SUMMER 2014

“There’ll be rats,” she said, facing him over English muffins at the red Formica-topped kitchen table.  She noticed, not for the first time, the decided slope of her husband’s once broad shoulders, the skin sagging at the corner of his right eye.  From the open kitchen window, she breathed in apple blossoms, freshly turned earth.

“It’s scientific,” he said.  “Read the book.”  She stared at the liver spots on his hand as he shoved the book across the table.  A slight figure, just over five feet, she had more gray now than red in the twist of hair fastened on top of her small, compact head.

“I don’t have to read a book to know about rats.  You remember Craighead Grocery.  It took us years to get rid of those rats.  They’ll be back if you take to burying garbage in the yard.”

“It’s scientific,” he repeated, as though he hadn’t heard her.

“Maybe so.  But in this yard, it’s unsanitary.”

“Read the book,” he said and got up from the table.

“Stubborn old man,” she muttered.

She peered over half-glasses at his faded blue slacks, stained with the black dirt of the garden, the moth holes in the sleeve of his navy wool sweater.  His thick white hair hung ragged on his neck.

“Look at you,” she said.  “You’re a mess.”

He turned and fixed her with the light blue eyes she had fallen in love with forty years before.  “Goddamn it, Lucy!  Be nice to me.”

That made her look, really look, through the battered clothes, through the years, to the intense lean face, the thin prominent nose, the sudden, unexpected smile.

“It’s not easy,” she said, smiling up at him.

“Read the book,” he said.

**

Forty years ago it had been easy.  Forty years ago she couldn’t take her hands off him.  She was teaching seventh grade and had run the gamut of the so-called eligible bachelors in Spottswood, Virginia.  They were a dull lot and she was hungry for a fresh face.

“I hear there’s this new man in town, buying that printing business over on Loyal Street,” her friend Elsie told her.

“What’d you hear about him?”

“Name’s Frank Stamps and he’s back from the war.  I’ve seen him. He’s tall, about six feet, and his hair’s naturally curly and coal black.”

“How come he’d want that print business?  They say it’s about to go under.”

“You can ask him yourself.  I hear he’s coming to the Victory Ball.”

“You think so?”  The city was putting on a dance in the City Armory that weekend to celebrate the end of the war.  Everybody was coming.

“What else do you know about him?”  she asked.

“He smokes cigars.”

“Yeah?”

“He likes whiskey.”

Lucy smiled.

“And he cusses.”

“I want to meet this man!” she said.

Elsie laughed.

Well, you couldn’t miss him at the Ball.  He stood a head taller than almost everybody, and he looked like victory itself in his Army uniform.  His black hair was shiny; she could tell he’d tried to slick it down, but sprigs of it kept springing up.  His face was red, not like he was blushing but a healthy red, like he’d been in the sun a lot.  And his large nose was thin along the ridge and straight.

Right away he asked Lucy for a dance.  She didn’t remember much of what they talked about that night; she just remembered that he danced like he was in charge and he smelled of cigars and she couldn’t take her eyes off of him.  He was that powerful.

The very next night he showed up at her house in navy gabardine trousers, worn shiny at the knees, and a white dress shirt that was frayed at the collar.  He later told her he’d worn that Army uniform for the last time and good riddance.

“I’ve just had raw onions for my dinner,” he said, holding out a peeled onion.  “Better take a bite, or you won’t be able to stand me.”

Lucy took one look at that curly hair and those light blue eyes, and she bit down on that onion like it was ambrosia.

It was true.  He liked his whiskey and he cussed and he smoked cigars and he was more fun than anybody she’d ever met.  She loved the way he spun her around when they danced, loved the easy way he laughed, his head thrown back.  Loved the way he touched her with his square-shaped hands and blunt fingertips.  He didn’t have much money, but he had the smell of the future on him.  She married him six months later and never looked back.

**

She read his book and admonished herself for being so cranky.  Composting seemed harmless enough.  But then a month or so later, as she was standing at the kitchen window. she saw him rummaging through the garbage, picking up egg shells and rotten tomatoes and dumping them into a blue plastic bucket.  He carried the bucket over to the composting pit he’d dug, and then, like in a fairy tale, a large gray rat streaked out of the pit and ran for the fence.

She stormed out to the back.

“I told you there’d be rats,” she yelled.

But he just stared into the tangle of red tomatoes and eggshells on the ground.

“What are you hollering about now?”

“Are you blind?  A huge rat just ran practically over your foot.”

And he started laughing.  Laughing!  “Well, I’ll be,” he said.  “And I didn’t even see it.”

“It’s not funny,” she said.

They stood facing each other over the open pit.  She crossed her bare arms in the cool September air.

“You have to cover up that hole,” she said.

“Why?”

“Why?”  She couldn’t believe him.  “Because it’s unsanitary.  Because there are rats.  Because it’s crazy.”

“Stop yelling,” he said.

“I’m yelling because I’m scared,” she said.

He frowned.  “Of a rat?”

“No. Well, yes. Of course I’m scared of rats.”

He laughed again.  “They won’t hurt you.”

“It’s not just that; you scare me.”

“Me?”

“Not you exactly.”  She didn’t know how to say it.   She didn’t even know what she meant.  It was something about that laugh.  Not his usual belly laugh with his head thrown back; it was like he was embarrassed or confused.  And he hadn’t even noticed the rat. “Forget it,” she said.  “It was the rat.”

“I’ll get some poison,” he said.  And then he stood there, waiting, watching her.

“No,” she cried out, close to tears, “no rats, no poisons.” And she rushed back to the warmth of the kitchen, leaving him standing there, the blue bucket dangling from his hand like a child’s Easter basket.

**

It wasn’t his to poison.  The garden was hers too.  Before they married, Frank had never even touched a spade, but Lucy had learned to grow vegetables from her father.  So in those early, giddy days, she taught her new husband to make a vegetable garden.  They dug up the entire back yard of their recently purchased house and planted carrots, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, parsnips, onions, even corn.  Their Forest Knolls neighbors peered over their hedges, from their identical squares of green grass and tulip borders, staring at the two of them, the tall, dark-haired man and his young, red-headed wife, groveling in the dirt, laughing, kissing.  But before long, the neighbors were grinning down at them, shouting advice, and taking home buckets of vegetables.

Lucy remembered one summer evening early in their marriage, Frank bursting into the kitchen, his fingernails black with dirt, holding up in the sun-washed air a perfect sphere of an onion.  Their first.

“Open up, Red,” he said, thrusting it at her.

“Let me sauté it first.”  She was laughing, kissing his neck, his chin, his mouth.

“Nope.  It’s the very first onion from the Garden of Eden.  We don’t even have fire yet.  We eat it raw.”

She started to peel it, when he shouted, “Wait,” and reached under the kitchen sink for their bottle of Jack Daniels.

“Sit down, Red, we’re celebrating.”  And he poured two full glasses of bourbon, put thin slices of the onion on toast, and they celebrated right into their second-hand brass double bed.

Frank took to gardening with the same zeal he applied to everything: printing, dancing, chatting up customers.  He had bought the printing business with a little inheritance from his granddaddy down in South Carolina.  The business was heavily in debt, but Frank figured that the country was coming out of the depression, and with luck and hard work he could turn that shop into a thriving operation. Which he did.  Stamps Printing. First he figured out all by himself how to use a Linotype machine to set type.  Before long he knew everybody in town and had more business than he knew what to do with.  He was thirty-five at the time, seven years Lucy’s senior, and a ball of fire.  Running the press, talking to customers, racing about town drumming up business, always laughing and joking and smoking those cigars. His energy never flagged.  He served on the school board, ran the Community Fund Drive, and was president of Kiwanis.  The only organization he didn’t run at one time or another was First Baptist.

“God’s got enough soldiers in his army without me,” he’d say, when the preacher tried to recruit him for the Board of Deacons.  “Besides, I’d have to cut back on the whiskey and the goddamns.”

**

The three children they brought into the world rebelled against all the weeding, watering, and picking they were forced to do.  The garden was a chore, not a passion.  And so it was left to their parents to tend with all the love they felt for each other.  But after the children left home, the garden began to overwhelm them.  There were just too many zucchini and eggplant, cabbage and carrots, beans and peas, raspberries and strawberries.  Lucy cooked and canned and froze, shared with the neighbors and gave to the soup kitchen at First Baptist, but the vegetables kept multiplying.  She insisted on planting a smaller garden, and Frank agreed.  But by then he was retired and had more time, and the garden grew even larger, the yield more abundant.  Lucy had nightmares of rotten vegetables spilling out all over the yard. Frank seemed unaware of the burden he was placing on his wife, even though she was getting older and was constantly reminding him.

And then the people started appearing.

First, a woman, somewhere in her late fifties, showed up wearing faded pink cotton slacks and a lime green tie-dyed shirt, with a cloth bag dangling off her skinny arm.

“Who’s that?”  Lucy asked Frank.  They were standing at the kitchen window, watching the woman pick green beans off one of the bushes.

He smiled and nodded in her direction.  “Her name might be Page or something like that.”

“You know her?”

He thought for a minute.  “I could have met her at the soup kitchen.”

“What do you mean, you could have met her at the soup kitchen?”

“I suppose I did.”

“What’s she doing here?”

He shrugged.  “I guess she’s hungry.”

“What’s wrong with the soup kitchen?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

“Then why’s she here?”

“I must have invited her.”

“Well, did you or didn’t you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Come on, Frank,” she said. “You know we can’t have strangers rummaging around in our back yard.”

“She’s not a stranger.  I told you, I’m pretty sure I met her at the kitchen.”  He went back to reading the paper.

“It’s my garden too, Frank.”  Her voice was high-pitched, shrill.

“Why are you fussing at me?” he asked.

It was a good question.  He was only being generous. So why was she begrudging this poor woman a few vegetables?   She liked her privacy; that was part of it.  But it was more than that; she felt irritated at Frank when she should have felt proud of him for being kind, and she didn’t know why.

The next day a couple of teenagers showed up.  She said nothing while they picked their fill of berries, but afterwards, she called the Reverend Lee at First Baptist.

“If it’s alright with you,” she said, “I’d rather send vegetables and fruit to the soup kitchen than have folks show up in our garden.”

“Of course, Lucy, and thank you.  You can call any time, and I’ll have somebody pick up whatever you’re donating.”

“Frank says he invited folks from the kitchen to our garden.  Did you know that?”

“I have heard him inviting folks to your garden.  He’s so generous, but I did wonder.”  The Reverend Lee hesitated.  “You know, he’s been hanging around the soup kitchen a lot lately.”

She tried to hide her surprise.  “Cooking?”

“Not exactly.  He’s been mostly chatting with folks.  Eating with them sometimes.”

Lucy felt something inside her chest tighten.  She told herself that there was nothing wrong with going to the soup kitchen, being friendly with all those hungry people.  She could imagine Frank cooking or hauling a truckload of corn up to the church.  He’d done that frequently. But it wasn’t like him to sit around just talking to a bunch of homeless people.

The preacher echoed her thoughts.  “I’m probably off base here, but Frank doesn’t seem himself.”

She wanted to say, you’re right.  He’s luring rats and strangers into our garden and doesn’t remember it. But she wasn’t ready to admit she was scared.

So she said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d talk to him.  Maybe you can find out what he’s thinking.”

Later that night she brought up the subject with Frank, but he got defensive.

“Can’t I help out at the soup kitchen without you nosing in?”

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “You’re right.”

**

For several weeks, no more visitors appeared.  Then one evening just before dusk, a young man with a mean looking dog, part German Shepard, part mutt, showed up in the garden, a paper bag tucked under his arm, and started picking raspberries.  He had a scarred-up complexion and a skinny blond pony-tail, and his tee-shirt didn’t quite cover his bulging white belly.  Lucy saw him from the kitchen window and came running out of the house.

“Who’s that?” she hissed at Frank, who was stooped down in the cabbage plants pulling weeds.

That started the dog to growling.

Frank looked up and frowned.  “Hey there!” he called out.

The man watched Frank for a minute, then unzipped his baggy khaki trousers and started to urinate on the berries.

“Oh my God,” Lucy muttered and turned away.  The dog bared its teeth and growled even louder.

But Frank just laughed.  “What’re you doing?”  he asked, as he struggled to his feet.

“You said I could pick all the fruit I want,” the man said, zipping up his trousers.  He sounded defensive.

“Well, I’ll be damned.  When d’I say that?”

“Yesterday.”

Lucy stared at Frank.  Suddenly the dog lunged at Frank, barking and snapping at his pants, and knocked him into the cabbage plants.  The man grabbed the dog by its collar and smacked it hard on the nose.

“Shut your face, you bitch,” he yelled, and he headed out to the street without another word, yanking the whimpering animal by its collar and picking up his bag of berries with his free hand.

Lucy took Frank by the arm and supported him as he struggled to get up.  After several attempts, he pulled himself to his feet while she dusted him off.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He managed a laugh.  “That was some dog,” he said.

“That man was lying, wasn’t he?” Lucy asked, her voice shaking.  “Surely you didn’t invite that man in here?”

Frank was staring at his trousers, which the dog had ripped.  “I might have seen him in town.  He had a sign.”

She exploded.  “You invited that man into our yard?”

“Like I said, I might have.  I don’t remember. You keep telling me we have too many vegetables.  I was trying to help.  He had a sign that said he was hungry.”

“What he is, is dangerous.  Frank, look at me.”

He turned to face her.  His shoulders were sloping down; his light blue eyes searched Lucy’s face for approval.

“I’ve been trying to do what’s right,” he said.  His usually deep voice ended on a high note, like he was asking a question.

She stared up at him.  “And you think bringing stray men with dangerous dogs into our garden is doing what’s right?”

He didn’t answer.  Instead he said, “Don’t be angry.”

“I’m more scared than angry,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

They stood there for a long time, looking at each other, not saying anything.  Finally, she took his hand and walked him back into the house.

They sat in the kitchen, where they had sat for over forty years, at the Formica topped table, facing each other.

“Lucy,” he said, “What’s happened to us?”

She searched his old man face, sagging around the eyes, still dominated by the straight, thin nose.

“I told you before.  I’m scared.”

“Scared of what?”

Suddenly she had the words.  “I’m losing you,” she said and started to cry.  “It makes me sad.  It makes me angry.  I don’t recognize you anymore.”

He took her face in his hands with the blunt-edged fingers she had loved, still loved.

“I don’t either,” he said.

Nancy Bourne practiced law for many years, representing California public schools as a senior partner in a statewide education law firm.  Since retirement, she has been writing stories, tutoring and teaching English composition to inmates at San Quentin State Prison, taking care of grandchildren, and hiking and bird watching on the mountain near her home in Mill Valley, California. Ms. Bourne has published stories in Summerset Review, Forge, Quiddity, and most recently in Persimmon Tree.  She studied with Tom Parker and Laurie Ann Doyle at the University of California, Berkeley Writing Program.

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Emily, kneeling in the garden, looked up and saw a spot of blood against the summer sky.  It unfurled slowly toward her, and though it was still so far in the distance, she knew at once that it was the parachute, that he had finally returned for her.  Emily rose, and as she did, the beans that she had gathered fell from her apron, forgotten; she strode toward the house to find Clare, who was in the kitchen.  She looked back, for a second, to see the parachute again, to make sure that she had not imagined or dreamed it, and it was still there, but she was weak and sank again to her knees; she could not stay upright; she had to lie down for a moment among the soil and plants, though she was still so far from the house.

The parachute landed in the garden, deflating softly among the green stalks, and the man, who was fastened to it with fine white threads, lay still for so long that Emily thought he might have died.

She had lived her entire life on the farm, and she and Clare had found their parents after the accident; they were not afraid of death.  So Emily lifted the parachute silk away from his face and felt for a pulse at his neck and temples.  He was unconscious, perhaps, or stunned, but he was alive.

She ran to the house and returned with Clare, who hung back shyly, her hands still damp from dishwater.  He opened his eyes and saw her first—Emily—and she felt the shift even then, as the earth might sense a sudden, unexpected rain, floating down over the garden and changing an entire landscape.

The sisters were still young, then, and strong.  Together, they rolled him onto a quilt and carried him back to the house.  Emily set the broken bones and secured them with torn strips of cloth, and Clare boiled water for tea.  The man’s face was tight with pain, and Emily wanted to smooth his brow with her fingertips.

He stayed with them all winter, in one of the back bedrooms, and Emily took care of him while he recovered.  One night, after Clare had fallen asleep, Emily walked back to his room and slipped under the quilts, and let him lift her nightgown up to her waist.

When the weather shifted, he wanted to travel south.  When he had a proper house, he said, he would send for her.  Later, Emily thought of these words so many times.  It was one of the nights they had been lying, flushed, in his bed.

In the spring, he left the house on foot.  Emily, dry-eyed, watched him from the porch.  His back was a narrow blade growing smaller and smaller in the distance.

Every day, she waited.  In the yard scattering feed to the chickens, in the barn milking the cows, and in the garden gathering the vegetables for supper, every day, she was tense, waiting for an envelope, for words, for his footsteps on the porch or the pressure of his hand on the small of her back.

She was so preoccupied that she didn’t notice the pregnancy at first.  She waited until there were too many signs to ignore.  There had never been any secrets between the two sisters, and she had trouble broaching the topic.  But Clare was practical about things, Emily could always count on that, and this was no exception.

That winter, Thomas was born, a stout little baby with round red cheeks and round little hands and feet.  He was walking before they knew it, following Clare around the kitchen and tugging on the ends of her apron strings, reaching for the cat with his own grasping little paws.  They taught him his numbers and letters, and when he was too big to sleep in the same room with Emily, she let him take the room that had been his father’s, once.

Thomas grew old enough to walk to the little schoolhouse up the road, swinging his lunch pail beside him, and then to work outdoors with Emily, not the way he had as a little boy but at her side, as an equal; he grew tanned and muscular; and when he was twenty-two, he fell in love with a girl from town and moved away.

Once again, Emily and Clare lived in the farmhouse alone.  That winter, in the late evening, Clare began reading to Emily by lamplight.  It was a peculiarly lonely time, with the snow piled up outside and the dark coming so early, and they often read Tolstoy and other Russian writers and took comfort in their own warm hearth.

In town, Thomas and his wife had a son, then a daughter, then another daughter.  Thomas had gotten work with his wife’s father; he and his wife both had fine business sense, and by the time they were expecting their fourth child, they had saved enough for a house with a wide wraparound porch and six spacious bedrooms.

Every few months, Emily and Clare traveled to their house to see all six, then seven, then eight of them.  Though they looked forward to the visits, the sisters had to admit (privately, of course, when they had returned home) that the noise of the house had begun to seem oppressive to them after living so long in their quiet countryside.

In her seventies, Clare developed heart problems, and the doctor told her to avoid any sort of strain, but she remained, in her usual fashion, unflustered.  She kept house and read to Emily and wrote to her grand-nieces and -nephews, some of whom were now in their thirties and had families of their own.

Mornings, Emily gathered eggs from the henhouse, and in the afternoons, in summer, she picked berries or beans for supper.  She couldn’t have said why she kissed Clare, that afternoon as she left the house, or why she tied an apron around her waist, as if she were a young woman again, with her hair in a long braid down her back.  It was a mild summer afternoon, with a light breeze and a few distant white clouds.

Emily, kneeling in the garden, looked up and saw a spot of blood against the blue of the sky.  It unfurled slowly toward her, and though it was still so far in the distance, she knew at once that it was the parachute.  Emily rose, and as she did, the beans that she had gathered fell from her apron, forgotten; she could see the house, in the distance, and she tried to call out to Clare, who was at home in the kitchen, but she was too weak and sank again to her knees; she could not stay upright; she had to lie down for a moment among the soil and plants.  Clare, she was trying to say.  He’s come back to us, Clare.

