FALL 2018

Frick had been running his rig around the country for over a year when they pinned him with his third strike. I’m laying the synth on a new track when he walks in and tosses his keys on the counter like he’s only been gone the weekend.

“Beer?” he asks, but he’s cracking a Bud before I can tell him where. I’ve got questions, but I just close my laptop and try not to force it. Frick’s got plenty of stories in him. Usually all you’ve got to do is wait.

“You ever get ringworm?” Frick walks into the room scratching his balls.

“Tell me about it,” I say. It’s just been me and the music for so long, even hearing about Frick’s hygiene sounds like a good chance of pace.

But instead of pulling down his pants and talking fungal infections, Frick tells me about his first strike: a missed weigh station five miles outside of Denver.

“It was the lights,” he says. “I was driving into the city and I couldn’t look away.”

“I don’t get it,” I say. “They’re just lights.”

“These were Denver lights,” he says. He pauses for a minute, like he wants me to take that in.

“So?” I say.

“Denver,” Frick says, “is the greatest goddamn city in the world.” He pauses, nods, and drains the brew in a single pull.

*     *     *

I jammed with a band called Penis Flytrap in high school, but we split clean when the other guys left for college. I wasn’t serious about the music—not back then. Instead I spent most of my time with Frick and Al and the Graham twins, two heavyweight wrestlers who’d outgrown the sport but were left with the bodies.

We all lived in a house together rent-free because Al’s aunt footed the bill. The cops knew us all right, but they knew Al’s old man better, and Al could have probably talked his way out of trouble even without the pass.

One day after a trip to the river, Al left an open cooler on the back porch. There was a half bag of Cheetos and a few empties inside, and that night it filled with rain. A week later a pigeon smacked our back window and dropped dead inside the box, and after Halloween the Graham twins added a shriveled pumpkin to the mix. A new game was born: what can you put in the cooler to make it more disgusting than before?

Hosts and guests alike stepped up to the challenge: in went dip spit and piss, liquor and beer, condoms and cigarettes and vomit, a half-pound of ground turkey that was already starting to rot. The houses were spaced further out where the city turned country, but if we’d had neighbors, the smell would have kept their kids out of the yard.

One night Al and I put twenty on a game of beer pong against the twins, and when it went to overtime we raised the stakes, loser takes a sip. Right away they hit three straight, Al and I missed the rebuttal, and the next thing I knew the twins were dancing and we were pacing the house, downing shot after shot to muster the courage.

Al and I regrouped in the kitchen to shotgun a beer, to taste one last good thing before we were ruined by that milky ooze, but Frick got impatient waiting for his turn to play. He marched past us to the porch and knelt in front of the cooler, gripping both sides.

“Pussies,” he grinned. He saluted us both, and dropped his face into the sludge.

*     *     *

I had time for my music when Frick was on the road. I was going to make it solo if I was going to make it at all, and I was working on a new sound—all instrumental, plucky but muted. Soft at first, but chaos when it comes together. Think Bon Iver meets Explosions in the Sky. You’d have to hear it to really know.

I would plug in my Telecaster for the guitar parts and use my laptop for everything else. Before Frick came back, I was pumping out a song a day, putting the final tracks online, picking up a about a hundred followers in only a couple of months—if nothing else, it was a start.

Now my time gets hijacked by pick-up football games and camping trips and parties where Frick only kind of knows one girl and we always end up fighting fat dudes in cut-offs smoking Black & Milds in the garage.

It’s Frick’s life, not mine—but the dude has pull. How do you tell your friend you’d rather spend your night alone when he’s got a fifth of rum and enough trouble lined up for the both of you? Lately I’ve been getting real about it, playing any chance I get until my fingers bleed. Work all day, party all night. I figure I should be able to handle at least these two things—my music and my friend.

I’m locked into a new song now, and this one’s got promise. It’s all about the rise and the drop, the single second of pause before the instruments crash together, jangling and wild. With each new song I think, “This’ll be the one that takes me,” but never like this. All I need is one to catch the right pair of ears, and I’m so close I can taste it.

I’m deep in a final mix when Frick comes in without knocking and tells me he’s got a case with our names on it. I tell him not now, but he just drops the thirty on the table and stares. Sometimes living with Frick is like having a kid around—anything I want to get done has to happen when he’s sleeping.

“Give me an hour,” I say.

Frick cracks a can and grins.

“I ever tell you about my second strike?”

This one came in rural Illinois, twenty miles south of Champaign, when he slammed on the brakes so hard he skid onto the shoulder and nearly toppled the rig, all to avoid a mother duck and her ducklings crossing the road.

“I said to the cop, ‘What the hell was I supposed to do?’ and the good old boy just says ‘Next time don’t be funny.’ Gave me a two-hundred dollar ticket for reckless driving. Said I could have killed someone, like it wasn’t just me and him on that empty-ass road.”

“Well,” I say. “He’s right, isn’t he?”

“Are you crazy?” Frick says. “What about the ducks?”

*     *     *

On some nights I do turn him down. I get cranky when my guitar sits for days.

“I want to go, I do,” I say. “I just need to work.”

“You worked earlier,” Frick says. He’s got to know I’m locked in, guitar in my hand and mix on the screen, but he just looks me straight in the eye, stupid, like none of it’s there. It would be one thing if he’d just go without me, but instead he stays in, paces around picking scabs and eating soggy fish sticks wrapped in tin foil.

“You call Al?” I ask. “The Graham twins?”

Frick shakes his head. He gets real quiet—turns in early, sleeps past noon. There’s a feeling in the apartment like I’m being shunned. Like I’ve betrayed him in the worst way.

I feel so bad about it, the next night I cut work early, walk down the hall to Frick’s room with a case as a peace offering. Part of me hopes he’ll turn me down and that way we’ll be even, but that’s never how it’s worked with us. I already know his answer before I even start to knock.

*     *     *

I got a call from Frick at least once a week back when he was on the road. The calls always came late at night or early in the morning, and though he never admitted he was calling to keep himself awake, he always started off groggy and got sharper as we talked. You hardly got a word in once you got him going about the old days, the house and the parties and the girls.

Back then I didn’t mind getting woken up at three in the morning to hear a little bit about Frick’s day, the cities he was passing, the bars he drank in, the makeshift gym he’d set up in the back of his rig. Sometimes he’d catch me when I was still awake, stuck on a song, and afterward I’d figure it out and work through to the morning. Something about Frick out on the road missing home reminded me why I loved what I was doing, why I was working part-time and living poor for my music while the rest of my friends were busting their asses forty hours a week at the plant and hating every minute of it.

One late night, just days before he came back, I talked to Frick for an hour, then told him I had to get some sleep. There was silence on the line, and then he just kept on talking, as if instead of saying nothing, he’d asked to keep going and I’d said Yes. So I lay back and kept the phone on my pillow, letting Frick’s voice go on while I settled on my side. I fell asleep that way, him narrating the shifting landscape of western Oklahoma, the flatness turning rocky around him, an inventory of everything he could see, for as far as he could see it.

