SPRING 2013

The story on the Tampa evening news would report that no one had seen little Cody until after he had been crushed beneath truck tires. All the candy-colored houses had blinds closed to the summer sun. The truck driver, in a whimpering interview with reporter Kelsey Grice, would say the kid came out of nowhere. Kelsey Grice informed greater Tampa that the kid’s babysitter, who was not interviewed, didn’t even know the did had gone out for a ride. Kelsey’s coral lipstick turned the words into an insult when she looked into the camera and concluded, “A tragic story.”

In the babysitter’s own recounting of the story, every night to herself before bed, the entire episode might have been avoided if it weren’t for the three calls. Cassie never shared her theory with anyone. She could see her mother, in the lounger on the screened in back patio, rolling her eyes. “Go on, honey,” she’d say. “Keep your little superstitions, but if God’s made up his mind that a thing’s gonna happen, it’s damn well gonna happen.”

To Cassie though, they didn’t feel like little superstitions. Her rituals felt like life preservers in a world full of undertows waiting to whisk her away. When she arranged her desk just so or repeated the last words someone spoke to her or touched her rabbit foot three times before a big presentation at school, Cassie was just trying to keep it all under control. After all, she knew that if she didn’t keep it together, especially at home, no one would.

At the dinner table, when Cassie knocked on the wooden surface or handled the table salt with extra care, her mother would sigh, “I don’t know where you got all those silly superstitions from.”

Cassie knew the answer. Nana, Cassie’s fraternal grandmother, had taught her the significance of omens and luck. Before Nana’s stroke, Cassie would stay at her house while her mother worked late at the restaurant. Cassie missed those nights. Nana would tell her stories about her own childhood, keeping rhythm with the clicking of her knitting needles. Cassie would make clumsy attempts at scarves she could never wear with a borrowed crochet hook, but mostly she just listened.

Cassie could never tell her mother any of that. To say that she missed Nana or to explain that Nana told her how to ward off the evil eye, would be to acknowledge Nana’s existence. And to acknowledge Nana’s existence would highlight the absence of Cassie’s father. And that could only end with mother crying or shouting, which Cassie would rather just avoid altogether.

Still, after the accident, when Cody had been laid to rest and Cassie stayed up late to go over that day’s events, it was Nana’s voice that would come to her. “The omen of three, dear,” she’d say. “Those three calls were bad luck.”

Cassie had been wiping down animal cracker crumbs from the coffee table when the first call came. She felt her cell vibrating on her thigh through the thin pocket of her cut-off jean shorts. At the same time, Cody’s baby sister, Mia, began to scream. During the one second that Cassie was distracted by the buzzing phone, Mia’s pacifier had ejected from the baby’s mouth and tumbled under the couch. While Cassie scooped up the baby to try to soothe her cries, Cody slipped out the front door. He had been bugging Cassie all day to take him out for a ride. By the time Cassie set a quieter Mia down on the stained lilac carpet, her phone had stopped ringing and Cody was gone. Cassie didn’t even notice.

Cassie’s story wasn’t the only one that wasn’t covered in Kelsey’s report on WFTS Action News. There had been, in fact, one witness to Cody’s last bike ride. The man, a stranger from up North, had crossed the street right as Cody came cruising by, streamers flying in the otherwise stiff, humid air. Marshall Hudson was in a foul mood when he crossed paths with little Cody. He was hot. His suit clung to his soft belly. He never had the right clothes for trips to the Southeast sales region. He had just abandoned the rental car, a piece of crap Chevy, back on I-4. Like him, it had overheated. On top of that, his cell phone battery was dead, like he thought he soon would be if he didn’t find some air-conditioning. He had set out on foot in search of a repairman, a pay phone, or at least a goddamn drink of water. The last thing he needed was for some brat to ruin the shoes his wife, Sue, had bought him when he got his promotion to lead sales.

Marshall jumped back out of the way of the careening bike. “Goddamn it you little shit!” he shouted. Immediately he felt ashamed of cursing at a kid.

Even more to his chagrin, the boy on the bike slowed and doubled back to wear he stood. The boy looked him straight in the face and said, “I’m sorry, sir.”

Marshall wiped the sweat from his brow. He found the boy’s gaze unnerving. “Next time just, watch where you’re going.”

“I will, sir. And you, sir, you shouldn’t cuss like that.”

Children never made much sense to Marshall. He and Sue never got around to having any of their own and his nieces and nephews were mysteries to him. When they were babies presented at family gatherings, he could never elbow in close enough through the crowd of adoring grandparents and more enthusiastic aunts and uncles. When he did hold them, he didn’t see what the big deal was. They smelled weird and threw up everywhere. When they were old enough to talk Marshall had no idea what to say. Now they were teens and everything about them seemed strange.

The kid on the bike in front of him seemed especially odd though. Marshall found it endearing. Meeting this weird kid with the flamboyant bike might be the one good thing to happen to Marshall all day.

“I guess I owe you the apology. I didn’t mean to lose my temper,” Marshall said to the boy.

“You’re sweating a lot,” was the kid’s only reply.

“I had to walk here. That stupid piece of…uh, car broke down on the highway. You wouldn’t happen to know where the closest gas station is, do you?”

“Sure.”

The boy walked with Marshall for a couple of blocks to a busy intersection.

“I’m not allowed past this invisible line,” the boy said, “but if you go just down there, past Burger King, there’s a gas station.”

Marshall thanked the kid, who turned and began to peddle away. Later, when Marshall turned on the evening news, he saw the kid’s streamers. Marshall remembered thinking they were a little queer. Now they were the only recognizable thing left of the bicycle. With trembling hands, Marshall dialed his home number. He would tell Sue he wanted kids now. He was ready. He’d tell work he couldn’t travel as much anymore.

But it would never happen. Sue never answered the phone. Marshall flipped off the TV, put on his suit jacket and headed down to the hotel bar to start forgetting he ever met a boy on a bike that day.

While Marshall stumbled over the uneven grass, muttering under his breath about the wisdom of a sidewalk and Cody was making his way back up the street towards home, Cassie received the second phone call. Cassie leaned over baby Mia, sprawled like an overturned turtle on the floor. Cassie shook her head back and forth, making ridiculous, horse-like sounds through her lips. The baby continued to fuss.

Cassie flopped on her side beside Mia, which put her pacifier in plain view where it was hiding under the couch. Cassie crawled over and reached her arm far into the dark space under the sofa. She patted a coin, a metal toy car–those could wait to be rescued another day–then finally the pacifier. As her fingers curled around the slobbery rubber, her phone began to vibrate. By the time she wriggled her arm free the phone was still. With one hand, Cassie wiped the pacifier on her shorts, with the other she slid the screen of the phone far enough out of her pocket to see that her once best friend was calling.

Cassie rolled her eyes at the phone. Ever since her so-called best friend had started dating an older guy, she rarely called. It used to be enough to just lie in the sand at Clearwater beach, eating out of the same bag of french onion Sun Chips and reading gossip mags. They’d talk for hours about what they were going to do when they left Florida. Alicia was going to California to be on TV. Cassie always said she’d go with her, but she knew she really wanted to go to New York City for college. She didn’t want to jinx it.

Nowadays, Alicia only seemed happy when boys were around. It seemed to Cassie that, as far as Alicia was concerned, the louder and more obnoxious the boy, the better. Meanwhile, Alicia’s hair got blonder, her bikinis skimpier, her days at school shorter, and her love for beer and cigarettes expanded exponentially. Cassie watched her becoming one of those Florida women that they wanted to escape from, like their mothers.

***

On the other end of the line, Alicia clicked her cell phone closed as a sweaty man in a baggy suit walked in the door. The bell above the door tingled in what sounded to Alicia like a cloyingly cheerful tone. The voice of the radio deejay pronounced it was a perfect day for the beach. Alicia couldn’t agree more, but she was stuck at this stupid job that her parents made her get. It would build character, they insisted. She had to save up for her own car, they explained. Alicia really knew they just wanted her locked up somewhere. They couldn’t put her in juvy themselves, so a job would have to do.

The man made a beeline for the cooler. He didn’t even wait to pay before cracking the seal on the sport’s drink and taking a long gulp. Alicia hated it when customers did that. How did she know he was going to pay? She didn’t want to get reamed for having a short drawer at the end of the night just because this old guy was so thirsty.

Besides, Alicia had bigger issues to worry about. Bigger than a short drawer. Bigger than a greasy, sunburned tourist. Earlier, Alicia had squatted in the employees-only restroom over a pregnancy test she had swiped right from the store’s shelf. The test said plus, which meant she had a plus one in her body now. All she could think to do was to call Cassie, who was babysitting some neighborhood kids. Alicia knew Cassie was avoiding her, but that all seemed a little silly at the moment.

In the store, the man circled the racks of Tostitos tortilla chips, Jack Link’s Jerky and Little Debbie cakes before bringing a Glacier Gatorade and a Kit Kat to the register.

“I see you decided to pay for that Gatorade you drank,” she said.

The man visible tried to contain his own anger. Alicia didn’t care. For all the things she was scared of, she wasn’t afraid of this man. Let him scream at her. Let him report her to the supervisor. Let him hit her even. In fact, she kind of wanted him to. Then she could scream at him too.

But the man just dug down into his damp pockets to retrieve the correct change. Without saying a word, he slammed the coins down on the counter. As Alicia scooped them off the counter and into her cupped palm, she missed and dropped them on the floor. The coins bounced and rung and spun. She could tell the man had just about lost his patience.

Alicia bent to pick them up and the man tap-tap-tapped on the counter with his thick nails. Alicia felt stupid. She didn’t feel like the badass she wanted everyone to believe her to be. She could picture herself through the man’s eyes. Thick black eyeliner, out-of-the-box black hair, a stud in her nose and eyebrow. It was all so ridiculous. How would it all look when she had a baby on her hip?

When Alicia straightened up, she knew her eyes were glassy, so she couldn’t look the man in the face. She bagged his things and slide the package across the counter.

“Not to be too much trouble,” the man said, “but is there a pay phone near here that I could use?”

“It’s out front,” Alicia answered.

The man gathered his purchases and walked away. Just as he was leaving, he said, “I just can’t believe how rude kids are these days.”