The parachute landed in the garden.  Emily had closed her eyes, but she could feel it, even at a distance, deflating softly among the green stalks; the sun shone; and there were his footsteps, running toward her from the house, and then the gentle pressure of his hand, which she had so long awaited, on her shoulder, and the small of her back.

Leah Browning is the author of three nonfiction books for teens and pre-teens. Her third chapbook, In the Chair Museum, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2013. Browning’s poetry and prose have previously appeared in publications including Queen’s Quarterly, 42opus, Per Contra, Halfway Down the Stairs, The Citron Review, 300 Days of Sun, and Salome Magazine, as well as on a broadside from Broadsided Press, on postcards from the program Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf, and in several anthologies. In addition to writing, Browning serves as editor of the Apple Valley Review. Her personal website is located at http://www.leahbrowning.com/.

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Everyone huddles in the back corner of the downstairs studio.  It’s all neon flames against sallow skin, sagging so you can see shadows underneath: orange hair, fuchsia fingernails, yellow sports bras. I’m barefoot. I remember when I was a kid in gym class, sitting cross-legged on the floor and peeling up the laminate like dead skin. The gym teacher, a big bullish woman in tearaway pants, would cuff me on the head and tell me to quit it.

“How are we doing today, girls?” I ask.

I was instructed to be cheery. I set my bag on the piano in the corner.  “Good” and “great” and some silent smiles greet me. This is my first time subbing for my friend April and teaching her dance class because she is off across the state trying desperately to get a man to forgive her. She knows I spent some time in Turkey – of course you know how to dance, what else were you doing over there? she asked, and I knew she was just begging me to make a joke about how it’s not ‛what’ I was doing but ‛whom.’ She was really softballing it to me but I didn’t swing. She thinks I could use the experience, teaching. She tells me I need to get out of the house more. She thinks they could use it; April’s been the only volunteer instructor for this bunch of middle-aged women for a solid three years. It will be good for them, she says, to have my joie de vivre, my style, my verve. But they don’t know me, and I haven’t built up any respect or trust with them. I am, for now, the enemy: a new pair of eyes.

I have them line up against the back wall, facing me and the mirrors they hate so much. Some women shift, some shake their heads and give a tired, I’m-game-if-you-are grin.  Already I am starting to sweat. My mother is in the back; she waves and then draws a pinched thumb and forefinger across her lips. With this gesture she promises me I won’t hear a peep from her. Lips sealed. She will not embarrass me. She will let me shine. I nod and try to forget she is there.

With so many eyes on me, it feels like the earth is circling closer to the sun.  Every pulse, a little warmer. They are all about the same age as my mother, mid fifties to early sixties, and in a town this size I assume they are all friends, but aside from my mother I have never met any of these women. I have no idea how or why they are friends, if they all meet for soy chai lattes before class or convene afterward at the local wine bar to compare notes on their children, their husbands, their failures as women. They’re not listed on the emergency contact forms posted to our fridge. I wonder which, if any, of them get calls in the middle of the night when my mother thinks her teeth are falling out, or when she is in a panic about an irregular-shaped mole. What about when my father had his second heart attack and collapsed on the living room rug, biting his tongue and bleeding onto the carpet? Does my mother talk to them about me, her only daughter, currently living at home because her ex-boyfriend kicked her out of the apartment they’d shared since college? Do they click their tongues and think on me with pity?

I bend over the cheap CD player in the corner.  “Sounds of the Middle East” – my mother loaned me the disc.  I know what she thinks of the Middle East already; she spends most of her free afternoons watching the news.  I come downstairs and the television in the kitchen is on, glaring doomsday pictures of yellow scrubland, smoke and sudden explosions. Maybe she listens to the music and it makes the images go down more easily.  I walk back to the group and face the mirror with the rest of them.  I hold out my arms as if I am balancing on a tightrope.

“The first thing to work on,” I say, “is our posture.  We want arms out, chins up, stomachs in, and legs relaxed.  On three.”

Their arms rise and fall with mine. I had to look most of this up on the internet the night before. I did take a class when I was in Turkey, but most sessions seemed to consist of an hour of “improvising” a handful of traditional moves to Turkish electroclash. Just in case, April wrote me a cheat-sheet that is currently folded inside my gym bag. We practice the percussive movements first: the bang-bang-bangs that hit the beat right on the quarter note. We do hip drops, hip rocks, hits, twists, and lifts. We try a few shimmies. Each move, when I announce it, causes a brief scattered pause as the women blush hard, reposition feet, and throw their eyes back up to the mirror. It’s hard not to be suggestive when running a belly dancing class full of women who hate their bodies.

Now we’ll try a hip shiver.

Remember to find your pelvic floor. Feel the movement down there. Feel it.

Smile, ladies. I feel like I’m catcalling them. Come on, smile. Enjoy yourself. Look like you’re having fun.

In the mirror I see myself, thin as I’ve ever been. Then I see my group. My girls.  A collection of wrinkly statues.  All fifty-plus. I’ve had sex with men this age.  Over the hill.  Past the horizon. Nobody gets all the moves right – some women have the proper gravity and solidity for the percussive stuff, some the liquid wispiness and delicate hands needed for the shimmies, but no one can combine it all. No one can be everything, and no one is very good at this dance. Hips sag to one side or the other, arms out but wrists limp, faces grimacing and eyes determinedly trained on the space above their reflections in the mirror. Nobody can look herself in the eye.

Gabe used to make the same face when I told him something he didn’t want to hear, like that I was ever unhappy.  His eyes would go blank and laze around my forehead.  When I told him that I had gone home with a waiter with long fingernails named Bahir on my way through Istanbul, I used the hotel phone.  I was drunk, I told him, hoping the word for my inebriation could also be a synonym for accidental or misguided.  I imagined his face. I knew how his eyes would be blank and stricken, fixed somewhere just above my hairline. He hung up before I could finish.

My arms drop to my sides. I wheel back around to face the group.

“Why don’t we take a break,” I say. Postures collapse like puppet strings have been cut as the class ducks to the back corners. They sip out of water bottles and smile weakly at one another.

My mother pops up behind me. “You’re doing a great job, sweetheart,” she says.

I lean against the piano. Hair sticks to the back of my neck. I fan myself with an old course catalog. “Tough crowd,” I say.

“I’m just happy you’re here. That we’re both here.” She smiles. “Two girls making it out on their own, huh?” She pats me on the shoulder and goes back to her group.

Making it out on their own. Something like that. She makes it sound so brave to have your husband forcefully taken away from you by ill health and then scrambling to cope with the aftermath. I felt a little brave when I flirted with other men, right in front of Gabe’s face. He had chosen me, picked me out of a crowd and stamped my forehead with his seal. That was it. If anybody was going to end the relationship, it would have been me, so I paraded around and tossed my pretty head and had myself a ball while he waited with fingers crossed that I wouldn’t ruin it all. That I wouldn’t throw it away just because I was bored.

And here is this roomful of women, some divorced, some widowed, some married but who knows how happily. Encased in pounds of lycra and shapewear, trying to regain a little something – something that they might have once had in their youth. Is it the feeling of being desired? Being chased after by some man, any man, plucking at the hem of their skirt with desperation in his eyes? I want it to be something only I have access to. Something I can grant at will.

“Okay, shake off the tiredness, ladies,” I say. “I want everybody to close their eyes.”

They arrange themselves behind me. I watch my bare feet measure out long steps across the wooden floor.  I think of my mother standing at the back, promising not to say anything. I wonder what she gets out of this class. What she thinks about as she shakes, shimmies, and vibrates with her friends – if they even are her friends. What sort of fantasies are ushering her through mid-fifties widowhood.

“Imagine that you are in a bar.  A fancy hotel bar.  There are long red curtains everywhere, and the chairs are all dark wood, and there’s jazz music playing.  A really sexy song. Frank Sinatra or something. Whatever gets you going,” I say. Giggles. I guess I should expect that. There’s maturity here, but no dignity, no resigned limp to the end of the line. “It’s a late Saturday night, and almost everyone has gone home.” I take a deep breath.  “But there’s one man sitting, all alone at the bar.  He’s handsome, wealthy looking, the most desirable man you’ve ever seen. Picture him.”

Who knows if they do? I try, but my efforts are only rewarded with a brief, fear-thrill-baited second of Gabe coming home from the lifeguarding job he had in college, peeling off sweaty shorts and complaining about his teenaged girl employees.  He hated their flightiness, their lack of ambition, their superficiality.  I push it away and think of myself with another man, not Bahir, not the older men I have dallied with. I try to think of myself not just having an affair but really being together with someone, and whoever it is being more smitten with me than I’d ever thought possible.

“Is that man our husband?” A dark-haired woman raises a tiny hand.  I smile and wink at my girls.

“If you want,” I say.

They nod.

Not enough.

“Actually, no, it’s not,” I say.  “This man is not your husband.”

They nudge each other.  Smiles spike the corners of their mouths.  They spread apart, each in her own space. Though the basement studio has no windows we can hear the rain whipping itself against the thin walls above.  They taught me in school that hot air rises, but it doesn’t feel like it’s rising. It feels like it’s all trapped down here, ballooning between us and above our heads.  Great blooms of hot air, hot breathing.  The walls are panting.  They beg me to finish.  Keep talking.  Tell us more.  Get to the end of the story.  Finish it.

“This man is alone.  He’s tapping his foot to the music.” I close my eyes again.  “He has your favorite drink in front of him.  Red wine, I guess.  He looks lonely but not desperate.  You’re not sure if you should approach him.  You’re wearing your favorite outfit, the one that makes you look skinny.”

I place my hands on my stomach, feeling the muscles underneath.  I am powerful.  I will outlast them all.  I feel like running, dodging bullets, skipping town.

“All of a sudden he looks at you, right in the eyes. You know without a single doubt in your mind that he wants you.  He wants you more than anything.”

My hands slide down my hips.

“Now,” I say, dropping my voice lower, “how do you walk towards this man?”

When I open my eyes I look straight to the woman in the front, the one standing right behind me. Her red face, closed eyes, mouth slightly parted.  It is my mother. They are all my mother. The mirror is dewy with the sweat of collective pent-up sexual frustration coming from these bored housewives, all of whom are my mother.  I turn back to the mirrors, rocking my most rocking saunter. I end with my hands drawn up behind my neck, Gabe creeping back into my mind as I think of him biting that skin, then a quick vision of the Turkish waiter but only in flashes and then he too turns into somebody else, some man from years past, some man I haven’t met yet, pressing me against the wall.

I spin to face the group.  Not one quivering muscle has moved.

I lift my chin.  “No problem.  We can always try something else, something a little more basic. Maybe some camel walking.” I stride to the CD player to turn off the music.  As my back is turned I hear smacking footsteps on the floor.

My mother is doing her best drag queen impression with one hand on a bulging hip and the other punching the air back and forth like a metronome.  Her thin lips press firmly together, cheeks crimson and eyes still trained on that spot above her on the mirror.  When she reaches the other side, she sets her foot down with a slap and looks at me with just a little relief mingled in her triumph.

“Well, honey,” she says.  “What do you think about that?”

The group erupts in applause behind her. Atta girl, Marsha, they call out. Her eyes shine, slick as the sweat on her upper lip.  She wants a pat on the head too.  Tell me I did good. Tell me it’s all going to be okay. I want to say it. I really want to. But something stops me – the truth of it. I can’t lie to my own mother.

“I think it’s time to get started,” I say instead.  “Everybody ready?”

I turn the music up, my hand slipping across the buttons. It fills the room with its sliding perverted rhythms and before I can position myself back at the front of the class my mother grabs me by the hand. I pull back but her grip is strong, and she loses all form and grace as we spin around. Her hips waggle. She wants me to dance – to dance with her, to enjoy this newfound freedom – the two of us making it out on our own. She lets go of my hands and throws up her arms: snake arms writhing with middle fingers perfectly extended. I can’t follow her moves. I don’t have enough practice. She is the star. The group cheers us on. In the cheap cracked mirror I catch glimpses of us dancing. Our bodies are so distorted I can barely make out my reflection or tell us apart – where I am and who’s copying whom. The woman in the mirror has my same hair color, my same long legs. She looks like she knows what she’s doing.

Laura Citino is a fiction writer from southeastern Michigan. She received her MFA from Eastern Washington University and is a regular contributor to Bark, an arts and culture blog online at www.thebarking.com. Her short fiction has appeared in The Mayo Review, The Intentional Quarterly, and Midwestern Gothic. She currently lives with her partner and teaches English in Terre Haute, IN.

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Misunderstanding was the rule in my family. While I did my part to contribute, I mostly observed – the misheard words, the misread signals, the misremembered moments that were supposed to have been unforgettable.

When the call came that Danny was finally coming back to Kimball Park, I anticipated the miscommunication that was bound to ensue, even welcomed it in a way, because I believed with my thirteen-year-old heart that I was destined to escape it. It was Danny himself who led me to believe such a thing. Hadn’t he singled me out the last time he visited?  Somehow, though, I overlooked the fact that the reason Danny was coming was to bring his new bride across the ocean to meet us, our large, loud family that took up so much of the dry air in the dozy confines of Kimball Park.

The news that Danny was married had crackled long-distance from Germany in Lupita’s old ear.

“No me digas,” she wailed, even as she begged him to repeat his message after each wave of static, hoping it would reshape itself into something ordinary and unobjectionable.

Danny is my uncle, and Lupita my grandmother. I referred to all adults by their first name – except to their faces. I communicated my adolescent rebellion by not communicating. I harbored an unoriginal catalogue of unspoken impertinences. My looks of derision were directed at people’s retreating backs. Only my sighs, heaved with the force of Connie’s late-model Hoover upright, were obvious. Connie was my mother and the most frequent recipient of my noisy exhalations.

But with the news of Danny’s marriage, my sighs were lost in the collective moan.  Danny was ours no longer. Lupita lamented the loss of her youngest. Connie and my aunts shook their perms at the intrusion of Teutonic stock into our family. He should marry his own kind, they grumbled of their only brother, their fingers twanging the telephone cord as they called each other over morning coffee. None of the sisters, though, had married her own kind, having introduced Filipino, Polish, Irish, and Caribbean genotypes into Lupita and Sergio’s Yaqui-dominated Mexican bloodline. Lupita liked to emphasize the fierceness of the Yaquis, their resistance to enslavement by other tribes, even their murderous attacks on trains when they sliced the wrists and ears of passengers for speedy acquisition of a silver bracelet or pearl earring. Then they were crushed like the rest, Sergio always added as epilogue, the heel of one hand grinding into the palm of the other. Let’s face it, even at thirteen I knew, as a family, we were a hodgepodge of conquered peoples.

But then there was our Danny, conqueror and hero. Since Danny had been stationed in Europe, we had boasted to our friends of his sampling of the culture. That he had carried baguettes under his arm in France, clinked steins of beer in Frankfurt with the locals, revved mopeds around fountains in Italy. Only Danny had ventured so far from our corner of the world. From Lupita and Sergio’s modest one-story on Palm Street, the clearinghouse for news of Danny’s adventures, we celebrated his triumphs, invested him with hero status even before he became one. The commendation and scarred hand he received for saving his buddy in a barracks fire proved his place in the world and in our family. Until we learned the news.

While there was no mistaking the fact that Danny had a bride, details about her suffered in the transmission. “She stands stiff as a salute, you know,” reported my aunt Lyla who had relayed the tidings of that first phone call to Petra. By the time Connie got the call from Millie, Danny’s wife was antiseptically clean and carried germicidal sprays in her purse. She was obsessively nationalistic and concealed a tattoo of the German flag between her vast breasts. She was brawny, a former athlete who handled a steak knife as if it were a javelin. She smoked cigars.

“I hate to say this,” said my mother who strove to maintain a semblance of fairness in the midst of such satisfying gossip, “but your uncle seems to have married a … ”

“Visigoth?” I offered.

Connie thought I was making the word up and ignored me. “An invader,” she shouted in triumph. “Magda is an invader.”

But Magda was not the invader.

What we gradually sorted out from a spate of phone calls was that Magda was Mercedes, Spanish not German. “Well, he was calling from Germany,” Lyla said to defend her initial dissemination of the particulars about the origins of her new sister-in-law. As for the details of the tattoo, javelin and cigars, there was silence all around.

The truth was less exotic but more intimidating.

“She speaks Spanish.” Millie pointed out. “We have that in common.”

“It’s different, though,” Petra said.

“Castilian,” confirmed Lyla darkly. “With a lisp.”

The women were seated around the dining room table, talking across the dregs of Sunday dinner before them, the tripe curling in the last of the menudo, tortillas stiffening in the uncovered basket, the gnawed corncobs becoming skeletal as they withered under the bulbs of Lupita’s cracked chandelier. The men played poker in the living room, scowling at their cards through eddies of cigarette smoke. My cousins and sisters were in the bedroom playing records. The Supremes were ooh oohing through the plaster walls and I knew my cousins Bonita and Rica, the pretty ones who already had boyfriends, were taking turns being Diana Ross. I should have been in there lip-synching back-up. But I sat in the corner of the dining room and listened to the meditations on Mercedes and the plans for a homecoming reception, wondering what they would get wrong and who would be blamed.

Rosa, Lupita’s old friend and so much a fixture in the house she was often mistaken for furniture, cleared her throat. When she was still ignored, she stirred the air with her napkin.

“Qué quieres, Rosa?” Millie said, probing a molar with a toothpick for some impacted hominy.

“The Spanish look down on Mexicans because we eat corn.” Rosa leaned toward Lupita as if she were telling a secret, although she spoke in her normal baritone. “You should feed that daughter-in-law masa.”

Lupita was silent as the women turned to look at her. “We’ll have duck,” she said. And we knew we were to treat Mercedes the way we had always treated Danny – like royalty.

So the preparations began. Connie and my aunts did the shopping and cleaning and, in the process, some refurbishing as well. Whenever they dropped by with a bag of groceries or to take their turn at scraping crust from the kitchen tiles or sweeping cobwebs from the porch ceiling, they also settled some new accessory onto the faded décor of Lupita’s house. Petra planted freshly crocheted doilies under ash trays, Lyla draped serapes over the backs of chairs which clashed with the floral pillows Millie tossed artistically against the worn seats. Connie donated a large plastic fuchsia and Frannie sprinkled knickknacks like confetti.

My mother and my aunts had a common decorating scheme – nouveau kitsch – a blend of Early American and 1960s colored-glass-doodad ornamentation. They coveted patchwork quilt cushions on maple rockers, as if they had crossed the plains themselves on Ward Bond’s Wagon Train with their heirlooms, muslin skirts, and Calamity Jane spunk. They accented their colonial trestle leg tables with Montgomery Ward accessories – ashtrays and vases blown from purple, green, or orange glass in sleek shapes that lifted upward like flower petals or curled like an ocean wave.

Even with this shared décor, their living rooms were distinguished one from the other by some particular detail – Grecian statues for Millie, stained glass coasters for Petra, cuckoo clocks for Frannie, mirrors for Lyla, and for Connie a profusion of artificial plants. My mother cultivated a plastic garden of ivy and fern, not from pots or vases, but from the head of a shepherdess or the belly of a troll – ceramic figurines she painted and glazed herself at the community center adult craft classes.

When I was young I was completely taken with this world my mother had created with the fake greenery springing from fake waterfowl, gnome, or other creature of the woodland. My sisters and I rotated dusting and vacuuming chores, and every third Saturday it was my turn to take a rag to the week’s accumulation of dust on the imitation flora and fauna. My aversion to housework found an exception in this chore. I was meticulous in the grooming of each plastic leaf, each ceramic curve, and when my mother said “good” and slipped an extra quarter in my hand, the callused tips of her fingers in my palm were as good as the hugs to which she was not often given.

“Woolworth’s in Tijuana,” was my cousin Leonard’s assessment of the aunts’ embellishments of Lupita’s living room. He was in high school, a cheerleader, and on the spirit committee responsible for festooning hallways with posters and streamers prior to football games. He had credentials, so when he recruited us kids to make decorations for the reception, we placed ourselves in his apprenticeship.

