the first in a series of three surgeries that was to grant some relief from the herniated discs in his back that had led to the purchase of a cane.  He didn’t react well to the anesthesia.  When he woke from the surgery, he was confused and screamed obscenities.  He didn’t recognize either of his daughters, and it took him a couple of days to return to some semblance of normalcy.  The family speculated that the high volume of scotch he’d been putting into his body for years had caused him to react poorly.  “Withdrawal will do that,” I’d said.

“How about Gail?” I asked him, as I took my eyes off MSNBC.  Gail had married Billy, a cousin of my grandmother, about twenty-five years earlier.  Gail, twenty years younger than Poppy, was also widowed, and happened to live a quarter mile closer to the bay, on Camden Avenue, the same road as Poppy.  Gail was a nurse.  She checked in on Poppy, and they often went to lunch together.  They had grown close a couple of years after he had permanently moved to the beach, and Poppy took her on that cruise he went on after talk of “the home” had come up.  Poppy had footed the bill, which made my mother and aunt talk.

“Oh, she’s down in the Dominican this month.  I think she’s coming back in about two weeks—something like that.  I can’t tell one week from the next,” he said and laughed loudly.  “Hey Virginia?”

“Yes, Robert?”  She had come from the kitchen where she had been putting away a couple of dishes.

“How about a scotch?”

“Are you sure you don’t want a cup of coffee?”

“Yes.  I want a scotch.  Not coffee.”

“You don’t want a cup of coffee first?”

“Damn it.  I want a scotch.”

“Okay, Robert.”  Virginia said.  She and I exchanged a glance.

“It sounds like Gail has a pretty good deal down there in the Dominican, huh?”

“Ohhh yeah.  Well, she splits it with her two daughters, and when none of them are there they rent it out.  Yeah.”  I had heard him describe the situation a dozen times.  “Apparently, there are a lot of Americans building houses down there.”

Virginia came in with a cup of coffee while Poppy talked.

“Damn it.  Virginia, this isn’t scotch.  This is coffee.  I said scotch.”

I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do.  I had witnessed situations like it more times than I could count.  I had stopped trying to tell him to slow down on the drinking.  I had stopped trying to tell him to just drink beer.  I had stopped trying to tell him anything because he’d lived long enough to go out in whatever way he wanted—scotch and all.

Virginia brought in another glass of scotch.  She didn’t get offended at his outbursts; every now and again she’d bring the coffee and he wouldn’t say anything, so if it worked once, she figured she might as well keep trying.  Poppy reached for his glass.

“You want a beer or something?  There should be some Heinekens in the fridge.  There might be some cokes in there, too.”

“Yeah.  I’ll grab something.”

I walked into the kitchen and looked at the messy stack of magazines, newspapers, and bills on the table.  I looked over at Poppy who was taking another shaky sip of scotch, and then took a couple of steps to the right, where the kitchen narrowed.  I opened the refrigerator, across from the sink, and grabbed a coke.  When I closed the refrigerator door I saw a white clip-magnet with Trust Company Bank written on it in blue letters.

Poppy had started work for the bank as a teller in his twenties.  He stayed with them for his entire career—over forty years—moving up steadily, eventually to Vice President.  He never finished college.

As I walked back to the recliner I saw some old stationary on the kitchen table.  “Notes from Robert Degelmann” was written in bold black font on the top of the pad.  The paper had yellowed a bit, and some of Poppy’s incomprehensible cursive was scribbled in blue ink.  I wondered if that pad had been to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where my grandparents used to spend the winters after they’d both retired.

My grandmother and I had written letters to each other while they were gone.  I’d found a stack of them in the back of a drawer in my childhood desk when I was moving out after college.  On February 10, 1994, she wrote: “Tell mommy that yesterday when we came out of the water, Pop-pop was washing the sand off my feet.  They ask you to take the tar off your feet and provide a solvent which smells like turpentine.  Pop-pop was using it on my foot—I told him those were freckles and not tar!!!”

“Ahhhhh.”  Poppy made a sound in the den like he was clearing his throat while simultaneously signaling the beginning of a drunken disagreement.  The sound had surprised me, even though I should have been accustomed to it.  It was the sound that signaled his intoxication.  I knew that soon he’d start yelling at the TV and Murphy, before falling asleep in his chair.

I got back to where I’d been sitting and placed the coke down on a coaster on top of the piano and told him, “I’m gonna go see if the ocean is still there.”

“I’ve heard there’s not much left,” he said.  “The last storm hit pretty damn hard.”

I put on my jacket and walked out of the house.  I took a right out of the driveway and glanced up at the dark gray sky as cold air snuck through my jacket.  The wind gusts grew longer and more severe as I walked by the seven houses on the way to the beach.  The gusts brought with them the smell of cold ocean salt and I remembered the summer days of my early teens, when my brother and I walked up and down the street barefoot, talking about older girls we’d seen on the beach, and how we couldn’t wait to be their age.  It seemed unfair, we’d told each other.

I took off my sneakers and socks where the cool sand met the boardwalk and stepped onto the dried seafloor, feeling rocks and shells under my feet.  I lit a cigarette, sat near the dunes, and watched a fisherman wade out into the water near the rock jetty with a pole in hand.  I could smell the mussels that lined the rocks which formed the jetty, fading under the water thirty feet from shore.  I remembered spending summer evenings wading into the water around that same jetty, looking for seashells with my brother and sister as the sun set over the bay.

I remembered sneaking out of my grandparents’ house when I was sixteen, from the upstairs bedroom my brother and I had shared—a bedroom left vacant the past two or three years.  I had gone to the beach and sat in the same spot, where I got high under the midnight stars I seemed to take more notice of then, dreaming about being older so I could talk to those girls on the beach.

It struck me that Poppy would never see the beach again.  He had tried once, after my grandmother died.  But he had left a few minutes later, upset.

The locals say that the Barnegat Peninsula won’t be here forever.  They say that it will eventually fall into the sea.  They say that it’s only a matter of time.

Geoff Watkinson holds a BA in History from Marist College, and a MA in English and Creative Writing from Seton Hall University, where he taught on a fellowship. Currently, Geoff is working on a MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Old Dominion University, where he also teaches composition. His writing has been recently published or is forthcoming in The Newtowner, Used Furniture Review, The Red Clay Review, and others. Geoff recently founded the online literary magazine, Green Briar Review (www.greenbriarreview.com).  He lives in a pool house on the banks of the Lafayette River in Norfolk, Virginia.  You can find him at www.geoffwatkinson.com.

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