Alicia knew it was true. She was ashamed. She needed Cassie. Cassie the calm. Cassie the polite-to-grown-ups. Cassie the perfect. Most of the time, it got on Alicia’s nerves just how easy everything was for Cassie with her tidy little room and good grades. Cassie needed everything to be in its place, everything set to rights, which was why Alicia needed her now, to tell her how to make a place for this pregnancy to fit.

Alicia tried to call Cassie one last time. Shaking, she pulled her phone from her pocket and flipped it open in one deft move. As the phone rang and rang she crumpled in on herself. Alicia was scared. Scared of the little zygote. Scared of telling her parents. The way her stepdad would yell, maybe even hit her. The way her mom would slink silently into the bedroom to ignore the whole scene. She was scared of giving birth. She was even scared that her boss would notice when she did inventory that a pregnancy test was missing even though the entire “health and beauty” section (one shelf) was coated in dust. All he’d have to do was take one look at her giant pregnant belly and know she was the one who stole it.

Of all the things Alicia was afraid of that day, she never thought to be scared of telling her boyfriend the news. Later, when she finally worked up the courage, the domestic disturbance noted in the police ledger of the Tampa Tribune was overshadowed by the story of Cody’s funeral. She would try to hide the newspaper from her parents for fear they might put the pieces together: her bruised arms, the already hated boyfriend’s address, her frequent disappearances lately at mealtimes. Sometimes, Alicia would pull the paper out and scan the pictures from the funeral for signs of Cassie. She didn’t know that her friend hadn’t been able to attend. For a long time after the accident, Cassie was incapable of leaving her bed.

She was getting ahead of herself.

But that would all happen later. For now, Cody was still riding his bike, the truck that would hit him had just turned the corner, and Cassie had finally calmed the baby with the pacifier. Alicia was crouched behind the counter at the store with nothing to comfort her but the stack of paper bags and plastic bins of penny candy. She put her finger on the store’s panic button, but she didn’t push it.

***

Later that night, deep under the covers with the lights out, Cassie would remember the third call with clarity. The call that had summoned the accident. The omen. The mail had crashed through the slot in the door and startled her, but not baby Mia. Mia wriggled carefree on the floor, restored to bliss with her pacifier. Cassie stood, then bent to gather the credit card offers and catalogs from the floor. The smell of baby powder and milk were overpowering in her memory. She flicked through the catalog, the twisting shapes of smiling women in bikinis made her feel suddenly conscious of her thighs. Then, turning from the door, she heard a loud screech and a more subtle thud. It was at that moment when she realized she hadn’t seen Cody in a while.

Cassie didn’t remember dropping the mail. Later she would come back for Mia and see the envelopes scattered around her like a halo. Cassie just remembered running down the street, feeling all the good she had tried to do melting off of her in the Florida heat.

In her memory, as she was running, she already knew what had happened, although she didn’t know if that was true. She knew that the good grades she had earned, the times she had demurred from the groping advances of the boys at the beach, the letters she had written to Nana after her stroke, all that good was erased by this one bad thing. She was cursed.

Even years from the day of the accident, when she was rejected from her first choice college, she knew she was being punished. When her first love left her in the middle of the night, that was her fault too. When child services took away her once-best friend’s toddler son, Cassie felt her stomach curdle. After all, if she had picked up just one of the calls, then maybe her and Alicia would still be friends. Maybe she could have helped raise the son or just been there for Alicia. If she had picked up one of the calls, there would not have been three. Without three, there would not have been an accident.

It had all so quickly gone beyond Cassie’s control.

***

But on the evening of the accident, all greater Tampa watched as Kelsey Grice laid the blame squarely at the feet of the truck driver. The shot graced thousands of flickering televisions that night: the behemoth truck, petite Kelsey, and an empty space of asphalt suggesting the absence of a small child. Maybe the kid had swerved into the street unexpectedly. Maybe the driver started dozing off after a long shift at the siding warehouse. Maybe the very design of the neighborhood was flawed. Too may blind spots. A hearing, surely, would be held. Kelsey Grice shook her head and fixed the camera with her “such a pity” face. A tragic story. Over to you.

Kara Mae Brown is a writer and a writing instructor at Northeastern University in Boston. Her work has appeared in Word Riot, Summerset Review, and SNR Review. In 2010, she was the winner of the Flint Hills Review nonfiction contest for her essay, “Desert Paradox.”

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The car is out there again. Claudia can see the Chevy, dark as it is outside, sitting at the end of the unpaved road, silent and solid as an army tank. She lets drop the window curtain. “Yes,” she says . “I think it’s him. Burke.”

“Jesus!” Peter says. “I’ll kill him!”

“Shh. What are you talking about?” In Peter’s mother’s living room Claudia’s children, Mikey and Kara, six and five, are watching TV. Claudia is frightened– by what Burke might possibly have in mind, and by what Peter said–although she wants him to act, to do something.

“Look in the hallway,” Peter says in a low voice. “See those?” They are in the kitchen, having coffee, talking about their upcoming marriage. Claudia doesn’t need to look. She knows there is a rack of rifles in the hallway, Peter’s dad’s hunting rifles. Peter’s dad is sweet and gentle, white-haired. She has regarded the rifles as decor, or harmless, like the machine the old man uses for tumbling rocks into smooth stones. Her children already call him Pop-pop.

“He doesn’t own you,” Peter says. “He can’t be out there.”

“Shh,” Claudia says again.

“Your children ought to know the kind of man their father is.” Peter’s voice rises in volume a bit, a tough bravado. The kids are sitting on the floor and laughing at the program, and Claudia wonders, briefly, about her marrying Peter. She reminds herself that he is the rational one, the one who isn’t bringing baggage into the relationship. There is no denying that Burke is baggage.

On her and Peter’s second date Burke materialized from behind a bush at the edge of the parking lot as they returned to their car. He had apparently waited outside the restaurant so he could accost them. “She is my wife!” he declared, and knocked Peter over. Peter lay stunned on the asphalt, reaching up, after a few seconds, to touch his jaw, checking. Burke ran away through the shrubbery. Claudia had assumed that that was the end of things as far as their dating went, but Peter stuck with her, arms out and palms up, as they entered any parking lot thereafter, even in daylight. They’d been on guard for the past six months.

“I know where he keeps the ammunition,” Peter whispers now, as though telling her a secret.

Claudia’s divorce lawyer has warned her never to be in a compromising situation, never to be alone with another man until after the court date, that she could lose custody of her children. “I need a chaperone?” she asked. She thought the word was funny. The lawyer answered, “Yes, a chaperone. Public spaces. Open drapes.”

So: Claudia has accepted her uncompromising situations with resignation, but Peter has assumed a heightened interest in the lurking drama, the tension. When Claudia blurted out that she was sure Burke had private detectives following her—he knew things he wasn’t likely to know unless she was under surveillance—Peter threw back his head and laughed. “What a fool,” he proclaimed. His tone, suggesting as it did both superiority and relief, has triggered another fear in Claudia, one that she blinks away since it makes no sense. Peter seems eager to define himself in a role of rescuer–the good guy in a mediocre movie–and she wonders what he gets out of protecting her. Or seeming to.

“He’s on our property,” Peter says now, moving to the window and returning. “I have every right to shoot him. ‘Self defense,’ I’ll say. ” He grips the back of his chair, moved by the theatricality of his own suggestion. Claudia finds the posture a little too self-conscious. “Defense of my fiancée,” Peter adds, using a word they never use, “and her children.”

The children come bouncing into the dining room, asking for pretzels, asking if Nanny and Pop-pop are coming home soon.

“That’s all we need,” Claudia says. “Your parents returning and Burke out there.” Peter strides abruptly into the hallway. He stands at the gun rack—Claudia can see him. His arms are folded across his chest.

“I think we better go home,” she tells the kids. “”It’s nine o’clock. Get your jackets.”

Peter returns in a rush. “You can’t,” he says. “I won’t let you get in your car and drive home with that maniac out there. He’ll follow you.”

It’s true. Burke probably won’t stay if Claudia leaves.

“I’m coming with you,” Peter says. “But I’m getting one of Dad’s shotguns first.”

Claudia says no, certainly not in her car. She cannot picture Peter even holding the gun, which he is removing—the top one—with some difficulty and is now clutching victoriously, as though by gripping it he is imposing his will on hers. The children are in the kitchen filling two paper sacks with pretzels from a large bag. “Ammunition,” he mutters and darts to the back room. Claudia grabs her coat and purse, helps the children.

“Are you going to hunt rabbits?” Kara asks. Claudia is crouched behind the little girl, and rises, heart thumping, to see Peter in the doorway, gun cradled.

“I couldn’t find it,” Peter says. “The you-know-what.”

“The bullets?” Mikey asks. Claudia has just realized he seldom speaks directly to Peter. “Ask Pop-pop. He’s the one that knows.”

Claudia wishes she could crawl under the old people’s table, huddled with her children in her arms, and wait until the world rights itself in some way.

“It’s late.” She pushes each child forward next to her legs, like chicks. Her eyes widen at Peter a brief moment, beseeching him either to stop the charade or go first, do something.

He stands, resolute, with the rifle. “Oh, I know where to look. Wait.”

“No,” she calls after him. “No, we have to go.”

Outside the darkness hides the road; in its dead end Burke’s car is hidden behind bushes.

The kids climb into her back seat, and suddenly Claudia cannot see beyond the floodlights Peter has switched on, until he is at her window, resting the gun against the car. “Promise you’ll drive right to a police station and report him,” he says. “Call me.”

Claudia agrees and backs her car onto the dark cinder road. Soon there are bright headlights behind her, creeping along. It is a mile from the rural house to the highway.

“Mommy, there’s a car behind you, close,” Mikey says, on his knees, looking out the back window at the high beams, so bright they—thankfully—obscure the car itself.

She reminds him there’s only one road out, to sit down with his belt on. Already she regrets leaving, but how could she have stayed and upset the old people? They graciously allow Peter to invite Claudia to their house, assuming there is more for the kids to do there than at Peter’s apartment. They know nothing of the crazy intrigues. “Probably one of Pop-pop’s neighbors,” she says, watching the lights through her rear-view. Surely Burke has seen the children with her? She hopes he hasn’t been drinking.