*     *     *

Frick says his final strike came on a night he was travel-worn and filthy, when the ringworm and jock itch and rashes were at full-fester. I slept through his call and he drifted into something like sleep, taking a wrong turn off a Missouri freeway onto a service road that got too skinny for his rig to follow.

“I woke up like that,” Frick says. “Stuck.”

He came to, tried backing up and took down a power line that totaled his back end. Two days later, he was home.

Frick tells me all this from our couch, where he’s been parked for the last three days eating Cheetos, leaving orange stains on the handle of the bathroom door. He was hired at Ford but didn’t make it two weeks on the line before they let him go. He had rashes and scabs and a bulging hernia. He hadn’t earned any sick days, and his health insurance hadn’t kicked in besides.

None of this phases Frick. Not really. He just wears his pants a little lower. He learns to walk with a hunch.

*     *     *

After Frick gets a few days rest in him, he conjures the idea of getting hammered and taking kayaks into the river. I’m plucking at something new when he asks. The last song had promise, but it didn’t age well. A week later the magic was gone, and I was searching again. I say no to Frick at first—been having job trouble myself, had to talk my boss out of firing me for coming in too many mornings hungover and late.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I say.

“Come on,” Frick says.

“Tomorrow,” I say, and my voice has a bite to it that surprises us both.

“What’s your deal, man,” Frick says. He hobbles up to me angrily and he looks so pathetic, fat and limping with his hernia popping out, I can barely look him in the eye. “You’re so pissy all the time. If you’ve got a fucking problem, you should tell me.”

When I’m with Frick, I’m filthy. I’m broke and stupid and drunk. I leave my guitar for days, and when I come back to it I feel useless, like I’m wasting my life. But when I look him in the eye, none of that matters. I can feel myself slipping and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

“Come on,” he says. “You want me to leave, you can say it to my face.”

I gear myself up to say something real mean, something that’ll cut through Frick like a cleaver, something that will let him know this is serious, that he can’t expect me to live the way he lives forever. But his mad act’s a front. His lip starts to wobble, and I know that it’s hopeless. I just can’t fight the pull.

“No,” I say. “I’m sorry. Let’s get some beer and go.” And Frick’s face slowly changes shape until he’s grinning wide as a pumpkin.

We shotgun two beers each and he shells out what has to be the last of his cash on another case and two cheap-looking kayaks. He drives us through the city from the store to where the river flows through, but not before we get turned around and do some swerving and looping and finally end up parking on a side street of a nice neighborhood a half-mile from the water.

“No worries,” Frick says. We drain what’s left of our road beers and pack our pockets with more. To get to the river we have to walk across someone’s big backyard and through the woods, so we take off across private property holding kayaks on our heads.

We’re in the woods long enough to stumble a little and lose our way. We walk for what feels like hours, passing the same trees again and again. The beers hit us like waves on a shore. We stop and stand for a minute, wobbling. I’m about to tell Frick to hold up and help me listen for the water when bright lights flash behind us. A car door slams. We’re told to stop where we are.

There’s a command to put our hands up. Boots on leaves. I follow the officer’s orders and the kayak slides off my head and into a tree. I feel the late-night wind like I’m wearing gloves—the callouses on my fingers are that thick. Frick and I stand right where we are, dumb and drunk and winded.

“Just let me do the talking,” Frick says.

It’s a quiet night. I listen for the water. I wonder if I can run fast enough to leave him behind.

Justin Brouckaert’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, Passages North, Smokelong Quarterly and NANO Fiction, among other publications. A James Dickey Fellow at the University of South Carolina, he serves as fiction editor at Yemassee and Banango Street. @JJBrouckaert

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The slot machine lights up, all three dollars signs flashing like a message sent from sea, and here comes the money—a trickle of it, a stream, a river, a geyser overflowing Jess’s cupped hands.

“Oh my God,” Penny screams. “Oh my God, oh my God.”

The crowd on the floor rustles and looks up, blowing smoke at the turrets and tapestries, at the empty suits of armor that watch from the walls.

Jess stares at his hands and giggles. “Oh crap.”

Ring-a-ling-a-ling goes the slot machine, sounding its jingle of victory.

They’d hitchhiked into Vegas when the Honda blew its transmission outside Elko. Panhandled a little, slumped beneath street signs when they were too hungry to move, stayed just ahead of the cops who trolled the neon-lit sidewalks instructing, move along move along. At the show, they met people. They always did, and the people had shared their grilled cheese sandwiches and their weed and their tents, the people always took care of each other. Dudes, he told each of his hosts with a bow, I wish you good fortune in return. Up on the stage, for the twenty-third time in Jess’s life, Jerry Garcia had hung his meaty arms around his guitar, singing, We will get by.

But that had been days ago, and today the two of them dragged themselves up and down the Strip through the brain-melting heat, past the souvenir shops that unspooled toward infinity. They set down their backpacks and guitars in a corner of a shop called the Five-Leaf Clover. Stood spread-eagled before the air conditioning vent with their heads tipped back. Thumbed decks of cards and ashtrays, dangled shot glasses and key chains. Penny lifted a pink feather boa from its rack. Ooh, very Hendrix, she said as she encircled his neck, and he’d laughed and crowned her with a feathered orange tiara. Very Big Bird. They kissed. They kissed until the salesclerk stepped up too close and cleared her throat. Can I help you two with something? Penny was the one who had straightened. We’re not stealing anything, she hissed. She took Jess’s hand. We don’t steal.

Jess lets the coins spill from his hands, now. There’s so much he can’t hold it, not even the plastic buckets are enough, it piles at his feet. The crowd lights fresh cigarettes and moves in, jostling, hooting, and on the naugahyde stool beside them, a woman turns away and cries, It’s not fair, they’ve only been here ten minutes, they weren’t even trying.

He gathers Penny in and spins her around on his stool.

“We can get the car fixed!”

“Screw that.” Her feet dance in the air. “Let’s get another car!”

He lifts her higher. “How about a tour bus?”

She opens her arms. “We can eat at a buffet!”

“Twice a day! Three times, if we want!”

They kiss.

“And then,” she sighs as she slips to the ground, “we can go see a dentist.”

“We’ll get ourselves a suite!” He tosses a handful of quarters into the air. “We’ll get suites for everyone we met this week! At the Luxor! We’ll smoke the finest marijuana money can buy and watch cable TV!”

“We can get an apartment. We could go back to school.”

The air stops between them, hanging heavy with smoke.

Ring-a-ling-a-ling, a-ling-a-ling. The sound fills Jess’s ears, his head, the marrow of his bones. Every machine in every casino tuned exactly alike, in the optimistic key of C—he tested it on the day they arrived, opened his guitar case right on the pink-and-white main floor of the Flamingo and found the chord, security approaching while Penny laughed and said, You’re right, it is, everything’s in sync.