We met at Lupita’s house every day after school, which annoyed me. I had been in the habit of spending afternoons alone at Lupita’s, biking over after lying to Connie that I had no homework. I wasn’t fitting in at school, stymied as I was by the social rules and customs of junior high, and at home Connie misinterpreted my every grunt and glare. It was relaxing to be with Lupita because it was clear why we didn’t understand each other.

Lupita didn’t speak English, even after over forty years in this country. The only Spanish I knew came either from the elementary textbooks at school or the pejoratives, endearments, or exclamations that flecked my aunts’ conversations. So aside from a trite comment on the weather, I had little to say to Lupita, since a context for bursting out with hay que pendejo or maldito sea seldom presented itself.

I generally just shadowed her at whatever she happened to be doing. Sometimes I sat with her on the couch, she watching a telenovela and I watching her twist her knuckles over the black and white melodrama until Sergio came in to claim the TV for the news or the fights. Sometimes I leaned against the kitchen sink while she slapped tortillas between her rough palms, or I trailed her around her rose bushes as we both pinched off brown petals, massaging the scent into our fingertips. Throughout, Lupita chatted in Spanish, a soothing murmur. Perhaps she was talking to herself. Still I responded, simulating conversation as I alternated nods and small laughs with something mumbled and incoherent.

But now because of Mercedes, my afternoons alone with Lupita had turned into a quilting bee of sorts, with many of my cousins showing up – even Tony, the budding family Romeo – and Rosa and Leonard vying for queen bee status. Rosa was teaching us to make paper flowers and we were piecing them together to make assorted frills and flourishes – bouquets, trellises, window hangings – supposedly to offset the Woolworth effect. Rosa demonstrated the technique she had learned as a girl in Mexico, though it was hard for us to imagine this plump, mustached woman could ever have been a niñita. “Se hace así en Acaponeta,” she instructed us, her fat hands threatening the tissue paper into shape.

But most of us imitated Leonard as he experimented with shapes and sizes, and Rosa paid us false compliments on our reckless handiwork to show that she didn’t care. We paid her back by stealing drags from her cigarette when she wasn’t looking. She would wobble on chubby legs to the bathroom and return to find her Camel smoked to the butt.

“Ay, qué molesto,” she would scold the smoldering stub.

We took turns lighting a fresh cigarette for her.

Once, Tony nearly set fire to Bonita who had the habit of trying on all the flowers she made. They adorned her hair, hung at her throat, twined around her wrists, crisscrossed her newly sprouted breasts.

“You look like a piñata,” Tony told her. We always laughed at Tony’s jokes because he was handsome and we could practice our flirting with him. But then Bonita almost went up in flames and he had to douse her with Rosa’s tamarind water. Besides Bonita, well over a dozen flowers were among the casualties.

“You could have killed me,” Bonita screamed, flinging bleeding tissue paper from her drenched blouse and running to tell Lupita. It didn’t matter that Lupita understood little of Bonita’s hiccupping denunciation. She understood tears and within seconds came her sharp, “Ven aquí, Antonio.” 

Tony picked his way around the ruined flowers to face Lupita’s reprimanding finger and the cannonade of Spanish negatives. Being scolded in Spanish was always comical to us. We tittered among ourselves at the table and when Tony came back in wearing a grin, Rosa pronounced us veddy bad shildren, which completely broke us up.

Leonard recovered first, sputtering a final guffaw that gusted some unfastened flowers off the table, reminding us of the work yet to be done. We started up again, and because we were tired, of paper flowers and each other, the only sound in the room was the rumpling of tissue paper and an occasional belch from Rosa as we crimped and creased blossoms for Danny and his bride.

After a while Bonita said, “I wonder what Mercedes thinks of his hand.”

Our hand, we all thought, possessively. Our heroic Danny’s hand, its deformity something only we could rightly cherish.

Tony made a claw with his hand as he reached for a piece of tissue paper and we let escape an appreciative giggle or two. But Rosa shushed us, having decided to take credit for and maintain the quiet that had slumped on us before. We obliged Rosa, because sometimes we just did.

Danny was our favorite uncle, though we rarely saw him. We knew him from pictures and from the scant memories of his visits on leave from the army. He was trim and athletic, performing pushups on our command, and his laugh resembled a riot of crows. But the best thing about him was his burnt hand, which we learned about the summer I was seven.

We were at the dinner table when Millie called with the news of Danny’s deed. My father always made us ignore a ringing phone at meals and we all dutifully continued chewing until the caller gave up. But when the ringing persisted, my father leaned over and grabbed the receiver from the wall with the intention of slapping it back on the hook. But Millie’s voice could already be heard calling for Connie who, though frowning at the interruption, nevertheless, hurried to the phone.

Now we all stopped chewing so we could hear better.

My mother’s two-word exclamations gave us the story in abbreviated form.

“A fire? His hand? A medal?”

But it would all be embellished as the story was retold over Sunday dinner at Lupita’s, and when we finally read the account in the Stars and Stripes that Danny sent, we were appalled that they hadn’t got the details right.

“That’s the military for you,” Millie said.

And everyone nodded, confident of the truth.

Danny earned leave for his heroics and we got to see the fresh scars. The women fussed over him and the men patted him on the back, hesitant to shake the newly healed hand. For us kids, he would contract the tendons and then offer the deformed pincers to one of us. “Wanna kiss it?” he’d hiss. And we’d scream, even though we always felt honored to have the ugly hand thrust in our direction.

But none of us was so favored when Danny came home, his arms for once empty of the European chocolate we were accustomed to expect, too full were they with Mercedes whom he carried over the threshold of the Sunset Inn. A misunderstanding about the flight schedule resulted in no one meeting the newlyweds at the airport. Their arrival apparently unheralded, Danny hailed a taxi which delivered them to the best Kimball Park could offer – a two-star motel by the bay. So Mercedes could be awakened by the sound of gaviotas, explained Millie with a laugh to Connie and Lyla as they sipped lemonade on our front porch a day before the reception.

“What are gaviotas?” I asked from inside the screen door.

Lyla made a squawking sound.

“Seagulls,” Millie translated.

“Did you do your homework?” Connie asked, squinting to see me through the screen.

I opened the door and joined them on the steps. “I think the sound of gaviotas is romantic,” I said. I meant the word and not the actual bird, but I knew they would get it wrong.

“Listen to the expert,” Lyla said, winking over her cigarette at Millie. This affront allowed me to rise and stalk off. Performing my adolescent tantrums in front of an audience served both me and my mother. Her admonitions were more subdued when subjected to the arched eyebrows of her sisters. But at least my huffy, stomping exit left her with sympathetic company.

I took my bike and headed to Lupita’s. On the way I thought of Mercedes’s fondness for seagulls and twice aimed my bike at a gaviota roosting by the side of the road. I sprinted the last few blocks and arrived in Lupita’s living room with my hair in a snarl and sweat sucking my shirt to my armpits. I was about to flap the hem of my shirt for ventilation when I noticed the man on the couch grinning at me, a familiar sight, altered, though, by the fact of the woman next to him.

“Hey, stranger,” Danny said, getting up to hug me. He smelled like limes and cigarettes and something else, something new and foreign. Then Mercedes stood and Danny introduced us. She was small, her streaked-blonde bun level with my nose. Though I knew the Magda image had been a figment of our imaginations and ill will, I felt that somehow Mercedes was an impostor in her petite frame and mousy face.

“Mucho gusto,” she said, which I mumbled back at her.

They sat down on the couch again, and I perched on the arm of Sergio’s easy chair. I watched Mercedes cross her legs so that her sandal with its painted toenails touched Danny’s trousers. Danny draped his right arm around her shoulder and fingered the strap of her sundress with his burnt hand. Or what was supposed to be his burnt hand. Confused, I checked his left hand for signs of damage, but it was unblemished. My eyes went back to his right hand and I realized the scars had faded. The mottling and discoloration, the ridged skin were still there, but now were barely noticeable, and in a certain light, at a certain angle, they were nearly invisible.

“Well, what do you think? I’m a married man now.”

“Great,” I said, studying the daisies on Mercedes’s dress which were overly large and bright, an annoyingly welcome distraction from Danny’s practically normal hand.  “Congratulations.” I looked at Mercedes, who answered “grathias.”

“Did you hear that?” said Danny. “It’s Castilian.” Then he talked in his jaunty and meandering speech about how they had met. He was on leave in Madrid, buying a round for his buddies when Mercedes began her shift at the sidewalk café.

Mercedes interjected something in her high-speed Spanish.

“You could see the opera house across the street,” Danny explained. “A Puccini opera was running.”

As Mercedes nodded to confirm, I wondered when Puccini had become part of Danny’s vocabulary.

“I had a bet with the guys that I could get a date with her,” Danny said. “She didn’t like Americans. But I surprised her when I spoke Spanish to her. That won her over.”

He patted Mercedes’s leg with his once-burnt hand and her toes arched inside her sandal.

We sat there smiling at each other for a minute until Danny excused himself to go to the bathroom. Then it was just me and Mercedes smiling. When our smiles went slack I could see that she had an overbite. She was on the cusp between pretty and plain. I pictured her serving tapas to my uncle and his buddies on a Madrid sidewalk, their leering faces lit by neon, and all of them ignorant of the baroque opera house across the street bathed by golden lamps, strains of Puccini issuing from its stone walls, and it occurred to me that maybe Danny had not necessarily conquered worlds – only Mercedes.

Mercedes gave a little sigh and we both looked in the direction of the bathroom. I searched the ceiling for something to say. “Las gaviotas,” I began stupidly. Mercedes smiled, waited. “Son interesantes,” I concluded lamely.

“Sí,” nodded Mercedes as if I’d said something original and profound.

Now I wondered if she was the stupid one. Or was she being nice? Either way, her response embarrassed me. I folded my arms and, still balanced on the side of my grandfather’s chair, I swung a leg back and forth, the heel of my sneaker banging the frame beneath the worn upholstery. I resumed my study of the daisies on Mercedes’s dress, wordlessly daring her to make conversation. After a few moments, satisfied that I had bullied Mercedes into silence, I stole a glance at her, and found her occupied the same way I was – absorbed in the daisies on her dress. I could tell her preoccupation was different from mine, though, and I looked away, not wanting to feel sorry for her.

Lupita came in wiping her hands on her apron. It was time for her telenovela and even her new daughter-in-law could not prevent her from her daily episode of Amor de Mi Vida. She turned on the set and adjusted the antenna for the best reception of the Tijuana station. Mercedes had stood up when Lupita came into the room, and I stood up now, too, and greeted my grandmother with a kiss, laying claim to her and to my place in the family.

But Amor was about to begin so Lupita patted me aside and took a seat on the couch, motioning for Mercedes to join her. I dropped back into my chair and placed myself at its edge to demonstrate my interest in the wretched life of the beautiful Gabriela de los Santos. I watched Gabriela’s perfect eyebrows rise in disbelief, her full mouth inflate with denial as the treacherous Ramón planted rumors of her lover’s betrayal.

“Mentiroso,” denounced Lupita under her breath.

“No le crees,” Mercedes warned Gabriela.

I felt my feigned anxiety for the soap opera characters turn to real concern as I realized their wretched lives were bringing Lupita and Mercedes together.

During the commercial break, Lupita filled Mercedes in on previous episodes and Mercedes gasped at the perfidy, clucked at the misery, and they patted each other’s hand in commiseration.

Danny came in with a beer and stood by my chair. I looked up at him ready to exchange looks of friendly exasperation. “Ramón is scheming to win Gabriela,” I informed him with a roll of my eyes.

“Oh, yeah?” he laughed. But then he sat down on the couch with Mercedes and Lupita.

I left them to their soap opera, left them to fret over the passionate and impulsive lives of others. I went to the kitchen and scanned the refrigerator, considered swiping a beer but took one of the bottles of orange soda bought especially for Mercedes. Out on the back porch I tossed the bottle cap in Lupita’s rose bushes and surveyed the yard. There was Sergio’s dilapidated shed that, though off limits to us kids, once served as our secret clubhouse. There was the rectangle of crabgrass where my cousins and I had spent so many Sundays playing Red Rover and tag. There was the cracked sidewalk that led to the rental that had housed Rosa and her husband Camilo since the beginning of time. And there from the gnarled branches of the lone tree hung the long-undisturbed wooden swing that we used to fight for turns on. I went over and sat on its worn plank, pushed off gently, my feet lifting slightly off the ground and I could feel that it was only a matter of time before it broke loose.

When I got home I told Connie that I had met Mercedes.

“What did you think?”

“Nothing special,” I said, but then I realized how satisfying my answer was to my mother, so I added, “just one more member of this whole entire stupid family.” And I was on my way to my room before Connie could send me there herself.

A few years after the burnt hand incident we saw Danny again. He had been assigned for special training stateside at Fort Huachuca in Arizona and when he finished he hitched a ride on the back of a buddy’s Harley-Davidson to Kimball Park where he arrived dusty and helmetless. Lupita fussed and scolded, chastised the buddy who, after depositing Danny and his duffle in my grandmother’s geranium bed, revved his motor and roared off, popping a wheelie before turning the corner. Danny waved with his scarred hand until the Harley was out of sight and Lupita, clutching his other hand, pulled him inside the house. We had him for only a few days before he would head back to Europe for missions he could only allude to with tight lips and lidded eyes.

When the family gathered for Sunday dinner, Danny laughingly recounted the journey on the Harley, its wheels skimming the westward ribbon of asphalt, the desert spreading out on either side, then the climb up the mountains, the twists and turns, and then the race down again. Finally, there was the stretch of highway pockmarked with warehouses, dying shopping plazas and used car dealerships that led to Kimball Park and us.

After dinner we kids played tag in the backyard, louder and giddier than normal because Danny was home. We still thought of him as being home, even though he didn’t live here anymore, hadn’t for a long time, and wouldn’t ever again, we knew. When Danny came out to the back porch for a break from the poker game, I went to sit beside him. I was sweaty and out of breath. Danny lit a cigarette and in the twilight, the flame from his match made the scars on his hand dance. He wasn’t talkative, so I stayed quiet too.

Every so often, Danny would be called upon to resolve a dispute over whether someone had been tagged or not.

“I’m neutral,” he would say. “Like Switzerland.”

Just his reference to a foreign country made us respect Danny. And I liked the word “neutral,” as if he was above the commotion and strife of the world and the squabbles of our family.

I didn’t know anything about Switzerland, except that it was the home of Heidi and it was famous for its clocks. Though neither of these things interested me, I wanted to go to Switzerland because Danny had been there.

“What should I see first when I go to Switzerland?” I asked as if my trip were imminent.

Danny leaned back on his elbows, the cigarette in his scarred hand growing a long cylinder of ash. He thought a long moment, looking up into the darkening Kimball Park sky. “You should see Berne. It’s medieval.”

I nodded, picturing serfs and plague from the pages of our encyclopedia at home, and I heard an invitation in those words you should see and I answered, “I will.”

He handed me his spent cigarette and I stamped it out for him.

When I came out of my room for dinner, the table was not set and my mother was lying on the couch. “What’s wrong?” I asked, wondering more about the lack of food on the table than about my mother’s well-being. She had an arm draped over her forehead, which she lifted halfway to peek at me with one eye.

“Your father took you kids out for Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

I gaped at her, waiting for her to acknowledge that I was there in front of her and not feasting on a drumstick and slaw.

Connie sighed heavily. “Why are you here? Why didn’t you go, for heaven’s sake?

“No one told me,” I fumed. “What am I, invisible?”

“Well, you’re very moody.”

“I’m very hungry.”

“You’ll have to make yourself something. I have a terrible headache.”

Connie sank back into the couch and I sulked to the kitchen to make a peanut butter sandwich. The peanut butter was too stiff and the bread too soft, so my meal resembled a child’s art project. More fuel for my resentment. Even though I was not fond of KFC chicken, there was still the issue of my having been left behind and I was prepared to make the most of the slight.

The phone rang and I grabbed the receiver off the kitchen wall. Millie’s voice reached my ear before the receiver did.

“Is your mother there?”

“Yes, Auntie, but she has a terrible headache.” I probably shouldn’t have put such an emphasis on terrible, but it went entirely unnoticed as both my aunt and my mother seemed anxious to talk to each other.

My mother called from the couch, “I’ll be right there.”

While I waited for Connie to shuffle her headache to the phone, I attempted small talk with my aunt.

“What’s new?” I chirped.

“Well, that Mercedes, I tell you. You just won’t believe –”

“What?” I prodded. But Connie was next to me now and I had to surrender the phone.

I sat down at the table and tore bite-size pieces off my sandwich, chewing slowly as I listened to my mother’s half of the conversation. Even though Connie was primarily the listener in any conversation with Millie, she could be counted on to repeat at intervals Millie’s annunciations and so suggest the gist and spirit of the story.

This was something that was baffling about my mother and her sisters. They never talked behind closed doors or in whispers, yet they harbored a delusion that their conversations were private and confidential. In a matter of minutes, I had pieced together that Mercedes and Danny had had an argument, after which Mercedes had gone for a walk and not yet returned. Connie and Millie were speculating on which one of Mercedes’s shortcomings was responsible for the fight.

I abandoned any further pretense of eating my sorry sandwich and mimed to Connie that I was going to take a bike ride. She nodded, absentmindedly, her face and body attuned, despite her headache, to the unmodulated trill of Millie’s voice on the line.

I pedaled quickly, as if on a mission. I actually felt as if I were on a mission, though it wasn’t clear to me what sort.

When I arrived I could see through the screen door that Danny was in the living room watching Perry Mason. As usual, Millie and Connie seemed to have got it wrong. If Mercedes were missing, Danny would not be sitting in front of the TV.

Danny beckoned me inside. I stood just inside the door, where I could see though the dining room and beyond into the kitchen.

“I’m alone.” Danny said.

The words sounded sad to me the way he said them, but, oh, so familiar.

“Where’s Mercedes?” I asked.

Danny shrugged. “Aw, she’ll turn up,” he said, as if she were a misplaced sock. He explained that Lupita had gone to the church and Sergio to the corner grocery in search of Mercedes.

I didn’t say anything, just stood there. Finally, he took his eyes from Perry Mason and I could see embarrassment. Confusion too. “We had a little fight,” he said. Then he looked around at the decorations tacked to the walls and streaming from the ceiling and gave me a feeble grin.

Leonard had come by earlier and worked his magic with the paper flowers we had made. The reception for Danny and Mercedes was tomorrow.

“What about?” I asked.

“Aw, married people stuff.”

“I’m never getting married,” I vowed. As I said this, I realized I saw Danny’s marriage as a betrayal, that Connie and my aunts did, too, and I didn’t want to be aligned with them. I sat down next to Danny on the couch.

He lit a cigarette. “You’re still young,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about any of this stuff yet.” He sucked in some smoke and then released it to the ceiling where it curled itself around some paper flowers. His words felt dismissive. We sat in silence while he smoked.

When he was done he held out the smoldering butt to me for old times’ sake, but I got up, leaving Danny to put out his own cigarette. I headed to the back porch, stopping at the freezer where Sergio kept a stash of Eskimo Pies. I claimed one for the rest of my dinner. I went outside and sat in the old swing, rocking gently back and forth, my feet skimming lightly against the ground so as not to stir up any dirt into my ice cream. I was facing the back of the old shed, staring at its sun-bleached planks and sagging roof, thinking about Lupita knocking on neighbors’ doors in search of her Spanish daughter-in-law, and Sergio at the corner grocery checking the aisles for Mercedes and picking up a box of cigars and a bag of salt water taffy while he was at it. I couldn’t imagine Mercedes from Madrid roaming the streets of Kimball Park.

