FALL 2018

5th grade 

Rita Jordan picked the clarinet to play in band class. Her parents had tried to pacify her with a tarnished trombone, an attic-dwelling heirloom that suffered at both ends from a coppery sort of halitosis. And anyway it was plain for Rita to see that girls were thought, generally, to play flute or clarinet—neither seeming odder to have picked than the other. 

6th grade 

The 13 members of the clarinet section were split up into three weekly lesson groups. Rita wound up in the odd larger group of five. Twice a week she had to sit and watch the instructor nod in approval at her—but shyly, without eye contact, and stifling all verbal acknowledgement of her, Rita’s, talents, all so as not to crack the four weaker egos in the room. 

In full band rehearsals, Rita caught the instructor persistently sending glances of notice and acknowledgement to a certain student other than herself—the band’s only boy clarinetist. In spring, when all the band members were ranked and seated by rank in their seats, Rita won first chair and this boy had to “swallow” second chair. At last Rita could stop worrying whether the boy had some special genetic advantage over her. She slowly retracted, over weeks, her scowling stares, seated beside him every morning from 9:40 to 10:30, and permitted herself to hum and nod pleasantly in response to his very civil tendency to comment on the pleasantness of the music, despite it occurring immediately to her that the music he heard was arguably pleasant in large part because he sat so near her, no? 

7th grade 

The boy’s parents bought him a new clarinet, a majestic black entity with soft, satiny wood and three keys more than Rita’s clarinet had. Rita, by that time, was taking private lessons from a woman in town—the woman agreed that Rita, too, was probably overdue for an upgraded instrument. 

A sales associate at the music shop politely insulted Rita’s old clarinet, calling it a beginner’s model. This was among the insults Rita was using in her own debasement campaign against her clarinet, which in the fondness of camaraderie she had once named “Tim” and which she was now publicly renaming “It,” and with less and less a sensation of treachery was dropping from a succession of heights onto the linoleum floors of empty practice rooms at school. 

But Rita’s parents didn’t accompany her and the sales associate in smiling at the discount price on a new model. And so at home, Rita began to criticize not only “Its” battered appearance, but the sounds “It” produced, sounds which deteriorated in correlation to her no longer wetting “Its” reed before pushing breath into “It.” 

Her parents were at a loss to make out the poorness of tone Rita got all flushed ranting about. Then again, they thought it was only expectable that Rita be refining her ears, sensitizing them to timbres they themselves weren’t sensitized to judge. 

8th grade 

Rita had no patience left for non-classical radio stations—in a lobby, an elevator, or at a mall. When a pop song came on in the car she was quick to lecture her parents on its historical insignificance as a composition. She told them that by surrendering access to their ear canals to commercial radio, they were nurturing a globally profiteering philistinism that was steadily downsizing her future job market by stunting the cultural growth and banalizing the ingrained spending habits of potential season-ticket buyers. 

“The music is worse than the ads,” she said, paraphrasing a Juilliard grad student whose Twitter feed was a staple of her bedtime routine, “because the music is selling the ads. Same way the ads are worse than the product, because the ads are selling the product.” 

“But don’t orchestras advertise?” her father asked. “Don’t they sell themselves? Posters and radio spots and ads online?” 

“No!” Rita said. But she had to consult Twitter feeds a few nights before she could rally a counterpoint. “Orchestras sell music, they sell themselves. They don’t sell products.” 

“What about their sponsors? Don’t they help ‘sell’ their sponsors?” 

That night Rita tracked down some stuff on Twitter about “donors.” 

“Donors, Dad, not sponsors. Whatever sponsors orchestras have, they’re more like donors. They just want good music.” 

“So why not donate anonymously?” 

“Because they want you to thank them. I would want to be thanked for that.” 

“Hm. Might they just be trying to appeal commercially to an audience that likes classical music.” 

“What? No!” 

“But then can’t we think of pop radio as having ‘donors’ too? Can’t corporate sponsors act as donors, just wanting to bring people music they enjoy, and wanting recognition for that?” 

“But you shouldn’t enjoy that music!” 

“Why?” 

“Because,” she said. Wanting to settle the issue now, impatient to wait and investigate answers on Twitter, she went with her gut, “Because otherwise I might never get to play in an orchestra!” 

Rita’s favorite albums were clarinet recordings available without commercial interruption on Grooveshark. She didn’t take any interest in recordings of other instruments, and she mostly stuck to the recordings that showed a clarinet soloist with his or her headshot on the album cover. 

As it turned out, more boys than girls ever grew up to have their faces on the front of a clarinet disc. 

“Why don’t girls take more pride in themselves?” Rita asked her mother. “Why aren’t more girls like me? What the hell is wrong with them?” Rita talked about it all the time, couldn’t seem to get over it. 

9th grade 

Rita started devoting all her practice time to the music of her private lessons and recitals. She let her band music fall by what her mother called “the wayside.” 

“But you have a duty to do well in band,” her mother said, “your classmates count on you.” Then, with manipulative flattery, “You especially.” 

Rita explained that she could meet and exceed her band teacher’s expectations without practicing. 

“You’d better find a better attitude,” her mother said, “or we’ll be selling back that new clarinet of yours.” 

And so Rita started practicing her band music again—but only long enough for her mother to lose track of the difference. 

10th grade 

A university band in a neighboring suburb scouted Rita to play third chair. She had thought the conductor would hand her the first chair spot—he didn’t. Nor was she appointed any solos to play. 

“They don’t know how to run things,” she would say to her father, in the car on the weekly half-hour drive to campus. “They have computer brains. They punch in ‘high schooler’ and their computer brains spit out ‘third chair.’” 

“But aren’t some of the university students good musicians?” 

“Well, yeah, but they suck for how old they are.” 

“Hey, come on. No ‘suck’ please.” 

“They stink.” 

“No ‘stink.’” 

“They—well I’m running out of words!” 

She said she wished professional orchestras held open auditions for high school students. Then she would just find a real orchestra and skip all the intermediate fiddle-farting. 

“High schoolers can’t audition for orchestras?” her father asked. After Rita’s birth, he and his wife had promised to wait to have a second child until they’d witnessed “distinct traits” in Rita that suggested she would be a “supportive and noncompetitive” sister. A month after Rita turned six, they finally decided not to reschedule his standing appointment for a vasectomy. 

Rita said of course high schoolers couldn’t audition in orchestras! But in fact Rita had never wondered about it. That night she ransacked Twitter, Facebook, and especially the Wiki pages of famous musicians, only to learn that many “prodigies” and “luminaries,” even nowadays, played in orchestras at upsettingly young ages. 

“I’m so old,” she said in the car to her father, less upset than grave, tired. 

11th grade 

Rita’s high school bandmates finally showed signs of understanding what a bright future awaited Rita in what they had no richer vocabulary than to call “the world of music.” Rita was the only person in her band who had a career path picked out for real. A folder on her iBook was titled “Career”: it held two files, “Resume” and “Potential Reference Letter Writers.” 

Many of her bandmates were surprisingly smart and nice people, Rita started to notice, now that they had noticed her. Rita hoped they would all achieve, in whatever career they chose, something on par with what she would achieve in Music. She liked to picture herself and them all celebrating one another in formal wear someday at a ten- or fifteen-year class reunion—raising glasses of champaign (which she assumed tasted like ginger ale but somehow much better) to the middle of a white linened table. She would sit among them as a representative of Music. She would remind these old friends of hers that if their school system had offered Dentistry or Law or Veterinary Science in fifth-grade, then of course they would’ve all found their life’s calling as early as she had. 

12th grade 

Rita, in emulation of a junior member of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra she followed on social media, spent the year commuting to a community college instead of high school, to complete 24 college credits of general courses—two Math, two Literature, one Chemistry, one Spanish, one History, and a Composition. She declined a Facebooked offer from a female classmate to carpool with the two, preferring to feel unique and alone, and incontestable in her choice of radio station. 

The only thing tainting Rita’s sense of being liberated from high school was the looming requirement of her “walking” to receive her diploma. Her parents insisted that she might someday regret not walking, that people they knew who indulged hermitic habits tended later to wish they had erred on the side of publicity and fellowship. 

And while Rita expected an aura of grandeur to accompany her presence at graduation, the last return of she who was already “beyond,” she oppositely understood that this aura would brighten doubly around her absence, the absence of she who was already indisputably “beyond.” 

When two nights before graduation, Rita’s mom threatened to revoke her gas allowance if Rita refused to “walk,” Rita felt nauseous with indignation and humiliating visions of “walking” amid peers who had maybe forgotten who she was in her year-long absence. After her shower that night, she tickled her uvula with a cleansed middle finger and did not flush the puke away until her mother, hearing her, had seen it. Surprisingly, Rita measured in at a temperature of 100.7°, and two or three times a day over the next three days the sense-memory of her finger pestering her uvula made her vomit. She lost approximately seven pounds and was profoundly freaked out by her pretty evident ability to intend herself sick. 

Freshman Year 

As she had planned for almost a decade, Rita “ascended” to a university. It was an in-state school, yes, but one of greater prestige than the schools her lesson instructor, band instructor, and university band instructor told her she could “count on” getting into. She had nevertheless internally “counted on” getting in, meaning she counted the days until she expected her acceptance email to arrive—which, according to her curated feed of undergrad blogs, typically arrived March 21-24, whereas the month of April was a gaping 30 day-wide receptacle for rejections, the most subtly derogatory coming late that month, at the time accepted students were expected to confirm their attendance—and felt justified in having done so by her eventual admittance to the program. 

On campus, she strictly made friends with other music majors—according to Twitter, “friending” and “networking” were, ideally, synonymous. Many of her friends had grown up in Minneapolis or some other metropolitan area, and a mobbish majority of these poked fun at Rita for having grown up in a “small town,” totally discrediting as “the self-defensiveness of a townie” her argument that if you had Twitter it didn’t matter where you grew up because your primary community was web-based and global. A lot of upperclassmen, too, just automatically labeled her a “hick,” even though her hometown was only 34 minutes north of city limits, and was the site of a major regional hospital . . . and labeling her more often with glances and withheld sociability than with words, since to say “hick” was rhetorically unbecoming. 

The first time Rita went back home for a holiday visit, she couldn’t believe how small her town looked. It was just a slightly modernized version of the shantytown farmers had established a hundred years ago on a random bend in the river, with a hospital plunked on some “back 40” lot, and was less a reflection of the sophistication of the community than its strategic proximity only to the interstate, the low cost of acreage, and a bid to direct suburban development in that direction, such that the town would, in a decade or so, no longer be just “rural-suburban” or what her classmates slandered as “rurban.” Rita had missed “suburbanite” status by twenty years, was stuck being a “rurbanite.” 

That night she explained to her parents how being “rurban” would probably hold her back in her career, in the long run. People would see where she was from and just assume that the cultural mechanisms in her brain had been miniaturized in early childhood and adolescence. 