He takes Penny’s hands. Here comes security, of course—a suit with a clipboard this time, grim but smiling, tailed by a pair of muscleheads in tight shirts. Penny’s fingernails dig into his palms. He digs back. “It’s only the beginning, baby,” he whispers. But when she nods, her eyes move somewhere far away, and he loses his breath. He’s still here in the interlude. The rest he can already see coming.

Alma García’s short fiction has been published as an award-winner in Narrative Magazine, Enizagam, Passages North, and Boulevard; is forthcoming in Duende and Kweli Journal; and appears in the anthology, Roadside Curiosities: Short Stories on American Pop Culture (University of Leipzig Press/Picador). A past recipient of a fellowship from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, she makes her home in Seattle, where she teaches fiction writing at the Richard Hugo House and is a private editing consultant as well as a violin instructor. She is currently at work on a novel. @Writer_Alma

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The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, my boyfriend appears in the doorway and says he loves me but we aren’t good for each other. I laugh. I mean, what the fuck do you say to that? He’s looking down at me because I’m sitting on the floor, which is the best place to be when the spins start. “Yeah, right,” I tell him. “And we’re getting clean, too.”

But he says, “maybe we should,” and walks out.

*

He doesn’t come back that night, which is just fucked. When I get in bed the sheets are cool and smooth as glass. I try to double my pillow up but my arms stumble over the mattress. When I look at them, they look like beach wood and I wonder whether they are still attached.

I wake when the windows are dark and the sheets are a rope snaking around my legs. I try to kick them off and they tighten. A drop of sweat crawls down my neck.

*

So fuck him, I’ll get clean. I will, motherfucker. You don’t know. You don’t know.

*

Cole comes back sometime in the morning while the light is still thin. Our sweat makes his cotton shirt stick to the skin. He says, “Bec, I’m ruining you.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

He turns my wrist over in his hand. Touches the dark spots on the inside of my elbow where the vein blooms to a black mouth.

“You do it too,” I say. I pull my arm back.

“But you’re you.”

We sleep.

*

When we wake, he hands me the bong; a dragonfly of smoke crawls up the glass, violet and blue. The burn hits the back of my throat. My bones are shards of glass, their edges slicing the flesh. When I open my mouth smoke makes grey fireworks.

“You know I hate this shit.” Already I feel the high spiral towards my heart. Cole sits on the edge of the bed. Last night he came home sweet; he had to have gotten high with Amanda from the park and what did he mean that we weren’t good for each other, and when was the last time we had sex? I touch his waist, lean to kiss him, but my bones ache and when he puts his hand over the back of my neck I feel bugs swarm across the skin and I move back from him. I want to say I’m sorry but I can’t open my mouth.

I have to work tonight. Closing. I say, “fuck what time is it.”

“Only eleven.”

“By three I better be sober. I can’t smoke this shit anymore.”

“You’ll be sicker if you don’t.”

“I think they’re going to fire me.”

“They’re not going to fire you, babe.”

I take another long hit, embers shooting into my lungs. I hold it for a while, hoping I’ll push past this into something better.

“I’m really not that bad,” I say. “These bitches from Sephora came back in complaining about her white mocha wasn’t sweet enough. Josh remade it, twice the syrup, and they leaned on the counter going, you’re so good, as if adding syrup is something you can be good at.”

“Josh is a bitch.”

“Were you with Amanda last night?”

“Are you fucking crazy? No. I had a drink with Jack. Give me the bong back.”

“Marsha told Josh to teach me some things when we got slow,” I tell him. “He was like, I’ll teach you some things. He was like, it’s ok, I’m the brains and you’re the beauty.” I know not to tell Cole this but I’ve already said it and it’s too late.

“I’ll come to work with you today,” Cole says, “and kill him.”

I don’t even know if he’s kidding. I get up and go kneel by the toilet, puking nothing until I think I might choke to death. I fucking hate weed.

*

I feel a little better, but I’d rather shoot out both my kneecaps than go to work, so I might as well call my parents too, because fuck this day. I was going to pull it together but I haven’t been to school yet this month.

It’s been a while since I’ve called. When I lived away from home before—half of junior year at this school for fuck-ups—they used to make us call home once a week. But then they pulled me out of there because they said I wasn’t getting an education. And they found out that my roommate was there for heroin, which at the time I had never even seen. Living across the bay feels so close, like I’m always about to see them, but I never do. It’s not like I don’t miss them. But what could I talk to them about?

My mom picks up. I say “I’m coming home for Thanksgiving. I think I need to.”

“We’d love to have you.”

“No. I mean, I really need to come home for a while.”

“Sure, honey. We haven’t seen you in so long.”

“Cole got the job with that painting company.”

“Well, that’s nice,” she says, and doesn’t sound like she thinks it’s nice at all. “How are your classes?”

“It’s not going that well here.”

“I’m sure you’re doing great. You always do.”

*

While I’m making a fucking latte at my fucking place of employment Josh says, “can you get me some, you know, yayo?” Who is he, fucking Andre Nickatina? He puts his hand on my back, his fingers moving at the waist of my jeans. It’s fucking degrading.

“No.” Fuck him. He doesn’t know me. What if I were religious or a narc or something?

“You know. Yay.”

Jesus I’m having this conversation right now. I’m not going to cave. “I meant no, I can’t. Extra hot skinny vanilla latte. Three-fifty for an eight ball I can do.”

*

Cole brings it when he comes to pick me up. BART’s going to stop running soon so he has my car. Josh only has twenties and we don’t give him the ten back.

“Two-hundred to rent,” I say.

“Can’t you ask your parents for rent?”

“I’m dropping out of school. I think that deal is off.”

He takes my hand.

“I don’t want to ask them. I just don’t.”

“Okay babe. We won’t.”

“We’re going to make it this time,” I say. “It’s not that bad. We’re done with the worst day.”

We walk next door to The Roundup. Probably the only dive bar until Berkeley—two Lulu Lemons, a Nordstrom, and three jewelry stores, no damn local—which is why we love it. And they never check my ID. Just a quick drink, Cole says, nothing crazy.

I get a triple of tequila in a cup, lime wedge. Cole says Irish Lunchbox. The bartender says, I know.

*

It’s karaoke Wednesday, and Cole sings Dolly Parton, throws himself on his knees when he screams I will always love you.

He has a great voice and he’s beautiful there on the floor of this fucking bar, crawling towards me.

*

When our guy shows up we both pretend we didn’t know he would, that both of us were planning on avoiding that shit for maybe forever, even though when I texted him he sent back, Cole already asked me to meet you guys.

Cole goes out to smoke with him.

When he comes back in, Cole leads me to the bathroom. On the wall, the kids from the Peets across the way have written, Starbucks serves grande cumbuckets with a shot of diarrhea. They’re snobby about their coffee and sometimes I see them after the store has closed, lined up behind the bar swirling steamed milk into little porcelain cups. But actually I think in another life I’d be their friend.