She steers her car onto the highway, and the Chevy follows. When she accelerates, it accelerates; when she slows, it slows. It: Burke. Then, the Chevy actually bumps into her car. Take that! And that!

The kids scream and pretzels fly. Another bump! Kara wails.

“We’re going to the police station,” she tells the kids. “It’ll be all right. We’ll get there.” She isn’t at all sure, though. Will Burke notice the detour away from her own apartment? Will he realize where she is leading him? “I won’t let you leave me!” he had told her. But she had already gone.

“Just stay down in your seats,” she tells the kids. “I think it’s clear now. We’ll be okay. I think that car is gone.”

The car follows her. Burke must know that the road past the mall, where they are now, is near City Hall, the police station.

He veers off.

Nevertheless, she pulls into the lot, traipses into the station, reports the incident. The children are in an adjacent room—she can see them through the window, excited at the setting. Burke will not bother them again, assures an officer privately to her, before he escorts them home.

Claudia knows that that probably isn’t true. But for this night it is. When the kids are in bed, she calls Peter, explains the complaint she filed.

He carries on about what a nervous wreck he’s been, waiting. He’s taking her call in another room, he assures her. She imagines he’s been sitting in the tweed easy chair, his legs crossed, his parents having tea.

“You should have let me kill him when I had the chance,” he tells her on his phone.

She doesn’t say anything. She hasn’t sent out invitations yet.

“I can’t believe the mistake you made marrying him,” he says. “Can you?”

For a moment she doesn’t know how to answer, and then she does.

Jackie Davis Martin teaches at City College of San Francisco. She has stories published online and in print in journals including Trillium, Midway, Sangam, Flashquake, JAAM, 34th Parallel, and Sleet.com. Most recently, a story was anthologized in Shadow and Light: The Monadnock Writer’s Group Anthology on Memory; flash fiction in April’s Flash and Fractured West. Her novella, Extracurricular, was a finalist in the Press 53 Awards of 2011. Her memoir, Surviving Susan, has just been published.

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Starr Weston’s wife, Georgia, was a rare beauty. Rare not because of her sulphurous red hair or the wide set of her startling green eyes, but because of the gift she had in attracting the affections of whacko thespians and looney-toon actors the way other pretty women caught the eye of normal and so-called decent men.

Cases in point: the lumbering Frankenstein at Universal Studios who’d tried to spirit her off the tour train in his massive green hands . . . the crusty mule skinner in buckskins at Bent’s Old Fort in La Junta, who cornered her behind a butter churn in a lovestruck standoff . . . and perhaps most notably, the white-haired geezer in the Civil War field hospital in Antietam who, posing as Walt Whitman, tried to feel her up as he recited some dubious line about manly attachments . . ..

The examples went on and on—a veritable Who’s Who of stage-struck oddballs—and if pressed, Starr could thumb down the list of offenders like a moth-eaten historian, tracing individual incidents back to every battleground, theme park, and historical site that he and Georgia had ever visited.

Starr, a newspaperman by trade, worked as an editor for the Sun Times, a small daily with dwindling circulation, and he claimed that after twenty years of dealing with the public, he’d seen and heard pretty much everything.

“Besides,” he explained to his newsroom colleagues with a shrug whenever a weekend went by that Georgia was accosted by some new admirer, “there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not like they’re breaking the law.”

Despite his air of nonchalance, though, Starr’s patience had begun to wear thin.  He’d grown tired of being publicly embarrassed by these characters, and wondered, privately, if Georgia’s pursuit by this particular class of masher was more than just coincidental.

“Why do you supposed it’s only those fake actor types,” he’d ask the boys in the office. “You know, the one’s I mean? The community theatre rejects? What’s up with that?”

Fred Begly, an old timer in sales who reeked of cheap aftershave and even cheaper, clove-scented cigarettes, propped his scuffed wingtips on Starr’s desk and grimaced. “I know how you feel, buddy.” He folded his arms over his big barrel chest. “The little lady and me used to go to ballgames all the time until the Philly Phanatic put his snorkel up her skirt.”

“Up her skirt?”

“Yeah, well. Maybe not up her skirt, exactly, but—“

“I’m not buying it, Begly,” smirked Dave Knudson, a young editorial assistant who, though he didn’t know it yet, would find himself in the soup line directly behind Starr in two weeks time. “I’ve seen your old lady.  She may be his body type, but she’s definitely not his type-type.

Begly nodded with an amused smile and gave Knudson the finger. “Junior here knows as much about women as he does about baseball.” Rocking forward in his chair, he picked up one of Starr’s Ticonderoga #2s from the cluttered desk, and twirled it lamely between his fingers. “Maybe it’s chemical, man. Ever think of that? People with bee allergies say the little bastards can pick them out in a crowd. Zero right in on them. Pheromones or something.” He turned up his palms, and shrugged. “Maybe that’s what we’re talking about here.”

Pheromones! Jesus. If Starr had a nickel for every crackpot theory and semi-educated guess he’d ever heard regarding these glorified—let’s just call them what they were—stalkers, he could have slipped into unemployment a happy man! But that wasn’t the way life worked. The way life worked was this:  his apprehensions grew and festered, and when he lost his job (the Sun Times folding overnight, victim of the Internet age with its online news bureaus, blogs, and conspiracy-laden chatrooms), they followed him into the dark malaise that would become his future.

***

Starr hid out in his study the first two weeks after he lost his job, surfing the Net in his pajamas, looking for work. But as time lagged on and his prospects waned, so did his ambition and, ultimately, his belief in his own talents. He’d worked hard all his life, and being on the dole now (which is what he called it when he applied online for unemployment benefits), all but destroyed him. He was under-qualified for this, overqualified for that, and there seemed to be no middle ground in which he might find comfort. He was now, in many ways, as big a loser as the nutcases and crackpots who’d chased after his beautiful wife all these years. Maybe bigger, as they, at least, had jobs.

“Nobody’s hiring!” he complained bitterly when Georgia, home from work at the hospital, sat down to a late meal with him in the dining room. “I was on the computer all day. There wasn’t even a dishwashing job to be had!”

Georgia nodded, graciously, and told him she understood. It was frustrating. Frustrating and time-consuming. She poured him another glass of wine and reminded him that things were tough all over, and that he shouldn’t let it get him down. He just had to keep pushing. Believing in himself. Yet they both knew that this was easier said than done, and Starr knew it better than Georgia, as it was him who had been cut adrift from his job, not her. How could it not drag him down or torment him with self-doubt? How could he not feel jealous? She was a beautiful woman, and ne’er do well men with empty pockets were not the type to keep beautiful women long.

In time, Starr’s spirits flagged and hope deserted him altogether. In turn, his neatly-trimmed hair grew unkempt, his shoulders began to slump, and his walk, once cheerful and jaunty, throttled down into an exhausted, old-man’s shuffle. He became a homeless soul, a vagrant spirit inside the empty cardboard box of his own body.

***

“Starr?”  Georgia beamed, poking her head in his office one evening and failing, Starr noted gratefully, to see the naked woman on his computer screen. “I’ve got just the thing to tow you out of the doldrums.”

“Oh, yes?”

After three weeks of fruitless searching, Starr had given up on finding a job and lapsed into the shameful habit of browsing the Net for porn. He shut the computer down and eased back in his chair. “My ship’s come in, has it?”

“Yes!”

Georgia clapped her hands together and announced that they were going out to dinner with their neighbors, Dick and Darla Henkles tomorrow night, to a vintage restaurant in Green Mountain Falls. It’s just what you need to make you feel human again! she trumpeted, clamping her hands on her hips and lighting up the room with her high-voltage smile. “I made us all reservations at Bob Young’s Cabaret!”

What Georgia neglected to mention, and what Starr would not realize until the following night, was that these expensive reservations included not only a sumptuous, candlelight meal with their friends the Henkles, but an extravagant night of melodrama as well. Old time melodrama, served tableside by first year theatre students from the junior college over in Greeley.

Starr made it through his dessert of crème Anglaise and fried strawberries in benighted contentment. He even squeezed Georgia’s hand when coffee was served, and whispered in her ear, thanking her for giving him such a lovely evening out. But when the curtain rose and he saw the churlish figure of Snidely Whiplash lurking in the dim glow of the footlights and realized what was about to happen, he moaned, “Oh, God,” and pretended to collapse sideways into Dick Henkles’s lap.

Indeed. Scarred by experience, Starr’s threadbare heart knew all too well what to expect from these second-rate stage dwellers. So what came next came as no surprise.

The villainous actor with the waxed mustache cackled and, living up to Starr’s lowest expectations, wrapped himself in his long, black cape and glided to their table on elastic legs. “Muhahaha!” He bellowed, arching an eyebrow at Starr, then at Dick and Darla Henkles, and finally, amid the titters of the other theatergoers, at the lovely red-faced Georgia, whose delicate chin he coochie-cooed with the butt of his buggy lash.

***

“You’ve got to learn to see the humor in it, Starr,” Georgia scolded when they got home that night. “They’re just playing, is all. It’s part of the show.” She stepped out of her dress and sat down at the vanity in her lacy white slip. “If you act embarrassed,” she said, brushing her hair, “they only get more aggressive.”

Georgia didn’t need to remind Starr of what these men were capable. He’d seen it first hand, many times. But now that he was officially unemployed, the advances of other men—especially the crazies in theatrical drag—brought out a simmering jealousy in him. He didn’t say it, but it pained him to think of his wife as having knowledge of these men’s secret desires. There was an intimacy to such insight—one that suggested complicity, perhaps even some sort of tacit approval.

Georgia rose from her dressing table, adjusted the straps of her slip, and flopped down on the bed next to him like a bag of fresh-picked apples. “Don’t be so grumpy, you old poop! You know I adore you. You know I can’t live a moment without you!”

Starr knew nothing of the sort. Or so he told himself. He only knew that he couldn’t go without work much longer, and that if he did, he might lose his mind—as well as his wife of twenty years.