Her parents were curious to know who might’ve exposed her to that perspective. 

“It’s not a perspective,” Rita said. “It’s out there”—she pointed to the window—“in the world!” 

That summer, Rita’s parents told her she had to get a job if she was going to live at home. She wound up teaching private clarinet lessons to teens and preteens who went to school in the district. 

For the most part, Rita was an encouraging teacher——a stickler for posture and embouchure. But she saw no reason to be a stickler with students who had little hope of going on to do anything in Music. 

Sophomore Year 

Rita’s clarinet instructor in college was the principal clarinetist in a world-famous orchestra: the venerable Mary Wendelyn. When not dressed in black dresses for orchestral “appearances”, Mary Wendelyn dressed herself in chevron-print shawls and long wraparound skirts—had all her life, so far as the curated display of photographs in her office library told. Rita reacted to this series of photos as she might have to an exhibit titled “The Mystery of Success”—she always scowled in strained thought at the pictures, waiting for them to teach her something. Rita understood that she, too, would need to start thinking about a distinctive personal style of dress. Not shawls and skirts, of course—those were already taken. 

Mary Wendelyn was not the kind of mentor who kept compliments in a huge bucket and handed them out for free. She always seemed half-bored during her lessons with Rita: checking her phone the instant it beeped (she had pockets for her phone in cuts of skirt not usually equipped with pockets), or pinching the craquelure of her elbow skin and applying requisite pumps of lemon-verbena lotion; Rita had to play like hell to liven her up. 

Every now and then, when Mary Wendelyn went a long time without sharing her opinion of Rita—Rita endured these periods of silence like bouts of constipation, sitting next to Mary Wendelyn and ineffectually straining, at heart, for her to say something. Rita would call Mary Wendelyn an “addict of belittlement” behind her back—she diagnosed her with Aspergers, or whatever dissociative disorder it is that causes chronic underevaluation of  the people around you. 

Most of the time, though, Rita couldn’t stop building Mary Wendelyn up to other people. It was clear to Rita that way down deep, she and Mary Wendelyn were burdened with the same personality—the same sensitivity to talent, and a relative boredom when you’ve sat too long in its company. 

Because one time, Mary Wendelyn said, “You know you really teach yourself a lot. You’re really very good.” Mary Wendelyn seemed only to check back in on her surroundings once in a while, to make sure conditions were how she remembered them, like a landlord checking up on a property she doesn’t live in. Her face, tiny on a big head, had heavy, muppety eyelids and fanning lashes, and even at her most alertly present and expressive, her upper lids, painted in autumnal reds and browns Rita would laugh at on a less monolithic woman, only lifted to the equator of her eyeballs. 

That spring break, Rita won a scholarship to attend a music camp at a university in Wisconsin. She made friends with a clarinet instructor there named Rick. Rick went out of his way to squeeze private lessons with Rita into his camp schedule. For a few days he loaned Rita his second most expensive clarinet. He even sent a note to Rita’s parents, giving them tips on what channels to take in purchasing the same model for Rita at “insider prices.” 

A week later, back at school, Mary Wendelyn commented kindly on a tonal improvement Rita had made at the camp. Rita told Mary Wendelyn about Rick, but Mary Wendelyn gave Rita an older-sisterly frown that told her not to “embrace” a guy like Rick too closely—unless she, too, wanted to end up someday teaching at a tiny program in middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin. 

Junior Year 

The month came junior year to finalize post-graduate plans, and Rita asked Mary Wendelyn’s opinion on which Masters programs carried the greatest weight in the music world. Rita alternately paged through a famous website that ranked such programs, then hunted for less famous ranking websites that celebrated the schools where Mary Wendelyn’s contacts worked. Rita did not to waste time applying to any programs that did not appear at least on the top ten of some list. 

That same month, Rita got a letter from Rick the Wisconsinite, wondering if she’d considered applying to his university in Wisconsin. He said it was very likely he could swing a full scholarship for her, since the program was new and small and had an unusual amount of liquid funding. Rita wrote him back a letter, a nice one, letting him down easy. 

Senior Year 

Something was suspect about the five schools Rita had applied to. 

Two schools turned her down her right away. The rejection letters were short and non-specific, no evidence that her application was reviewed by a person and hadn’t simply been cycled back to her by a computer. Both letters congratulated her talent, but regretted the number of qualified applicants in the field. 

The third school invited her out to an audition. And so she drove out to Massachusetts with her father, only to get turned down via email on the drive back—a rejection no longer or more specific than the others. All the way home, Rita lay with her head in a pillow against the window, saying how the whole trip was the biggest waste of time she could ever imagine—though she didn’t think she could have imagined it, and still refused to. 

Rita didn’t see any reason why she had to pass any of her news on to Mary Wendelyn. And Mary Wendelyn did not send any letter or make any phone call to check up on Rita. 

Rick, however, sent the sort of letter Rita might have liked to receive from Mary Wendelyn. Rita had no energy to fabricate a reply. 

Postgrad 

The June after graduation, Rita flew down to Florida, to audition for a professional orchestra, but only made it past the second round. One of the older girls auditioning told Rita the whole audition was “a hoax,” was “rigged,” and that oftentimes orchestras know in advance who they are going to hire. Rita found this easy to believe, but hard to accept. 

A week later, Rita told her mother about another audition, one in Maine. Her mother asked her to come sit at the kitchen table. She walked Rita through some old bills and bank statements—a reminder of how much her bachelor’s degree had cost, and what the monthly loan repayments would add up to after the grace period was over, and how there wasn’t much money on the fringe of things to afford many more plane tickets. Honestly not even one more. Her mother offered to let Rita live for a while at the house and teach more lessons locally—to save up for airfare. 

Rita stood and walked away from the table and put her face in her hands. She thought about brain aneurisms, and the only thing that mitigated her minorly suffocant pressurization of her own head was the now habitual fear that she could intend herself sick, could successfully intend a brain aneurism. 

“Why did I even go to school?” she said. “It was just a big waste of money! I could’ve been in an orchestra by now if that’s what I’d focused on doing from the start!” 

Her mother watched her sit in the chair facing the window. Strands of Rita’s hair wandered and nodded above her head, as if some lightning had selected her as its next target. Something definitely had selected her in this way, her mother thought. She thought Rita should just get struck by whatever it was, and maybe it would “reset” her. She had begun to relate to Rita as a computer program that was glitching and freezing in weird ways, and she just wanted to hold the power button and see if the thing rebooted back to normal. 

Rita gazed at a speck on the window pane, framed by the blur of the yard beyond. “I don’t feel like I decided to be where I am.” 

Rita lost 18 pounds during her long visit home that summer. She ate buttered Ramen noodles and carrots mostly, suffered alternate episodes of constipation and diarrhea, which the internet said were plausible symptoms of colorectal cancer. Her back and legs started to get stiff and atrophy—and when she tried to jog or do jumping jacks, felt inflamed for days. All her joints seemed to click when she stood up from her bed. Whenever she had to go out into the sun for some reason, she squinted a lot and felt colorless, flammable, like paper. 

She cancelled her lessons whenever she didn’t feel like watching anyone play music. A lot of her students’ parents had no patience for her, and Rita didn’t end up handing her dad many checks to take to the bank for her. 

Rita watched seasons of television shows she’d never had time for at school. One of the characters in one of the shows was discovered to have ordered a vibrator from Amazon, but that wasn’t the kind of thing Rita could safely mail to her parent’s house. Sometimes she walked down with her laptop to the public library overlooking the river to loiter on the internet. She had physical difficulties getting her eyes to focus on reading books or magazines, which she thought of like little medications that would keep her brain from turning stupid. Her clarinet slept all day and all night in its case under her bed, like a clinical depressive. 

The one thing that could always make Rita cry and “drain emotional buildup” was the prospect of her school reunions. Everyone would wonder what the hell had happened to her. 

One afternoon in early autumn, Rita’s mother came into her room and sat on her bed and patted her awake from a nap. She told Rita about a part-time musicianship opportunity with the church in town, one of her accounting clients. They needed a clarinetist to play at service twice Sundays, once Thursdays. 

“They’re willing to pay you a little,” her mother said. 

Rita said nothing. Hearing her mother approach in the hall, she had lain so as not to face her, if she should come in. 

“It would at least give you a chance to play some music again,” her mother went on. “You could play anything you want, within certain limits. I know it’s not an orchestra—but doesn’t it sound better than laying around here all day, every day? Doing nothing? Rita? Doing absolutely nothing?” 

“No,” said Rita. “It doesn’t. And I don’t like churchiness.” 

Her mother went out of the room. 

Rita lay feeling that Music was a window Greatness had flown in through—now the Greatness had wandered off out the same window because she had not offered it anything it wanted. In the clarinet-free decade that came, it mattered less and less to Rita what sort of window the Greatness might come back in through. Any window would work just fine. Marriage was fun in a humbling way, and as a relief from conclusions that she was culturally asexual—but it wasn’t a window. She just needed to find a window that would open wide enough for her to fit through. She worked at an insurance agency, in a basement office with no literal windows. Being urban was not a window, but was like having a house with windows. She feared she had the ability to actually intend her eggs to be infertile. In a corner of the unfinished basement of her urban home lay the black, oblong window of her clarinet case, and not once did she go down there without her eye compulsively seeking the glint of the case’s three bronze clasps, such that she often forgot what it was she’d walked down there to do. 

Kyle Ellingson lives with his wife in Saint Paul, MN, and works at Garrison Keillor’s Common Good Books. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Sou’wester, The Madison Review, Euphony, Pacifica, and Kansas City Voices. 

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The lady with the birds in her head, they say she died. Mom showed me the picture in the Clifton-Fine Telegraph this morning, of a tow truck pulling some car out of Star Lake. The caption underneath says the car is “the property of Mrs. Adele Winters” and that it’s a black 2002 BMW, but you can’t tell. The picture is all grainy like the ones in the Telegraph always are. If the car really was the lady’s, it should be shiny black with no scratches anywhere, and it should be so polished you could use the hood for a mirror while you combed your hair. But in the picture you can’t tell if it is or not. And the caption says too that “Mrs. Adele Winters” is “assumed drowned,” but she’s not there in the picture. If she’s not there, you can’t know anything. 

When Mom showed me the article, she said at first she hadn’t wanted me to see it. She knew how much I liked the lady. We all did, Mom and Dad and I, and not just because she stayed at our motel for half of June and part of July this summer. For one thing, the first thing she did when she came was tell Dad how much she loved our motel’s sign. Our place is called the Blue Heron and Dad made the sign himself. He carved and sanded the wood, etched in the bird’s head, and painted it with those fine-detail brushes that are so small you can get every barb of a feather in. Until this lady came, nobody else but me and Mom had ever noticed how he got the colors exactly right, or how the feathers sweeping back from the bird’s head look like they should ruffle in the breeze. 