In this life I unfold a piece of tinfoil from my purse and jam the barred window open, pick open the Saran Wrap and drop one little nugget onto the sheet, pop the cap off a hollowed Bic pen from my bag and Cole, the gentleman, lets me go first. I flick the lighter, watch the tar melt and slide with a concentration I’ve felt in no other part of my life, inhale, taste licorice, in this life I am in love, in this life it doesn’t matter, Cole takes his turn, we’ll stop again tomorrow, we have needles at home. The door moves against the lock and it doesn’t matter, nothing outside matters, I push Cole against the wall and turn my face to his neck.

*

That night I watch him sleeping, his back looking marble in his white t-shirt and when I hear myself think, I have to get out, I fit my body around his, inhale.

*

I have to open Thanksgiving morning because they hate me, but then I have four days off because they hate me. When I leave it’s 3:40, still black in our room, and Cole is sleeping with one arm flung over his head, his knees in an L close to his chest like a child.

*

While I’m packing my bag I say, come to Thanksgiving at my parents’ tonight, but I don’t look at him when I say it. For a minute I think he might say yes, that I might have to find a way to back out—would my parents actually turn him away?—but he just offers a short laugh, more like a hard exhale.

*

I am going to stay right for the next four days and then figure it out on Monday.

On BART, I realize I haven’t eaten since Tuesday. I look at my jeans, loose around my thighs, my hipbones rising sharply. I used to have to try to lose weight. I pull off my sweatshirt at Glen Park station even though of course it’s raining. Only a little.

My sister gets out of the car but my dad stays behind the wheel. She hugs me.

“Jesus, bones. You doing okay?”

“I missed you.”

*

My dad follows my sister and me in. My mom is in the kitchen and I stand in the doorway, hoping they won’t hug me. They do. My dad tells me to get changed. I reach back to touch my spine, trying to see if I can feel the vertebrae between my shoulder blades. My mom says, “everyone will be here in a few minutes and I could use help with the cake.”

Their standard poodle Alyssa comes trotting into the kitchen and sits at my feet. I stroke her ear, her soft tight curls. They take her to the groomer every two months.

In my t-shirt, my pale arm shows a fork in my veins like roots being ripped from the earth, purpling, but I don’t bother hiding it. They aren’t looking.

*

I go downstairs to my old room. My parents put a TV in the closet and I have to roll it out of the way to pull out a blue and black dress. My sister shows up in the doorway.

“How do you survive here?” I ask her. “They can’t even leave a TV out in the fucking TV room.”

“I think I’ll survive three more years,” Rae says. “I’ll be so glad to get out of the gorgeous house and into some awful dorm.”

“I think mom Lysoled the turkey.”

“She says you wouldn’t help with dinner,” Rae says.

“Bullshit. I just got here. I need to change.”

“She says you’re in a mood.”

“She’s in a mood.”

“Her dad is dying.”

Okay. Okay.

“He dropped his dentures in the toilet and made grandma use the neighbor’s restroom for a week. Wouldn’t pay a plumber. Wanted to save the fucking dentures.”

“Doesn’t he have a bedpan now? What does grandma do with it?”

“I wish he’d just die already. Mom says he’s getting sorry about things. What a joke. Eleventh hour song and dance.”

The last time I saw my grandfather, he lingered at the edge of the room while we talked to my grandma, his skin gone soft and faintly sour. I was young still, I did what my mom and dad did: didn’t talk directly to him, except when I had to, to be polite to my grandma. When we left, he said, “What, no one hugs me good bye?” I turned back. His face was damp and stubbled and he shook me when he let go. I felt guilty for my fear.

“I can’t imagine. Having no one who loves you.”

“Cry me a river. He’s getting teary about chasing mom around the kitchen table with a dinner plate when she was nine and meanwhile grandma is carrying a trashcan full of his shit to the field.” Her jaw moves and I know she’s biting the inside of her cheek, something she does when she feels sorry for someone. She’s getting so old, and it’s strange to see this vestige of her childhood self in her teenage face.

“How’s mom?”

“It’s sad here. With you gone and everything.”

“I didn’t tell mom I wouldn’t help. I mean, I’m gonna help. With the cake.”

“I know.”

*

My aunt and uncle and my cousin and his wife are in the living room, and some friends of my parents. One of the friends, a psychologist, is talking about a project she leads in Tanzania. “Oh, Rebecca,” she says when I come in. “How’s school?”

I can see that I’m just going to be a total asshole tonight if I don’t do something so I go back downstairs to call Jeremy, then offer to walk the dog.

Alyssa moves in a slow, graceful glide beside me, her shoulder just the right height for me to rest my hand on it, the swing of her back calming. It’s not like it’s that big of a deal.

Cole texts me a picture of him and Jack at the bar, each holding a package of Turkey Jerky. Jealous, I text back and he doesn’t respond.

I meet Jeremy around the corner, outside a house with a wrought iron gate and brick steps winding up a lawn. The second story of the house has a porch greenhouse, plants so twisted and blooming so ferociously they look as if they are feeding on one another, a bloodbath of choking ivy and lavender orchids. He says he doesn’t have crystal, only coke, but Jeremy is a douchebag so I say I’m tasting it first.

I do a key standing in the street, under the windows of this seven million dollar house; Jeremy moves two nervous steps away. Alyssa pulls the leash and a dusting of Jeremy’s shit lands on my dress. “Fucking cunt,” I say and Jeremy grabs her collar, jerks her head so she drops to her haunches.

“Don’t touch her.”

“Just trying to help.”

I move between them, do another. The burn is insane.

“You buying or not?”

“This is meth,” I say. “And bleach.”

“It’s what I got.”

“Eighty,” I say. I end up giving him a hundred and going home.

*

“School is great,” I tell my uncle and pass the platter of sliced turkey. There’s a thin vein, blue against the white meat. My stomach turns.

“Really interesting,” I say. “But I don’t really know what I want to do right now. Sometimes I just feel stir crazy.”

“Study abroad?” my mom asks. “Berkeley has a wonderful program.”

“Sure,” I say. Excuse myself.

*

I pass my sister when I come out of the bathroom and she looks at me for an extra instant. I sniff. The pain is tearing open my sinuses.

I text Cole I love you babe but he doesn’t respond. I don’t know if I can go back to the dining room now but what else can I do. I’m twisting my tongue against my teeth and I suck my cheeks in between my molars to stop it. Metal taste of blood.

My parents are talking about when we went to Costa Rica the year I was ten. I remember being sick the whole time but my mom says, “Rebecca just loved it. If she applies now she can go her sophomore year.” Like I’m not right here.

“Honey,” she says, “would you like some more?” Looking over my untouched plate, holding out a bowl of green beans like some kind of 50s ad.

“They’re vegan,” she says. “They’re so good with Chevre, but I wanted you to have enough food.”

I put a green bean in my mouth. It snaps, sweet and fresh. After every chew I tell myself I’m going to swallow. The stalk gets tough and stringy between my molars. I check my watch. In twelve seconds I’ll swallow. In forty-two seconds. Maybe I don’t have a stomach anymore. Every once in a while I nod vaguely but I can’t hear what they’re saying over the chewing. At seven minutes, I panic, shove back my chair, and go back to the bathroom.