“Nine weeks!” He groaned as if someone had stepped on him. “I’ve been unemployed nine weeks! I haven’t had nine weeks off from work since I was twelve—back before I was a paperboy!”

Georgia frowned, thoughtfully. It was the look she reserved for only the most solemn of moments. Then she raised up and slapped the bed covers. “We should take tomorrow off,” she announced in the voice of someone who knew what was best for all involved and wasn’t afraid to say so. “We should drive up into the mountains and have a picnic and just forget about everything!”

Starr made a moody face. “I don’t know.”

“Why not?  What could it hurt?”

“I’m supposed to be looking for work. It’s part of the—you know–the deal with the job service people. I’m supposed to spend time every day looking for employment.”

Georgia rolled onto her back and crossed her feet at the delicate curve of her ankles. She was unmoved by his protests. She had a way, at times, of being depressingly optimistic, and Starr sensed that this was going to be one of them. Suddenly, she snatched his arm and squirmed, her bumcakes jiggling with glee beneath the flimsy satin slip. “I’ve got it!” she squealed. “You can say you went up the mountain looking for a job!”

“Who would believe that?”

She gave him a look. This was the government they were talking about.

“Okay, but still—“

“Oh, stop being such a stick in the mud!” She laughed, tousling his unkempt hair. “Let’s just go and have fun. You only have to apply for a job. You don’t have to come back with one!”

***

But Starr did come back with a job. One that, despite Georgia’s gentle protests, he’d pursued with a shameless fever and, when offered the position, accepted with what seemed a reckless and almost joyful abandon. It was fate, he told her as they drove back down the mountain that night. Destiny! Good jobs were impossible to come by these days, and here, as if by the hand of Providence, the one he’d always dreamed of having had fallen out of the sky, squarely into his lap!

In a sense, this was true. The job had fallen out of the sky. For it was while he and Georgia were lounging in a back booth at the Pecos Café and Old West Souvenir Emporium in the little town of Buena Vista, munching on a lazy lunch of cheeseburgers and French fries, that Starr heard the commercial that roused his slumbering ambition and urged it into a hard, sweaty gallop.

The gravely voice that came at him was full of six-guns and saddle leather. It drifted down on the airwaves of an old RCA Victor radio, and when Starr heard it crackle out its unbridled call to adventure, he was overcome as if by the magic of a mighty spell.

He dragged his eyes from the radio’s glowing dial, and looked across the table at his lovely, unsuspecting wife. “I want,” he announced in an innocent voice, “to be one of those guys.”

Georgia smiled at him, not quite understanding the drift of his meaning. “What guys, honey?”

Starr pointed up to the radio on the shelf. “One of those living history guys. The kind who dress up and put on shows for tourists.” His palms found the table top, and he leaned into the words. “I want to work in a place (here he recited from the commercial) where legends still ride tall in the saddle and history comes alive in a whiff of gunsmoke!”

Georgia’s face went as white as the napkin in her lap. “Have you lost your mind?”

“No,” Starr said, coming around with a quick little shake of the head, his eyes going from soft-focus and cinematic to pure, tempered steel. “But I have lost my job, and I want to get back to work.”

“Honey. In theatre?”

Georgia reminded him that looking for a job had only been a joke. That they’d driven up here to relax and see the sights, to admire the snow on the Collegiate Peaks. But Starr reminded her that the unemployment bureau was a humorless mistress, one who did not take kindly to fraudulent suitors.

“But you haven’t any experience.”

“I was a shepherd once in a Christmas pageant.”

“You were twelve!”

“And your point would be?”

“You loathe those sorts of things, Starr. You always have.”

Loathe? Hmmm. He gave the word a serious going over in his head. More, perhaps, than it deserved. No, he told her after a thoughtful sip of coffee. That wasn’t it. What frustrated him, what made his blood boil all these years, was not the occupation, proper, but rather the disservice its players did in carrying out their roles. He put his hands on hers, reminding her of all the forts and farms and battlegrounds and graveyards they’d visited over the years. All the historic sites and roadside monuments they’d stopped for on their way to other places.

“I guess it’s all finally gotten to me,” he said. “Only, in a good way. The way you’d always hoped.”

***

The ride out to Buckskin Joe’s Frontier Town and Railway was a quiet one, Starr’s silence born out of nervous excitement, Georgia’s out of what Starr took to be raw and unwarranted desperation. They arrived mid-afternoon, hardly a word between them along the way, but as they barreled into the gravel lot and saw the great wooden lintel with the rusted branding irons crossed like swords, Starr knew, instinctively, that everything would be all right.

He surveyed the scene as he walked around the car and opened the door for Georgia, nodding in aching appreciation at the blueness of the mountain sky and the clean, Pine Sol scent of the air.

Tourists were passing through the gates in droves, which was something Starr hadn’t expected, or even thought about. But there was an energy to them, a crude electricity that moved his heart to a merry little quickstep.

“How about you take yourself a ride on this little dandy,” he told Georgia, “while I go up to the office and check things out.”

He pointed to the dizzying billboard picture of the miniature-scale train that ran from the town’s old west depot out to the rim of the Royal Gorge.

“Alone?”

“You’ll be fine. Sign says it’s only a twenty minute ride.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I’ll meet you right here. On this very spot, all right? I promise. Just give me twenty minutes.”

Georgia looked at him.

“Starr, this is ridiculous.”

“Please?”

She glanced disdainfully at the train with its overweight tourists and shrieking children and took a long, exasperated breath. “All right,” she conceded. “For you. But then we’re going home.”

When the train pulled out of the miniature station with a frowning Georgia on it, stuffed ankles-to-elbows into boxcar No. 12, Starr waved like a proud father watching his only child take her first ride on a carousel. Georgia managed a dim smile and a twiddle of the fingers, but nothing more, and when she disappeared into the jagged red rock of the canyon beyond the trees, he turned and trotted off to the main office to inquire after the job.

The eighty-year-old proprietor of Buckskin Joe’s was a man named Gus Whitehead. Starr and Gus took an instant liking to one another, and after a brief chat in the old man’s office, Gus invited Star over to his cabin where the two of them could talk in a more leisurely fashion. They had a manly, heart-to-heart in Gus’s back yard. A stick-whittling, slug-in-the-arm kind of talk, the likes of which Starr hadn’t known since he was a boy sitting around a campfire with his chums. They jawed on about fishing, hunting, man’s natural distrust of the federal government, and a host of other issues whose rugged importance had been lost to Starr over time, but which he now revisited with gusto.

Gus Whitehead was impressed with Starr’s savvy, and told him so. “Don’t know if it’s cause you read or went to college or what. But you got yerself a good head on yer shoulders there, son. Rill good.” The old man rose from his lawn chair and thumbed up the battered straw hat that covered his balding, liver-spotted head. “I believe you know what yer talkin about.”

“But what about the job?”

The old man poked his tongue around the inside of his mouth, then sniffed and raised his chin. “How you set on a outfit?” He lit a smoke and pointed at Starr’s tee shirt and cargo shorts, indicating they wouldn’t do.

“I can scare something up.”

“Gotta look authentic, son. This here’s an authentic western town.”

“I’ll find something. I’m sure of it.”

The old man gave him a good going over, like he was totting up a list of plusses and minuses. “Got some used duds down in the bunkhouse,” he said.  “Might have a look-see. Somethin might fit.”

“You mean—“

“Yep.”

“I’m hired?”

“Start next Monday,” the old man said gruffly, “providin you kin get your look right.”

***

Starr had a grin on his face the entire way home. Not so with Georgia, who seemed nonplussed by the scant details Starr was willing to part with regarding his new employment arrangements.

“What? Aren’t you happy for me?”

Georgia folded her arms and turned to the window. She’d stopped being happy for him the moment he’d put her on the little train—alone—and gone off to have his talk with Gus.

“Okay, so it’s not the same money as I was making before. But Gus says there’s room for advancement.”

Georgia explained in measured terms that she wasn’t worried about the money, so much as the long commute. It was hours up and back down the mountain. That meant wear and tear on the car, excessive gasoline charges on the credit card, the possibility of accidents.

“It was your idea I look for job,” he said.

“That was because I didn’t think you’d find one.”

Starr put his eyes on the road and, without thinking too hard, began to whistle. Being employed again was the finest feeling in the world. He’d always miss his work at the newsroom, but there was something about this new job that felt as right as anything he’d ever known. It wasn’t journalism, true. But it was a chance to educate people, and in a way that, let’s face it, was a whole lot more interesting than reading some stuffy old rag.

He told himself he was going to be one of Gus Whitehead’s best employees. A fellow who, once he’d studied up and gotten a handle on his new responsibilities, would give folks something to write home about on the backs of those old postcards over in the gift shop.

“Did you know they shot Cat Balloo up here?” He was driving one-handed now, confident, his elbow resting on the window. Wind ruffled the sleeve of his tee shirt, and flashes of sunlight glinted off the lenses of his Bollé Cruisers.

“What?”

“The movie. Cat Balloo. Gus says they shot it up here. Lee Marvin was drunk as a skunk the whole time.”

“That’s nice.”

“Gus says they filmed John Wayne’s The Cowboys up here, too.” He put his eyes back on the rolling, two-lane highway. “I didn’t know that, did you?”

“No.”

“God, I loved that movie!” He slapped his thigh. “Remember that part where Bruce Dern gets drug through the river by his broken leg!”

Georgia stared out the window, bleakly, and Starr glanced over at her without much to offer in the way of solace. He was sympathetic with her concerns, yet he felt too good to let her bleed the steam from his newfound enthusiasm. She’d get over it. Change was one of those things you had to take to, gradually. Real easy like.

***

A month into his job at Buckskin Joe’s, Gus Whitehead promoted Starr from bartender to telegraph operator. Then from telegraph operator to newspaper editor. Starr wore a black vest and a collarless shirt with sleeve garters, and he kept a pair of round wire-rimmed spectacles perched atop his short, graying hair for affect. When visitors wandered in for a look-see he’d get up and rattle off some news current to the day and times, and if things clicked and the people joined in on the jawing, as was often the case, he’d try and sell them a copy of the vintage broadsheet that Gus printed on the old linotype machine in the shed behind the main cabin.