And then she told all of us – even me – to call her Adele. We don’t have any money or fancy cars or anything, and she came from Boston and had the Beemer and these patent-leather high-heeled sandals. Those sandals were white like ice, and they had thin high heels that looked like they should snap off like ice, too, but she walked across the crunchy loose gravel in our parking lot like it was the floor of a mansion. And she liked us and wanted us to call her Adele, like we were her friends. (And they didn’t find her sandals either, they didn’t find anything even though the paper says they dragged the lake all over. So you see, they don’t know.) 

Mom said at first she hadn’t wanted me to see the paper, or the picture, but then she decided she’d better show me because everybody in Cranberry Lake gossips. She knew I’d hear about it if I went to Al’s Grill for French fries or to Stewart’s for an ice cream. Somebody getting their car pulled out of Star Lake, and the paper saying they probably drowned, is a very big deal. Mom didn’t tell me this part, but I know she especially didn’t want Andrew Young or Greg Adams or anybody else from that bunch of boys at St. Hubert’s to find out about it and come over and shove it in my face, like they definitely would if they figured it would bother me. Mom knows how those boys picked on me all through eighth grade and how they probably won’t leave me alone even though I’m going to a new school in the fall. Cranberry Lake isn’t big enough for anybody to get away for good from anybody else. 

Those people who wrote the paper, though, they didn’t know Adele. They never saw her sandals, or her big sunglasses or her dark curly hair. They didn’t know how small she was, shorter than me, and I was one of the shortest boys in eighth grade. They didn’t know how she talked, how she called me “M’sieur Parady” instead of plain Rob, you know, joking around, and they didn’t know how if you brought her a newspaper or some coffee she would say “Merci,” and they never heard her laugh, or how it sounded like the first warm day in the spring. They never saw her sit on our back porch and stare out at the lake for a whole afternoon at a time. And they never knew about the birds in her head. 

Nobody knew about her birds. Nobody but me. 

She came to our motel on June twelfth, six weeks ago yesterday, and checked in for a week. We were all supposed to call her Adele right away, Mom and Dad and I, but to each other we called her Mrs. Winters. We talked about her in whispers, not the way mean kids in school whisper behind your back, but the way you don’t say something out loud in case you jinx it. We’d never seen anything like her before. I think we all felt like one day she might do something magic, like turn into a bird or something, and fly away. 

When you run a motel, you shouldn’t try to figure out stuff about your guests. Dad spends a lot of time in his woodshop, so he doesn’t pay too much attention to anybody. Mom and me, though, we couldn’t help watching Adele. I was the worst. I’d stand out back with the hose way longer than I had to, watering Mom’s tomato plants and peppers and the basil and chives and marigolds till I practically flooded the whole yard, because from where I stood to water the garden I could see a slice of the little porch out back of Adele’s room. Mom would always ask when I came in if I’d “happened” to see Mrs. Winters, and every time, I would tell her our guest was just sitting out there on the little porch, in the faded plastic armchair, looking out at Cranberry Lake. 

To tell the truth, the lake isn’t much to look at. A long time ago, somebody hung signs about every ten feet along the mile of highway on each side of our town: Cranberry Lake Welcomes You. The signs all have a picture of a turquoise lake on them, with pine trees around it and a great big red Adirondack chair in the foreground, like all anybody does here is sit around in their Adirondack chairs and stare out at the water. The signs are all faded now. The chairs look like somebody spilled bleach on them, and the turquoise lakes are more kind of mold-colored, but Cranberry Lake was never turquoise to begin with. Up here the lakes and rivers are all full of tannin, so the water is more the color of black tea if you let it steep a long time and then put lemon juice in it. But sometimes when the breeze comes up, the lake kind of crinkles like a soft brown sheet, and the sun makes the little waves sparkle, and the swallows go swooping and skimming around in the air. That’s when you can stare out at it all day and never get tired of looking, and never want to be anywhere else. 

So Mrs. Winters spent most of that first week looking out at the lake, as far as we could tell. When the week was up, she renewed her reservation. Mom invited her to eat dinner with us the night after that. After all, she was our only guest, and from what we could tell she’d only been eating peanut butter sandwiches and cereal in her room since she’d arrived. It felt weird at first to have her back in the kitchen with us, and she was kind of shy about it, like she didn’t want to put us out or anything, but pretty soon we were all eating and talking like we’d always known each other. Mrs. Winters asked about my school. Usually I don’t talk a lot, but before I knew it I was telling her how I’d skipped a grade a few years ago and how I like to read a lot and all, and how I don’t like field hockey or lacrosse the way practically all the other boys do, and how the fathers at St. Hubert’s think the Internet means stringing a hammock up between two trees. She laughed when I said that, the warmest laugh you ever heard. And she said she was sorry about the boys in my class but she hoped I’d like my new school better in the fall, and she said I shouldn’t let people bother me. I remember exactly what she said because I’d never heard anybody talk that way before. She said, “The world has too many disagreeable people in it. The best you can do is let them be disagreeable all by themselves.” 

That second week was when I got to know her. You see, she ate dinner with us, and she was talking and laughing and everything, but then the next afternoon Mom put a fresh pot of coffee on and sent me to see if “Adele” – we were practicing calling her that – would like some. I kind of rushed over there before I could decide I was too shy, and that was when I found her crying on her porch. 

I didn’t realize she was crying till I was practically a foot away. Then I wanted to tiptoe off, but she looked up from the handkerchief she had in front of her face, and she said in this very small, kind of thick voice, “Bon soir, M’sieur Parady.” 

I stammered something about how I was sorry to bother her, and I told her about the coffee and how Mom sent me over, and then I was going to run away as fast as I could, but she stopped me. “Merci beaucoup,” she said. (I had to look up how you spell that. It sounded like ‘mercy buttercups.’) She nodded over at the empty lawn chair next to her. Every porch at our place has two lawn chairs on it. She said, “I would like some coffee, but first I wonder if you would mind sitting here for a moment or two.” 

I kind of edged into that chair like maybe it was going to bite me, and then I sat there with my mouth squeezed shut. She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. The fabric was white with little pink flowers on it, and the flowers matched her sundress, which was exactly the color of these round wintergreen candies you can get at Stewart’s. She wasn’t wearing her sandals. Her bare feet looked like a kid’s; they even had grass stain on them. 

She said, “At one time, you know, I thought I might have a boy of my own. If I had, I think he might have been a bit like you.” 

I didn’t know how to answer. I’d known she was Mrs. Winters, but I hadn’t once wondered if she had kids or anything. Now I noticed she didn’t have a wedding ring on either. I felt pretty nervous and extremely dumb, but it seemed like I should say something, so I came out with, “Do you have, you know, girls?” 

Dumb, like I said. She didn’t laugh. “No,” she said. “No children.” 

I wondered if maybe she was sorry she didn’t have any, or if she was divorced and things were bad back home, or if her husband had died or something. I wanted to know why she was crying but didn’t know how to ask. Out on the lake, a breeze was blowing and the swallows were skimming around the way they do, so I stared at them and tried not to think about the sweat running down the back of my neck and sticking my legs to the chair. 

She saw the swallows too. She held out her hand, the one with the handkerchief in it, and the fabric kind of fluttered as she pointed. “I love those birds,” she said. “They’re so free.” 

I kept staring at them so I wouldn’t stare at her instead. Even when she’d been crying, her face still looked all delicate and pretty. She was Mom’s age, I guess, but she really didn’t look like it. I said, “Yes, ma’am, they are.” 

She said, “This is a beautiful place. It has plenty of room to breathe.” 

My brain was kind of spinning around, the way it does when I’m taking a math test, and I tried to think if I should just say something polite like “uh huh,” or if I should ask her what it was like back in Boston and say that I’d never known anybody who actually lived in a big city. It turned out that I didn’t need to say anything at all. She told me, “I find all this space very helpful. You see, my head is full of birds.” 

You can bet I had never heard anybody say a thing like that before. I couldn’t help it: I stared at her with my mouth hanging open like maybe an actual bird was going to come along and build a nest in it. 

She laughed. It sounded clear and sparkly like a stream. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I may be a bit crazy, but I’m not dangerous.” She said she knew how “odd” it must sound, her saying such a thing, but she had a feeling that I knew what it was like to be different and to get tired of it sometimes. And she said, “I know they aren’t real birds, of course, but they are real to me,” and then she told me. 

The cockatiels were the bad ones. “At first I thought they might be parakeets,” she said, “but no. Parakeets are too pretty.” The cockatiels would scream and chatter at her, always wanting something, and she’d have to run from one of their cages to another, back and forth all day long. “They’re insufferable, you see.” They filled up her head with noise till she thought her skull would crack open. If you’re wondering how she could have the birds inside her head and how she could be inside there herself at the same time, well, I guess you can wonder that. I didn’t, while I listened. I could see those cockatiels, rows and rows of them all shrieking for something all the time, and I knew exactly what she meant. It was like at school when I wanted to sit under a tree at recess and read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but Greg Adams and those other boys were making everybody play pick-up basketball and even though I was way too short to be any good, I had to do it because books and reading were for girls and I was asking to get beat up. 

Adele didn’t have only the cockatiels, though. She had to spend a lot of time with them, but sometimes she could get away and visit the birds she liked better. She had goldfinches too, she said, and hummingbirds and tanagers. She had never seen any of those in real life because you don’t get pretty birds in the city, only sparrows and pigeons, but in her head she had a whole rainbow of them. And sometimes if she was really lucky, she could stay for a while with her nightingales. Those weren’t as pretty to look at, she said, but they had soft feathers and quiet songs. When she spent time with them, she couldn’t hear the cockatiels screaming anymore. 

But her favorite bird, the one she loved best, she only got to see once in a long while when she was really, really lucky. That was the heron. It was a great blue, she told me, just like the bird on our motel sign.  It had perfect gray-blue wings and a long white neck, and long slender legs and a crest of smooth black feathers. On her best days, when the bird unfolded its wings and took off into the sky, she could sail along with it. The rest of the world fell away from her then, and she was free. 

While she talked, I watched her and saw every one of those birds too. Goldfinches like splashes of fresh yellow paint. Nightingales, gray and drab, but with voices like drops of honey sliding off a spoon. And that heron. I saw that heron as if it had been there in front of us, its wings spread, its neck stretched out, gliding over Cranberry Lake. 

When she finished telling about it, she turned around to look at me. I didn’t stop to think, and I didn’t blush either. Straight out, I said, “What kinds of birds did you see today?” 

“When you sat down with me, I was trying to quiet the cockatiels. I couldn’t do it.” She smiled. “But now the heron’s come back.” 

That was when I learned about her. I knew why she had been crying, and why she liked to spend every day looking out at the lake. Room to breathe. I knew why she had renewed her reservation the first time, and I wasn’t surprised when she did it another time, and another. 