I was down to the last bite of Eskimo Pie when I suddenly stood up, the swing thumping the back of my knees as if prodding me toward the shed. I rounded the corner to the front and saw the door slightly ajar. I pushed it open and came face-to-face with Mercedes. Though she sat precariously on the edge of an old wooden chair to avoid too much contact with the dust around her, her posture was prim, her arms were crossed and her chin firm with determination. But her eyes were scared and I was sure that I was not entirely the cause of that.

“Hola,” I said. For some reason I whispered it.

“So,” Mercedes said. “You find me.”

“Sí,” I told her, suddenly finding my little Spanish words ridiculous and her efforts at English touching.

I persisted in this bilingual communication and, trying not to sound like a cartoon, I said, “Qué pasa?”

“Oh, we have a fight.” Mercedes’s eyes began to leak tears and a reflex I was unaware I owned made me want to dab at them, but all I had was the ice cream wrapper in my hand. Another reflex took over and I told Mercedes to wait, stay there and I put my fingers to my lips to indicate a secrecy between us. I ran back into the house and grabbed an Eskimo Pie from the freezer and ran back to the shed, breathless with this gift of solace, and I was relieved when it made her smile.

I sat cross-legged on an old trunk and we talked, our conversation fractured and hobbling, a mixture of my elementary, unconjugated Spanish and her travel dictionary English. I learned that Mercedes loved Madrid and missed it fiercely, as she pressed her hand to her heart, in case her English did not properly convey her meaning. I wondered what it would be like to be in love with the place where you lived, thinking fiercely that I could never miss Kimball Park.

Then Mercedes said she was afraid no one here liked her.

“Not true,” I told her. “No es la verdad,” I said, a phrase I had heard too often on Amor de mi Vida. I was concerned it had a melodramatic ring.

“Sí, es true.”

“No, ees not,” I countered, and we laughed at the muddle we had made of our languages.

After a while, Mercedes asked, “Why you no ehspeak ehspanish?”

The words stung. I wanted to ask back why she didn’t speak English. But then I saw there was no malice in her face, just curiosity.

“Only the grown-ups speak it,” I said, which was no explanation at all, merely an anthropological fact, but Mercedes seemed to accept it. Or she didn’t know how to question it further.

“Mañana, tomorrow,” she said, “I want say something in English. Words to Danny.”

“Like a vow?” I didn’t know the Spanish word. “Una promesa?” I ventured.

“Maybe, un poema,” Mercedes said, hopeful, suddenly taken with the idea.

I didn’t know any poems except for the refrain from “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” which we had been required to memorize at school. I did know songs, having spent countless Sundays lip-synching back-up to my destined-for-stardom cousins, Rica and Bonita. We were the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Martha and the Vandellas. I had the perfect song – one that admitted confusion and confessed love.

Mercedes was a quick study, memorizing the lines I gave her in minutes. Then we scrounged around the shed and found a dirty crayon and a bit of paper, and I wrote the words down so she could practice on her own.

“Grathias,” Mercedes said.

“Grathias a ti,” I said, saying the word back at her, replicating her Castilian accent, pleased at how nearly authentic I sounded.

I walked her to the back porch and then ran off to round up Lupita and Sergio.

The next day the family assembled in the house on Palm Street for the blessing of the couple. Father Silvio, a nearly deaf, retired priest who lived down the street, positioned Danny and Mercedes at the wide threshold that separated living room from dining room. Garlands of paper flowers cascaded around them. Lupita and Sergio and my mother and aunts formed a semi-circle behind the newlyweds, close enough to touch the couple if they wanted, or push them apart. The rest of us stood behind Father Silvio, me and my sisters and cousins jostling with Rosa for the best view. My father and uncles hung back, restless for the poker game that would follow the ceremony and meal. Leonard, holding a clunky, important-looking camera, darted in and out among us all.

Mercedes stood composed in an ivory, A-line, chiffon shift with a hemline that invited go-go boots, but instead was coordinated with matching stockings and pumps that lifted her to my height. Her coral lips were closed against her overbite, which gave her a demure, flattering look. Danny was solemn and confident in his suit and his military posture. He was not a tall man, though he had always seemed larger than life to us. Now with Mercedes at his side, he was both more and less familiar. More and less ours.

I saw Bonita stare at Danny’s hand which hung at his side, the faint mottling a pretty abstraction against the dark of his trousers. I stared, too, and I tried to remember if we had really been scared or if we had just pretended to be when Danny used to thrust out his hand and hiss at us to kiss it. Father Silvio took Danny’s once-burnt hand and put it in the small white hand of Mercedes. He delivered a blessing, his Spanish made more unintelligible by the scouring thickness of his voice, which added to the mystery of his words.

When Father Silvio finished, we clapped almost as much for the newly blessed couple as for the end to the old priest’s droning, but he held up his hand to shush us.

“First,” Father Silvio said, “Señora Camacho – Mercedes,” he clarified, lest we all thought he was referring to Lupita, “has a few words to say.” He beamed at Mercedes, though there was a hint of uncertainty at the corners of his large smile.

We stood still and silent. It was possible to hear the rustle of the paper flowers caused by our breathing. My hands were sweating as I watched Mercedes take both Danny’s hands in hers. She looked at him shyly and began,

I can’t explain it

Don’t understand it

I ain’t never felt like this before

It was the word ain’t that set off the twitter. Where had she picked up that word? That bad grammar?

Mercedes seemed more intent on getting out her full declaration than in the reaction that was beginning to make a low whine around her, the way a mosquito sounds as it swoops in search of exposed flesh. She seemed oblivious even to Danny’s puzzled expression. I felt my face and neck go hot, and I closed my eyes as Mercedes continued.

Now this funny feeling has me amazed

I don’t know what to do

My head’s in a haze

“Is she all right?” one of my aunts whispered loudly.

“Qué dijo?” Lupita asked.

“It’s the excitement. She might be feeling faint,” said another one of my aunts.

Mercedes, determined to finish, spoke louder, more emphatically, her accent more pronounced.

Ees like a heat wave

I feel it

Burnin’ right here in my heart

Ees like a heat wave

With these last few lines, Mercedes had dropped Danny’s hands and placed both her own at her heart, which prompted Millie to shriek, “Get some water, quick!”

Millie’s outburst, rather than spur us to action, fixed us in place as Mercedes turned to stare in confusion at all of us. I felt that I should say something since, after all, I had been the one to put those words in Mercedes’s innocent lisping mouth, words that had seemed perfect for the occasion, but which now I realized had only been perfect for me and my befuddlement with the world and the hope to one day be out in it. But I kept quiet. Our nerves were straining with the silence, our mouths dry of saliva. Something was surely going to implode.

But then suddenly everything clicked, a collective light bulb radiated understanding above the heads of my hyperventilating family. Danny grinned his big grin, let loose the crows in his laugh and wrapped Mercedes in his arms, accepting the gift she had made him – English words spoken by heart, from the heart. It was a noble and sweet intent, never mind that she had little clue of the meaning. Bonita and Rica, having finally discovered one of their favorite songs lurking beneath Mercedes’s accent, began to warble, one of them assuming the role of Martha and the other channeling a Vandella.

In the commotion that followed, I tried to catch Mercedes’s eye to exchange winks or a thumbs-up or some other sign of team spirit, but she was engulfed by family. Lupita and Sergio hugged their new daughter-in-law, clung a moment to Danny, then the other grown-ups crowded behind to do the same.

Lyla and Millie handed around champagne in stemware redeemed with S&H Green Stamps and poured Dixie cups of Fresca for the minors. We raised our glasses and cups over and over, toasting the couple’s happiness, their health and prosperity, their fecundity, Puccini, sidewalk cafes, Danny’s burnt hand, Mercedes’s Castilian lisp, gaviotas, (my toast), America the beautiful, España para siempre (Mercedes’s toast). And then a reluctant final toast – a safe trip back to Europe. Our glasses were empty now and we were reminded that a taxi would take Danny and Mercedes to the airport in a few hours.

“Pues, vamos a comer,” said Lupita, herding the couple to the buffet laid out in the dining room. It was a feast we set upon greedily, as if it were our last. Still there were leftovers. Duck meat glistened in its gelled fat, rice fastened in perfect mounds to serving bowls, carnitas lay unskewered next to a brimming bowl of salsa. Though we wanted to, we couldn’t eat any more, couldn’t hoard against future hungers. There was a brief lethargy when forks ceased to rasp against plates, when conversation lacked the shrill one-upmanship of my aunts, when we were in danger of saying something cruel or stupid simply to avoid descending into silence.

Frank Sinatra saved us or rather Father Silvio did when he set the phonograph spinning. It was Mercedes who coaxed Danny to his feet, but then he took over, steering her left or right, back and forth, then finishing by dipping his new wife to a daring angle as Frank crooned the last notes of “The Way You Look Tonight.” Mercedes’s squeal was matched by our applause. Then Sergio and Lupita danced to Pedro Infante, Leonard led Lyla in a cha cha, and soon we all wriggled to the Beatles.

Enlivened by the music, we faced Danny’s departure like overworked puppies, jostling one another as we slapped his back a little too hard, rumpled his thinning hair, shook his once-burnt hand. We kissed Mercedes European style, bumping noses as we moved from cheek to cheek and even then it seemed I was lost to her amid the blur of faces. We formed a gauntlet down the porch steps and heaved paper flowers as they ran for the curb to escape in the taxi. I aimed especially for Mercedes and saw my flower catch in the crook of her arm.

I stood on the front lawn next to Connie, who closed ranks with Lupita to wave goodbye as our Danny left home again. They were silent, but I understood them both perfectly. Before the taxi pulled away, Mercedes leaned her head out the window, and even though I was in the crowd of my family, I knew it was me her eyes searched for, me to whom she blew a kiss. For minutes after the taxi disappeared around the corner, we stood there watching the traffic pass. Then we all went back into Lupita’s house, no one willing to go home right away.

I sat in the kitchen for a while listening to Lupita and Rosa converse in Spanish, not trying to understand, not pretending to.

I walked through the dining room where my mother and aunts were dividing the leftovers and trading gossip.

Then I joined my cousins in the bedroom just as Leonard was sliding a stack of 45’s on the record player. When the needle hit the groove, I was already in place beside Rica and Bonita to sing back-up. Not for the last time, but not forever, either.

Donna Miscolta is the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced (Signal 8 Press, 2011). Her short story manuscript has been a runner-up for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award and a finalist for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in a variety of literary journals, including the anthology New California Writing 2013. She has received awards from 4Culture, Artist Trust, the Bread Loaf/Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the City of Seattle, and residencies from Anderson Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Find her at donnamiscolta.com.

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No one drives their life, or even drives up to it. Fate’s no fast-food window. Take your order? Uh, I’d like a secure job, please, and a side order of soul-mate. Would you care to upsize to killer loft? What comes in killer loft? Airy ceilings, great light, sense of superiority. Not today, thanks. But could you throw some packets of meds in the sack? Sure: assorted? Yeah. Couple of anti-anxieties, anti-d’s, and a few sleepers. Think I got some at home but you never can be too sure. No you can’t. Your total will be at the first window.

To get something good, bro, you need a collision. A meet-cute crash. Fuckers our moms and dads’ age had it easy. They actually had to approach each other to secure shots of love. Forced to scope and flirt on each other at supermarkets and laundry… places. Whatever they were called. Laundry-mats. Dunno what they used the mat for, maybe to dry clothes on. Anyway, the chaos of encounter pushed them. They couldn’t talk their way into a date or friendship. Hells dude, when was the last time you and me even truly met, did a facer some place?

Other day I saw this pop-up ad for diamond rings. From a distance they looked like a pair of handcuffs. But once I made the connection for what it was, I didn’t get all hot sweat. I was like, that would be kind of cool. Handcuffed to someone else’s hand. I’m serious. I need this problem. Better than being a slave to screens, which is how life rolls now. Haven’t been part of a we or us in who knows how long. I’ve become a bunch of iI’s. iPad, iPhone, iWhatever: only thing keeping my lap warm is cathodes.

I don’t want it to be that way. So I signed up for a new app: CupidCollisions. It’s like blind dating mixed with bumper cars. Yeah! You know, bumper cars: those little electric shits at a carnie. Except only one party is truly driving blind. The app cross-listed people at our college who identify as “Single” or “Looking Around” on social media sites with the times my classes let out. See, classes are the hotspot. Each time they wrap, students got ten minutes to dash through the quad, quest from one rich-person-named building to the next.

We make these mad dashes with our eyes glued to our navels. To our screens. To make plans, flail at plans, report on class, ask what’s on the quiz, say who’s missing and guess why with winky-faces. Was teacher hung-over? She tumbled out of bed with that hair, at any rate. Since we’re not looking, we’re doing a lot of bumping. But what if those bumps had purpose? If I bang against someone the app identified as a potential match, not too hard to hurt, not to soft to brush off, it could lead…well, to love bumping. Bumper carnal. Something, bro, more than what I got.

You there?

Yeah, I did it. Three times, actually. After my nine, ten, and 1:30.

After first release, that’s my anthropology, no wait, my mineral science. Anyway after that, I was nervous. Bump someone early, it could be a day ruiner. For them and you. App told me I had several options to crash against. Except each looked like they knew I was looking at them, even though none looked up from their screens. Maybe the sky was making them angry: those grim clouds hadn’t cleared off the horizon deck yet. Anyway, no one looked like they wanted to be shoved.

By second release those grim clouds had folded into themselves or whatever it is grim clouds do. So I started my sortie in good spirits. Didn’t break stride. Type don’t look. Type don’t look. Then, bang! One got me right in the arm. Hot city. My pulse… wow. Launched into the concrete right along with my phone. If it spider-cracked the screen I wouldn’t of cared, girl was so pressing. And she was like sorry sorry sorry. And I was like no worries, no worries, no worries. And we talked about screens cracking. And she asked if I liked my new or old brand better. And I was like, coverage on this one flows. Layout is for shit, but data sharing is snap. All the while I’m trying to build some data bridge to get us talking romantic. Trying to recall what I said on my last first date? I talked up my watch chain, got on some run about squirrels. But before I could bring those topics out for an encore performance, she asked if I had a girlfriend. My screensaver today was an image of my sister. No mocks, bro, I just put it there to remind me to call her, but I sort of froze. I wanted to be like, “No,” but not have it sound “Nooooo!” Because then the girl would wonder if I was lying about screensaver girl. But the silence was a stammer. A broken link. A wreck in momentum that allowed the girl to remember her next class. And jet. And leave me in the quad down two strikes.

On try three, it came together. I knew I had limited time to make a mark. Had to keep up the stream. Veer from any tech. talk. That was part of the problem. We weren’t looking at screens, but we were still talking about them, you know? Hadn’t adapted.

Before I’d even hit the last girl, I smelled her. What she had on. Before even copping a proper gander, the diameter of her bones registered in my head. I knew their weight the instant we collided. Everything abandoned me but blood courage and smile. When I looked up to make apologies, all the data and discussion I’d planned out got overwrote with questions. The voices asking the questions sounded like a mix of judge and poet. One asked: you see yourself crushing hard on this person? Another: could she crush and crash hard on you? But what I actually said to her was, whoa. I’m seeing stars. She said her too. Well do your stars, I asked, share the color of your eyes? Because mine do. So they must be, I mean, good stars.

Pretty good live line, right?

Then she asked if I knew which stars had what colors. She’s into astronautomy! So I’m liking this unfolding. Science smart and perfect bones. We talked up stars a while, and I told her about the girlfriend who bought one for me. But bought it after she was an ex, and after the star was already expired. It’s become the gift that keeps on taking, each time I looked in the night sky. I told her I didn’t want to talk more about it.

And this girl asked, maybe you’ll want to later? I’m a good listener.

So am I, I said. But I already knew that.

She laughed. Then she said she could teach me to be a better looker. Said she had planetarium and telescope access this semester. We could go find my gift star together. Even if it’s dead, its flicker will still fill the sky for centuries to come.

Same as the light after you knock into someone, I joked.

Then I got bold—pretty much based off the same lightning bolt as awkward, but you aren’t sure which strike you’ve put out there til it’s already landed—and I asked, do you ever think people are asteroid fields? Ramming each other all the time, usually for no reason. But maybe every once so often, a couple go out of their way to hit on purpose, not to hurt, but join masses. If it happens at just the right moment and speed, just maybe the sticking rocks form and swell into a livable permanent planet.

She said, you’re funny. And you know nothing about science.

I know Thai food, I said.

Then she gave me her card. And I was thinking, Who carries cards anymore? So righteous old school. She might as well have been carrying a feather fan. But she was out of cards, so she wrote it on my palm. Not a Palm pilot, bro-ron. Actual palm. Even older school! Like light from a star that doesn’t know it’s supposed to be dead. Had to get that ink shit transferred to screen fast, because my hand got clammy looking at the digits. I’m 99% pure sure it’s really her number. Phone numbers have how many digits: seven or ten? I need a refresher. It’s so good to need a refresher.

Matthew Pitt teaches creative writing at TCU in Fort Worth. He is author of the short story collection Attention Please Now, which won the Autumn House Fiction Prize. Recent fiction of his appears or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, Epoch, BOMB, The Good Men Project, Oxford American, and the anthology Writing Texas, and is cited in Best American Short Stories 2012.

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When Natalie proposes a much-needed vacation from the endless New York winter, I jump at it. She’s always the one who hatches exotic ideas.

Two weeks in paradise; that’s our plan.

__________

And so we’ve arrived in this staggeringly beautiful country, small though it is, with its translucent blue-green sea, sand the color of bleached flour, and lush tropical vegetation. Of course there’s also a volatile and dangerous interior, far from the pristine beaches, where tourists fear to venture.

For the first few days we do nothing but lounge on the beach. I never give the office a single thought. Between margaritas and shave ice, if I’m not dozing or reading a paperback — no e-reader for me since I find them too utilitarian and therefore too much like work — I enjoy watching the other tourists, especially the beautiful, wealthy variety. The water is as warm as a bath. When I begin to sweat I dash into the surf and bob in the waves, my face tilted to the sky. Natalie warns me about getting sunburned.

“Don’t forget how sensitive your skin is, darling.”

My wife is the solicitous type, but I’m too lazy to give a damn. Everything feels too good — the sweltering air, the hard, bright light, the simple fact that I don’t have to be at my desk in the morning.

My erotic impulses have been jolted to life again. There is, I’m convinced, a correlation between torpor and libido. I desire damned near every female who passes on the horizon.

My wife, too.

“Shall we?” Her voice breaks into my reverie. “How about a shower and some dinner? We can try that authentic Szechwan place I read about….”

“Sure. Just give me a minute or two to find the motivation.”

On the way through the hotel lobby to the elevator a newspaper headline catches my eye.

FEVER CLAIMS SECOND LIFE; WIDER OUTBREAK FEARED

I stop and start to read. I’ve just glimpsed the words “method of transmission” when I feel a tug on my trunks.

“Come on, slowpoke. I’m starving.”

__________

In the morning I’m awakened by shouting in the hall outside our suite. Some kind of argument is going on — or so I think. It seems to be between two men who don’t speak English. I have the idea that they’re employees of the hotel, though I have no proof of it. And maybe it isn’t an argument at all, maybe it’s just an animated conversation; in this country it’s not always easy to know the difference.

The angry hollering is accompanied by a loud thud, followed by the sound of shattering glass.

Then utter silence. I wait to hear something else, footsteps, but there’s nothing. It’s as if whoever was out there vanished into thin air, like ghosts.

I glance at my wife: her eyes are still shut. I envy her ability to sleep through anything. It’s a facility I’ve never had.

While waiting for the fracas to resume, my eyes wander around the bedroom, with its cheerful salmon-colored walls and potted plants, and I have the strange impression that something about me has changed from the day before. But what? It’s probably just my imagination.

Beyond the drapes the sun is burning high in the sky, just like it was when we arrived. Natalie groans and opens her eyes. As she rolls over I catch a whiff of her hot, stale breath.

“Why are you tossing and turning?”

“Was I?” She always blames me for waking her up.