*

I spit into the sink and wash my mouth out. I don’t know what this is. This isn’t good. I feel myself starting to come down and I can’t fucking do that right now. The door rattles but I can’t make the words come out of my mouth so I don’t say I’m in here.

“Sorry.” My mother’s voice.

I pour a fat line onto the counter, then another. I’m shaking too hard to separate it nicely. I’m never going to do this again. When this is over I’ll never do this again, just let me get through this night, please. I roll up a dollar and do one line, sniffing loudly. Don’t care. If this doesn’t get into my brain I’m so fucked anyway. “You ok?” My mom calls. “Fine,” I say. It shoots through me. “Just give me a fucking minute, Jesus.”

I hear her walking away.

I do the other; sparks. Everything’s going to be fine. The mirror swims. I’ll withdraw, go back next semester. I think of how Cole loves it when I kiss his neck, says, “oh my God, are you trying to kill me?”

Blood shoots out of my nose, slashing the white bowl of the sink with crimson. I grab some toilet paper, drops of blood splashing after me, thin pink on the green tile, the white porcelain toilet. The first wad soaks through to a wet pebble. I pile more onto my face, hold my head back. I think for a moment that my entire nose has come off and I’m bleeding out. My fingers stuck to flecks of paper with a film of blood.

When it slows, I flush the paper down and start cleaning the sink, seeing another spot, wiping it, realizing the last spot isn’t gone yet. There’s a faint spray on the mirror. I think I did ok. It looks normal. I notice a dark spot on the neckline of my dress. Not too bad. Not too noticeable.

*

I find my mom in the kitchen, everything buzzing, and she asks me to help with the cake. “It’s your favorite,” she says, and slices into the chocolate with a long knife.

I realize how hungry I am, somewhere.

“I’m a vegan,” I say. “Can you even do one thing that’s actually for me?”

“Why are you so horrible to me?” She says.

“I’m not ok,” I say. And I know how much I’ll regret this but right now I’m high, I’m up, I can see everything, my whole life split apart, me dying in that apartment with the blinds drawn, or me making it, a hospital bed or something, or something, somewhere I could sleep, someone else just doing this for me because I can’t, I can’t.

“Please help me,” I say. Alyssa pushes her nose under my palm.

My mother puts down the knife. “I try so hard,” she says. “What do you want from me?”

I can see she’s not going to get it so I pick up her cake knife and I put the point of it right on the dot of a track mark, I know my veins, I know where my blood is, I know where to cut, and I tell her I’m going to fucking kill myself.

I notice then that the kitchen door is open and I can see through it to the dining room, to the table stacked with a palette of color, steam rising over the mashed potatoes and the green beans, and my little sister biting her cheek, staring right at me, the only one of them who doesn’t look away.

Sarah Kahn is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of Montana. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Map Literary, Cobalt Review, Sweet, and Empty Sink Publishing.

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Late in the growing season of 1904, the wind that coddled the small farming town of Frowning, Iowa, smelled of alfalfa and dry soil. Fields unrolled in peaks and troughs of cropland and grazing pastures with the odd copse of oak. Redwing blackbirds and goldfinches flitted from fencepost to sunflower stalk and back. The call of crickets overpowered even the hustle of the wind. It was, for the pioneering men and women who had that past half-century called Frowning their home, a near idyllic sight. And it would have remained idyllic if the fully matured corn standing eight feet tall in the fields hadn’t, one night early in September, walked off.

Corn did not usually walk away from five square miles of farmland. Not even in 1904. It did not travel. It did not go and see the sights. It sprouted, it lengthened, it flowered, it pollinated, it grew cobs and it died. Whether or not the corn found this a satisfying life, no farmer thought to wonder. No farmer except Jimmy Ohliger. But Jimmy was the kind of man you heard telling children about the trolls in the cistern or the sprite nests under his hay cart. At church he talked to his neighbors about darner fairies. Why church made Jimmy think of darner fairies was anyone’s guess. Anyone’s guess, that is, except Mary’s. Mary was Jimmy’s wife and she didn’t guess a single thing about that man any more. Personal policy, you might call it.

Mary had been twenty-seven when she realized she was going to marry Jimmy Ohliger. She lived alone in a brown two-story on Main Street. Her father was dead, the family farm sold, her younger sister already married in Illinois with five children. She’d chosen Jimmy because she’d hoped that a man who told children’s stories wouldn’t be as serious as the other, older farmers looking for a woman to share in their labor. But Jimmy was serious. Serious about the farm work and serious about the stories. Jimmy married her because Mary still tied her braids up with ribbons, even at her age. She refused to give up her hair ribbons and she refused to leave Frowning. Both she connected to her deceased father. Reverend Longing wedded Mary and Jimmy Ohliger with no living family present. They rented out her house on Main St, and Mary moved out to the Ohliger farm.

Five years into her marriage, Mary had heard Jimmy Ohliger’s tale about the corn so often that she could recite it from memory, had even done so in one of her regular letters to her sister Constance as evidence of the madness she endured from her husband. Magic corn, haunted barns, the lot of it. The hours alone in the fields had loosened a cog or two in that bearded head of his. That’s how she described it to her sister: cogs. Malfunctioning clockwork. No telling when he’d tick next. The legend of the corn started, as many of Jimmy’s stories did, with the darner fairies. Dragonflies. But Jimmy lashed out when Mary called them that. “Bitch!” he shouted at her. “Slut! Do you like those nasty names? Then why d’you think they like something just as nasty? Dragons. Flies. As if they’re another pest to be flicked away by a horse’s tail.”

Corn had been a gift from the darner fairies, Jimmy told her as he pushed the individual components of the noon meal into his mouth as quickly as his teeth allowed, and darner fairies never did anything that didn’t benefit themselves. Sure, today corn was a crop to be fed to the animals and ground into meal, but the grain was only edible in its hibernation phase. Hibernation? The corn was waiting, he told her. Multiplying. One year, after people grew enough acres of the crop, it wouldn’t be a grain that sprouted any more. It’d be soldiers. An army.

Stories. Fairy tales. Legends always got told in the same tone, Mary thought as Jimmy paused to chew on an old hunk of bread. They were always recounted in the same voice, as if in the years of telling, the vine-like details had died back and only the waxy gourds remained. The dryable seeds of the story. As Jimmy ate, Mary took down her mother’s tea set from the cupboard and began to pack it away in a crate. She’d been packing her belongings all day and as far as she could tell Jimmy hadn’t noticed yet. Jimmy swallowed, continued:

“What other plant you know that stands at attention for that long? What plant is that straight without a single kink in his back? No man could stand that still that long. That’s how we know they’re not from this world. That’s how we know the darner fairies gave us the corn to invade.”

“Invade?” Mary released a sort of humorless chortle. “How?” She knew his response, knew she shouldn’t encourage him, but today was different from the other days, which made the telling different from other tellings. “How?” It was a challenge. If he could convince her of this one magical delusion, she might find a reason to stay. It was late April. She’d just finished planting the vegetable garden.