She never told me not to tell anybody about her birds. I never would have. Every day, she would say, “I saw some goldfinches in the garden” or “The nightingales were singing last night.” It was like a code. She could say those things in front of Mom and Dad too, but I was the only one who knew what she meant. 

When I remember it all, I wonder if it could have been different. If I did the wrong thing. 

In the middle of her fourth week, I asked if she would like to go for a bike ride. You can get plenty of space and breathing room in the hills above Cranberry Lake. She wasn’t anywhere near tall enough for Mom’s bike, so I took my old one and gave her the new one Mom and Dad got me this past spring. You should have seen her. She got on this boys’ bike, barefoot, wearing a yellow dress the color of the daffodils we get in April, and she was laughing like a little kid on a merry-go-round. She said she hadn’t been on a bike since she was maybe seven years old. We went out on Main Street and pretty soon, barefoot and all, she was whizzing on ahead and I had to pedal like crazy to keep up. 

We went north into the hills. Nobody goes up there much anymore, but you can still see some old empty houses from back when the town used to be bigger. A long time ago, Cranberry Lake used to have lumber mills. A lot of people got rich off them – at least, that’s what Dad told me, and he said his dad told him – but then the government shut the mills down and nobody was rich anymore. A lot of people headed out for better places and left their big fancy houses standing empty. 

The old houses have huge porches and big windows, and fussy carved scrollwork over the doors and along the edges of the roofs. The windows are busted out in pieces, the way the lake ice melts in the spring and you get cracks and jagged edges and you can see the dark water underneath, or sometimes somebody puts a BB pellet or even a bullet through the glass and it cracks in patterns like spiderwebs. 

Adele and I turned onto this one old road and came up on a house that was falling down. The roof had caved in and shrubs and stuff had grown up through the floor. The window glass had all fallen out a long time ago, and you couldn’t tell anymore what color the paint had been on the shingles or on the last of the fancy woodwork. Adele stopped in front of the house and sat there, looking at it, till I pulled up next to her. 

“It’s sad,” she said. “It wasn’t supposed to happen.” 

I didn’t understand right away. “Well, it’s made of wood,” I said, “and it’s been empty a long time. It had to fall down one way or another.” 

She looked around at me then. “I don’t mean that. I mean that someone’s life shouldn’t have gone that way. Who lived here? Why did they have to leave?” 

I’d never seen her look that way before, intense all of a sudden, staring at me from behind her sunglasses like maybe I was hiding something from her. I got stammery again, but I told her as best I could about the lumber mill people and how their money ran out. “I don’t know who they were, or where they ended up or anything,” I said. “A lot of them had to go someplace else. Maybe a city or somewhere.” 

Adele looked back at the house. “You make plans,” she said. It sounded like she was talking to herself. “You think you know how your life will look, and then it falls apart.” 

She never told me what she meant by that. I still don’t know. Maybe I’d been right and she did get divorced or something. Maybe her life was just kind of bad and crazy somehow, and that’s why she had the birds in her head. Or maybe she’d had the birds to begin with, from when she was a kid, say, and then she got older and she couldn’t fix things. I don’t know, because she never told me. 

We sat there together and looked at the house. It was a pretty day, sunny but not too hot. The sky was that turquoise color that the people who put up the Cranberry Lake Welcomes You signs thought a lake should be. Big fluffy clouds sat near the horizon, pure white and mounded up like double scoops of ice cream, and the grass was so green it looked like a Technicolor movie. By the time Adele and I got moving again, though, the colors had faded somehow. We turned around and headed back to the motel. When we pulled in the driveway, her face looked kind of tight, like the skin had gotten stretched too hard over the bones. She said, “The cockatiels are noisy today.” 

For the rest of that fourth week, she went back to sitting on the porch a lot, but I thought she seemed okay. She’d been eating dinner with us now and then, pretty often, and she did it again on her last night. While she layered lettuce and tomato on her hamburger, she told me that she’d seen the heron that afternoon. Mom was all surprised because we don’t usually get herons out here this time of year. I had to try not to laugh. 

The next morning, Adele packed up her things. She told us she planned to head further east, see this Lake Placid she’d heard so much about, even get as far as Champlain if she could. Mom asked her to keep in touch if she felt like it, maybe let us know when she got back to Boston. “You’re welcome back here anytime,” she said. 

I helped Adele carry her two suitcases out to the car. That was all she had, two suitcases for however long she’d already been away from home, and however much longer she was going to stay away. We crunched across the gravel and I wanted to ask her all kinds of things. I wanted to ask whether she really had to go back to Boston, and if anybody was waiting for her there, and if she was sure she couldn’t stay longer in Cranberry Lake. Most of all, I wanted to ask her if sometime I would see her again. 

It’s hard to say anything when you’re trying not to cry. Boys aren’t supposed to cry, you know. I hoisted her one suitcase, the big leather-sided one, into her trunk, and she put the smaller canvas one on her back seat. Her car was a few years old but it still smelled new. The beige upholstery looked like no one had ever sat on it. I shut the trunk, and she shut the back door, and then we stood there and looked at each other. 

She had a red-and-white striped sundress on, and her sandals and sunglasses. I didn’t care about my bare feet or the ragged fringe on my old shorts. She held out her hand to shake. Her fingers were small and strong and warm. “Merci, M’sieur Parady,” she said, and she smiled. “The nightingales are singing today.” 

I wanted to tell her I hoped they’d sing a lot more, and that she’d see the heron again, every day. I wanted to tell her I’d miss her. You get choked up, you know, even when you shouldn’t, but I managed one thing. I’d looked it up and practiced how to say it: “Bonne chance, madame.” 

Good luck, instead of good bye. Her whole face lit up and she laughed. “Merci beaucoup. Bonne chance à vous aussi.” I understood, before she explained it, that she meant good luck to you too.    

Then she got in the car and started the ignition. I stood there on the gravel, listening to the Beemer’s tires crunching, until the car went around the curve of the driveway and I couldn’t see it anymore. 

The Beemer didn’t make it to Lake Placid or Lake Champlain. That’s all we know for sure. It didn’t get very far at all, only a few miles down the road. Star Lake is okay, though. It’s bigger and deeper than Cranberry Lake, and there’s plenty of trees around it, and room for birds of all kinds. 

In the paper, it says she’s “assumed drowned.” I guess you would think that. If those reporters or whoever had known about her birds, or if they’d seen the way she looked when we sat there in front of the abandoned house, I guess they could think she meant to go into the water and not come back out. But nobody found her. 

I know what I think happened. If it sounds crazy, I don’t care. 

She went into the water, but she left the door open and her seatbelt unfastened. She went because she’d seen the heron sailing over the lake, its wings spread, its neck stretched out. She’d seen that perfect plume of feathers stirring in the breeze. So she went out to meet it, and the Beemer sank because it was so heavy, but she floated straight up through the water and out into the air. 

The bird was there and they sailed off together. Free. 

Kris Faatz is a Baltimore-area pianist and teacher. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Potomac Review, The Kenyon Review’s KROnline, Glassworks Magazine and Reed Magazine, among others. Her first novel-in-progress, To Love a Stranger, draws on her experience of the classical music world, and was a finalist for the 2015 Schaffner Press Music in Literature Award. Kris is also an assistant editor for Bartleby Snopes literary journal.

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The overnight shift can be weird at Stop N’ Go. Sure, most of the patrons after 11 just want to gas up and get back on the freeway to Detroit or maybe Lansing in the other direction, but don’t worry. Just wait. After about 1 or so the whack jobs get let loose: the scritchy-scratch meth heads, eyes dilated up like black marbles and skin all yellow and waxy. The pervs, still dialed up from their trip to the adult video store across the street. The silent, caffeine-faced cops traveling in pairs. I don’t mind these guys. I kind of look forward to seeing them. 

Anyways, what I’m trying to say is that it didn’t surprise me that early morning last February when my homeless pal Jaybird came into the store with a live, frantic hen tucked under his arms. It was almost 4:00 AM, my shift end. 

“Rex, baby boy,” he said. “Look at my new friend!” He held the bird high above his head and grinned. His cane clattered to the floor. “Her name is Buffy.” The chicken flapped her wings and wriggled in his grip. Jaybird was drunk. His fly was open. 

“Hey Jaybird,” I said. “Give me ten minutes.” 

# 

 Jaybird used to be a Marine. He liked to remind me of that whenever I caught him with a stolen pack of Tridents or a 40 of Mickey’s wide-mouth tucked into his trench coat. He was a Marine, damn it, and served this country alongside the greatest men of his generation. It didn’t matter that he was only in Japan. No. He saw the bodies that came through, you know. The hollowed-out skull cavities and the snaking intestines. His cousin was killed in one of those Vietcong tunnels. Jaybird served hard and he deserved a beer and some candy from time to time. 

He was a bit of a klepto, but I liked him. Out of all of the batty regulars I got most nights, he was the most personable. I started buying him Kit-Kats and the occasional 12 pack of Natty Light so that he wouldn’t be tempted to swipe travel bottles of mouthwash to drink. I felt bad for him because he lived in a ragged old Coleman tent underneath the Washington Street bridge. I’m a veteran too, so there’s that. I’m only 27, but I didn’t leave the service on great terms. Jaybird and I get that about each other. It’s the least I can do to help an old vet catch a buzz. 

# 

 It was warm and there wasn’t any snow on the ground when I walked out of the Stop N’ Go after my shift and met Jaybird by my station wagon. I didn’t even need a windbreaker. Buffy the chicken strutted around the curb, scratching through loose wrappers and dried leaves, and Jaybird sat on the ground up against the front tire. 

We drove to the library and waited in the parking lot for it to open. Bluegrey light started to color the sky, and Buffy the chicken rummaged around in the back seat, pecking at crumbs and pieces of fuzz on the ripped fabric upholstery. 

“It’s already crapped up my car, and now it’s going to eat the seats, too?” I asked. 

“Buffy’s just getting acquainted with things,” Jaybird said. The bird jumped up to the top of one of the seats in a flurry of feathers and tucked her head under her wing. 

“Where did you get her?” 

“Jenny-town wanted some dust, and I had some dust,” Jaybird said, pulling a stubbed-out cigar from his chest pocket and lighting it in a cloud of brown smoke. “The good stuff, too.” 

The chicken lifted her head out from under her wing and sneezed and looked side-headed at me, like she was trying to read my aura or something. 

“Now Jenny-town didn’t have the money like she never has the money,” Jaybird said. “So I said ‘What else you got?’ and she pointed to some chickens picking through the grass in her backyard.” 

“And you took the chicken instead of money?” 

“Damn right I took the chicken, baby boy,” Jaybird said. “Fresh eggs!” 

The reference librarian unlocked the front doors of the library at 5:30. She came up from the inside, and I saw that she had this dark green cardigan on and a bright, parrot-green skirt. She looked monochromatic, like one of those paint swatch cards you get at Home Depot. 