It’s already hot, even with the air conditioner puffing full blast. I whip the sheets off my body. On my left calf there’s a spot of blood.

“What the hell’s that,” I hear myself say.

“What?”

“Look.”

Natalie pushes herself up on an elbow and tries to focus.

“Mm. Probably a mosquito bite,” she murmurs, and falls back on the pillow.

“I don’t remember being bitten.”

“I got attacked myself last night. Those little so and so’s love me. I had to brush an army of them off my clothes before we came inside. Maybe I didn’t get them all.”

I’m annoyed at her, though I know I shouldn’t be. I pull a tissue out of the box on the night stand, reach down, and try to rub off the coagulated blood. When I do, there’s an angry red welt that’s painful to the touch.

It’s true. I’ve been bitten.

__________

I’m sunburned after all. I should have listened to my wife and been more careful. Instead of the beach, we drive aimlessly around the island. This purposelessness is incredibly pleasurable. After the boutiques and galleries, we find ourselves at a swarming outdoor bazaar. This is the kind of scene I find interesting and Natalie doesn’t. What she can’t seem to grasp is that I’m not looking for anything, just at what’s there.

I park our rented car at the side of the road. Natalie decides that she’ll duck into a nearby café and check her email while I stroll through the bazaar. There’s no point, she says, in looking at piles of junk.

The bazaar is mobbed with shoppers. Parrots and monkeys chatter and cavort in the trees overhead. I take my sweet time walking past the rows of tables with their stacks of miscellany. It’s nothing if not an exotic swap meet, a flea market, featuring everything from coffee beans to crude musical instruments, clothing to fresh produce from the local farms. The atmosphere is made more interesting by the Babel of tongues.

I’ve just finished thumbing through a stack of old magazines and postcards when through a space between tables our eyes meet briefly and the world stops dead on its axis.

It’s her.

It can’t be, but…it’s her.

Marrie.

I blink, and she’s gone, disappeared into the stream of market-goers.

I drop whatever I was holding. Could it really have been her? No — it makes no sense.

Because Marrie is dead.

There has to be some mistake. I only thought I saw what wasn’t really there.

It’s only now that I realize my heart has stopped beating. I grab onto the table for support. When it starts up, I see her again, up ahead.

I begin to jog towards her. I feel the others looking at me now, they must think that I lifted something from one of the tables. I don’t care. Everything about this woman matches the Marrie I knew — her height, the color of her hair, the way her haunches move when she walks — everything.

Sweat erupting from every pore of my body, I finally catch up to her. In profile there’s no difference either — more proof. The fine, straight nose, the thin, arching brow, the lower lip that’s fuller than its counterpart — it’s all her. It’s Marrie. She’s aged ten years, but I’d know her anywhere. Anywhere.

Beneath my shock is a wisp of anger. Just as I’m about to say something, I realize that she’s not alone. Her companion is a muscular, bald black man with a gold pirate’s hoop hanging from the ear that I can see. I notice that their hands touch, leaving no doubt that they’re connected. This is the second shock.

Now what? Whatever happens, I can’t allow her to get away, not a second time.

They stop at one of the tables near the outer border of the bazaar. Marrie reaches out and handles some kind of vegetable that’s long and green and leafy. I linger at an adjacent table and pretend to be interested in the cheap, handmade jewelry laid out there.

Marrie’s man says something to her.

“Si, I think so,” she answers.

The voice I sometimes still hear in my dreams has come to life here, in this most unlikely place, a rancid junk market in a third-rate country. It doesn’t matter that I don’t understand. Nothing matters except for not letting her out of my sight.

The man reaches into the pocket of his baggy cargo pants, hands over some money, and picks up the vegetable stalk. He and Marrie move on. Soon they’re beyond the tables and marching across a dusty parking lot. Just as they reach their vehicle, a beat-up, plum-colored Renault, the man shouts a few words. Marrie nods, and he turns on his heel and trots back towards the bazaar.

Luck is on my side. He’s forgotten something.

Marrie climbs into the passenger’s seat of the Renault. I wait until the man is out of sight, then move closer and try to peer through the mud-caked windshield.

She’s primping herself in the mirror attached to the sunshade. It’s all Marrie, every little gesture. My heart splinters into a thousand pieces.

I glance over my shoulder, to make sure that man isn’t on his way back. Then I go around to the open passenger’s window.

At first she doesn’t realize that I’m staring at her. When it finally registers, she looks at me and the hint of a smile appears on her face.

“Do you need something…?”

Of course she speaks perfect American English. Because it’s her.

“Marrie.”

I imagine that I see a tremor pass through her body. She cups her brow and looks at me, harder.

“Do I know you?”

I keep waiting for her to recognize me. Because she must.

“Yes,” I whisper in a quavering voice.

She shakes her head. “I don’t think so.” For the first time, she appears uncertain.

“I’m sure of it. Twelve years isn’t all that long, is it?”

She turns back to her image in the mirror.

“What are you doing here, Paul? How did you find me? Did you follow me or something? With that mustache, I hardly recognized you.”

“No. I wasn’t looking for you. I never looked for you. From the first day I assumed that you were dead. This — today — was by chance. I just happened to be walking through the bazaar when I saw you. It was a stroke of sheer luck….”

“I didn’t think you liked to travel to certain places.” She seems to be talking to herself.

“I thought you were dead,” I repeat. “All this time I thought you were dead.”

Marrie shakes her head again, her unkempt tresses more lovely than ever. Back in New York she was never less than perfectly maintained, and this new, careless look — shorts, sandals, diaphonous blouse — makes me want to enfold her in my arms, even if I should hate her for what she’s done. Because it’s obvious now that she thought she escaped — from our life, from everything. From me.

“I can’t talk to you about this,” she says curtly, “not now. Deaven will be back in a minute. You’d better go, Paul.”

“I don’t care about him. He means nothing to me.”

“Oh, Paul.”

“What about me? I was — I am — your husband! I need to know what happened. I need to know everything. You owe me that — you owe me at least that.”

“I don’t owe anything to anyone.”

It’s true. I’m impotent in the face of those words. Nevertheless, she appears to be thinking it over.

“But if you have to know, meet me tonight at the Black Rooster. It’s on the other side of the highway. Now go. Please. He’s on his way back.”

__________

“What in the world happened to you?” says Natalie when I appear at the café, where she’s curled into a rattan chair, an American magazine open on her lap. She looks at me as if she’s never seen me before — or as if I’m not the same person.

“Sorry. I got involved in checking out some watercolors and completely lost track of the time. You know how I am….”

From the tight expression on her face I see that she’s miffed that I stranded her for so long. But I can’t be concerned with that now.

We drive back to the hotel, change into our swimsuits, and head out to the beach. I force myself to pretend as if nothing’s happened, but the truth is that I’m in shock. I whistle. I talk without stopping. I tell my wife about the other gewgaws I saw on the stands of the bazaar, even though I know she’s not interested.

Facing the turquoise sea in the swelter, I feel odd; my mind is elsewhere. Elsewhere is the past, well over a decade ago. The date was the eleventh of September….

Though we’d known each other for a few years, Marrie and I had been married only a short time. We weren’t old, but we weren’t kids anymore. It was a good place to be in life. And we had one anybody would envy, or so I thought: an apartment in a choice neighborhood of Manhattan, we made money in our careers, we traveled. We had great sex. We were in love. Really in love. We talked about having kids at some point in the future. What we had was meant for the long haul.

If it were up to me alone, I would have said that Marrie and I were ecstatically happy together…except for the occasional feeling that something was wrong. What it was, I didn’t know. I never knew. From time to time I fretted over it, but all I had was a cloudy presentiment, which might amount to nothing more than a case of superstitious insecurity over how charmed our lives had been.

Marrie worked on the seventieth floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. She never complained of feeling dissatisfied or stifled or anything like that. Was there a problem I was blind to? There must have been — and I never saw a thing.

Once or twice she talked vaguely about living a “different kind of life,” but it wasn’t clear to me what that life was since she was never specific. And what human being doesn’t dream of living a different kind of life at least once in a while? Naturally I always assumed that a “different life” would have included me — why wouldn’t it?

What comes back to me now is that she kissed me that morning while I was still in bed and half-asleep. I’d watched her dress, then rolled over and tried to sleep for a few more minutes. There was something strange about that kiss….It was, for lack of a better word, mournful.

Later that day I thought I understood why it felt so sad. But it turns out that I was wrong — I didn’t understand at all.

As with so many of the other victims that day, Marrie’s remains were never identified. But I made my assumptions, as all of us survivors were forced to.

For a long time afterwards, I was nothing more than a somnambulist. After a few years of existing in a stupor, the cloud over my head slowly dissipated. I came back to life — at least in a manner of speaking. Through a mutual friend I met Natalie. But I could never get over Marrie and what happened to her. You don’t ever forget something like that, it’s with you every single day for the rest of your life. Because of the nature of the disaster that took her life, because of the lack of closure, it’s impossible to ever know whether the person who died was your one true love, if there is such a thing — the prism through which you view the memory of her is too distorted. But when a true love dies, part of you dies with her. Part of me died on 9/11.

To be granted even a glimpse of a second chance at life and love was a miracle. That’s what Natalie had given me.

She’s dozing, oblivious to what courses through my brain. I decide not to say anything to her about Marrie. There’s no point. Why inflict pain on her? She saved my life and I care for her, even if it’s not the same as what was there for Marrie.

What remains is the question of how everything went down. All these years later, at a point when I never even dreamed I would have to consider something like this, a range of scenarios begins to take shape in my mind.

When Marrie got to her desk that day, something must have made her leave the building before the first plane struck, otherwise she wouldn’t have survived. No one from the high floors made it out alive. It could have been anything that pulled her out: a prescription from the pharmacy in the bowels of the building…a book she decided she needed from the Borders down there…a cup of designer coffee from one of the shops over in the World Financial Center. Or maybe she needed to take a walk outside in order to think through some work problem. 9/11 was, as everyone knows, a magnificent day to be out of doors.

Or maybe she never even got to her office in the first place. Maybe she decided to blow it off altogether. I didn’t speak to her that morning after she left the apartment, so how would I know anything for sure? Assuming, that is, that she would have told me the truth. I understand now that’s an unsafe assumption.

Because I didn’t know Marrie at all, I realize that now.

But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she seized the opportunity presented by the great disaster to disappear. Forever — at least she thought it would be forever. Because she was violently unhappy with something — me, among other things. That’s clear now, too. She’d wanted to get away, even before those towers crumbled into heaps of smoldering, twisted refuse.

And so what I’ve believed all along, from that horrible day forward until just this morning, was false.

Marrie is not one of the dead.

__________

Another day at the beach. I go along with Natalie’s suggestion that we have dinner at the hotel.

When she’s in the shower I grab the car keys and slip out. Natalie would never understand what I’m about to do and I don’t expect her to. I’ll worry about explanations later.

Setting out for the Black Rooster, I begin to feel strange, very strange, as if my insides have been blasted out by an electrical current. I’m weak. Lightheaded. Dizzy. Something’s off — but what? I can’t remember ever feeling like this before.

When I can’t find our rendezvous, I begin to panic. I cruise up and down past the now-deserted bazaar, but where Marrie told me to look there’s nothing except for irregular rows of ramshackle, pastel-colored huts.

What was it she said?

“Meet me at the Black Rooster….”

Did she lie to me again?

For some reason, her words echo ominously in my brain. Maybe it would be better if I quit, forget I ever saw her, and went back to the hotel and Natalie.

But I don’t. When I’m just about to give up, I spot the sign, which is like a red explosion in the black tropical night. How had I missed it earlier?

My head throbs, and the asymmetrical sprays of hard yellow light from the windows of the dive do nothing but exacerbate the pain.

There are only a handful of vehicles in the lot. The surroundings — husks of cars, a dead wash machine and refrigerator — speak of another world. What would Marrie be doing in this pit, after the life we had in New York?

I don’t see the filthy Renault. The thought that she’s not inside is enough to make me weep.

I walk in and wait for my eyes to adjust to the dimness. The Black Rooster is a real piss-hole, all right, complete with sawdust and crushed mollusk shells on the floor, and the stench of urine and feces in the dank air. The few patrons, men mostly, drop their conversations when they see me.

No Marrie. I hear a hiss — they’re whispering about me. I’ve been had again.

My heart falters. Then I see her at a table in the corner.

She looks exactly like she did earlier in the day. There’s a drink in front of her. As I make around the tables, I feel as if I’m mired in quicksand. Those few steps are like a hundred miles.

“You came,” she says emotionlessly. “I was beginning to wonder.”

I drag out the empty chair, which feels as heavy as a dresser. Before I sit, I look around again: no sign of the man she was with at the bazaar.

For a long moment we take each other in. After all this time, it seems almost ridiculous to say anything.

“So…you’re alive after all. That’s what I wanted to say earlier, when — ” I’m furious, frothing at the mouth.

My beautiful dead wife is mystified. “What are you doing here, Paul?”

“I — I need to know what happened.”

She smiles sadly, even condescendingly. Whatever afflicts me is making Marrie seem unreal, an apparition. An image in a nightmare.

“It’s not easy to explain.”

“Why not? I came all this way….You talk about it to him, don’t you? Don’t you talk about it to Deaven?”

Marrie shakes her head. Suddenly compassion is visible in her blue eyes, which haven’t changed at all in the years I’ve not seen her. “You’re sick, Paul. Don’t you know that? You’re very, very sick.”

What she’s saying is probably true. But I don’t want to acknowledge it, don’t want to hear it, even.

My rage gives way to supplication. “I’ve never stopped thinking about you. I just need to know why you’re here. Tell me, and I’ll leave.”

“What difference will it make? Will it change anything?”

“But I have to know! Goddamn it — I have to know!” I smash the table with my fist, causing Marrie’s drink to slosh over the sides of the glass. Her expression changes. She’s very earnest now.

“A fever is ravaging the island. Haven’t you seen the papers? They don’t know how many people have it.”

The headline in the hotel lobby comes back to me. The bloody mosquito bite. The bizarre argument in the hall outside our suite. All the other things that have made no sense since I arrived on this accursed island.

“You’re sweating all over, Paul. You have it. You have the fever.”

There’s no denying it — my body is on fire. The barroom walls undulate, melting into mutating shades of crimson, until whatever is left is bathed in blood.

When I try to focus on Marrie again, she’s gone. There isn’t even a glass on the table.

It’s finished. She won’t be back. I’ll never see her again in this lifetime or the next. My eyes suddenly flood with burning tears.

The other patrons drill holes into me with their eyes as I stumble out the door into a balmy night that feels as frigid now as an icebox.

Where’s the car? I lurch around the few other vehicles and debris, frantically searching for it.

“Ay! Ay!”

Voices. It’s directed at me, whatever they’re saying.

“Ay!”

I stop and turn. Marrie’s husband, or whoever he is, is right there, his gold earrings like flares in the moonlight.

But it’s not just him: there are more in the shadows, a mob, closing in on me, until they have me surrounded. The night erupts with the fiery coruscations of knives, machetes, swords.

The cold blades penetrate my body, ice into fire.

Before long it will be me who is one of the dead.

Mark SaFranko’s novels, which include Hating Olivia (Harper Perennial, 13e Note Editions), Lounge Lizard (13e Note Editions, Murder Slim Press), God Bless America (13e Note Editions, Murder Slim Press) and Dirty Work (13e Note Editions) have collected rave reviews and a cult following in Europe, especially in France. His stories have appeared in 70 magazines and journals internationally, including the renowned Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In 2005 he won the Frank O’Connor Award from descant magazine for his short fiction. He was cited in Best American Mystery Stories 2000 and has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

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The torrents of rain have passed, but the river
in the backyard boils up with mud
and sloshes back and forth. Does it remember
the now-passed downpour the way a man would
remember, watching such a river, the power
of a force too much for him to bear without
it showing as a turmoil—now he’ll bow (Or
is it less voluntary?) in a gale-force, wait it out
bent and puny, as unmanly as a reed;
now he’ll spring up shaking at what’s passed—
a turmoil in his words and actions, his need
for pity and his need for love fast
swelling the banks of his prodigious dignity?
Dignity—from the Latin for what is fitting.
But nothing fits anymore. You see,
it’s a fit of weather that fills him to splitting.

Luke Hankins is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions, and the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (both from Wipf & Stock). His poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Literary Review, Contemporary Poetry Review, Image, New England Review, Poetry East, and The Writer’s Chronicle, among other places. He serves as Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review.

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Because it is too hot, I wonder instead
what it would be to tether my wrists
to the diver, to be dragged along

for the ride, to be left in a sandy bed, to be tangled
in the crazy resolve of discarded nets
and weathered boats. I wonder what it would take
for night to come. This is how I hope to die.

I want nothing of the heavy look inside my grandmother’s eye
when she grasps for the smallest word, repeats it
like a trained bird, and shuffles her hands

because she is too tired to wring them right.
Or when her eyes go wide and the nurses part
her lips, insert fresh tubes. I want nothing of those

days spent walking down the street and that salty taste
rubbed along my lips. I am tracing my wrists, looking

for a rope. I am asking the man
anchoring his boat to help me.

Stephanie Kartalopoulos’ poems appear and are forthcoming from journals that include Thrush Poetry Journal, Barn Owl Review, Phoebe, Grist, Harpur Palate, 32 Poems, and Radar Poetry. She earned her PhD in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Missouri and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Kansas State University.

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Kelly Nelson’s chapbook, Rivers I Don’t Live By, will be published this coming fall by Concrete Wolf Press. She has work forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Watershed Review and I-70 Review as well as an anthology of erasure poems based on Charles Bukowski’s poems. She lives in the Sonoran Desert and teaches Interdisciplinary Studies at Arizona State University. Find her online at www.kelly-nelson.com.

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We know what we’ve done to it,
birds hunted to extirpation,
fence-to-fence monoculture,

but still find it beautiful: Headlights
sweeping the ditch banks,
low, dark moraines out to the horizon,

featureless except for the ordering
of farm lights miles apart
like the running lights of boats,

and in the middle distance
the domestic glow of lamps
behind living room curtains,

a halogen light on a tall pole
encircling the empty place
between house and barn.

John Palen’s Open Communion: New and Selected Poems was published by Mayapple Press in 2004. Since then he has had chapbooks published by March Street Press and Pudding House, and recent work appearing or forthcoming in Upstreet, The Heron Tree, Midwest Prairie Review, Poydras Review, Arcadia and Delmarva Review. He lives in Central Illinois.

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It is called keening,
what women in India
do at funerals, that high
pitched, wordless sorrow.
I have seen it too, in Ireland
and the black churches
of my southern childhood.
It is devastating to watch
a strong-backed woman
collapse on her prostrate
lover, tearing at her body
and his as if to marry
the two. I think
of the tight, screwed
faces of my own family
last winter at my cousin’s
wake, their bodies bottled-
up, rigid, their hearts
more concerned with
propriety than grief.
I have always been
that way, too calm,
careful, emotionally flat.
But just now the thought
of you gone stings my eyes
and squeezes my throat
free of air. At the base
of my spine is a small
coal waiting to flame
on the winds of your
departure. It will lick
up my back and rib
cage, over my chest
and neck, burning
until I keen, my tongue
bloody with the wailing.

Carolyn Stice is currently working on her PhD in Creative Writing at UT Knoxville, where she is poetry editor for the graduate literary magazine Grist. She has a particular interest in the work of female poets, especially that which deals with the landscape of the body. She is also working on a project translating the work of women poets of Venezuela. Her work has appeared in  Cutthroat, China Grove, The Clark Street Review, Antipodes, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Stirring: A Literary Collection, and is forthcoming in Permafrost, Booth, and Electra Magazine.