“Just look at those brace roots!” her husband exclaimed. He threw a hand toward the window that looked out on their twenty acres of corn. “We call them roots because we didn’t know what other word to use, but they don’t go underground. They ain’t roots. They’re legs. Pairs and pairs of them. Like a spider. Like two spiders stitched together.”

“Legs,” Mary repeated. She buried the paper-wrapped china in wood shavings from the barn. “What’re you saying? The corn’s gonna pack up its things and walk out on you some day? Without a word?”

“March,” Jimmy corrected. “Why do you think they grow in rows? So they’re ready when the orders come. You understand, don’t you?”

“I do.”

Mary wasn’t a soldier. She wasn’t hard, and a crick in her back made it impossible for her to stand straight. When she left Jimmy she didn’t march out without a word. She gave him two words. And those had been them. I do. The last syllables she ever spoke to her husband. A perfect bookend to their fairy tale marriage. If only Reverend Longing had been there to officiate. A neighbor picked her up on his way into town. One carpetbag and three apple crates went into the wagon. One carpetbag and three apple crates were deposited outside of her old two-story on Main Street. It stood abandoned. The front porch sloped. The renters had left town for the promise of oil in Texas and they hadn’t been able to find someone willing to rent a house that large. It wasn’t until she’d finished unpacking that Mary realized that in her hurry, she’d left her hair ribbons on the dresser of the farmhouse. She didn’t go back for them.

The sensation Mary Ohliger felt when she left her husband was like nothing she had experienced. A tingle on the roof of her mouth, a warmth on her tongue. For five years, her right nipple had itched against her old shift and when she quit Jimmy, Mary took the tip of her breast between her thumb and her forefinger and squeezed the itch gone. Bliss. Pure bliss. Four months later and little had changed. Except, of course, for the corn, which was gone. That hot September morning, Mary woke to the clamor of Main Street packed with buggies. Dressed still in the dirt they had found barren, farmers from Frowning, Franklin and Hamilton townships surged into Frowning’s only church. Groggy townsfolk followed. Those who couldn’t fit stood in the rear and in the aisles. Parents sent the rowdiest children into the choir loft where no one but God had to look at them. Jimmy Ohliger, ashen faced but calm, took a seat alone near the front of the congregation. His wife—former wife, the whispers said, although no papers had been signed—tucked herself beside her friend Grace Somerhalder in the middle of a pew. Mary made eye contact with nobody. She kept her head bowed and her face hidden. The town had talked, her alone in that house and all, but most knew Jimmy, and knowing Jimmy was all anyone needed to understand. Why then did she look so cowed? The ever-poised Mrs. Somerhalder put an arm around her friend, frowned. “Is that my hair clip?” she asked. Mary’s hand flew to her scalp, but she managed to shake her head. Grace’s tone softened. She smiled. “You look beautiful with your hair up like that, without your ribbons.” Mary mumbled a weak thanks to her knees.

All around the church, the congregation whispered in hunched clusters. Corn. Not a stalk left. How? Corn. Gone. Slowly, the murmuring ocean of worries and thoughts solidified into opinions. Opinions grew to a grab-bag of shouts. Indistinguishable, truths and misinformation circled the crowded room while the stagnant air grew heavy with the press of too many bodies. No one could agree on the most basic of facts. Some said the corn had disappeared just before dawn, some the stroke of midnight. The boundaries of the blighted area seemed amoebic. Theories were tossed like baseballs. The milkman, Sid Jones, suggested insects. His cousin had told him about a town in Wisconsin that had been stripped bare in hours by a swarm. His grown daughter gave a laugh that had the mirth sucked right out of it. “Not even a nibble on the other plants, though.”

The town dentist, Peter Kuhne, stood. “The soil was disturbed. What if socialists dug up the plants, loaded and stole them away?”

“All in one night?”

“Five miles square?”

From his pulpit at the front of the commotion, the old Reverend John Longing peered down at the packed pews with smug satisfaction. It wasn’t even Sunday. “Perhaps,” he announced in his orator’s voice that carried through the hot, respired air all the way to the men standing at the back, “if we had spent more time praying in the Lord’s sanctuary…” The word we jumped from the peaks of his brown teeth onto the thin grey hair of Mrs. Davies in the front row. The instant it touched her head it spread like a spell until it had drawn in every moving creature inside the church. Every moving creature, that is, except Reverend Longing. There was no doubt in his mind why the divine father, blessed be his name, had chosen to punish Frowning with the smiting of its crops.

Toward the front of the sanctuary, Jimmy Ohliger stood up. “It ain’t our Savior. We know who done this.” But before he could continue he was shouted down by elderly Mrs. Edith Blunders. Mrs. Blunders sang in the church choir. She knew how to project.

“The flowers! It isn’t only the corn. Remember what happened to the flowers! They’ve been disappearing too.”

It was true and the whole town knew it, but each resident had their own theory for why and where the corn had fled. They were surface plots: cosmic visitors, chinch bugs. For the real stories you had to look a layer below, dig around in the aerated soil or even deeper in the heavy clay this region was known for. Down there in the Iowan dirt were no stories of corn or its absence. Milkman Sid Jones, for example, had drowned lightning bugs as a child. Despite a strong policy of rationality and two decades of professional experience in a dairy industry drowning in pests, he still held a secret fear that the bugs would someday seek revenge. For the German dentist, Peter Kuhne, it was important that his three daughters remain fluent in their native tongue. He let them read any book they found in the language. Which is how he found himself with three young women touting the word of Karl Marx. Socialism frightened a dentist who dealt in the monarchical trade of gold and crowns. As for Reverend Longing, one of the original founders of the town who had christened it with its appropriately Protestant name, his wants were more complex than the pious man with a portly bank account let on. The theories the townspeople shouted from pew to pew were not responses to the mystery of the corn. They were their own projected, private biographies, kernels of Frowning, miniaturized and lined up on the cob. Ready for harvest. All that was left was to shuck the whole town.

One microscopic biography: When Mrs. Edith Blunders, second soprano, mentioned the missing flowers, Mary Ohliger winced.

In the months since walking out on her husband, Mary had felt the itch that had plagued her right nipple during her marriage returning. To release the tickle, she had found here and there the odd trinket also walking out with her. They started as small things: a colored medicine bottle from Grace’s boudoir, A peppermint at the grocer’s, a dirty spoon left on a back porch. She had not meant to let the objects follow her back, yet when she shut the front door to the brown two-story, her pocket invariably contained one more item than it had left with. The pied piper of Frowning. She whistled the orphaned items up to the attic where they began to collect beside the heavy suitcase that contained her father’s hat and Sunday suit jacket. Inkwells made new homes beside prayer books and matchboxes. Flower vases beside teacups. But as the months wore on the itch grew and no amount of pinching, squeezing or rubbing could make the annoyance go away. By late July, she wasn’t bringing home little nothings anymore. She left the house at midnight with a trowel and a basket. She came home with zinnias, irises, and alyssums, chrysanthemum bushes, gooseneck and leggy lupine. She dug them out of front lawns roots and all. The attic became Mary’s floating, secret garden. She relocated her pilfered blossoms to apple crates, chamber pots, anything she could find that held more than a fistful of dirt. She stole a watering can. She opened the double-hung attic windows. Light and air poured in. The floral scents floated down into the street so that any passerby would look at the few rosebushes in her front yard and think that Mary Ohliger had bred something magical.