“Ain’t she pretty?” Jaybird asked. 

We left the chicken in the car with the window unrolled a bit so she wouldn’t suffocate. I found the computer carrells in the library and sat down in one. The whole place smelled like perfume and coffee and it made me excited and kind of knotted up inside. I logged onto one of the computers and watched the reference librarian drop a teabag into her mug behind the desk. I think she may have looked over in my direction. Jaybird grabbed a stack of Wheeler Dealers and Housekeeping magazines and sat across from me. 

“You look intense, Mr. Rex,” Jaybird said, peeking over a copy of Better Homes and Gardens. “You plotting destruction?” 

“Just waiting to hear about a job.” 

“What kind of job?” 

“Oil work out in North Dakota. Supposed to be good money.” 

“Think they’d draft up an old horse like me?” 

“Maybe,” I said. “They give veterans’ preference.” 

Jaybird snickered and disappeared back behind his magazine. “Five gluten-free holiday snacks your kids will love,” he said slowly, reading from the page in front of his face. 

# 

 At noon, we went to check on Buffy. We watched her through the window as she pecked at the flotsam on the floor. Filmy white and black droppings the size of walnuts were scattered everywhere. They were harder and more firm than I thought they would be. 

We drove to Jaybird’s tent underneath the Washington Street bridge. “Want to see a trick?” he asked. He yanked Buffy from the back seat and tucked her under his arm. 

“It doesn’t involve money, does it?” 

“Nope,” Jaybird said. “I’ll even give you a beer.” 

I walked with Jaybird to the tent, and he unzipped the opening flap and pulled out a small cooler with a padlocked handle. He found a warm Natty Light and tossed it to me. I was thirsty so I drank nearly half the can in one gulp. 

“Where’s this trick?” I asked. 

“My gramps used to hypnotize the chickens on his farm,” Jaybird said. “Just put them right out.” 

Jaybird lifted Buffy up with his right hand and tossed his cane out in front of him on the ground with his left hand. Buffy was calmer than before, and she stretched her wings out as Jaybird held her high in the air. I noticed how golden her feathers were, and how her comb and wattles were the same color as raspberries. 

“There now, baby girl,” Jaybird whispered. He held her with both hands and turned her upside down. He lowered her to the concrete, and held her chest and neck. Her legs pedaled in the air. She wriggled under the weight of his arm and started to cluck. 

“Look at the stick,” he said, pointing to the cane on the ground. He was trying to get Buffy to look at his cane, but she fussed and flapped under his weight. One of her talons snagged his coat. 

“Damn it, bird!” he said, letting her loose. She puffed up her feathers and trotted into the open tent. I was done with my beer and I handed the can over so Jaybird could get some money for it. 

“I’ll work on her,” Jaybird said. “She’ll be doing flips by the end of the week.” 

We chatted for a few minutes about how warm the weather was and I eventually got back into my car and started the engine. Jaybird fished Buffy from the tent and held her as I pulled away. 

# 

 I drove to my apartment. There’s not much to see there. It’s small, only about the size of my 3rd grade classroom. There’s a painted-over radiator in the corner, and I’ve strung up some multicolored Christmas lights along the ceiling above the window. I’d like to think that it’s cozy. 

It was already 1:00 PM and I was exhausted of chickens and kind of tired from the beer. It was muggy and warm and I flipped on the clattering old AC and plugged in the Christmas lights. Standing by the mini fridge, I flipped through an informational pamphlet from the oil company in North Dakota. Jobs were plentiful, it said. Wages were high. I wondered when they would get back to me. 

I sat on the edge of my futon and poured Vodka into a coffee cup and drank it all in one go. I poured another guzzle’s worth and took it down and looked up at the Christmas lights and thought about North Dakota. I could buy a boat with the money I’d make. One of those single-engine jobs with a built-in cooler for fish. I could take Jaybird out on the water. It was funny to think of old drunk Jaybird staggering along the deck with his cane in one hand and a fishing pole in the other. Buffy the chicken would be there, too, picking at the night crawlers in the bait bucket. The reference librarian would be my girlfriend and we’d all sit on the boat and drink Mickey’s. I took a swig from the Vodka bottle. It was still warm in the apartment, even with the AC blasting. I laid back and went to sleep with the Christmas lights on. 

# 

 Jaybird came into the store a couple of nights later. He kept wiping his lips with the back of his hand. He looked angry, and his jaw was set hard. 

“Everything all right, Jaybird?” I asked. “How’s Buffy?” 

He bit his lower lip. “Buffy’s having some problems, baby boy,” he said. “The hypnosis isn’t catching.” 

“That’s too bad.” 

“Hey, Mr. Rex,” he said, leaning over the counter on his elbows. “Think you can spot me for some cash?” His face was close enough to my face that I thought he might kiss me. 

“Maybe. How much do you need?” 

Jaybird backed off a bit and looked out through the front door of the Stop N’ Go. Two men with boots and parkas were sitting on the curb. One of the men turned and looked inside at us. He was huge, and I could see a thick gold chain peeking out from the fuzzy hood of his parka. 

“That’s the thing, Rexy boy,” he got close to me again. “I need three thousand dollars.” 

I laughed and laughed. Jaybird looked out at the men on the curb again. I reached into the clear plastic case next to the register and pulled out a technicolor, cardboard scratch-off ticket. 

“Here you go,” I said, smacking the lotto stub on the counter. “I’ll spot you for this fiver.” 

Jaybird wiped his lips again and shook his head. 

“You guys have a safe back there, right, Mr. Rex?” 

Both of the men on the curb were standing up now, facing the door and looking inside at us. I wondered why they had thick parkas on — it was so warm outside. 

“Jaybird, what are you doing? What the hell is going on?” 

“I don’t want to have to make things physical, baby boy. I really don’t.” He lifted up a corner of his shirt. A comically small, derringer-type revolver was poking out of his jeans. I could see the little woodgrain handle and chrome safety catch. I almost laughed again. It was like one those dinky pea-shooters that Victorian ladies tucked into their garter stockings. 

“There’s cameras on, you know.” 

“Just get what I need, Rex.” 

I went to the safe in the back room and counted out three thousand dollars. I dropped the wrapped bills into a donut bag. There wasn’t that much left in the safe. Maybe five or six hundred. I put that in the bag, as well. 

I came back out and handed the bag over the counter to Jaybird. The men were no longer outside. At least I couldn’t see them anywhere. 

“I’m going to have to call the police, Jaybird.” 

“Do what you have to.” 

# 

They say that Detroit dope is at least 10% more potent than the heroin you get anywhere else in the country. I don’t know if that’s true because I’ve never used, but Jaybird seems to think so. “It’s the difference between a wink and a nod,” he’d say. I’ll smoke some grass from time to time, but I won’t touch the brown stuff that I see him with. 

I thought about that after Jaybird left. I wondered what would drive someone to pull a gun on their friend like he did. Is there anything out there that I would pull  a gun for? 

I told Danny the day manager about what happened when he got to work in the morning. The police had been by and everything was on tape, so he was actually pretty mellow. “Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve been knocked off like that,” he said, mixing himself a cup of coffee. “I’m glad that you’re okay.” 

He asked me if I wanted any time off or anything and I told him that No, I’d be fine. I left the store and my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. 

“Is this Rex Nichols that I’m speaking with?” The man on the other end of the line sounded all backed up, like he was holding in a burp. He was calling about the oil jobs in North Dakota. He said that there would be open interviews at the community college that weekend and that they were interested in my Hi-Lo experience. He said that they have Veterans’ Preference. “Thanks,” I said, “I look forward to meeting you.” 

I hung up the phone and got into my car and just kind of sat there while morning commuters came out of the store with giant styrofoam coffees and pastry bags. It started to rain and the raindrops made a cracking sound when they hit my windshield, which made me realize that they were freezing and it was getting colder. I didn’t have a coat with me. 

I couldn’t tell you why, but I started the car and drove straight to Jaybird’s tent. 

# 

When I pulled up to the clearing under the bridge nothing looked out of place. I parked and ran up to the tent. The wind blew across Jaybird’s old Coleman and rattled the bendy poles that framed it out. 

I yelled into the wind. “Jaybird, you there?” 

Jaybird didn’t answer and I found the zipper of the tent and opened it. Jaybird was gone, and Buffy the chicken was perched on top of the cooler. She cooed when she noticed me. She didn’t look so good. Her comb was hanging off to one side and her beak was open, like she was out of breath. The tent smelled like a microwaved pair of old socks, and droppings were clustered up in the corners. 

“You hungry, girl?” I picked her up from under her wings and sat her down outside the tent. I found a water bottle and a bag of kettle chips in my back seat. I crumbled the chips and poured them out on the asphalt in front of her. I splashed a bit of water into the bottle cap. 

Man, was she happy. She gobbled up the chip crumbs in quick little pecks, and sucked up the water and tipped her head back as she swallowed. She ate until there were no more crumbs left. 

“Where’s your dad at?” I asked her. She pecked at my fingers. I remembered how Jaybird tried to hypnotize her, and I wondered if I could somehow get it to work. It couldn’t be too hard, right? I rustled a twig out of some nearby bushes and set it down on the ground. I picked her up and petted her head and gently set her down on her back. At first she struggled and kicked her legs but I held her, just above her wings, firm to the ground. “Shhh,” I said. “Just look at the stick.” I got her to focus on the gnarled end of the twig right there in front of her head. 

After about thirty seconds or so, it worked. She froze up, eyes focused completely on the stick. I couldn’t believe it. She looked like a little taxidermy bird. I slowly lifted my hands off of her. It was freezing at this point, and the falling rain turned into falling snow, whooshing in under the bridge from the open sides. 

I wanted to see how long she could hold out her trance, so I sat there on the asphalt right next to her, my knees balled up in my chest. She blinked her eyes and her downy little chest raised and lowered with her breathing. Otherwise, she was gone — off in chicken Shangri-La — staring at that little twig like it was everything in the world. The ground was cold beneath my jeans and the chicken just laid there, legs pointing up to the sky. A crow cawed out from the bushes and flapped up to the dead telephone wire off to the side of the bridge. Soon after that about ten more squawking crows flew up next to their brother and they perched on the sagging line all in row, lined up like voters. 

Me and the crows and the hypnotized chicken all waited. Just waited like that, there in the snow. 

Sean Higgins lives in a brick farmhouse with his wife in Ypsilanti, Michigan. They have cats and chickens. He works as a citations submission editor for a research firm, and likes to collect old nautical maps. His work has been published in Midwestern Gothic, Bartleby Snopes, and The Furious Gazelle. 