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Alis volat propriis, Uncle says, citing the Oregon State motto.  His lips are stained with marionberry juice, and crumbs of the flakiest pie crust this side of the Snake River collect in his moustache, form a colony against, perhaps, your Aunt in the kitchen who kneads and kneads for next month’s contest at the State Fair.  You know that our state motto was written in 1854 by judge Jesse Quinn Thornton, that he traveled from Virginia to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois, and finally to Oregon to “improve” his health.  You know that members of Thornton’s wagon train eventually split off for California and became the Donner Party.  You know that, on the trail, Thornton often butt heads over the distribution of provisions with a fellow traveler named Johnny B. Goode, who was adept at sneezing blood into his handkerchief, making oddly floral shapes, but who couldn’t play the guitar worth a damn.  You know that Thornton and his wife, Agnes, would remain childless, and that he longed always for a daughter, and, as such, favored feminine pronouns, even in the face of mistranslation, and so imposed gender and, perhaps, the ghost of the daughter who was not to be, onto the Oregon State motto, translating the genderless Alis volat propriis (“It flies with its own wings”) into English as, “She flies with her own wings,” and maybe this was his stab at parenthood (Thornton often spoke of “raising Oregon”), or maybe he was taken with the yellow half-moon breast of the Western Meadowlark, our state bird, as she dive bombs the trailing vines of the marionberry—the vines that Uncle describes as damn-near bridal—emerging with a gaped beak that could be purpled, as if, with decades-old blood.

*

Here, any reminder of blood is just another kind of ring-less covenant…

*

According to the article, Cannibalism Along the Oregon Trail, “A family of four needed over a thousand pounds of food to sustain them on the long journey to Oregon, and when bad weather delayed the journey the food supply sometimes ran out, leaving the hungry pioneers facing death from starvation;” and Uncle starts on the new test pie, talks about hunger as if it’s something that can be bred, cultivated, and therefore, just as easily destroyed.  You want to ask him to clarify, but he has so many drupelets stuck in his throat.

*

The marionberry was developed in the laboratories of Oregon State University, in conjunction with the USDA Agricultural Research Service, by George F. Waldo in 1945, as the crossbred offspring of the Chehalem and Olallie berries, and was released onto the general public only eleven years later, after extensive “testing”—locating the perfect climate in which the berry thrive, which just happened to be the area in and around Marion County in the Willamette Valley.  The new fruit was soon marketed as the Cabernet Sauvignon of Blackberries, due to its earthiness tempered by sweetness, the volume of its smashing juice, and its “powerful size.”  Uncle swallows and sniffs, thinks of chainsaws and rain, evergreen needles, and the longest unrestricted coastline in the continental U.S.  All here, he says.  He says, As long as we’re willing to cut something down, we’ll never starve.
 
*

Ask the pioneers: Sauvignon means savage.  Cabernet derives from the Latin, caput, which means, depending on the context, head, sense, top, summit, source, root, mind, mouth.  That the word kaput also derives from this source inspires Uncle to kiss his paper napkin, and wonder, you guess, about the point at which all upper, oral savagery goes extinct.

*

Here, we name our state berry after the wine that most evokes our desire to take a bite out of one another.

*

Uncle wonders if in cannibalism is the urge toward extinction, or infinity.

*

Uncle wonders if he’ll ever stop laughing at bad jokes long enough to finish his third slice, kiss Aunt on the most tender of her scars.  And according to the Oregon Historical Society, “cannibalism was practiced on the Northwest Coast of America…off the mouth of the Umpqua River in Oregon,” and Uncle laughs the crumbs at the ceiling, and Aunt punches through another curtain of dough.

*

Uncle has all of them in a thick book on the toilet tank:

Q: What do tornadoes and graduates from the University of Oregon have in common?
A: They both end up in trailer parks.

*

Here, we punch not to hurt, but to soften.

*

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “As they forage, meadowlarks use a feeding behavior called ‘gaping’—inserting their bill in the soil or other substrate, and prying it open to access seeds and insects that many bird species can’t reach. Western Meadowlarks occasionally eat the eggs of other grassland bird species. During hard winters, they may even feed at carcasses such as roadkill… The buoyant, flutelike melody of the Western Meadowlark ringing out across a field can brighten anyone’s day.”

*

Pliny the Elder—who wrote of Scythian cannibals who wore necklaces of human scalps; who first called the berry, wild—may have written of another ghost-daughter, She is mastery, broken, tangled in a white lawn chair.  Fall, six meadowlarks cast flight shadows over her forehead.  She’s eating something vanilla, something sour with a silver spoon.  You wonder: lemon, yogurt, paralysis, horsefly… The bird plucks the fruit from the vine, shits an insect into your bowl, and you can’t move your legs, no matter how coppered, no matter how long… 

*

The meadowlark knows: the world survives by being buccal, by taking us into both of its cheeks, our flavor slowly seeping into cavity after cavity.  Uncle assures you: the day will brighten—perhaps even melodiously—with or without us.

*

The cornstarch binds berry to berry.  At the treetops, as within us, another kind of binding agent gathers.

*

The spruce tickles the windowpane like an awful violin.  This is not meant to be savage.

*

To drown out the sound of the trees, the berries hissing as their juice evaporates, to prove your hands still work, you compel your fingers to tango the broken piano, snaking the keys like the river, like the roaches through the sugar.

*

According to the Bureau of Land Management, the Umpqua River is wild and scenic, the beautiful heart of the timber industry.  In 1854, the Coquille tribe, who inhabited the river’s valley, ceded nearly all of its land to the U.S. government.  Seven years later, the river spilled its banks in what was then the greatest recorded flood of the American West.  According to a December 14, 1861 article in the Oregon City Argus, a gloom settled on a scene such as probably never was witnessed in our Valley before. The ceaseless roar of the stream made a fearful elemental music widely different from the ordinary monotone of the Falls; while the darkness was only made more visible by the glare of torches and hurrying lights, which with the shouts of people from the windows of houses surrounded by the water, all conspired to render the hour one of intense and painful excitement… the insatiate monster is still creeping up inch by inch, winding its swelling folds round the pillars and foundations of all the houses in its way, crushing and grinding them in the maw of destruction, and sweeping the broken fragments into a common vortex of ruin… On the fragments of a large barn, sat a number of chickens, bearing melancholy evidence of devastation above…

*

Here, beautiful hearts are born of devastation.   From its maw, come the berries of hybrid parentage that now line the Umpqua’s banks…

*

This has little to do with music, and every sound we use to drown out other sounds.

*

Uncle wonders: in what way is naming predictive?  He knows: ouragan, in French, means hurricane.

*

Marion County and, in turn, the marionberry, is named after Francis Marion, a slave-owning brigadier general in the American Revolutionary War (nickname: Swamp Fox) who is considered the father of modern guerilla warfare and who forced the Cherokee toward starvation and desperate cannibalism after decimating their villages and burning their crops, and who was tasked with hunting and executing freed slaves, and who inspired Lord Cornwallis to say, “Marion had so wrought the minds of the people, partly by the terror of his threats and cruelty of his punishments, and partly by the promise of plunder,” and who inspired author Neil Norman to call him, “a thoroughly unpleasant dude who was, basically, a terrorist,” and who inspired historian Christopher Hibbert to call him, “not at all the sort of chap who should be celebrated as a hero…  [He was] very active in the persecution of the Cherokee Indians and… committed atrocities as bad as, if not worse, than those perpetuated by the British… [and had] a reputation as a racist who hunted Indians for sport and regularly raped his female slaves,” and who was known on the trail for entertaining his men by trapping birds and breaking their wings and watching the poor beasts waddle in confused circles before mercy compelled him, with his boot-tip, to kick their bodies into the campfire, and who is now our pie, our pie, our pie.

*

Here, mercy is just another form of terror.  Here, we don’t quite understand the mechanism with which our state berry has flown to such heights of flavor and fame, or who precisely possesses it.

*

Cannibals capture three men on the Oregon Trail. The men are told that they will be skinned and eaten and then their skin will be used to make canoes. Then they are each given a final request. The first man asks to be killed as quickly and painlessly as possible. His request is granted, and they poison him. The second man asks for paper and a pen so that he can write a farewell letter to his family. This request is granted, and after he writes his letter, they kill him saving his skin for their canoes. Now it is the third man’s turn. He asks for a fork. The cannibals are confused, but it is his final request, so they give him a fork. As soon as he has the fork he begins stabbing himself all over and shouts, “To hell with your canoes!”

*

If one misspells Alis volat propriis, Alis volat propiis, that translates as Wings fly closer, suggesting the presence of a second entity.  Closer than what?  Or: closer to what?  In this is a cocktail of intimacy and foreboding, a little shock and just a pinch of terror, another series of ingredients we incompletely understand, but still, we name our counties, and our pies, after it.

*

Think about lionize, Uncle says, with a purple mouth.  A lion’ll rip your viscera out.  Watch it cook in the sun.

*

Audubon gave the Western Meadowlark the binomial nomenclature, Sturnella neglecta—meaning “forgotten race”—as he believed that the early settlers who ventured west of the Mississippi ignored this widespread bird precisely because it was so common.

*

The early settlers knew: our arteries only want to untangle like shoelaces, like the ribbon that tops a box made of cellophane and cardboard, in which this year’s winning pie will soon be coffined, cooling, gelling into the sort of softness that allows us to eat it without teeth.

*
 
Q: What is the definition of an Oregon virgin?
A: An ugly twelve year old who can outrun her brothers.

*

In the 2009 Oregon State Fair’s Marionberry Pie contest, first place went to Arlene Thorp’s Marionberry Surprise Pie, so-called for the “shocking” and “hidden” layer of cream cheese frosting, sweetened with sugar and vanilla, in between the outer piecrust, and the inner filling of local marionberries stewed with sugar and thickened with cornstarch.  According to the Oregon Raspberry and Blackberry Commission, Thorp’s pie is more likely than other pies to “protect against cancer, heart and circulatory diseases, and age-related mental decline,” until, of course, we get to that uncommon layer for which her dish is named.

*

Marion, Uncle says, and he does not say, berry.  You can’t tell if this is an utterance of damnation, or reverence.

*

If we can crush our food with only tongue and palate, we can convince ourselves that we’re not so violent.  In this way, survival on the trail, like our pie, can be fall-off-the-bone.

*

If one truncates Alis volat propriis to Alis volat, that translates as flies wings, which evokes that frenzied cloud buzzing over the corpses.

*

From Whispers: A Man Questions God, by Anonymous:

The man whispered, “God, speak to me.”
And a meadowlark sang.
But the man did not hear.

*

Even on the most current word processing computer programs, marionberry appears with a squiggly red line beneath it, indicating a misspelling.  A right-click on the word brings up a menu without any alternative spellings, but with only the generic options, HELP, IGNORE, IGNORE ALL…

*

In the article What to Eat When There is No Food, Nutritionist Tess Pennington states, “What will you do if your family is starving and there is no food to be found?  This fear is always in the back of our minds. There are many choices of tree bark that can be eaten,” which makes you wonder how long the pioneers endured sustenance by Oregon’s alder and ash and cherry and plum, juniper, fir, chestnut and locust before turning their teeth on each other.

*

Sauvignon for everybody…

*

Hail Marion, full of his Surprise Pie.

*

“The wood smell is the smell of Oregon,” Log Marker Ray Agee says, “When I come home from work, I’ve got tree sap all over me.  It’s on my glasses and in my hair,” and in this way, the body makes a pact with the woods that only starvation can break.

*

We watch the sky, the trees, the river, the oven.  We wonder, and wonder what’s coming…

*

“Promises that you make to yourself,” Francis Marion says, “are often like the Japanese plum tree—they bear no fruit,” and Uncle spits the harder of the marionberry seeds into a napkin with a wagon on it.

*

…and the meadowlark with still-working wings builds over its nest, a roof of grass and a six-foot long entrance tunnel, hatching its eggs and digesting its berries in this concealed layer between earth and sky.

*

Excerpt from The Eugene Register-Guard article, “OREGON’S MARIONBERRY IS NO JOKE,” by Jan Roberts-Dominguez (July 15, 1998):

The amused caller, a features editor from the Daily Hampshire Gazette, had just finished reading through the story and recipes on Northwest berries I had sent her.  My inclusion of the marionberry—one of Oregon’s agricultural pride and joys—had created a comical stir among the newsroom staff.

To them, it wasn’t Marion—“the berry.”  And they sure couldn’t figure out why anybody out in Oregon would name a wonderful piece of fruit after the mayor of Washington, D.C.  Then the marionberry jokes began to fly: “Are they habit forming?”  “Can you only eat them in hotel rooms?”  “They must be pretty seedy…” this unique variety… this special berry… perfect for hand-to-mouth consumption…

*

Step six in above article’s Marionberry Pie recipe: Prick dough with fork.
           
*

The marionberry, due to its “powerful flavor,” now dominates the current blackberry market, allowing us to forget its more subtly tasty ancestors—the dewberry, youngberry, santiam berry, the chehalem and the olallie—push them toward extinction, or the sort of infinity that’s ever eating itself, thus ever-surviving.

*

Q. What’s the difference between a Portland State University sorority sister and a scarecrow?
A. One lives in a field and is stuffed with hay. The other frightens birds and small animals.

*

Here, in our mouths, all species go hybrid and confused.  Our throats don’t know whether to swallow, or laugh.  Aunt brings out her 5th test pie like a punchline, the steam trailing into the air.  You think of vines, or bridal trains.  Between her stained front teeth, you can’t tell—marionberry seed, or cuticle.  The trees scream against the window, but they scream softly.  Before he even tastes it, he knows.  This, Uncle says, is the winner, baby.  He’s never been sweeter.

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer (forthcoming July 2014 from W.W. Norton: Liveright), Pot Farm, and Barolo, the poetry books, The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and the chapbooks, Four Hours to Mpumalanga and Aardvark.  He teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North.  This winter, he prepared his first batch of whitefish liver ice cream.  It paired well with onion bagels.

Return to menu

Our driver stood scowling curbside at LaGuardia airport. He snatched our bags, tossed them in the trunk of his car, slammed the lid, and got behind the wheel without saying a word. 

Welcome to New York City.

My wife, Amy, and I slipped into the back of the car. Our driver’s laminated identification card was mounted in front of me. His name was Demitri. In the picture he looked like he was about to strangle the photographer.

Before our seatbelts were fastened Demitri flattened the accelerator and careened around a line of cabs, driving violently, firing Russian cuss missiles at other drivers, left hand on the wheel, right hand pounding the horn, all while engaging in a heated argument on his hands-free cell. He maneuvered through traffic and accelerated onto Grand Central Parkway, pushing the engine until it was panting for breath. He drove with pace. He didn’t change lanes when it was safe; he changed lanes when he wanted to, dancing on the edge of crunching metal. Every maneuver was a confrontation, a contest of courage and control played on asphalt at 80 miles per hour.

Amy looked at me. Her eyes were big like silver dollars. The blood drained from her face as Demitri cut across three lanes of traffic without signaling or glancing over his shoulder. There was a rollercoaster in my stomach. I loved this man. There’s no one like him in Minnesota.

● ● ●

I’d been slaving seven days a week at a demanding job while Amy held down full-time work and pursued a graduate degree at night. Alarm clock, coffee, shower, commute, work, commute, dinner. More work for me, studying for her, four eyeballs locked on two computer screens deep into the night. We were robots. To get away from our grueling schedules we booked a four-day trip to New York City, the first time there for each of us.

On the plane we studied a NYC guidebook. It contained helpful tips like: “Don’t stop and read this book on a busy sidewalk – you will get elbowed.” When the pilot announced that we were approaching New York City, I glanced out the window as a corner of the Manhattan skyline came into view. I saw a familiar sight—downtown Minneapolis—but with taller buildings. And next to it was another Minneapolis. And then another one, and another one, and another one! The skyline just kept going, higher and wider than anything I’d ever seen. I clutched Amy’s arm and gestured toward the window. Peering down at Manhattan, my jaw hanging to my knees, I realized our city wasn’t really a city at all.

● ● ●

Demitri The Violent Russian Cabbie grumbled as he decelerated into the slow moving bumper car ride that is Manhattan. Amy and I sat quietly in the backseat, observing and absorbing Demitri’s Life Lessons:

1. If you’re behind the wheel, act like every other driver killed your mother.

2. Do not stop in front of Demitri on a narrow street and slowly back into a parking space. You might get murdered before you finish.

3. Crosswalks are not safety zones. Every encounter between a vehicle and a pedestrian is a game of chicken. The most assertive chicken wins. 

Somehow we arrived at our hotel having neither suffered nor witnessed any significant injuries. I tipped Demitri and thanked him for an authentic New York experience. He grunted and sped away, leaving us holding suitcases and blocking a sidewalk on the Upper East Side. I looked around and soaked it all in. Within seconds I was madly in love.

I mean, have you seen New York City?

Our hotel room could be described as “cozy” (the hotel’s advertisement) or “tiny” (our impression), but we had shelter and we were getting three nights for the price of two. We only got one bar of soap, though. Not one for the sink and another for the shower, just one, lonely, hardworking bar of soap doing double duty for two people. The hotel didn’t mention that in their ad.

Amy had a list of places to see and things to do. She is incredibly organized. I, unfortunately, am not. I didn’t take time to properly pack – on the morning of our flight I just threw a few things in a duffel bag. After checking into our hotel room I dumped the contents of my bag on the bed, reviewed what I had, and said, “Shit.” I was wearing beat up jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt, and I’d only brought one extra shirt. But the big problem was that in my grogginess that morning I’d stuck to routine and worn my black wool dress coat, the kind I wear with suits. I looked at Amy and said, “I can’t wear this long coat with my casual clothes – I’ll look like a child molester!” She tried to reassure me that I would look fine. I shook my head. “No way.” I pulled my second shirt over the one I had on and said, “Let’s go.”

We set out to explore the city. It was 35 degrees outside and my pair of cotton shirts was a pathetic defense against the harsh March wind that whooshed through the skyscraper canyons. I decided a sweatshirt would effectively ward off the cold and I found one at a store at 86th Street and Lexington, the kind with a hood and the little kangaroo pocket in front for your hands. Black. $19.95.

We waited at the cash register. The woman at the front of the line kept arguing that she shouldn’t have to pay sales tax on her clothing purchase because she lived in Toronto and didn’t have to pay it there. The clerk wore her down by repeating, with classic New Yorker annoyance and hostility, one indisputable fact: “This isn’t Toronto.”

Game, set, and match.

I paid for the sweatshirt and pulled it over my other shirts. No longer on the verge of hypothermia, I was now merely chilly as we set off on foot for the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art – MOMA. On the way there I spotted some loud yellow sunglasses at a sidewalk stand. Minnesotans don’t wear loud yellow anything; we favor earth tones that won’t draw attention to ourselves – brown, green, camouflage. But I was emboldened by New York so I bought the shades. The sky was overcast. I wore them anyway. With my day-glo sunglasses and black hood pulled over my head, I looked like the Unabomber if he’d shaved his beard and gone to art school.

Inside MOMA, first room, first wall, first painting: a beautiful Cezanne. Right in front of me, probably worth more money than I’ll ever make, and two more were right next to it. As I admired the Cezannes I saw a blur in my peripheral vision. It was Amy speeding into the next room, a vapor trail behind her. She had blown past the Cezannes, ignored the horde of admirers around Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” and skipped over other priceless art in less time than it takes her to write a check. Taking her to a world-class museum is as pointless as taking a dog to a fine restaurant.

Okay, that’s not fair. I appreciate art only marginally more than Amy does, and my appreciation is mostly artificial. I like to pretend I’m somewhat refined, but I couldn’t keep up the charade for long while Amy was injecting doses of truth strong enough to topple a horse. She pointed an accusing finger at a sculpture and declared, “That’s just a lump.” I couldn’t argue. It was, indeed, just a lump. A shiny lump, but just a lump nonetheless.

Things really unraveled for me when we entered a room that had an entire wall covered by a gigantic painting that was all one shade of red, but with a few narrow stripes of different colors. The placard on the wall said the artist intended this work to overwhelm the senses. It totally overwhelmed my sense of bullshit.