Starr felt authentic working in the true-to-life old west town, and after a while the thought of getting a job as a flatlander again all but deserted him. Still, Georgia had been right about the drive. The daily commute was long and costly, and some tailoring was in order to make things more sensible. So he approached Gus one day about tossing his bedroll and other possibles in the bunkhouse and holing up there for the rest of the season. The old man agreed without a second thought.

“It’s just for the summer,” Starr told Georgia over what would be their last dinner together that week. “I don’t like being away from you, either, darlin. But it helps pay the bills and I’m picking up some nice change on the side with tips.”

Georgia raised an eyebrow and laid her fork carefully on her plate. “I don’t like being without you, Starr. I didn’t get married to live here, all alone, in this big house.”

“Me neither.” Starr reached across the table for a piece of bread, giving her the smile he’d been using with regular success now on the tourists and tour-bus drivers from town. “It’s just for the summer, darlin.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Starr would have liked it if Georgia had been able to spend a few nights a week with him in the bunkhouse up on the mountain. But with her own job, working as a radiation technician, there was no way she could manage it. Not unless she put in for vacation time, which she wasn’t willing to do if it was only to watch him perform for tourists.

“I’ll come up weekends,” she told him. “That’s all I can promise.”

***

The summer pushed on like a big, fat, lazy cloud, and as it did Starr became less and less inclined to go home. He had it good up here at Buckskin Joe’s—decent chuck, a bunk, a bedroll, black coffee with a touch of whisky at night when him and Gus sat under the stars talking philosophy—and he began to fear that if he left, he would never be happy again. He wasn’t gaining any ground, financially. But on the other hand, he wasn’t losing any either. Which evened things up. He was working hard, sending home his wages, and life couldn’t have been simpler or better—unless, of course, he could get Georgia to move up here with him.

The conjugal visits, as Starr had begun to refer to them, were fine in and of themselves, but he was looking for more now, and he wrote Georgia to tell her so.  My sweetest Georgia, the letter said, I long for the touch of your vanished hand.

Georgia wrote back a hasty screed. See you Saturday.

“JesusChristGoodLordAmighty!” Starr laughed when, four days later, she pulled up to the bunkhouse in their Honda Civic and got out to greet him. “How I do miss you when you ain’t here!” He peeled off his hat, tossed it in the air, and did a little jig. Then he strutted over, clutched her hand in his and, giving it a crank, twirled her about in a two-step move he’d picked up from Slim Liebowitz who worked over in the saloon as a piano player. “You’re a fine little lady to look at!” he yipped. “You know that Mrs. Weston!”

Georgia pushed her hair back into place, and glanced around, embarrassed. She knew why Starr was excited, and only part of it had to do with her spending the weekend with him. The rest was because of the promotion Gus Whitehead had just steered his way, and which Georgia, upon hearing about, had cruelly labeled as yet another of “the old man’s tricks” to force a wedge between them. Only three months into my employment here, Starr had scribbled to her on the back of a sepia postcard, and the old man has offered me a crack at the top job in the outfit—gunslinger!

It had been a difficult decision, Starr told her, whether or not to accept the position. First and foremost, he was still learning the ropes—and his confidence remained a bit shaky after having been fired from his last job. Second, he was in his forties, and most men who lived by the gun were pushing up daisies on boot hill by that age. It was Gus, he told her, who’d helped him decide.

Of course it was, Georgia said.

Starr said that Gus, who admired him for wanting to be authentic in his role, had explained that there were notable exceptions to the west’s notorious “live by the gun, die by the gun” rule, including the likes of shootists Doc Holliday and the Sundance Kid. So they talked the matter over and, after a convincing speech by the old man wherein he was told that the streets of the old frontier town were exactly where he was needed, Starr had stood up, shook hands, and called it a deal. Now, every day at high noon, he got to swagger into the street, call his rival out from the Pair-O-Dice Saloon, and slap leather!

“They had me workin the necktie parties last week,” he said, putting his arm around Georgia and steering her off for a stroll through the trees, “but folks was gettin put off seein men strung up in public, so Gus figured maybe we should put the gallows in storage for a while an concentrate on the bigger stuff.”

Georgia shuffled to a stop under a spreading cottonwood and eyed him up and down, noting the spurs and gunbelt. The rakish way he tilted his hatbrim low on his forehead. “Listen to yourself, would you? ‘Necktie parties?’ ‘Strung up?’ What’s gotten into you, Starr?”

“What do you mean?”

“I feel like I’m losing you.”

The words startled Starr, who stepped back as if he’d been drilled by hot lead, and he turned and faced her and, taking the toothpick from his teeth, gripped her by the arms. “Ain’t nobody losin nothin, darlin. You hear? You an me, we got us a heap a livin to do, and I aim to see we do it.” He released her, and lowered his head. Pawed at the dust with the toe of his boot. “I love you, Georgia-girl. I love you like there’s no tomorry.” He looked up, reclaiming her shoulder with his long, thin arm, and began walking her toward the setting sun. “And don’t you never fergit it.”

Georgia wept some during their lantern-lit Dutch-oven dinner of beans and biscuits in the bunkhouse that night, and later retreated into a cold and bitter silence. She fell asleep under his wool saddle blanket, and there was no sweetness between them or putting forth of domestic favors. But Starr, though disappointed, was all right with it. He knew that it had been a long summer for his wife. It had been a long summer for both of them, and he was sorry he’d caused her any hardship. But a man didn’t quit on a thing just because the going got rough. Nor did he back down from a scuffle, regardless of the odds confronting him. There was still a good two months of tourist season left before Gus nailed the place up for winter and headed down to his condo in Tucson, and that meant everybody would just have to buck up and see it through the best they could. Everybody.

He turned out the lantern. His hand found the curve of her luscious hip. He couldn’t explain why, but he was mad about this woman. Simply mad. She might not realize it, but there was no way in the world she would ever slip through his fingers.

Robert McGuill is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and Glimmertrain finalist, whose short fiction has appeared, or will soon appear, in Southwest Review, Bryant Literary Review, South Dakota Review, Baltimore Review, The Santa Clara Review and other literary publications, here and abroad. He lives and writes in Colorado.

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I watched the rabbit on the moon through my bedroom window, and I wondered how people of the tropics imagine the world differently. It was my last thought as I fell asleep.

Several palms of a kind I had never seen before swayed in the warm ocean of my dreams. The thick, banded trunks led to a canopy of green fronds set high above a knoll of tall reeds. I saw the radiant figure as it passed through the stand of trees; in her white robe, she shone like a lantern on a passing ship. The girl turned her head in my direction and then, as if time had skipped, stood right next to me. I reached out to touch her hand. Her smile was soft and familiar.

“This way,” she whispered.

I swept my arm to part the dry grass and walked along the shifting shadows of the fronds. Each time the wind blew, I could feel the warmth of the tropical sun on my shoulders.

“Why do you seek us out, Noë?” she asked.

“Who are you?” My voice sounded harsh compared to hers.

“My name is Lily.”

For a while I took to walking in the poor island neighborhood where the maids, gardeners, and other laborers who work for the tourist industry lived. What stood out most about it were the dogs, how wretched and frail they were, nothing more than bags of bones. I went there so I could hand them scraps of food. Each time, those poor animals looked anxiously at my hands, but did not dare come too close. They flinched when I tossed the morsels at their feet, even after repeated times. Each time they saw me coming, the desperation in their eyes grew.

I looked into the girl’s melancholy eyes and understood the pity in them. In the presence of that radiant being, I felt like the dogs who roam the streets of the Caribbean barrio near where my wife and I lived.

I awakened with a start and felt as if the darkness itself had passed judgment on me. I turned over and hugged my sleeping wife. Nora wiggled against my body and settled there, making the dark seem less like a looming presence. I was comforted by the soft, long, slightly raspy breath that she sometimes made as she slept. But the dream, which began so beautifully and turned pitiable, had settled in my mind.

I had recently stopped feeding those island dogs, since we would soon be leaving this once-British colony. What did it matter if I fed them for a few extra days? My efforts would not alter the reality of their miserable lives. That’s what I had told myself, until the dream of the radiant girl, when I realized I stopped mostly because I could no longer bear to look upon their desperate state.

“Are you all right, Noë?” my wife said as she shook my shoulder.

“I don’t know. I had a bad dream,” I replied as I sat up.

“It’s just a dream, honey.” She reached over and turned on the light. “Just a dream.”

I rubbed my eyes, trying to wipe away my disorientation. “I’m sorry for waking you. Go back to sleep. I’m okay.”

“I’m not sleeping,” she whispered, pushing herself up onto her elbows. “Noë, I have something to tell you…” She paused, unraveling the blanket from her body. There was just enough light to see her wipe away the lock of hair that had settled between her breasts.

“I went to the doctor today. I know we decided to wait but I’m pregnant.”

My dreams are often nested, and I thought myself in another layer. I didn’t say anything, waiting to see what would follow.

She drew back the curtain by the bed, letting the light of the moon inside. “Did you hear what I said?”

“But we’ve been so careful since the honeymoon,” I replied and saw the look of disappointment on her face. I lay down beside her. Nora’s eyes widened as my fingers moved slowly over her belly, ever so lightly brushed her nipple, and settled on the curve of her neck.

After a moment, she pulled slightly away. “I thought you would be upset. That’s why I didn’t say anything.” The tears ran down the side of her face, leaving dark splotches on the linen.

“Shh. Everything is fine.” I ran my cheek along her arm, gently kissing my way up to her lips. The feel of her skin lingered, as ephemeral as memories of a dream, and I waited for her to respond.

We made love and I woke later that Monday morning. I left Nora in bed and went out to get the Sunday Times, which usually arrived dog-eared and a day late at the corner store. All thoughts of the girl in my dream had morphed into my impending fatherhood. All the reasons for not wanting a child were disappearing one by one. I walked along smiling at the stretched morning shadows of the trees and their funny bends along the sandy berms that acted as curbstones.

“Good morning, Noë. Going for the paper?” My neighbor, an elderly lady with a house full of plump cats, greeted me with an unusual look of worry. She was standing awkwardly just outside her adobe apartment building, clutching the faded blue door with one hand and with the other holding her white sweater tight around her neck.