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1955 

 Left to my own memory, I would tell you that this takes place in West Virginia, but my mother has convinced me that our six-month stay in West Virginia was over and we were back in Harrisburg. I am four and I attend nursery school (as it was called then), perhaps for half-days, perhaps all day, since my mother works full time––a rarity for mothers then. One evening, I greet her by announcing that the other kids are babies and I am not going back. I think they whine too much and cry too much and talk more like babies than four-year-olds. They even look like babies and I am embarrassed to be in the same class. I feel it reflects badly on me. Apparently I’m very convincing because my mother finds a private kindergarten that will take me mid-year and at the wrong age. Kindergarten is an immediate improvement, and in the spring there is a formal graduation complete with caps and gowns. I can tell that the parents find our procession adorable (who can blame them?) but their amusement bothers me. I feel grown-up and dignified and it’s hard to maintain that feeling when I hear their appreciative inhales. 

My mother now has the challenge of getting me into first grade for the following fall when I will be five years and two months. She and my father went to school in New York City when it was routine for smart kids to skip a grade during the elementary school years, often more than one. But in Pennsylvania things are not done this way. The school officials believe it is a bad idea; no one has done it and no good can come of it.  I have to pass muster with our pediatrician and this is followed by a lengthy exam with a psychologist. Despite my usual shyness, I find the tests entertaining and the attention not unpleasant. I am allowed to begin first grade in the fall. My mother walks me to the classroom and I seem to be the last child to arrive that morning. I don’t like this. It is not a happy situation for a reserved child to be the last to enter a room of strangers. First grade suits me though; I am still the tallest child but I’m not embarrassed to be here and there are things to learn. At some point, the psychologist comes to the classroom to observe. Luckily, I have no idea I am being watched. He is pleased with me, but my mother tells me many years later that the teacher didn’t approve of me being in the class. I am allowed to continue because the only deficit she can name is that my paper-cutting skills are sub par. 

1960 

I’m in fifth grade and I’m still the tallest girl but one or two of the boys are taller, finally. I am always the skinniest and always the youngest. We moved the previous year to Washington D.C.––Maryland really, but we always say “D.C.”  Moving is never a favorite activity of children but this one is especially difficult. It coincides with me having been persuaded to cut off my very long, not great but pretty good hair. It coincides with the onset of glasses, always the cheapest frame sold, which means horn-rimmed, pastel-colored (the choice was white, pink, or blue) with little speckles throughout the surface of the frame. Years later when friends come across the few photos in which I have not hidden these things behind my back, they look at me with compassion. One day at recess, I am hanging out with some kids from my class and a few unfamiliar kids from another fifth grade class. One of them begins to taunt me. He says that I am so tall and look so much older that I must have flunked a year, maybe even two. I must be fourteen. I am ten and I don’t feel flattered by this. My sister is four years older and I am often taken for her twin, which I think is a compliment. But I don’t think he means anything flattering by it. I think he means that I look stupid and I don’t fit in. This encounter is a definite setback in my quest to be in the right grade with the right people. I have, by the way, become very good at using scissors and my friends often ask me to cut out the ball dresses we design during our  “Gone With the Wind” phase. 

 1962 – 1968 

 Things improve slightly in junior high school. Other kids are starting to grow now. Being skinny (I try to insist on the word ‘slim’ but it doesn’t take) is not a good thing but I see that it attracts less vitriol than the opposite. In seventh grade I meet two friends who will prove to be friends for life, though for one of them life will be cruelly short. Popularity is out of reach and I think that I handle this gracefully. In our high school, being smart is valued almost above looks. But it also takes confidence, or a convincing impersonation of confidence, to be popular. Some years after high school I learn that a surprising number of the popular girls turned out to be lesbians. I wonder if their brain chemistry pushed them in the direction of having more confidence (simulated or real), along with a more competitive drive than the traditional female brain might provide.  And perhaps these subtle enhancements were topped off by a dusting of aggression, all useful qualities for rising to the top. Popular or not, gay or straight, we begin to make our plans, which for many of us means choosing distant schools. I am still the youngest but the others are catching up nicely. 

1968 – 1982 

 People at college seem to find out quickly that I have just turned seventeen. How does this always become a topic? I can’t believe that I am making it known–– maybe our birthdays are posted somewhere. Right away, another freshman is promoted to me as a good match. He is a young one too, even younger than I am, and this is thought to be a significant bond for us. To me, he seems as if he hasn’t quite finished puberty, and I’m embarrassed by the pairing. At one of the first dances, he asks me to dance and I say no, an unkindness I regret to this day. He is handsome and mature by graduation and goes on to have a significant career as a classical musician, but I regret my rebuff long before I know any of this, in fact from the moment it happens. When I graduate I am twenty––two months away from twenty-one––an event I celebrate at a local bar where I have been drinking for two years. When I show the bartender my I.D. in order to claim my free drink, his eyes widen, he swears, but he realizes there’s no point in worrying about it now. 

For a while after college, I feel as if I have a few extra years to spend before I get my life started. I spend them well: traveling, living in a beautiful place, making mistakes with men, learning to make different mistakes with each new man (this is harder than it seems). Eventually I realize that I have used up my bonus time and begin graduate school. Many of us are the same age but there are also a few who came right from college. I feel a bit displaced. In 1982 I officially end my reign as the young one by marrying a man who is two years and four months younger. 

1983 – 1988 

 Two sons are born during these years. Neither of us is the youngest anymore. I religiously read the college alumni magazine that arrives quarterly. This turns out to be a somewhat demoralizing thing to do if you are prone to comparisons: one graduate near my age has just received the highest honor that the University of Minnesota can bestow on a faculty member; another is the new president of Miami of Ohio; another has just been offered a post as the priest (female) of a Scottish Episcopal Church in the Kingdom of Fife (we are assumed to know where this is); another has had a book of essays published by Columbia University; and one is a comedian-magician with very successful magic show in Las Vegas and a glowing paragraph in Frommers. In the last section, titled In Memoriam, I read that the police have finally solved the murder of James, whose death in 1969 had shocked and puzzled everyone. A career criminal has finally confessed to shooting James because he fought back during a robbery in his off-campus apartment. I didn’t know James well. He was sort of famous for not using any drugs. I’m surprised at how relieved I feel that this sad mystery is solved. 

I’m reading these entries one evening and feeling unaccomplished; I did manage, at least, not to get murdered during college or since, but that’s more luck than talent. I know I shouldn’t, but I hear myself saying to my husband, “I can’t believe I have made so little of my life so far.” He sees what I am reading and asks suspiciously, “Who are you comparing yourself to now?”  I wait a moment. I know I will sound like a child, but still I mutter, “Koffe Annan.” He snorts with disgust and begins, “Well, if that’s how you want to…” He stops himself; he does not want to hear about Koffe Annan (class of ‘61) and he does not want to make the case, again, that I have a respectable and even admirable career which brings in not-bad money, and if I had really wanted more out of life, nothing but drive and ambition have stopped me. Instead he leaves the room. This is not an argument either of us can win––or enjoy. 

I didn’t know then that in a few years the scenery was to change, and I would travel from the petty terrain of comparison and competition to the vast and foreign landscape of grief. The sections that follow may be difficult. Turn away if you need to––I did at times. Each of these people deserves a full chapter or perhaps a book, but for now, just this. 

1994 – Brad 

 One of the two friends from seventh grade is ill. I do not know this because I have put him in a position that makes it impossible for him to tell me that he is infected. I have one too many times conveyed to him that I am sure he is healthy and he must do everything to stay that way. When the first medications become available, he finally decides to take the test. He doesn’t tell me that he took it. I am easy to avoid. He lives in New York and I have a new baby. Eventually the truth seeps through my layers of denial and I start calling. We trade messages and then I reach his partner of sixteen years and the poor guy is stuck with telling me that Brad, after many years of reasonable health, is battling his first serious infection. Brad and I talk regularly; after each phone call I am up all night. I want to be back in denial. When he’s discharged from the hospital I have flowers mailed from Hawaii. I know it’s like a treasure hunt to unpack the deep red Antherium one by one from the oversized carton. One day on the phone, he makes a casual reference to now being blind in one eye. When he realizes by my reaction that he hadn’t yet told me about this event, he apologizes profusely for shocking me. I beg him not to apologize––one shouldn’t have to go blind and apologize. Things go badly and there are several more hospitalizations. After three months of this he refuses the hospital and he dies at home, not quite forty-four. The new medications (the ones that actually work) become available in something over a year, and for many years after that I’m bitter that he missed the treatment by so little time. I trade in the tickets we were going to use to visit him for tickets to attend his memorial service. I don’t tell the ticket agent at the airport why I am changing the dates, but maybe he can read it in my face. He doesn’t charge me the change fees. 

1995 – Mary, Ted 

Mary is my husband’s stepmother; she is forty-eight years old, barely older than her four step-“kids.” She has been in the family for about ten years and she was welcomed not with resentment but with gratitude and relief. She is doing a fine job taking care of my impossible father-in-law, though the job is approaching impossible, between his alcoholism and his not-yet-diagnosed dementia. We learn that Mary has been seeing doctors and her vague and innocuous-sounding symptoms result in a diagnosis that kills her one short horrible month later. Leaving the funeral, thinking of the needy man she left behind, I ask my sister-in-law, “Whose marriage do you think will break up first? Taking care of him is bound to destroy something.” My husband ends up being his father’s caretaker but we don’t break up over it. My sister-in-law’s marriage does end, but over other things. I had always planned on befriending Mary after my father-in-law died. 

Ted is a boyhood friend of my husband’s, though only my husband was a boy since Ted is twenty years older. In his teens, my husband was taken in by a band of artists of whom Ted was the king. Eventually they reached that stage of life where twenty years isn’t such a gulf and they became friends. Ted’s son Paul is ten years younger than my husband and looks up to him; Ted is often undependable when it comes to fatherly things. He has been battling lung cancer for several years; it’s not a type you get from smoking but the chemicals and solvents that artists work with are suspect. Ted and my husband have not been close since around the time that we had kids––too much domesticity for Ted perhaps––but illness draws them together again. After one of those long remissions that offers false hope, Ted dies in the early winter; he is sixty-two. Shortly before his death, a fire in his studio destroys much of his work. A few months before the fire, he let us buy seven pieces, the first of his art we were ever able to own.  When he was well, he wouldn’t give it away and he wouldn’t sell it either, except to a scattering of museums around the country. 