Then there was Josef Albers. One of his paintings of concentric squares was displayed. According to the placard, this painting was part of Albers’s most famous series, a “highly rigorous and formulaic” study called “Homage to the Square.” Evidently the idea of putting squares inside of squares blew more minds than LSD.

But much of MOMA was incredible. For example, I really enjoyed the Warhols. Soup cans, Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe I can understand. Unfortunately I’m not sophisticated enough to appreciate much else, including the bottom rung of the cultural ladder: Times Square.

● ● ●

New York is a city that moves. Cabs, cars, ferries, subways, trains, helicopters – New Yorkers are always on the go. Their first option is walking, a shocking change from the Midwest, where everyone drives from Point A to Point Z and every letter in between. We walked so much our first day in Manhattan that I woke up the next morning with aching calves. Calfitis. Worse case in history.

My sore calves made walking difficult, but they took my mind off how cold I was without a jacket. I nearly froze to death when we walked to Times Square, which we decided to check out even though our guidebook warned that New Yorkers avoid it like herpes.

I don’t know what was more tragic, our decision to go to Times Square or Times Square itself. New Yorkers, you live in the greatest city in America. Why did you make the focal point of your metropolis look like Generic Town, USA? Trust me, there is no shortage of TGI Fridays and Olive Gardens from sea to shining sea. And most Americans don’t need to go to New York to stare at giant video screens – they can do that from their couches.

If my hatred of Times Square didn’t make me an official New Yorker, then I became one as I crossed 7th Street at 43rd Avenue. As I entered the crosswalk, I noticed a flash of yellow to my left. Pivoting, I saw a cab turn onto 7th and come straight at me like a big yellow shark. I could’ve stopped and let the cabbie go in front of me, but I never broke stride as I stared him down with a What the hell?! scowl on my face.

He submitted and hit the brakes.

I smirked and muttered “That’s right, bitch.”

All he could do was honk.

Horns are the rhythm of Manhattan. Beep! Beep! Beeeeeeeeeep! Once we watched a string of five cabs approach an intersection. The first one hit the brakes at the last possible second on a red light. The cabbie behind him honked his displeasure—Beeeeeeeep!— and then cabs 3, 4, and 5 followed suit. Beep! Beep-Beep! Beep-Beep-Beep! 

The honking was my New York soundtrack. I awoke to it and its rhythm paced my day and lulled me to sleep at night. Beep-beep!! I loved it, but Amy was far less enamored of the honking and all the other NYC noise. At the end of our trip, as we strained to hear each other over blaring 80s music in a bagel shop, she finally had a breakdown. “It’s too damn loud in this place! Just like this damn city!”

She had a point. Blaring 80s music in the bagel shop, thumping dance rhythms in clothing stores, horns assaulting our eardrums at all hours of the day and night. Annoyance to Amy, but pure expression to me. The Midwest is so reserved, all undercurrents and subtext, a veneer of politeness hiding suppressed emotions. New York was a refreshing blast of emotion and candor. Express how you feel, say what you want, or get out of the way. Our first time at the bagel shop near our hotel, an intense Italian guy staccato shouted at me like a verbal machine gun: “Whaddayawant?Creamcheese?Toasted?” I nervously fished out my wallet and surrendered. It felt like a stick up. We named the place Gunpoint Bagels.

But the bagels – the bagels were delicious.

With the exception of the bourgeoisie chain restaurants in Times Square, New York is a smorgasbord of spectacular culinary diversity. Chinese, Korean, Italian, Indian, Vegan, Carnivore. No matter what our appetites desired, it was never more than three blocks away. I even broke my month-long streak of vegetarianism and got a hot dog from a sidewalk stand, the big spicy kind with mustard. Amy chided me for eating meat, but I reminded her, “Technically, it’s not really meat – it’s intestines.”

It felt like we traveled through an intestinal system to get to the pizza place in Brooklyn that our guidebook recommended as the best in New York. By this point in our trip I’d anointed myself Master of the Subway, and as we bounded underground at 86th Street I confidently explained to Amy, “We’ll just take the 6 to the A and get off at Jay Street. Easy.”

The subway is a microcosm of New York. Stuffed into tight quarters are every race, every creed, every color. Every kind of person on the planet. No one fits in so everyone fits in. Someone could walk on in a clown suit or a bondage outfit and no one would glance twice. Oh, haven’t seen that in a few weeks. On the three-seat bench across from us were a college student, a stripper, and a wannabe rapper rhyming along to the music in his headphones. A middle-aged bald guy in hospital scrubs got on and wedged himself between the stripper and the rapper. I don’t know if his butt was even touching the bench – he was popped out between his seatmates like fistful of flowers. He grinned. They were stonefaced.

On the way downtown we learned that the 4/5 was re-routed to the F track because of construction. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize the effect of this until the 6 stopped at Canal Street and an intercom voice announced that we were at the end of the line. I snatched the subway map from Amy’s purse and said, “Don’t worry.” I got us on the D, thinking we’d get off at DeKalb, but the D didn’t stop at DeKalb so we circled back at 36th Street and caught the R to the F to Jay Street.

Then we got off and I realized I had no idea how to get to the pizza place.

We had to go toward the East River, I knew that much, so we started walking. We were quite a sight: a shivering man in bright yellow sunglasses, black hood pulled low, grimacing from calfitis. Beside him his patient wife, wondering where the bozo was leading her now.

I stopped a fashionable young woman on the sidewalk and asked directions to the pizza joint. She pointed us down the street and to the right. I thanked her and she patted my arm in a somewhat sympathetic and somewhat condescending manner, as if I was an orphan from Flyover Country.

We rounded a corner and saw the pizza place. There was a long line outside the door, proof of its appeal to New Yorkers, except we soon discovered that no one in line was a local. Tourists. Every one of them. Probably had the same damn guidebook. But the pizza was good.

We walked back to Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge, checking another item off our list, and then we took the subway uptown to our hotel, where we were pleased to discover that the maid had not only cleaned but had left a special gift: a second bar of soap!

It’s the little touches that draw repeat customers.

● ● ●

On our final morning in New York we went for a run in Central Park (a heroic accomplishment, considering my severe calfitis) and ate cinnamon rolls in bed while we read a fresh edition of the Post. Then I pulled on my three shirts for the fourth day in a row, rotating them so the one that was closest to my body the previous day was on the outside so I could air out the B.O.

We walked to the Upper West Side, stopping at Theodore Roosevelt Park to watch some dogs play. Amy noticed that I was standing in a puddle of dog pee. “It’s okay,” I told her, “it’ll probably make me smell better.”

We wandered up and down Columbus and Amsterdam between 85th and 72nd Street, wandering into a shoe store, a pet supply boutique, a bakery, a chocolate shop, and a breakfast place. I was shivering and my calfitis was unbearable, but I wanted to keep moving and explore every block. I tried to absorb the city’s vibration—the cool crazy relaxed intensity—and store it in my bones.

We meandered down a side street, took a turn, and suddenly there it was: my dream house, the one I’ve envisioned my entire life. It was a brownstone in the low 80s near Riverside Drive. Peering through my bright yellow sunglasses, I saw myself sitting in the second floor library—my library—amidst hundreds of books, looking out my window, pondering where I should go for lunch that day.

Beep-beep! A horn jolted me back to reality, the sad reality that Amy and I can’t afford to buy a home on that block unless we band together with all our friends and relatives and sleep twelve to a room like migrant workers. I exhaled my fantasy into a cold gust of wind.

Amy said it was time to go back to the hotel and pack up for our flight home. We backtracked through Central Park and paused to sit on a bench. My eyes wandered and I burned images of New York into my brain.

I picked up a small jagged rock and slipped it in my pocket.

● ● ●

Five hours later we were on the ground in Minneapolis. We took a light rail train home. A pack of rough-looking teenage boys got on and sat behind us. One of them walked up and down the aisle, casing the joint. There was an eerie, tense vibe. I watched other passengers nervously shift around and whisper to each other. I reached in my pocket for my Central Park rock. It shot New York steel up my spine. “I’m from New York City, kid. You think I’m scared of you?”

I ended up leaving those words in the holster because nothing happened, but I still carry that rock in my pocket every day. I reach for it whenever I need a little New York energy, a little New York flair, a little New York attitude, a little New York confidence.

I mean, have you been to New York City?

B.T. Baker was first published as a fourth grader in his hometown newspaper, which printed his Christmas story about getting sick in the back of the family station wagon. As an adult he picked up several “noncreative” nonfiction publication credits before deciding to have fun with his life. He is working on a screenplay.

Return to menu

Erica and I ended our five-year engagement on May 21, 2005, in a diner outside Oakland Park, Florida. While I was in the bathroom, she took my purse from the booth and searched the pockets. When I returned, she rolled a half-smoked Black and Mild across the table. The plastic tip clicked against my fork.

“I thought you quit,” she said.

“I did.”

“I don’t think I can be with a liar.”

Truth was, I had been lying. I knew our relationship was over months before, ever since she said she wouldn’t move if a job or school took me out of state. The confession stunned me. After all, I’d followed her, moving 900 miles from Louisiana so we could live and work on our Masters degrees together. She dropped out three semesters later, but I stuck to it. I’d made a commitment. Her refusal to finish the degree seemed to mean that she’d given up on everything connected to it.

I couldn’t accept this and tried to salvage our relationship. Unfortunately, I did a shitty job. Instead of spending time with her, I kept ten-hour days on campus. When I finally came home, I shot some vodka, grabbed a Diet Coke and leftovers from the fridge, and retreated to my room. We barely spoke during the week. On weekends I studied, wrote, slept, or went out with friends. If Erica joined me on these outings, we didn’t act like lovers. I knew she hated cigarettes, but I started smoking again—even though we’d celebrated the day I quit with dinner and sex. The last time we ever had sex.

———

The breakup came a week after I’d gotten a new piercing. It was an industrial: a long, surgical steel barbell that chorded the upper curve of my right ear. I’d never seen one until Tanya, one of Erica’s friends, visited us; she had one in each ear. Erica and I fell in love with them immediately and told Tanya we wanted to get them.

“Did it hurt?” asked Erica. “More than a regular ear piercing, I mean?”

“Not really,” Tanya said, “but they’re a bitch to care for. The aftercare hurts a lot worse than the actual piercing. Your ear swells up twice its size for about a month, and even your hair will hurt it. Plus, if you get pierced on the side of your head that you sleep on, you can’t sleep on that side until it heals.”

“How long does that take?” I asked.

“About six months. Sometimes a year or more.”

That turned Erica off, but I still wanted one.

“Yeah, you should,” she told me. “You’re better at dealing with pain.”

———

Graduate school put a huge strain on my finances. I made just over $7,000 a year as a teaching assistant, and even with student loans, I had trouble making ends meet. So, in order to save money, I roomed with two people. One was, of course, Erica. She had steady work, sold her art online, and didn’t mind helping when I was behind on rent. The other was Ben, a 22-year-old programmer we’d befriended soon after our move. Despite the usual arguments over chores and such, we all got along pretty well. Ben and I were particularly tight. We would spend hours talking about everything from gourmet food to Jewish mysticism to The Iliad.

Both Erica and I knew that Ben prided himself on his observational skills, so when I got the industrial, we decided to prank him. We promised not to mention the piercing and placed bets on how long it would take him to notice. I said a month. She gave him two weeks. I made certain to expose my ear as much as possible.

Three days into the healing process, he noticed the swelling. “What’s up with that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Only when I touch it.”

“Huh. Maybe you have an ear infection.” He said nothing else.

Erica got tired of waiting after six days. Frustrated, she dragged me to his room, forcibly tilted my head to the side, and pointed to my ear. “Look.”

Ben stared for a moment. “What am I looking for? You’re crazy.”

“Look harder.”

At last, he saw the two-inch barbell, red skin bulging against round ends. “Oh.” He shrugged and turned back to his keyboard. “I thought that was a hairpin.”

———

My ear was still tender the next day, that afternoon in the diner. I had my hair in a ponytail so it wouldn’t irritate my swollen helix. When I realized that Erica was really breaking up with me, I took off my engagement ring and tried to give it to her.

“Keep it,” she said. “It’s yours now.”

I slipped the ring back onto my finger. Honestly, I was glad. My hand was used to its weight. After a couple of deep breaths, I pulled my hair down to hide my face, hide how upset I was. As my hands moved away from my head, the ring accidentally clipped the piercing. That’s when I started crying.

———

Temp work paid less than usual that summer. Before I knew it, I was months behind on my car note and had a credit card in collections. I wanted to move out but thought I couldn’t afford to live alone. So, six weeks after the breakup, I agreed to move with Erica and Ben into a two-floor, three-bedroom townhouse in Coral Springs. The place was nice—new tile, washer and dryer, cupboard under the stairs à la Harry Potter. We didn’t mind the Clinique-green exterior or the fact that it faced a sketchy apartment complex. For the bargain price of $1,300 a month, we were willing to overlook an ugly paint job and bad neighbors.

The best part was the space. We finally had enough room for everyone’s stuff. But despite all the square footage, shelving was limited. We had over a thousand books and only a few bookcases between us. Ben insisted on keeping his entire library in his room for easy access while working. Both Erica and I had small shelves to keep in our rooms for the books we needed most, but the rest had to remain downstairs. When she suggested we consolidate our libraries to conserve what little shelf space we had, I flipped.

“They’re my goddamn books. I don’t want to mix them up.”

“But we don’t have enough shelf space.”

“I’ll stack them on the floor.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Fuck you.”

She left the shelves open anyway.

I protested for a few days by keeping my books in stacks and boxes. It didn’t take long, though, to realize that Erica was right. I couldn’t leave my library all over the living room. So I filled the spaces she’d made for me. My books on literary theory sat beside her comic collection. Nabokov’s Pale Fire next to Anton Wilson’s Ishtar Rising. A dog-eared copy of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s technical manual cozying up to a catalog of Bernini’s sculptures.

It was strange, keeping my most important possessions with someone else’s. I’d read an essay that said the surest sign of love among bibliophiles was the consolidation of personal libraries. But we had done this out of necessity; by the time Erica and I combined our books, the engagement was over. I wanted to pretend her comics, Ishtar Rising, and Bernini were mine. I couldn’t. She knew what was hers.

———

We didn’t tell Ben about the breakup right away. His previous roommates, a married couple, had stiffed him three months’ rent when they moved out after their divorce. Erica and I didn’t want him to think we’d do the same. Besides, we didn’t know how to talk about it publicly. We were too busy acting like nothing was wrong. Once school started, however, I spent less time home than before. My ten-hour days became fourteen-hour days. I left at 8 AM and didn’t return until after 10 PM. The daily shots of vodka multiplied.

A couple of weeks after the move, Ben confronted me in the kitchen.

“How come you’re never home?”

I shrugged. “I’m always busy.”

“Bullshit. The semester just started. You can’t be that busy yet.” Pause. “Is it my fault?”

“Dude, you are the least of my problems.”

“Then it’s Erica.”

What could I say? I hadn’t been able to admit to anyone that our relationship was over. I shrugged again, left the kitchen, and went upstairs to Erica’s room.

“We have to tell him,” I said.

She nodded, as if expecting the moment, and followed me downstairs. We all gathered in the kitchen, our cat curling around our ankles, to discuss the breakup. Erica and I swore that it wouldn’t affect our ability to pay rent. That nothing had really changed—after all, didn’t we still act the same around each other?—and we would keep our personal lives separate from our financial obligations. Ben remained silent.

Afterwards, Erica shut herself in her room. I followed Ben to his room, sat on his king-sized bed, and cried. Even though the industrial was healing well, my ear throbbed. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was crying or because I’d somehow managed to bump it while crying. “What am I supposed to do now?” I asked.

He answered with a box of tissues and a copy of Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat. “Read this. You can’t keep it, but it’ll make you feel better.”

———

The Stainless Steel Rat is not a breakup story, but a science-fiction adventure about James Bolivar diGriz, a master thief, con-artist, and liar—the Stainless Steel Rat of the title. After accidentally joining a government agency, James meets a sexy murderess named Angelina who paid for her cosmetic surgeries by stealing. Of course, he thwarts her schemes, cures her homicidal tendencies, and makes an honest woman out of her in the end. Light-hearted, ridiculous stuff. Still, even as I wondered why Ben recommended The Stainless Steel Rat, reading it made me feel better. James and Angelina had big problems, and it worked out between them. Maybe I could work out my problems with Erica.

———

Hurricane Wilma struck Coral Springs on October 24, 2005. It damaged approximately 14,000 power poles, more than the total number of poles replaced after Hurricanes Charley, Frances, and Jeanne in 2004. An estimated 95% of Broward, Dade, and Palm Beach County residents lost power. Erica and I were among them. Ben was not; he was in Phoenix attending a convention.

Having weathered many hurricanes over the years, Erica and I assumed Wilma would be a cakewalk. We made only basic preparations. When the power went out in the morning, we celebrated with shots of Cuervo Gold. It took us most of the day to realize we still had meat in the freezer.

Neither of us had ever barbecued, but by sunset, we were more than drunk enough to believe we could. We stacked charcoal briquettes in a lopsided pyramid, following the diagrams on the bag. When we realized we didn’t have lighter fluid, Erica coated a sheet of newspaper with cooking spray and used that to start the fire. Once the coals whitened at the edges, we made hamburger patties and cooked them until the juices ran clear.

We sat in lawn chairs and ate the bunless burgers with our fingers, congratulating each other on our combined genius. Post-hurricane breezes tangled our twin ponytails around our necks and ears. The coals smoldered white-red in the pit, their smoke almost overpowering the backyard ligustrums. The sky darkened. With the lights out all over south Florida, stars we’d never seen before emerged. It was like all the electricity had been scatted above our heads.

Erica suggested I bring out my book of starmaps, so I did—along with a portable radio, batteries, and a flashlight. As I flipped through the charts, she put the batteries in the radio and cued up a local station. We spent the next hour and a half talking, drinking, searching the sky for every constellation in the book. The host rattled off deaths, gas shortages, and boil-water orders in the background. And every twenty minutes, a commercial break interrupted the news, advertising everything from the Red Cross to custom engagement rings. If it wasn’t for the host’s voice, I could have imagined this was any ordinary fall night before our breakup. But we were just two roommates sitting outside, shooting tequila, wondering how we’d never noticed all the stars.

“Doesn’t it feel,” Erica said during one of the jewelry commercials, “like we’re listening to a broadcast from another universe?”

“Yeah, it does.” I wondered if she’d timed it, wanted to speak over the advertiser so I wouldn’t get any ideas.

“You should write a story about it. A science fiction story about two chicks who buy a radio that only picks up channels from other dimensions.”

“Sounds like something Stephen King would write.”

“I like Stephen King.”

“No one would read it.”

“I’d read it.” She would, and I didn’t want to argue. It broke the illusion.

“I’m gonna go study for the GRE.”

“How, read Milton by candlelight? Fuck grad school. Let’s play Trivial Pursuit.”

Of course she wanted to spend time together when we weren’t together. But any time spent with her was time I could pretend we were still engaged. “Sure. You go set up the board. I’ll bring in our stuff.”

By the time I got everything inside, Erica had the game, four Capri Suns, two shotglasses, and bottle of Cuervo set up. “Hurricane rules: every time you get a piece, you have to take a shot.”

“You’re going down, bitch.”

I won the first match and drunkenly proclaimed that I’d always win because it was my game and I’d memorized all her cards. She called me a cheater, swapped decks, and won the second round.

———

We didn’t divide our stuff until I’d completed my Masters and was moving to Mississippi to start my PhD. That’s when the real split happened. Didn’t matter that she already had a new girlfriend and hadn’t thought of me as her future wife for a year. Everything else had been practice.