“Hello, Mrs. Fielding. Can I pick up anything for you at the store? More milk perhaps?” The woman bought vast quantities of the stuff, but she rarely left her house. I would often buy her milk and she, knowing this, waited for me by her door.

“Oh, that would be lovely.” She relaxed. “But not the skim. Get me the two percent. Did you sleep late today?” Two of her cats were peering out the door through her legs.

“I’m afraid so. Had an unsettling night.”

“Oh dear. Don’t you have any pills for that?” she said with noticeable anxiety in her voice. I realized how dependent on me she and her happily spoiled felines had gotten.

“No, Mrs. Fielding. I don’t like pills. I’ll be back in a jiffy; don’t you worry.” Curiously, and for the first time, the thought of all those privileged cats lapping up the milk was somehow displeasing.

I glanced back at the old woman and wondered if I was meant to provide for the meek and desperate. Why did I find that look of dependence in her eyes as she asked for the milk so unsettling? Perhaps it bore too close a resemblance to the eyes of the wretched dogs, or perhaps because it contrasted sharply with the indulgent look of the cats that stared at me from her feet. Was the suffering of the stray dogs as opposed to the luxury of the cats the result of local karmic influences, or was the god of this island more partial to cats?

It was a beautiful morning, and I was dimly aware I could not give the day the attention it deserved because of my heavy ruminations. In most religions, I mused, suffering is tied to salvation and selflessness is the highest virtue. If so, those cats were damned to hell and the dogs…but I wondered if the moralists were in error, and there was no thereafter…the dogs were not so blessed after all.

“Actually, you’d better get the whole milk today,” Mrs. Fielding yelled as I rounded the corner.

Those poor dogs, I thought, as I walked on. Was there ever a culture that worshipped them like the ancient Egyptian venerated the cat? What cat owner does not cherish her pet, not just in spite of, but because of his regal insolence? If there is some eternal law of correspondence, does God looks upon us as we see our creature pets? Perhaps He pities the moralist among us and esteems the hedonist.

“May I help you?” the teenage girl behind the counter asked from behind a dull green apron. Her dirty blond hair was tied back with a limp red ribbon. “Six fifty, please,” she added, with pretty blue eyes glazed with disinterest. She stuffed the Sunday paper next to the dewy cartons of milk and handed me the bag.

At home I saw the damp stain that had formed on the headline: The World Mourns the Death of Lady Di. A slightly smudged photo showed her in a bikini with her millionaire boyfriend on a luxurious yacht, while in another she was holding hands with an AIDS patient.

“Isn’t it terrible about Lady Di,” Nora said as she placed a cup of coffee in front of me. “She was such a saint,” she added as she poured in a dab of milk.

I watched the milk swirl in my coffee. It coalesced into an opaque image of the radiant girl; the vision blotted away the rest of the world. “Will you open your heart to me?” the radiant being’s voice whispered. I watched as her form swirled into the coffee until the cool whiteness blended the black liquid brown.

With the cup in my hands, I glanced at my wife flipping through the pages of the damp Sunday Times. I always liked to look at her when her dark hair was loose and unkempt as it was that morning.

She smiled at me. “You want more coffee?”

“No, I’m okay. Did the doctor tell you when you’re due, honey?”

“Due for what?” She lowered the paper and looked over the crumpled pages at me.

“The baby. When is she going to arrive?”

“What on earth are you talking about, Noë?”

“Didn’t you tell me you were pregnant, you know, last night, in the middle of the night, when I woke up?” I replied, lifting the coffee to my lips.

“Pregnant? How could I be? I’m on the pill. Though I’m glad you woke up. Feel free to wake me up like that any time.” She smiled and winked at me, and then her face became more serious. “Do you want to have a baby?”

“So you’re not pregnant?” I placed my cup down, feeling as if a part of me turned to mist. “I guess it was just part of my dream.”

“I hope this isn’t one of those prophetic dreams. I’d better get one of those rabbit tests,” she winked and then reached for my hand. “We discussed this, remember? Maybe we should get a dog, a cute little puppy.”

“You know they don’t allow dogs in the building.” I squeezed her fingers and smiled. “Don’t worry. It was just a dream.”

There was a knock on the door. I rose from my seat to answer it and found Mrs. Fielding with a green basket of tiny white kittens on the crook of her arm. Gently, she picked up one of the little creatures. “I want you to have her,” the elderly lady said. “You’ve been so kind to us all these weeks.”

“Oh, aren’t they so tiny and white,” Nora said as she reached for the creature.

“They’re awfully young. Where’s the mother?” I asked.

“There is no mother, I’m afraid. A pretty young girl brought them to me yesterday. She said she found them in a bag in the alley by the butcher shop. Can you imagine separating these poor creatures from their mother at this age? How cruel can some people be?”

Nora held out the tiny white kitten for me to hold. “I think this one would suit us fine, don’t you?”

I took the blind little creature in my hands, wondered about the color of her eyes, thought about what might follow, and how nested my dreams really were.

Aside from writing, Joe Occhipinti teaches geography and holistic medicine, and co-owns a small, independent used book store and gift shop.  He likes to travel about the world and has lived in Italy, Canada and Argentina.  As an avid nature lover Joe blogs at  www.thewondersofnature.net.  You will occasionally find him behind a brush, the bench in his shop, or occupied in some other manual endeavor.  His work has been published or is forthcoming in The Forge, Gryphonwood, The Helix, Perihelion Science Fiction, and the anthology Twisted Tails VII: Irreverent. 

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The night is biting cold,
the cobbled streets empty
and we walk, already drunk on aquavit and lust
up the hill where a single light
marks the restaurant door
where we will dip bread in melted cheese tart with wine,
lick burgundy from thin-glassed goblets,
the tannin aroma bitter, ripe as blood,
and by candlelight
quiver with constant desire.
Outside the Alps rise above the village
and we stumble home, he’s singing
and I’m aflame with being wanted,
I have never felt so singular, my skin so cold,
and we hurry back through the lobby
where the night porter watches.
We move toward the stairs,
melting into one another,
back to cold white sheets,
dark musty walls smelling of history,
and our bodies are hot against the crisp linen,
rustling as we fall,
as we move,
the window in our room opens to
frozen December night air,
where darkness and ice have their own kind of light,
ruby heat shining through the black

and I think I will never again
know exactly this kiss, this hand,
this smell,
this delicious dark danger
this ecstatic safety.

Adrienne Amundsen is a psychologist living in the San Francisco Bay Area, with poems published in a number of literary magazines such as River/Sedge, Lalitamba, and The Texas Observer, as well as the Marin Poetry Center Anthology. She recently published her first chapbook of poems with a political and lyrical bent, Cassandras Falling. Herinterests have taken her from the Paleolithic cave paintings of France, about which she has taught several courses, to the warzone of Afghanistan. She is currently finishing her book of poems about that trip to Afghanistan.

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Heavy dark limousines prowl
in fresh pelts of March rain:

we’ve broken the back of winter.
I count the pairs of bare legs.

Sometimes I wake next to you,
start-eyed, reaved open,

a ready ache stirring
beneath my left ribs. It will be

as they say it is, the city speaking
in tones meant only for hummingbirds,

the newly blind. When I’ve been tied
down before I liked the blue-

ribbon bruises, the imprint
of a slap. Visible crimes.

Now those times before dawn
I will your blinds

to show me words I’ll understand,
carry me to a pair

of arms that will never tire. I want dying
to mean an embrace by something

marvelous. I mean I want
to know I’m part

of what it’s been since
the beginning. Honey, I want to dream

one thing: just this heavy dark
where sometimes, improbable,

you turn. You search.
You find me.

Kate DeBolt is a poet and high school teacher living and working in New York City. Her work has appeared in various print and internet publications including lung, Breadcrumb Scabs, Plainspoke, and others.

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Surrounded by a wall worn smooth

when once it used to be a memory or three.

They all come back

and I hear them from the blue-green

crest near the mountain

where you live there is water and water

is a mystery I’m scared

I might find what is holy, what is sacred

and then, I’ll start to believe

in more than red earth and daisy chains.

I’m sure I heard you say

Stay. When I woke you watched

as I walked after I said goodbye to the night

after the morning I felt

all of you and then, of course, you start

talking about your wife.

It doesn’t matter she left ages

ago. There was always your need for blame.

These days, you tell me you have changed.

No flood could light

another broken prediction you threw

me off like a souvenir.

I will never send this postcard.

Alison Eastley lives in Tasmania, Australia where she reads a lot of books, listens to Beat poets on Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox and writes poems. Her work has appeared in FRiGG, Thrush and is forthcoming in the Australian print edition of four W.

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One night, you can open up

your arms and hold the stars

and the Hunter’s Moon;

the next night, you grasp

the rattly swarm of the rain,

with the clouds between you

and the sky, and the moon

beyond out of reach.

These gifts of the same sky,

intimate and open-ended,

embrace you and escape

your embrace.  In the light

and darkness of your orbit,

all space becomes your planet:

you hover nearby, unable

to touch, but always close,

unable to leave, but apart.

JB Mulligan has had poems and stories in several hundred magazines, including recently, Angle, The Kerf, Loch Raven Review, Turbulence, and Shot Glass Journal, has had two chapbooks published: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, and has appeared in multiple volumes of the anthology, Reflections on a Blue Planet, as well as in the anthology Inside Out: A Gathering Of Poets.

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A visual dessert, says the host:

a bowl of flowers in water.

There’s a parallel history with

slight alterations, says the host:

a boy standing in the coral dust

who smells of dirty river.

Who thumb-shuts the eyes

of the dead?

Who finds someone

to love more than himself?

He will, says our host, in a

parallel history, his sun-kissed face,

his leonine hips, his body a siphon

for the light.