1997 – Paul 

Paul, son of Ted, is thirty-five and far too handsome ––I can hardly think around him. Like his father, he is a talented artist and he’s finding success in tough places, including New York. He is also too smart; I know he doesn’t do anything unkind or pretentious to cause it but I feel slow and stupid around him. Besides making art, he writes for academic art journals and I find his essays impenetrable. At his funeral his mother assures me that hardly anyone can understand that kind of writing. One night two years after Ted’s death, I come home from work and my husband leads me upstairs. He has something he wants to tell me without the kids hearing. By the look on his face, it might be something good. I can’t really tell. It’s not an expression I’ve seen before. He tells me that Paul has hung himself in his studio in Williamsburg, the same studio he had proudly shown us when we were in New York for Brad’s memorial service. I don’t understand what I’ve been told. This is just like eighth grade when a girl in history class told me, “President Kennedy has been shot,” but all I could think was, Why is President Kennedy shocked? What could have shocked him? How do people know that he is shocked?  Why is she telling me this?  Eventually it sinks in that Paul is not shocked either. I write his mother one of my finer condolence letters; I have recently had a completely convincing dream in which I watch my young son drown and I use this in just the right way in my letter.  For years, I indulge in an elaborate fantasy in which I could have saved Paul. I don’t tell anyone about this because there are enough elements of truth in my rescue fantasy that they might look at me and say, “Why didn’t you?” 

2000 – Al 

We’ve gotten to know a new couple and are becoming friends with them. We’re short on couples because one half of a pair turns out to be too alcoholic, or self-centered, or boring.  Sometimes we like both halves of a couple and it’s clearly meant to be a match, except they don’t think so. Getting married doesn’t really rescue you from the dating life. You may be married but you’re still dating. So it is not a small thing that we like both halves of this pair. She, however, is very reserved and things only really work when Al is around too. He is enthusiastic and voluble and can carry the social weight for both of them when she’s in a quiet mood. In May, he tells us about his diagnosis; a neighbor who is a doctor saw a spot on his back and told him to get help now. Al is upbeat and brave and does every horrible thing they tell him to. I decide that my husband and I are under some kind of terrible curse, except that so far, the danger is only to those around us. I know it’s not rational, but I am nonetheless sure that if we hadn’t befriended them, he would be fine. The statistics promise him a few years but he dies on Thanksgiving morning. They are our young friends––he was forty-three. She meets a good man not long after, but he is also quiet. We make some attempts for a year or two, but everyone loses interest. 

2005-Carol 

Carol isn’t a close friend but she is a good friend of twenty years. It’s a steady friendship though we only see each other a few times a year. She travels and I think we are the only people who call and say we want to see the photographs and hear about your trip and let’s schedule a time for it. If you travel, you know that most people want to hear about your trip for exactly eleven seconds. Carol is politically liberal and compassionate but not a radical like some of her friends; she likes that she can say things to us that might offend the others. She appreciates that we don’t over-parent our kids and that it’s safe for her to grumble about the indulgence she sees around her. We’re not in her inner circle but we’re important to each other, and its’ a friendship of compatibility, not of proximity or convenience. In 2003, while traveling in France, she can’t ignore her symptoms any longer and when she gets back, she turns herself in for a diagnosis. Carol is a doctor and thus is denied the denial stage, a cruel omission. Before Carol’s illness the death rate around us had slowed down for a few years. We both lost our fathers but they were old and their bodies (and my father-in-law’s mind) had given out and only very bad things lay ahead for them. But here we go again with a not-old person dying and I don’t want to be around it.  

During the last five months of her life––a life which, like the others (except Paul)––she is desperate to hang on to, I do as little as possible: I bring flowers twice; I bring fresh sliced peaches on the first day she is allowed to eat again; I bring her books. Her close friends can’t choose the right books, but I am good at matching people with books. I do not volunteer for any shifts of overnight care and I do not visit often. I do not want to know more than I already know. My husband, on the other hand, dives right in. He takes over her lawn mowing and helps her other friends with gardening. She is determined to put in a first-floor bathroom, counting on having enough time to need it. Most people think she will never use it, but it is a great distraction for her. My husband enlists an architect who understands the timeline, and Carol and he design a wonderful bathroom. Carol chooses tile, paint, and fixtures from the many samples and catalogs brought to her chair, and then to her bed. I think my husband is nuts to become so close to her now, closer than he has ever been in the past. I do not say this out loud. Heroic acts are performed to keep the bathroom project moving and the room is completed. One bath later, Carol, at age fifty-one, enters the hospice she helped found. 

2006 – Dennis 

Don’t despair, this is the last for now, as far as I know. Dennis is also fifty-one. His two children are on the young side, a son in middle school and a daughter in high school. He married late because he and my friend didn’t meet until 1989. She is my age and we were single together long enough to become really tired of being single. I was the first to meet someone suitable, and she had several more discouraging years of looking. I admired her technique though-––she was very businesslike. She joined a singles group and would go regularly to these bleak events. She wouldn’t drink more than one glass of wine because she wanted to make clearheaded decisions. In other words she was doing everything differently than she had when she was younger. Eventually her patience and discipline paid off; she met Dennis and they began a careful courtship. He is a sincere Catholic and his earlier divorce was something he was not going to repeat. It was necessary, but this is not a man who fails at things––that marriage was probably the first failure of his life. After their wedding, Dennis and my friend moved quickly and had two babies right away. Kids didn’t slow them down much. You can get tired just from hearing about one of their weekends––don’t even ask about vacations. One Tuesday night in late October, Dennis commits the second failure of his life. Watching the bitter end of a Tigers’ World Series game late at night, uncharacteristically alone, he has a heart attack, no warning, no known disease, good marks on his last physical. He manages to get to the stairs and wake his daughter just in time for her to watch him die.  His mother, a querulous and burdensome woman (even when not grief-stricken) who lives yards away and under their care, blames this fifteen-year-old child for not knowing CPR and she tells her this. My friend doesn’t blame her daughter but does find a role for his mother in the explosion of her husband’s heart, and now her own. 

Now    

Aren’t you relieved? No names in the heading. Just life again. My husband, always good with the dying and the affairs of the dead (I do not mean this entirely as a compliment) is able to be helpful with the complicated aftermath of Dennis’ death, though it is still a full-time job for our friend. It turns out that very full lives result in very full afterlives. Dennis is dead for less than a month when I begin a private list of possible men for her to meet. I am outraged that after all her hard work, she is single again. She is outraged too. 

In a few weeks my husband and I are going to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to see a new show titled PAUL DICKERSON: AS ART. In April we hope to go to New York for a few days, and if we’re lucky, we’ll see Brad’s partner. It took him about ten years to find someone he cared about. Brad wasn’t really replaceable. I suppose none of us is, but that part was written only for him. 

I haven’t been the youngest for a long time and I only seem young to the elderly. I think more about time than age now, and friends know not to complain around me about getting old. Whatever ungrateful thoughts I have on the topic, I keep to myself. 

Deborah Gang, originally from Washington D.C., moved to Kalamazoo to attend grad school and remained there, both for her work as a psychotherapist and the huge freshwater ocean to the west. Her research is published in Education & Treatment of Children, and her creative non-fiction and poems are in Literary Mama and The Driftless Review. Her poems are also seen in Arsenic Lobster, The Michigan Poet, J Journal/CUNY, and Flare/Flagler Review. 

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My husband and I are both fiction writers.  In order to earn a living we’ve taken on an odd assortment of freelance jobs over the years. We managed to raise two children this way, with me poring over supermarket circulars each week as I enthusiastically assumed the challenge of orchestrating a half-priced existence. We never felt deprived or poor, maybe because our sights were always fixed on the distant horizon, where success lay waiting for us.  We went on like this for more years than I care to admit. 

The cracks in the ceiling, the mismatched tiles on the bathroom floor never bothered me, nor did the fact that a Spanish restaurant in our neighborhood with a Health Department rating of C was just about the only place we ever went out to eat. 

Heaving a succession of two pregnant bellies down the streets of Washington Heights for a period that spanned three or four years, I managed to find us a six-room rent-stabilized apartment, with a view of the George Washington Bridge, at a rent that the new landlord periodically wails to me in his shrill and whiny voice is “highway robbery.” True, our vacations in those horrible little cabins in Upstate New York were pretty awful, but the children never seemed to mind and Phil and I never liked vacations anyway:  our happiest moments were spent pummeling sentences into shape on our respective laptops. 

During this time Phil wrote eight unpublished novels; I wrote short stories, some of which were published in small literary quarterlies.  For Phil recognition came in the form of awards and fellowships. 

Then one day a literary agent from William Morris appeared in Starbucks, where Phil, who has earned more gold points than any customer in Starbucks’ history, was at work on yet another novel. She agreed to represent novel number nine, declaring that his was the most impressive literary debut she had seen in years.  Less than three weeks after she put his novel up for auction there was an email from her reporting that an editor was offering to buy the book for something in the six figures. 

Phil was on his way back from the dentist at the time and I called to tell him the news. Suddenly overcome by an overwhelming sense of dread, I asked him, Are you walking?  Be careful!  I don’t think it’s a good idea to be walking and talking at the same time!  Stop walking!  Stop walking! I want to talk to you, I said. Did you stop walking? Tell me you stopped walking!  When he reassured me that he was sitting as still as the gargoyles adorning the gutter of the roof of the apartment building on 177th Street and Ft. Washington Avenue on whose stoop he was perched I told him how proud I was of him for sticking it out for so long.  I feel like a proud mother, I told him. And I’m happy it was you before me, I said.  I swear I am. 

That was true.  Phil had always taken his rejections a lot harder than I ever took mine.   It was that tender male ego of his.  And then, he had been at this a lot longer than I had been.   After my parents guessed the ending of the “book” I wrote when I was in third grade there had been a long hiatus in my literary pursuits, whereas Phil had been writing fiction obsessively since he was eleven.  His old girlfriend from college once told me that he used to bring his typewriter along with him whenever they went to the beach. 

Phil wasn’t ashamed to admit that he was glad he was the first one of us to get a book of fiction published.  Maybe you’ll be next, he said.  Let’s hope you’ll be next.   Then we talked about the money.  I did a quick calculation and figured out that considering how I had been managing our lives these past years it could last us for a long time–long enough for us to quit our freelance gigs and devote ourselves fulltime to writing fiction. 

We were both in our fifties then, too old, it surprised us to discover, to be excited by this amazing stroke of luck. Our main feeling was relief. 

Over the years we had known other writers like us, writers who had persevered well past middle age. We had read their work.  They had read ours.  Many of them were talented.  Others we thought were wasting their lives.  They were temp typists with Ph.D.s, teachers who had contempt for their students; people who never gave their hearts to the things they spent most of their time doing: how tragic.  Those were our unkind thoughts about them, and no doubt there were plenty who thought the same right back at us. 

And Phil’s brother, the prominent cardiologist, and his brother’s wife, the renowned bioengineer, and his cousin, the economics professor emeritus, who at family gatherings were always asking genially, “How’s the book going, Phil?”  What did they really think about us?  What did they say about us on the car ride home? They must have wondered, at least. Now hardhearted professionals who expected books to make money were endorsing the idea that the reason Phil had never stopped writing was because he was good at it. 