I packed my dishes, left her pots. My television. Her DVDs. She insisted I take everything she owned that she couldn’t use without me—her Playstation games, which were useless without my PS2. Her lampshades, without my lamps, just took up space. Our mixed shelves yielded seventeen boxes, each one carefully numbered and labeled with its contents. I was tempted to pick through her library, take what I wanted. She probably wouldn’t have noticed until I was long gone. But books were sacred. I had no intention of alienating her.

“What about our armchairs?” I asked. We’d received them as a joint housewarming gift before anyone knew about the breakup.

“Take them. What do I need armchairs for?”

“I don’t know if I’ll have room in the truck.”

“Then leave them. Whatever. They’re just chairs.”

“But they’re our chairs.”

“They can’t be our chairs if you’re not here.”

I couldn’t argue with her logic. “Well, I’m giving them to you. You can keep them.”

“That’s stupid. What am I going to do with two armchairs?”

I don’t remember how the argument turned from chairs to our relationship, but I do remember that I finally stopped pretending that everything was okay. I bitched about moving to Florida in the first place, how her choice had cost me my savings and my independence. How she’d never finished school. How I’d supported that decision—all her decisions—when she had no intention of returning the favor. How sick I was of relying on her when all I wanted was for her to rely on me. How impossible that was. How we weren’t getting married.

When I finished shouting, she narrowed her eyes. “You,” she said, “are the most selfish bitch on the planet.”

———

Erica is right. I am selfish. I know this because of the industrial. I say that I got it for her, but that isn’t true. I thought it looked nice; I got it for me. I could have set the cost of the piercing aside—plus all the money I spent on cigarettes, alcohol, distractions—to move out, start over. Instead, I spent a year leeching off her and imagining that she’d come back, be my blushing bride. Like that would have happened. She had her mind set on a tux and wouldn’t have worn a dress if I’d begged.

She is right about a lot, including the pain. Not because of the industrial. Because I could ignore the rift between us. Because when she called me selfish, I knew she was right and started throwing things. Small objects at first, then bigger ones. I had a glass bottle aimed at her head before I caught myself, stopped mid-throw, and punched a wall instead. A wall that had been repaired with a steel plate.

Yes, I am good at dealing with pain. I packed with a broken hand.

———

Ben never mentioned whether or not he heard the fight. I never told him the truth. When I signed my last rent check, he noticed me struggling with the pen and asked what happened. I said I’d dropped a box of books on my hand. He must have known, but he kept my personal life separate from my financial obligations.

A year and a half later, I lost the engagement ring at a party. I convinced friends to help me search, but no one ever found it. I waited a couple of weeks before telling Erica. During that phone call, we talked about current events. Books we’d borrowed from one another. Possible visits. Ordinary, friendly topics.

Then I changed the subject. “I lost the ring,” I said, scratching my ear. “You know, our engagement ring.”

“That sucks. I know how much you liked it.”

“Yeah, I miss it. My finger feels naked. Look, I know this is gonna sound weird, but I think it’s a sign.”

She laughed. I could hear typing in the background. “That’s one of the things I hate about you. You’re always looking for signs. Sometimes things that happen to us don’t mean anything.”

I thought about James diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat. It had been some time since I’d read the book, but I remembered that things really hadn’t turned out perfect between him and Angelina. Sure, he’d foiled her plans, but he never did cure her completely. She still indulged in the occasional threat of murder, still acted on her suppressed sociopathic tendencies. Their relationship was far from idyllic.

We weren’t them, but it was hard to throw away so many years, so many bad habits.

“If it is a sign,” I said, “you have to admit it’s a pretty good one.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”

T.A. Noonan is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently four sparks fall: a novella (Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, 2013) and, with Erin Elizabeth Smith, Skate or Die (Dusie Kollektiv, 2014). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Reunion: The Dallas Review, West Wind Review, Hobart, Ninth Letter, and Phoebe, among others. A weightlifter, crafter, priestess, and all-around woman of action, she serves as the Associate Editor of Sundress Publications, Founding Editor of Flaming Giblet Press, and Literary Arts Director for the Sundress Academy of the Arts.

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The good book says that he who seeks good shall find good, but evil comes to he who searches for it. It is a drizzly November evening in lower Manhattan and tonight I am finding evil everywhere I look. As the R train lurches through the darkness, the woman across from me holds a black bag on her lap with a pink devil face printed on it. Across the aisle a bearded hipster with a skull tattoo taps out a rhythm on his thigh.

I am on my way up to 23rd Street to a place called the Manhattan Diner. Tonight is the monthly meeting of New York City Satanists, a gathering of kindred spirits who follow the “left-handed path.” On the verge of meeting my first real live Satanists, I feel a form of self-consciousness I thought I left behind in high school. I worry that the Satanists are going to peg me as a meek little lamb, fit only for slaughter. Five minutes from the restaurant, I suddenly worry that I will be despised as sickeningly willing to please. No stranger to self-consciousness, this represents an entirely novel basis of self-doubt: am I evil enough?

I arrive promptly at 7:30pm. Even my punctuality feels woefully bereft of evil. The hostess, a squat woman of Asian descent, greets me. I tell her I am meeting a group of friends. She wrinkles her nose, “Oh, you mean with the … people?”

I wince in affirmation and make my way to the back. The lighting seems all wrong for devil worship—or at least what I know from the movies. The joint is almost blindingly well lit and the walls are lined with mirrors, making the place as bright as an operating room. A few limo drivers in blue suits and matching suspenders sit at the counter eating pastrami sandwiches and drinking mugs of coffee, their caps resting in the chairs beside them. I find a small group huddled around two small tables near the back wall. A man with a shaved head and a Mephistophelean goatee smiles. He wears a black jacket over a black shirt and a pentagram pendant dangles on his chest. He looks almost cinematically demonic which, for some reason, surprises me. He reaches to shake my hand.

“Hi, my name is Aiden. Are you here for the meeting? ”

His voice is friendly, almost soothing. I introduce myself and nervously take a seat. Seated beside Aiden is a middle-aged woman wearing a black sweatshirt and a pentagram necklace.  Her face seems frozen into a grin, reminding me of an acid casualty in an educational film from the ’70s. She introduces herself as Susan and explains that she is the founder of the Theurgist Azazel Church in New York City, a “theistic Satanic church that incorporates some pagan traditions.” Her gray hair is stringy and her teeth are crooked and yellow. She abruptly falls into silence, staring at a spot a foot or two above my head.

Next to Susan is Jaydan, a  portly kid of maybe 19 from Long Island. His hair is gelled into twisting Medusa-like fingers and when he speaks he presses down on his knees with both hands as if his legs might run off without him. To my left is Mel, a stout warlock of a man whose defining feature is a colossal white beard. Mel wears a devil-imprinted T-shirt that reads: “If God won’t answer your prayers, try me.” Seated across from me is Erica, a young woman who wears black plastic glasses that pinch down upon a relentlessly morose expression. She sits with her body curled like a wary animal against the back of her seat, alternating between doodling on placemats and staring at the plastic counter top.

The conversation quickly falls into a lull. Aiden eyes me suspiciously. I wonder if there is some sort of agenda. And if there were an agenda what could possibly be on it? I figure that even Satanists need a sense of administrative order. Having worked in a variety of soul-sucking offices, I long ago learned the power of a written agenda. It is perhaps one more sign of how little evil is left in me that my first thought after meeting a group of Satanists is that I’d like to see their bylaws.

I find the silence overbearing and search for some way to break the ice. But what do Satanists talk about? Do Satanists watch Breaking Bad? Do they like football? I feel like I did many years ago at the cafeteria table in seventh grade when I’d rather say nothing than possibly say something stupid. A quick flash of a thousand school lunches, head bowed as if in silent contemplation of pizza and tater tots. I can’t even pretend to study the menu because our waiter seems to be avoiding our table. I naturally assume he despises us. Do these Satanists even know each other? I can’t tell. I found this group online by typing my zip code and the word “Satanist” on a website for people with common interests. The whole process took three minutes. It’s possible we are seven people who have never met before, drawn by malevolent forces to this den of wickedness and rubbery Spanish omelets. But I am ready for the evil to truly begin.

Anything has to be better than this silence.

I stare at the reflection of the back of Aiden’s head in the mirror and am surprised to see my own reflection next to it. My face looks puffy and pale in the bright light. My right hand rests under my chin, a nervous habit of mine—a way of partially shielding myself when I feel I’m being too closely observed. Another school-age remnant.  The reflection of my face looks passively back at me, the face of a lamb.

As if suddenly remembering that she  left her car lights on, Susan suddenly startles to alertness. Out comes an unexpected torrent of words. Though she speaks in large looping circuits of logic that almost but never quite come full circle, Susan manages to make Satanism sound about as threatening as Episcopalianism. She talks about her church, which she says she founded after an epiphany. Satanism, she tells us—though her focus is to unsettlingly degree on me—is about rationality and honesty.

“If you’ve read Paradise Lost,” she says, “you know that Satan represents the ‘adversary’.”

I nod my head, pleased that she had mentioned one of the few stray facts I could recall from college. To worship Satan is to free yourself to test your ideas on your own. It is to accept no established hierarchy or tradition. Satanism is for freedom and against religious bigotry—it is, Susan says, fundamentally about testing things out for yourself rather than inheriting answers.

“We are against all forms of inherited thought,” she says.

“Or do we just replace those inherited systems with our own?”

Aiden’s eyes crinkle, the flesh beneath his goatee flexing into a broad, friendly smile. The adversary, indeed.

She hands me a stack of pamphlets about Satanism, including one titled “Myths About Satanism.” I skim the pamphlet and find it surprisingly cogent and well written. The pamphlet described Lucifer as the “light-bearer,” the giver of knowledge—and Satan as a challenger to power. Other pamphlets are screeds against “Illuminati”-type conspiracy thinking. There is no evidence, it says, that 9-11 was an inside job and the world is not controlled by a secret cabal of Jewish bankers. The pamphlets also warn against the threat of “Abrahamic theocracy.” If there’s anything that could unite the world’s great religions, I think, it would be its shared hatred of pentagram-donning devil-worshippers.

Aiden explains that everyone has their own different view of Satan. Aiden tells us he is a painter as well as an atheist. He doesn’t believe in a literal Satan.

“As an artist, Satanism gets me in touch with my dark side which is important to my music and paintings. My idea of Satan is closer to the Hindu god Shiva, the destroyer who clears the way for new creation.”

Susan replies that she is a “theistic” Satanist, and that her pantheon includes five gods, including Satan, which she equates to Azazel. She explains that Azazel represents the God of “inner will and heresy.” The ancient Jews had performed a ritual involving Azazel, who was a sort of desert demon or djinn—but was more generally used as a symbol of impurity. During the rite, a high priest would be presented with two goats. The first goat would be let loose in the desert. This was an offering to Azazel, the sins of the people to be carried back with the goat to the source of evil. The second goat would be offered to God. This goat would be led to the top of a canyon and pushed over the edge, his legs crushed and his body battered as he bounces down the rock face. This is the genesis for the word “scapegoat,” the blood sacrifice which carries away the sins of the whole tribe.

At least from the point of view of the goat, I could certainly see the virtue of the dark side. Sent off to wander the desert, no doubt hungry and lost, the goat of evil is cast into the world to fend for himself. But the consecrated goat, the goat of righteousness? For all its sacredness, this goat winds up a heap of mangled flesh and bones. This as much as anything explains the central insight of the Satanists: that it’s better to be free and impure than holy and slaughtered. But this presupposes that you have a say in whether the spirits of light or dark take a hold of you—or whether the world cares what’s in your heart before it shoves you off the side of the cliff.

Throughout this discussion Jaydan continues to squirm in his chair.

 “Why did you put so much attention on Azazel? Is it because of the Book of Enoch? I’m just wondering what the significance of Azazel is.”

The Book of Enoch? Has this budding young Satanist been surreptitiously reading his Bible? If he’s not careful, he might find himself a Lutheran.

Susan seems thrown off guard by  the sharpeness in Jaydan’s voice. She unleashes a frantic lecture that mentions Leviticus and Enoch—books of the Bible that sounded mildly exotic to me when I was in Sunday school 30 years ago—and the numerous Talmudic traditions equating Azazel with Satan. It was clear that the last thing she wants to do is recreate her highly personalized five-god pantheistic spiritual system while trying to decide between onion rings and French fries.

Jaydan is not deterred.

“But why Azazel? Azazel is listed in one of my grimoires, but only as a minor demon.”

His fidgeting increases until I begin to feel jittery myself. A part of me wholly understands Jaydan. The poor kid just wants to cut through the esoteric mumbo-jumbo so he can get to the incantations and the goat’s blood and the orgies. It is indeed a heartless man who can’t remember what it was like to feel the sap flowing through his veins and to yearn for blood-soaked Satanic orgies?  Besides, who ever heard of a metal band praising Azazel? Jaydan just wants to go straight into the heart of the matter, conjuring up the Prince of Darkness in all of his ecstatic  grandeur. His Dionysian impulses seem perfectly rational to me.

But Susan clearly did not have Rock’n’roll in her blood tonight.

“Let’s talk about this later.” She seems frustrated at her inability to communicate. “This isn’t a subject I think interests anyone else.”

“No! I want to hear this.”

Erica, who had spent most of the evening doodling, was staring directly at Susan.

After a surprised lull, Susan repeats her spiel about Satan and Azazel and Leviticus and her five-god pantheon. In a roundabout way, she seems to be saying that devil-worshippers can do anything they want. There are no set practices, so there is no real heresy. Go and sin in peace, she is saying.

A little more light-heartedly, Erica says she thinks the real problem is that all the good Satanic church names have been taken.

“What about the Church of Later Day Satan?” I interject.

“Perfect!” she says. “I love it! I’m going to found this church—the LDS!”

Erica continues to curl in an uncomfortable slouch, but her smile lingers. It makes her look attractive and girlish. I am immensely pleased to be able to make a Satanist laugh. It’s feels like getting Darth Vader to chuckle after telling him the one about the rabbi and a priest in a bar.

More calmly, Jaydan says that what he really wants is to learn some ritual. Maybe we could find a nice quiet place in the park and perform some black magic. He suggests Central Park.

“Do you really think it’s a good idea to hold a Satanic service in Central Park?” laughs Aiden. “Gee, nothing could go wrong with that plan.”

Perhaps the waiter began to fear our Satanic powers because after nearly an hour of waiting a stack of laminated menus are suddenly dropped in front of us. I quickly decide on the gyro. Jaydan explains that he became interested in black magic through a friend. But shortly after he began learning about Satanism his friend told him he needed to slow down. A few years before, he had been interested in Taoism but ended up “having problems” after becoming overly absorbed in it.

“What do you mean by having problems?” I ask.

“Just that I got too deep into it,” he smiles nervously. “I just had … problems. Sometimes I have a tendency to go overboard with things.”

“Don’t you worry that you might have some problems with this, too?” asked Aiden.

Erica nods her head.

“I have always had this darkness inside me and Satanism is the only religion that recognizes that part of me.”

Erica continued nodding.

Instead of lamb wrapped in a pita, my gyro came as a kind of salad—three slices of lamb over a bed of lettuce with some tzatziki sauce on the side. I am grateful that my gyro is not wrapped up because I am genuinely worried about the waiter spitting in my food. I watch Mel cut at a slab of beef roast with a knife. The sauce is a reddish brown and the meat is still on the bone. I cut into my gyro salad and shovel it into my face. I have waited a long time to eat and I’m starving.

Erica’s face has turned sour again. She orders coffee and chicken soup and doodles little goat-heated Satan figures on the back of napkin. She explains that she is drawing Baphomet—also known as the Sabbatic Goat—a figure long since associated with devil worship.

Mel lifts his eyes from his roast and says that when his wife is angry she turns into something that like that.

“You must really enjoy her oversized cock then.”

Erica points to the gigantic penis that rises up towards Baphomet’s goat head.

“Baphomet is a hermaphrodite,” she explains. “Has both male and female organs.”

Mel stares at her blankly.

As I eat my gyro, Aiden eyes me quizzically.

“So you say you have only a passing interest in Satanism. If that’s true, what possessed you to come out and meet all of us scary Satanists?”

I thought about how I’d answer this question before I arrived. I realized I’d have to finesse an answer that is neither dishonest nor insulting. I decided that, if I am asked this question, I would simply say that I am “interested in all kinds of experiences.” I told myself I’d deliver this line slowly and with a hint of darkness so that it could mean anything: exotic drugs, blood lust, Transylvanian vampire orgies. It would sound as hedonist and mysterious as this corn-fed child of stolid Midwestern parents could pull off.

It occurred to me that what connects these people is not dark, sinister power but a sense of vulnerability. Like most people, they had experienced hardships. In the face of these hardships they had constructed a religion not to glorify evil but simply to recognize its existence. What experiences have brought them to this diner? I could not imagine. Darkness certainly exists in the world, and not all spirits are as airy as the wings of angels.

All eyes were on me.

“What I find most fascinating is how everyone seems to want the same things out of life. People want to feel like they’re mostly good. People want to feel like they’re part of something larger. People want to create more than they destroy. The religion itself almost doesn’t matter. It just seems like you are trying to reach the same ends as everyone else though you take different roads.”

Aiden seemed to be listening intently, nodding his head slightly.

Susan said that, from her point of view, Satanism was not even incompatible with Christianity. It was all about having a balance between the light and the dark.

“No deity is either all good or all bad. Look at the God of the Old Testament, look at the prophets. By our standards, the Old Testament God did some pretty nasty things.”

Aiden said that what attracts him to Satanism is that the person is the symbol of his own will and agency. We act for our own reasons and not to please God.

“When I do something good, I want to think that I did it for me—and not because God scared me into doing it. For me, Satanism is a religion of responsibility. If I do something wrong, I make amends. If I do something good, I did it because I wanted to.”

Erica, who continued to draw Satanic symbols on her napkin, lifts her head. The look of pain on her face is unmistakable, as if it had become so habitual it became fixed into the lines of her face.

“I hate these religions that tell you everything will be OK if you just believe X and Y. Some people just have shitty lives. And some of us have experienced some really shitty things. I don’t want anyone telling me it will all be taken away in the hereafter. That’s bullshit and it’s a copout. I don’t want someone telling me that everything is fine when I know it isn’t.”

I want to ask her more about what she means—to find out more about her experiences—but I can think of no question that doesn’t seem like a violation.  She quickly returns to doodling, her body once again coiling around the table.

The meeting begins to wind down.  It is nearly 10:30. The conversation has become more personal. Erica tells me that she was a harpist who plays angry music. I try to imagine what angry harp music sounds like. Aiden hands me a CD of his artwork.

The waiter brings out separate checks. He seems surprised when I offer a thanks for his service. Susan begins talking about plans: maybe there could be a separate meeting for rituals, reminding us to come out to a meeting against anti-abortion protestors.  There is a brief conversation about perhaps finding a more atmospheric meeting place, at which point Aiden laughs and suggests we find something near to the Dakota Building, where Rosemary’s Baby was filmed.

As I grab my coat and stand up, I look into a mirror and notice a face staring directly at us. It is the face of an old man, a limo driver in a blue shirt and suspenders. He is almost completely bald and his face twists into a hateful glare.

The others grab pocketbooks or try to calculate tips and only I am aware of his reflection. I am struck by a feeling of deep-seated affront. What right does he have to judge? I wish to shield these people from the evil thoughts of this citizen, just as I wish to fling away the evil he sees in us.

At length his expression returns to normal as he turns to face his bowl of chicken soup. Beneath the incandescent glare his face looks ashen and gouged with deep, dark lines. I fish out a few more dollars to tip the waiter. I am suddenly very tired, as if I am standing at the bottom of an invisible ocean. It’s getting late and I need to find my train out of the city. But it’s dark outside and I decide to linger in the light just a little bit longer.

Robert Slack is a technical writer working in Washington, DC. He has an MA in  English and Publishing from Rosemont College in Pennsylvania.  He is an active freelance journalist writing on a range of issues, particularly on environmental themes. He lives with his wife and dog near College Park, MD.

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