Timothy Schirmer lives in New York City, where he’s happy to walk down the street with his headphones on.  His writing has recently appeared in Jenny, Kerouac’s Dog , Interrobang!?, and now in Bluestem.  He is currently applying to MFA programs around the country.  You can find a bit more of his writing at www.timothyschirmer.tumblr.com

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you and I have made faces and hollow men out of the earth;

dragging together the still night air, the clumps of wood,

the ingredients of fire. we have long since given ourselves

over to the shrill pops and the burning of trunks, the shy bite

of smoke in our lungs, the squint of these underlit eyelids;

we have made ourselves part of this blackened soliloquy,

scarecrows balancing scarecrows in the fallen arches of trees.

under our rule the branches are spun and snapped, the rough

wood broken—two squat logs make a ready home for tinder

and a quick-flicked match completes it. we dart and giggle,

we guess at destruction: nothing is ceremony where the sparks

fly tall. we enjoy this fire, these haloes. we devour the squeak

and squee of burning leaves. we enjoy the sight

of many-armed martyrs falling.

Sarah Stanton is a translator, editor and writer from Western Australia who has spent the past three years living and working in Beijing. She has been published in a number of magazines and indie projects, including Clarkesworld, Voiceworks, Hunger Mountain, Cha and Conte. She blogs at theduckopera.com and tweets @theduckopera.

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for Sonia

Sky is gray like a curtain

around the hospital bed.

What goes on behind it

is always a mystery.

“A man’s life is but a shadow

from dry grass…”

At 47th Street

shop windows

are mostly empty.

Many jewelers are out,

I guess.

Was the word “jewelry” derived

from the word “Jew”?

Jews toiling

on making pretty Jew things

to adorn the ears, the neck,

the hands.

I often see the six-ended star

in old Scottish pieces,

alone or combined with the Maltese cross.

That was before the yellow star of the Holocaust.

My friend Sonia is at the end of her road/rope

after twenty years of living with cancer

and seven dying from it.

Anna Halberstadt was born and raised in Vilnius, Lithuania She moved to Moscow at the age of eighteen to study psychology at Moscow State University, and immigrated to New York twelve years later to attend Hunter College, where she earned a degree in social work. Since 1980, she has worked as a clinician, teacher, and administrator of mental health clinics specializing in the adaptation of immigrants, with a special interest in immigrants from the former Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries. She has published many works in psychology but has found poetry to be a more adequate and condensed way to expand on the same themes—growing up as a child of Holocaust survivors in a country still struggling with past trauma, living in three countries (Lithuania, Russia, U.S.), and immigration. Her creative work has been published by Cimarron Review, St. Petersburg Review, and Tiferet.

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Abigail Warren lives in Northampton, Massachusetts and teaches at Cambridge College. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in print and on-line, in Monarch Review, Duct, Forge, Pearl, Brink Magazine, Gemini Magazine, Into The Teeth of the Wind, Sanskrit, Emerson Review, The Clarion, and Compass Rose.  She is a recipient of the Rosemary Thomas Poetry Prize.

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My father

eats celery

on his deathbed

munching it hard

like meat,

warning of the

expectations of women,

admonishing me

not to let them down

as he did

throughout

the self-proclaimed ruins

of his 85 years.

Holding the celery

like a staff

he anoints

women as owls

who trick men

into snares.

Proclaims that he, like Job

in the enveloping darkness

is companion to owls,

his life

a court

of the forsaken,

awaiting Gospel,

the Advent,

for light to appear.

Marc Berman began writing on airplanes while traveling from his home on business trips.  He is chairman of The New England Public Radio Foundation and a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts. His work has appeared in The Alembic, Grey Sparrow, Forge, Poetry East, Lullwater Review, Eclectica Magazine, and Pisgah Review.  He is a native of Boston.

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I pedal Julia through back roads
to day camp. Heat rises
from the fresh blacktop.
The scents of June—honeysuckle
and blooming grasses—perfume the air.

From her dusty seat behind me,
she calls out: “Momma, what are eyes?”
“They are for seeing.”
“Can you have eyes and not see?”
“Then you are called blind.”

A pair of scarlet tanagers darts
among stands of birch and pine.
Bridal veil tumbles wild
in the overgrowth between lots
where newly constructed mansions
have begun to appear. A half-grown
doe turns her head to watch us pass.

“What is it called when you have ears but can’t hear?”
“Deaf.”
“Death?”
“Deaf-f-f-f.”
“Death?”

I prop the bike against the kickstand
and send her off with a kiss at the door.
On my way back I see a fledgling caught
in the trailer’s wheel. I pull
its taut, light body from the spoke.

Ann Hostetler is the author of Empty Room with Light: Poems and editor of A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Cream City Review, The Cresset, Grey Sparrow, Limestone, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Quiddity, Rhubarb Magazine, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, Washington Square and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets and many other journals and anthologies. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana, where she also edits the online Journal for the Center of Mennonite Writing at www.mennonitewriting.org.

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Soaking in salt. Bi-carb of dried tears

Sensibility’s wavering
Feasibility low
Credibility zero

Get back without looking back. Too many traces. Shapes. Crystalline. See where it goes. Tracks running forward.

Non-committal. At this juncture. White washed figure on asphalt. Washed under carpet

On prior assault. It’s a demure demise. How easy it must be, to reinvent. Present as pristine. Marked and soiled. Not that you’d know. Slip a gear. Oiled.  Surprising how trusting.

Add subtitles. It’s a new foreign front. Begin without end. A lost sequel remake, the reels were once files. Who you knew is no different.

Squandered what could be, based on prior opportunities. No need to reflect. Mirror image presents same. As though it could be anything else.

While tomorrow is not another day, it is tomorrow, it is encumbered with weights of yesterdays. Dragging us behind, to where we hoped we never were.

Cold. Distant. As the years should be.

End of hopscotch, turn and jump back. Same squares. Different direction.

Anthony J. Langford lives in Sydney Australia. He writes stories, poetry and makes video poems. His story The Long Jetty featured in the Verandah 25th Anniversary Edition. Some of his recent publications include Ink, Sweat & Tears, Mused, Citizens for Decent Literature, Crack the Spine and Eunoia Review. He works in television and has made short films, some of which have screened internationally. His novella, Bottomless River is out now through Ginninderra Press. A poetry collection, Caged without Walls will be released in 2013. A wide selection of his work can be found at www.anthonyjlangford.com.

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Across a trillium mesa, black fog contemplates, hovering like

a condor in an updraft. The grim veil pauses, circumspect,

needing to know what I know of love—

how a kiss is like the drawing out of juice from a pomegranate

jewel, how the touch of kindred skins is like freefall running

down the slope of Highgate Hill.

Always though, there is discontent. Taste and feeling are

evanescent, fleeting moments that fly or flow.  Love is sensual

happenstance, pinioned by expectation and midnight pulses.

I have never existed within my lover’s contours.

The deep mist disengages, gathering itself for a headlong rush

down Hayden’s Peak. Even if I could prevent a haphazard

descent, my words will change nothing. This is how love is

pursued. In sudden desperation, a rock slide disembogues and

a dust cloud envelopes an unsuspecting valley.

Not a black fog at all—

only the polemic billow of my day shadow turned inside-out.

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He has a wife, Vickie and a daughter, Sage. His work has appeared in hundreds of publications including Prime Mincer, Sheepshead Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Fox Cry, Prairie Winds and The Red Cedar Review.

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Your demands for a cell phone louder, every day.

We visit high schools, girls parade in a yard of fabric

that doesn’t cover their nubility.

Boys look at them and you without blinking, as if it’s their

entitlement. The trouble with biology is that it starts early

and never stops.

Like that fish in the ocean’s abyss that bites the larger female’s

belly from underneath, sometimes for a week, until he’s

permanently attached. There he stays, the rest of his life,

feeding from her, and in return she gets his sperm for new life.

He looks like a rudder, a small appendage underneath.

This middle time, between your total innocence and what’s

to come, these fawning boys, their stories biting, sucking,

your skin, precious in its unknowing, ripe red plum, all colors

of yellow-red and orange, as if the sun shone just on you.

Your hair brown and blond, cascades to your waist, shining

on this autumn day, as if this could be enough.

Donna Emerson is a college instructor, licensed clinical social worker, photographer, and writer of poetry and prose. Her publications include Alembic, CQ (California Quarterly), Eclipse, Forge, Fourth River, Fox Cry Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Ohio Review, Paterson Literary Review, Praxis: Gender & Cultural Critiques (formerly Phoebe), Sanskrit, The Schuykill Valley Journal, Soundings East, So To Speak, The South Carolina Review, and Spillway. Her second chapbook, Body Rhymes, which was nominated for a California Book Award, and third chapbook, Wild Mercy, were published by Finishing Line Press in June 2009 and September 2011.

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the yellow (yellow).
is simply vibrant,
a (green) field
the field of
the air or whatever.
physical quantity.
Amen, amen,
to the man on
the bloddy tre
whose blood
makes the air.

…

I didn’t know that my heart could rest in you.
Holy… I fail, every time. But I will kneel at the marble rail
to adore your tabernacle, a monstrance (monstrosity) of (baked) bread
I worship, my true God, a plated steel monstrance

Micah Cavaleri’s most recent book is ‘the romances and other poems.’ He has served in Iraq, jumped from helicopters and flown Humvees off dunes. Before that, he received his MA in Philosophy from the University of Minnesota. There was poetry. After school, he trained in satellite communications and as a cavalry scout for the National Guard, and completed graduate studies in Advanced International Affairs at Texas A&M. Micah now lives in Michigan’s UP and edits Mid-June. You can find his poetry and literary criticism in Bolts of Silk, elimae, Moria, The New Mystics, Otoliths, Galatea Resurrects, Jacket2 and more.

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Hold still, now

That I might taste the tangerine

In your kiss

And see the strawberry seeds

In your teeth

You are the pucker of the cheeks

You are the sour giving way to sweet

The squint of the eye

As it studies the skins and shines

Searching out the most perfect breakfast

When I feel alone

I linger in the produce aisles

Counting the rhythm of the spritzers

Learning to look and not touch

To judge before I taste

Jennifer Nicolini has no pseudonym, though sometimes wishes she did. She is a 26 yr old dual college graduate (UNC-Asheville and UNC-Charlotte) with 3 B.A.’s (Engl./Phil./Econ.), a mountain of student debt, and a reckless inability to abandon her writing pipe dreams. After 7 years of college, she has finally been released into the real world, for which she finds she has a general distaste, as no one seems to be seeking a single, educated, not-yet-thirty-some female for much of anything. Originally growing up in Long Island, New York, she found herself a transplant in the heart of the NC mountains at age 18. The Appalachian experience changed her life and her art in unalterable ways for the next 8 years.