Long before my husband’s novel was published, friends and family who had read it kept on telling us that it was sure to be a best seller; and we detected many other signs that we were about to enter the Big Time.  There was Phil’s gigantic advance; the pre-publicity that had yielded terrific blurbs from famous authors and a starred review along with an interview with Phil in Publishers Weekly; there was the fact that the publisher had paid to have his novel spend a month on the New Arrivals table at Barnes & Noble; book clubs had bought it; there was even going to be a Large Print edition of it so that people with bad eyesight would not be denied the pleasure of reading the book that, by then, everyone would be talking about. 

I went around proclaiming we were going to be millionaires. I started thinking that it might be nice to have money.  We could eat out at good restaurants, and maybe even order dessert.  We could go on the kinds of vacations our friends went on. The day the novel “dropped,” industry lingo for when a book enters the world for the first time, we learned (“drop”—what a peculiar term for the fulfillment of a writer’s dream of a lifetime), I went to Home Depot and contemplated buying a granite countertop for $1500—and that didn’t even include a sink. 

As it turns out, however, Phil’s book has not been the overnight blockbuster I had decided it would be. So now I find myself asking myself questions such as: Why did we go on the way we did for so long?  Why couldn’t we have at least made some attempt to earn a decent living?  And then the little deprivations we have endured for all these years  (deprivations which before those visions of the millions that would be pouring down on us overnight I never realized were deprivations) starting sinking in. 

My eyes are no longer fixed on the distant horizon now, and the mismatched tiles in the bathroom are driving me crazy. But I know this feeling of despair won’t last forever: I keep on telling myself that the novel hasn’t been out that long and perhaps it is a little premature for me to concede defeat.  As for me, ever since I starting coughing up the three-dollar reading fee that most literary quarterlies are charging writers these days, the pace of my acceptances has been picking up.  And Phil is well into writing novel number ten.  He reads sections of it to me every night after his second or third stint at Starbucks is done and we have high hopes for it.  And why shouldn’t we feel optimistic?  We’ve been living off hope for so long.  Why should we stop now? 

Maxine Rosaler’s husband’s name is Phillip Margulies.  The title of his novel is Belle Cora. 

Maxine Rosaler’s work has been or will be published in The Southern Review, Glimmer Train, Green Mountains Review, Ascent, Fifth Wednesday, Able Muse, The South Carolina Review and other literary quarterlies. She is a recipient of a New York Foundation of Arts fiction fellowship, and a story of hers was cited in Best American Short Stories. 

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Even when everything else is gone 
from here, there will still be a pond 
thick, vernal, much 

the color of a newly opened swimming pool 
after a long New England winter 
under cover, and stinking warmly of oil. 

The pond has no border, no raised hand, 
no flame. Everything is only another 
member of the water’s green 

democracy: roads someone crossed 
a silver platter, the skull of a baptist, 
children, drowned rats, roots 

unsoiled and unnamed. Above all 
the light of the local star goes on reflecting, 
though there is no more breath, 

save an emotionless belch from the deep 
that might be the last laugh 
of a holy ghost, excusing 

the roiling gasses steeped in all history 
for making him again. 

Taylor Daynes grew up in Wenham, Massachusetts. She currently resides in Baltimore, where she writes, teaches and is pursuing an MFA at The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. Her work has appeared online at Incessant Pipe, and in print in ZigZag Folios. 

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My dog approaches,   a baby bird clutched in her mouth. 

Impossible to tell 

if it drowned   in its nest in the gutter         during the rainstorm last night 

or if it fell out                                      and she found it alive. 

I dreamt this, or something like it:                  my husband and I parents 

to a newborn redbird.              A hawk swooped in                a community 

of birds surrounded the predator        drove it from the nest 

in a cloud of frantic wings.                                          I only watched 

enamored by the hawk’s desire to eat something so small               so new. 

I didn’t join in stopping it. 

When the hawk was gone, I turned to my newborn         lying wrapped in a                blanket 

nestled                         in a crib high up. 

I wished I had never had a child. 

To save her from choking on the hollow bones, 

I try to take the dead hatchling from my dog. 

                                                                                              Drop it, I demand 

                             and hear the crunch                 of her keeping it from me. 

Stephanie McCarley Dugger’s chapbook, Sterling, is available from Paper Nautilus. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Calyx, CUTTHROAT, Gulf Stream, Meridian, Naugatuck River Review, The Southeast Review, Still: The Journal, Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, Zone 3 and other journals. She grew up on a farm in Alabama, received an MFA from the University of Wyoming and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee, where she serves as poetry editor for Grist. 

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On the north shore 
of the Ouachita, 
the landing is flooded 
where a mountain bluebird 
hovers and sings.  Too 
far east to be here, 
the guidebook reads. 
Pay that no mind. 

I, a ghost, was sweeping 
the south stairs.  You were 
quartz crystal sold at the fair. 

Lady Ghost Lane 
connects with no town. 
In the winnowed 
first fields of hay, damp 
undersides lift from stubble 
to dry.  We drive, 
our hands out our windows 
like minor wings. 

Old sea poured into mountains 
born of folds and faults 
and was pressed with heat 
to change in time. 

Butterflies kettle 
in the mud.  The monarch 
leaps in its tiger ways 
with kerosene flames 
down these old logging lanes. 
Rockhounds pry and chisel 
the sea’s crystal veins, pulling 
out prisms to heal all blame. 

Translucent, I could only 
be pierced by an arrow 
built from your stone. 

Angie Macri is the author of Underwater Panther (forthcoming from Southeast Missouri State University Press), winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize.  Her recent work appears in Cottonwood, Heron Tree, and North Dakota Quarterly.  An Arkansas Arts Council fellow, she teaches in Little Rock. 

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Lucian Mattison’s first full-length collection, Peregrine Nation (The Broadkill River Press, 2014) won the 2014 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Boiler, Everyday Genius, Hobart, Muzzle Magazine, Spork, and The Valparaiso Poetry Review, among other journals, and has received Pushcart Prize nominations. He received his MFA from Old Dominion University. He is an associate editor at Big Lucks and edits poetry for Green Briar Review. To read more visit Lucianmattison.com 

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“One Night,” by Alexa Mergen 

“Through the Loupe,” which takes its name from the tiny glass that jewelers use to appraise the fine details of gemstones, will be a series of reviews that examine singular works — poems, stories, essays, etc. — that have appeared in recent issues of literary journals. Lately, I’ve been frustrated by book reviews that focus solely on “the project” of a book and not enough on the individual pieces therein. Though theme, organization, and subject matter are important elements to consider, I want to see more attention given to craft. My hope is that this series will provide critics a space in which they can focus on finer points of an individual work. More than anything, though, I envision these reviews working in the same way one friend might hand a magazine to another friend and say, “Hey, read this. It’s great.” 
–James Davis May, Reviews Editor

Recently, I’ve been interested in the lyric. I’m drawn to the immediacy, the absolute must-ness of what’s uttered. (If it’s not urgent, it’s not a lyric.) I’ve also been thinking about and drawn to poems that have their eyes pointed toward the quotidian, the everyday, the banal—more specifically, how the very public (and often overlooked) life of the banal contains a very private language, if we but have the patience to pay attention, to really sit and listen. Mark Strand says somewhere that the point of truth comes when a poet goes from writing private poems in a public language to writing public poems in a private language—and this, I think, is (or at least can be) the great triumph of the lyric poem. 

Reading through literary magazines the past few weeks for this review, I was happy to click upon Alexa Mergen’s poem “One Night,” published in the Winter 2015 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. “One night,” the poem begins, “she turns the novel’s last page. This is all—”: 

small house, plain street, some trees, sweet and irksome neighbors, 
dishes, bills, water leaks, 

fallen branches, people, dogs, cats adrift in dreams. 

 The scene here is austere (“small,” “plain,” “some”): a litany of things, plain things in the novel’s landscape. What balances the dullness of the description though is how well the music is managed: the internal rhymes and assonance (all-small, street-trees-sweet-leaks-dreams, plain-neighbors) that connect and rush us through the lines; those deftly handled rhythms moving from a spondee-heavy line to trochees, and then finally, in “cats adrift in dreams,” to an almost perfectly iambic end. 

The poem continues, revealing that the novel “is for youth, the story of a sea journey after loss, cross words / and danger…” And indeed, these lines do read as more adolescent, raging against the Real World, its cookie-cutter domesticity, its abstraction-shattering weight depicted in the poem’s opening lines. And so the poem concludes: 

and, in the end healed bones and hearts choosing this, over adventure, 
effervescent longing. 
The story plucked like a string— 
the world a whorl, made plain by the stain of surrender. 

The last stanza here strikes me as a wonderful example of closure, both formal and dramatic. I was most surprised (and delighted) by this stanza’s ABBA rhyme scheme, nicely disguised. That Ms. Mergen has chosen to employ this particular rhyme scheme in the final quatrain—rather than, say, ABAB or AABB—seems rather apt in this poem[1]. The rhyme scheme is at once one of fulfillment and deflation. And if there can be a way to describe how one feels when finishing a novel (any good book, for that matter), it is this, fulfillment alongside deflation. 

But the rhymes themselves contain a rewarding resonance—especially between adventure-surrender. If adventure suggests freedom, exploration, agency, then this poem finds its end in none of these things; it finds its end, instead, in surrender. Even the stain it makes is uninteresting. And yet, the great tension of this poem seems to be in that phrase, “choosing this”—are the trees, neighbors, etc., truly chosen, or finally assented to? That “adventure” and “surrender” are a half-rhyme suggests a certain ambiguity, a lack of closure; rough going for the folks living in the novel, though to my eye and ear, a satisfying decision to end the poem, reflecting that uncertainty formally. 

So far I’ve engaged in a conversation mostly interested in Ms. Mergen’s formal decisions—reading, as they say, like a writer—though I’m quite taken by other aspects of the poem: particularly how the “she” of the poem appears only once, and yet is somehow subsumed by the narrative framed in the novel—one imagines the novel’s narrative as an extension of the woman’s own interior landscape (the private becoming public, in a way). All a very restrained, controlled, deft handling of a framed story in a poem, set off by that refrain one hears in the first and last stanza, “This is all—” and “choosing this,” with “this” taking on a painful sharpness the second time we hear it. The music, too, as I’ve mentioned earlier, is a virtue of this poem, in its phrasing and its melodies. Finally, as I wrote to open this little review, I’ve been drawn to poems with an eye for the everyday—and while “One Night” is certainly not a celebration of the mundane, mendacity wins out in the end. In the end, we’re forced to look at it in this poem and, for better or worse, I find myself admiring that. 

[1] The ABBA quatrain, used quite famously by Tennyson in “In Memoriam,” has the effect of both an opening and a closure: we know there’s a partner in sound and expect it, though the two following lines force us to wait (the opening); and when the rhyme’s completion finally does come, the stanza ends (closure). 

Christian Detisch’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Superstition Review, Blackbird, and the minnesota review. He is a third year MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he serves as the Levis Fellow. 

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