In the weeks before the corn walked off, Frowning had begun to notice its missing flora. Blame was placed on dogs, idle children, even Sid Jones’ daughter, who everyone agreed was sweet but odd. Mothers began to pay their sons to spend a chilly night keeping guard on the front porch. Mary had spotted a rifle across the lap of a sleeping young man just in time. Fearing death, or worse, discovery, Mary immediately halted her nighttime escapades. The itch in her chest grew.

Now there was this business with the corn. As the congregation swelled in volume around her, Mary shrunk. She waited for the accusations, for someone to call her name. Now Grace Somerhalder was adding her theory to the tumult, an idea rooted in the methods her mother had used to beat her as a girl (ass, thighs, chest, body parts easily covered, mustn’t endanger the marriage proposals). Beside her, Mary stared at her fingernails. They were ragged and bitten but clean of dirt. It wasn’t her. She’d checked the attic. She’d checked every room in her monstrous brown two-story. She’d slept through the night, but that’s what worried her the most. Not a rustle, not a peep until the crowd outside had woken her. Mary wondered ridiculous things. The sort of questions Jimmy would ask: Had she dreamed about her pilfered garden? Had the dream bled out of her head? Had it spread?

Eventually the church emptied. It had no more answers than when it was full.

In the month that followed the disappearance of the corn, the Town of Frowning found itself expecting everything and believing nothing. Smiles were tense. Irritable bowels abounded. Seven farmers’ wives on seven late afternoons reported a swarm of dragonflies over their now abandoned fields. Men remembered their duty to God. Sunday service swelled to twice the size. More fairy tales. More shucked secrets. The irreversible truth: the corn was gone and no amount of suppositions could return it.

Mary Ohliger, now afraid to even touch a growing thing for fear it might sprout legs and follow her home, was nonetheless plagued with worse and worse itches underneath both her nipples that even the jagged edges of her bitten nails couldn’t scratch. She resumed her old inanimate habits. By supper each evening the seams of her pockets strained under the weight of knickknacks she didn’t remember taking. Canning jars, handfuls of buttons, rotting newspaper, a porcelain chicken, three wedding rings. The attic transformed from a botanical garden into a dragon’s hoard. Piles climbed to the rafters. They migrated down to the second floor. The interior of the house began to mimic the farmland outside until the topography of rescued objects could be seen from the road. A full set of linens hanging out to dry found their way home under Mary’s petticoats. She covered the large attic windows. The plants died. She stopped sleeping and instead spent the black hours of the night wandering the town and staring at the last of the autumn flowers, plants that would never be hers. Sometimes it felt to Mary like her treasures followed her on her nightly escapades, stuck to her by string like the cans people tied to the back of newlyweds’ buggies. The house was filling, but with what Mary could not say. She did not know what sat in her piles. She had no memory of to whom they belonged. Only one item she was certain she still did not possess.

Her hair ribbons.

It was the first week of October and the threat of frost hung over every sunset. Families that had, until a month ago, grown corn, were scraping their coins against one another in hopes of duplication. Mary heard the distant rapport of a rifle as she headed out of town on foot in the direction of the Ohliger farmstead. Without the profit or the labor of the harvest, more men were devoting their early fall to hunting to get through the winter. The Frowning paper had reported two shooting accidents so far. It was a calm Iowa afternoon, warm for the month, and although there wasn’t a cloud above her, she could hear the plip, plip of rain in the brown alfalfa and beans. Grasshoppers jumping in the fields. There had been a lot of locusts about since the corn had vanished.

She turned up the lane to the old farmhouse that had been her home for five years. She passed the old washout then the vegetable garden she had planted before she left. The plants looked remarkably strong for a drought year. Unbelievably strong, in fact. Tomatoes as big as dinner rolls hung off caged vines. The potatoes, usually besieged with white-winged pests by this time of year, were still green and healthy. The basil hadn’t bolted. When other gardens she’d passed looked choked and tough, her old garden—Jimmy’s garden—was thriving as if by magic.

She found her husband in the kitchen blanching tomatoes for canning. He hugged her so hard she imagined she would smell like cooked vegetables for a week. She choked out a hello. He did the same. The interior of the old farmhouse was the same, but oddly unfamiliar. He had moved the furniture. The sitting couch now faced the window rather than the room. The shelves once occupied by her mother’s china were crammed with canning jars of asparagus, carrots, Iowa white peaches and stewed apples. She hadn’t realized until then how much she had expected to find her old life waiting for her exactly as she’d left it. But it had changed. Jimmy had dragged it outside into the sun. Her old life had faded in the light.

“How are you doing?” she asked Jimmy, who had to lunge to remove the peeling tomatoes from the boiling water before their innards leaked out.

“Surviving. Easier preparing for a hard winter with one mouth to feed ’stead a seven, eight. Got a little in savings. Uncle Steven said he can sell me seed corn next spring, fraction the catalogue cost. His corn didn’t go missin’. Far enough away, I guess. Don’t like the species, but what can ya do?”

Mary watched as he struggled to pull the softened tomato skins off with a fork. The limp red casing kept splitting under the pressure of his hands. Canning had used to be her job. She tried to remember teaching him the procedure but couldn’t. Giving a grunt of frustration, Jimmy threw down the fork then looked up at her. For a moment all his rough edges smiled.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. What was she apologizing for? There were too many options to know.

“Stay for supper?” he asked. She nodded.

He served her a thick, gelatinous stew of vegetables and old, tough beef and bread as hard and as dry as the backs of his hands. They ate in the silence of two people who had grown used to eating alone. For the first time in over half a year, each had company. Mary forgot not to slurp. She wiped her mouth on her arm. Jimmy ate like a raccoon, washing each hunk of bread in his soup before bringing it to his furry mouth. As he chewed he favored the left side of his mouth. A tooth had turned on him. As she looked at the lopsided face, Mary didn’t see the untrimmed beard or how tightly the man clutched his bowl. She looked at her husband and she saw the farm. This farm and her father’s farm. The memories stretched back. She looked at Jimmy Ohliger and she saw her family.

“I wondered,” she began, “if you still had my ribbons. The blue ones my father gave me.”

For the first time since her arrival, Jimmy looked uncomfortable. He attempted to tear into the broth-soaked bread with his canines and winced. The stew inside Mary’s stomach turned to mercury at the sight.

“Jimmy, dear lord. What did you? Please don’t…you didn’t give them to some child, some sixteen-year-old girl you’re courting. Those were…you damn well know…” Whole sentences fell from her mouth and smashed on the ground. She threw the shards at her idiot husband. “Where are…what did you…”

“I tied them to two ears of corn when you left. Good luck with the crop. Good luck with, you know, Like this corn, so our love shall grow.”