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Make the distraction your focus—
Your sleepless night,
your subject,

The neighbor’s leaf blower,
your muse,

The weeds in the rock garden,
your lover,

The letter to your mom,
your novel,

A cloud and a skylark,
your Alpha and Omega.

Our conversation,
your sex,

my body,
your poem,

our memories,
your distraction,

your focus,
my present.

Joshua Brewer’s most recent writing has appeared in several journals, including Yemassee, Sargasso, vox poetica, and The Mindful Word. He teaches people to write but doesn’t take his own advice.

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You were here on a day

when geese were crossing, aspen

bending with beginnings

of cold seasons and you

walked in brilliant

wind. Hand in your pocket

you were talking, maybe

singing there were leaves

beneath your feet then, forest

new and yellow, blue between

the clouds then and it

wakened when you walked.

Laurie Sewall’s recent work can be found in Folio, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Peregrine, The Pinch, Poet Lore, Salamander, and Soundings East, among other publications.  Her poetry was selected as a finalist in the Atlanta Review 2011 International Poetry Contest. After living in New England for many years, she now resides in rural Iowa, where she writes and teaches poetry.

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I am an empty suitcase

the Californian laureate claimed

never to write in the first person.

Second, do you like to be compared

to God or Dickinson or tarot cards?

my game, my deck, my ride

across the country, I was still

extremely prosy.  I willed too much.

Too much control.  Not enough range.

I pissed down rabbit holes,

craved success, fame, self-published,

gave too many loaded talks on stages.

Thirdly, my discipline is interior.

I use a steel hammer

to drive needles through silk.

Finally, as a poet, do you have specific goals?

Breakfast.  Yes.  And look better.

Plus, get closer to my brother.

But really, I’m not much of a dreamer.

Morgan O’Connor grew up in a small village on Lake Huron and always desired to travel the world. He has lived in New York, London, Sao Paulo, Toronto, Dublin, Doha, Nice, Sevilla, Verona, Miami, Barcelona, and his current home, Rio de Janeiro. He has taught English at The University Of Miami and Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona and spent 15 years working as a professional actor. In his free time, he enjoys cycling, yoga, and languages. His writing has been published in The Guardian, The Write Practice and Collective Exile.

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I can’t stop picking you like a bump,
rubbing till you’re red, rushing to see,
out to sea one more time, can’t drop you
like a hot potato, a split green
tomato left in the garden too
long with a slug who tunnels through and
moves on under the next leaf curling
to brown, summer again come winter.

Sandra Kolankiewicz’s poems and stories have appeared most recently in Gargoyle, Bellingham Review, Solo Novo, Monkeybicycle, Rhino, Cortland Review, Atticus, Per Contra, and Forge Journal.  Turning Inside Out won the Black River Competition and is available from Black Lawrence Press.  Blue Eyes Don’t Cry won the Hackney Award for the Novel. She teaches Developmental English at West Virginia University Parkersburg.

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I know you best in winter
No flutter
No leafy camouflage
No confusing thaw
No spring honeysuckle
Grown heavy and sweet by swollen creeks.

Just scar and muscle and chafe
Bend and bone
Sighs and whispers I can read like smoke signals
Your body curving into mine for warmth
This I understand,
This I know.

Laura Schulkind is a poet and writer, and an attorney by day, where she is entrusted with telling others’ stories. Through fiction and poetry she tells her own. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in The MacGuffin, Talking River, Eclipse, Minetta Review and Forge. She and her husband divide their time between Berkeley and Big Sur California. Her two grown sons continue to inspire her.

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It’s been years since I visited Audri’s country house. I used to go there regularly with my parents and her family over the summer, back when she and I were five or six years old. All of us piled into their car and drove for six hours to their old house in the Catskills, arriving long after sunset. Audri and I jumped out of the car and scampered up the overgrown asphalt path toward the front door. Our parents told us to be careful in the dark, because the path was so cracked and churned up by the weeds growing through it, so I slowed down. But Audri never stopped; she leapt over the cracks with the agility of a deer, running gracefully right up the path and into the house. She was always filled with energy when we first arrived, but long after sunset was a very late hour for one little girl, and my eyelids soon drooped. Once we were in bed though, we were both eager to sleep so morning would come sooner.

We awoke almost as soon as the sun rose, dragging our parents out of bed to make breakfast. Then we went swimming in the creek. I knew the way, but I let her lead me every time, watching the brown curls of her hair bounce on her shoulders as she skipped ahead of me into the unkempt yard. The grass grew up past my knees, and the expanse of green was peppered with dandelions. Their petals tickled my calves as we passed through. A gap in the bushes around the house opened onto the road. From here, we could see the mountains rising in the distance, their smooth curves emerging from the morning mist. The clouds cast shadows that rolled along these curves, as if the mountains were the sky itself.

We clambered down off the side of the road and then through a patch of brambles. They scraped my legs, dotted my bare feet with splinters, but I never cared. Besides, we soon came to the trees, and the ground turned soft again. Once in a while, we saw a deer that dashed away, showing only a thrilling flash of its tail. Finally, we reached the creek. We stepped out onto the algae covered, slippery stones, the water dancing around the edges of our feet. The water here wasn’t deep enough to swim in, so we followed the current to where it pooled next to a clay bed. We stood together by the edge. The water was still enough for us to see our reflections, mine slightly shorter than hers. But Audri kicked a small stone into the water and the reflections scattered away like more startled deer. We had learned that the water was too cold to enter slowly. We threw off our clothes and leapt gleefully in. I remember the shock of it against my skin.

We stayed in the water only a moment, climbing frantically away from the cold onto the
shelf of clay, getting coated as we did. We ripped handfuls of clay out of the bed and smeared it
on our bodies, using our fingers to stripe each other’s faces like war paint. It all was wild.

***

One time, her mother followed us to the creek, suddenly worried for our safety. While we slid and scrambled over the clay bed, she stood across the water from us. She balanced awkwardly on the rocks, absentmindedly twirling a strand of hair between her fingers. Placid and out of place, she was certainly not part of our game. We resented her presence. Losing her balance for a moment, she dropped her sunglasses and had to turn her back to us and bend over to look for them. I saw a mischievous glint in Audri’s eyes.

“Oh my God, we have to!”

“What—”

She quickly ripped out a fistful of clay, shaped it into a ball, and hurled it across the water, where it hit the back of her mother’s shorts with a slap. I was shocked. The thrill of being bad, of being complicit with Audri, mingled in my chest with fear of her mother’s anger. But Audri laughed so hard I couldn’t hear her mother scolding us. Finally, her laughter subsided. Her mother scolded us some more, telling us to come home with her. We obeyed, but as we were walking home, Audri grinned at me behind her mother’s back, extinguishing any spark of contrition I felt.

***

It is now too cold to venture into the water. It is only late August, but fall comes early here. We have returned, Audri and I, older and without our parents. We took the bus this time, getting here even later than usual. We have stayed up almost all night, though, baking scones and drinking coffee on the porch. The night air is uncomfortably chilly, so we find a couple of moth-eaten, oversized sweaters to curl up in outside. Slowly, luxuriating in every smooth movement of her thumbs, Audri rolls a cigarette, lights it, takes a drag. I envy the graceful curve of her neck emerging from under her sweater as she leans her head back to exhale a stream of smoke. Her rows of earrings dangle like chandeliers, and her rings reflect what little starlight there is.

Most things about Audri are wild. I am painfully domestic in comparison, and have spent much of my life in her shadow. It is moments like these, when I admire the ease with which she moves, the animal life coiled in her muscles, that I understand why I have followed her for so long. We do not speak. I watch her as she finishes her cigarette, and then we go inside to sleep.

We waken lazily, long after the sun, and decide to walk to the creek. We follow the same path we took as children, my feet stepping on the edge of her shadow as she walks in front of me. Finally, we reach the creek. We stand away from the water this time, making sure not to get our shoes wet. An abandoned railroad track runs alongside the creek for some distance, and we clamber over the rocks to it. Audri skips agilely ahead of me as I test each plank carefully with my feet, not wanting to step on soft, rotten wood.

“Dude, why are you so slow?” she calls back to me.

I want to make up an excuse, unwilling to reveal my unease, but she is already moving again, and I remain quiet in order to focus on catching up with her. As we continue along the tracks, the ground slowly falls away below. I am dizzied by the stripes of forest floor I glimpse between the planks. Our shadows walk along these stripes, mine still slightly shorter than hers. Looking ahead, I can see that the creek has widened into a calm river, and that the tracks curve, forming a bridge over this little river. I can also see that Audri intends to cross it.

She takes one step out onto the bridge. I want to stop her, but suddenly she is running, leaping gracefully over the gaps between the planks and letting out an exuberant whoop when she reaches the middle of the bridge. She turns to beckon to me. I shake my head, but I know, even considering my real fear, that I won’t be able to resist her. And then I am walking across the bridge, forcing myself not to watch the water streaming by below me. Only when I reach Audri do I allow myself to look down. I see I am only about ten feet above the water, but with no railing I feel exposed, ready to bolt back along the bridge.

“This is amazing,” she says.

It is hard for me to agree. I just want to be safe on solid ground. How can she be so fearless? But maybe I should be wondering about me. How can I be so cautious with only this sky above and this river below? I look down and the water is so calm that the sky is reflected perfectly in it, as though there is nothing between them; the sky and the river are one. I feel a sudden thudding in my chest, and Audri frowns as she sees a mischievous glint appear in my eyes. I take off my shoes, placing them next to each other on a solid plank. I look over the edge. The water here should be deep enough, I think. I throw off my clothes. I jump.

Clio Contogenis was born in New York City to a family of writers.  She began writing almost as soon as she could hold a pencil, and has experimented with many different genres, including poetry, fantasy, playwriting, and creative nonfiction.  After graduating from Stuyvesant High School, she started at Yale University, where she is currently a junior studying English and Theater Studies.  She also enjoys acting, singing, and playing the piano.

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