Mary’s face had turned the blotchy color of the stew. “Is that something from Reverend Longing?” Jimmy Ohliger nodded. It was from their wedding, but Mary didn’t remember that. Her mouth opened and closed a few times before language managed to move it right. “You tied my hair ribbons to the corn.”

“If I’d known it was gonna walk, Mary, I’d a—They didn’t exactly give me a warning.”

“They?” Mary started to say, and then when she realized the answer to her own question she threw her spoon down on the table. It landed with a dull clank on the dense wood and clattered to the floor. “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Jimmy!”

The argued. Mary’s chest felt covered in fire ants.

Frowning entered harvest season without its main crop. Miles away in Illinois, Mary’s sister Constance was writing home with her usual letter. The baby was growing by the day. The crops were doing well. Better than well: the ears had almost doubled overnight. Wouldn’t Mary come to see? In a postscript, Constance added an anecdote: while out walking their fence line last week, her husband had spotted two stalks of corn standing straight as soldiers, each with a blue ribbon tied around its stalk. And were they or were they not the precise color of the ribbons Mary had always worn in her hair? It was too funny. She’d had to send a note.

The letter traveled by train across the Mississippi to Frowning where it and two hundred of its fellows were handed in a satchel to the postmaster for sorting and delivery. Frowning was a small enough town that the postmaster, the handsome, keen-eyed nephew of Reverend Longing, handled every aspect of the federal mail himself from arrival to delivery. He was also keen on Mary Ohliger, who he still thought of by her estranged husband’s surname despite thinking many other things about her of which her estranged husband would have hardly approved. It was unfortunate, then, that while out delivering that week’s mail on a typical, blustery, October day, the postmaster had a coughing fit and fainted dead away. The letters in his hand blew two blocks down the street before eventually lodging in a young oak tree. The next day it rained. The postmaster did not live to hear his uncle’s sermon the following Sunday. The last thing he smelled before he died was chicken manure.

By the time Constance’s letter to her sister Mary was located, the washed-out name on the envelope deciphered and the note delivered to its intended recipient it was nearly Thanksgiving. Throughout the Midwest, crops had been harvested and sold, corn and beans and wheat and sorghum shipped upriver to the markets in Chicago. In the meantime, Mary Ohliger’s sister had written once more to announce she and her husband had sold a veritable bumper crop of corn that season. They were putting the farm on the market and moving to St. Louis. George was thinking of going into the artificial sweetener industry. Christmas presents were on their way. Did her sister have any special requests? A new teakettle? Dress? Hair ribbons?

Molly Rideout is a writer and Co-Director of Iowa’s only artist residency Grin City Collective, in Grinnell, Iowa. Her fiction has been published in the book Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the Midwest (Ice Cube Press 2014) as well as WarBing Magazine, Driftwood Press, The Grinnell Review, and The Wisconsin State Journal. You can find documentation of her other work at www.mollyrideout.com

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They’re known as the Front Range Winds, and when I’m driving south on Interstate 25 from Denver to Colorado Springs in the fall months, they blow sideways across my rental car in gusts that are fresh and sharp and cool. They smell of sagebrush and dirt, and crawl inside the car through the vents and windows I almost always have open. During afternoon drives, while the sun draws steadily closer to the peaks of the mountains to the west of me, I breathe deeply and fill my lungs with as much of the Front Range Winds as I can.

Over the last decade, I’ve breathed in those winds and taken that drive down I-25 as frequently as time and money have allowed, doing as much as possible to lessen the distance between my daughter, Haley, and me. We live in different cities—she in Colorado Springs and me in Chicago—and I fly from O’Hare or Midway, over Iowa and Nebraska, and into Denver, where I rent whatever car is the cheapest and make the seventy-mile drive south to the Springs.

On most trips, I’d pick up Haley and we’d check into a hotel room, and then spend the weekend eating and watching movies and feeding quarters into the claw machines at the mall. Afterwards, when Saturday became Sunday and our lives had again reached the point of separation, I’d make the seventy-mile drive back to Denver where a United Airlines 737 was waiting at the gate, ready to fly me another fifteen hundred miles away from fatherhood.

Those drives down I-25 took between seventy and ninety minutes and had a way of calming me just as car rides had calmed Haley when she was nine months old and couldn’t fall asleep. I’d strap her into her hand-me-down car seat, Cheerios and animal cracker crumbs sprinkled across its stained bottom, and we’d drive down Highway 9 towards the Green Mountain Reservoir, Haley’s eyes closing just seconds after the car’s wheels began to turn. After she was asleep, I would sometimes crack the window to let in mountain air that often smelled of campfires and pine trees, glancing in the rear view mirror at the tiny, closed eyelids of my sleeping child.

I’d moved to Colorado when I was eighteen years old and left when I was twenty-one. In the three years in between I’d managed to get arrested on almost a dozen different occasions, witness my daughter’s birth, spend just under two months in jail, and use crystal meth, acid, and ecstasy for the first time.

During that first year with Haley, when I had just turned twenty, so many of the choices I made were fueled by anger and addiction, by my urge to drink or use drugs, that seldom were there moments when I felt fit to be a father. But for a few miles under the dim streetlights of Highway 9, while my daughter’s head rested against the side of the car seat in the back, her tiny chest moving up and down with each breath she took, it finally occurred to me that I might actually belong in the role.

Years later, after I’d gotten sober, the I-25 drives to see Haley had become a form of therapeutic reflection, a time to confront the reality that faced me every time I slowed down long enough to think about what truly haunted me: that I would always be one bad decision away from losing everything that I’d worked so hard for.

In the earliest days of sobriety, while lying on a hard mattress in a Minnesota rehabilitation center and staring at the white popcorn ceiling above me, I would replay the words my counselor had told me in one of our therapy sessions. “Your disease is always with you, Tim. It may go quiet for a while, but never forget that it’s always there, just waiting for an opportunity.” In the years that followed, I would think of those words often, terrified that every urge I had, every dream where I found myself snorting lines of cocaine or feeling the subtle burn of vodka as it raced down my throat, meant that my achievements were nothing more than fleeting, ephemeral triumphs.

I’d called Haley’s mother, April, from one of the semi-private phone booths in the rehab facility about a week after I’d arrived. When she’d answered and I’d told her where I was and that I was trying to get sober, her voice had sounded sticky, a cynical mix of disbelief and resentment. “I’m making changes, April,” I’d said while sitting on a banged-up wooden stool in a phone booth lined with knotty pine paneling. “Big changes. I want to be in Haley’s life. I don’t want her to grow any older without me.” There was a pause that came before her answer and I imagined her rolling her eyes on the other end of the line. “Okay,” she’d said. “But why should I believe you?”

It was a fair question. Why should she believe me? Why should anyone? I wasn’t even sure I believed it myself. The night before I’d left for rehab, I met my coke dealer on the street in front of the Chicago high rise where I lived. I climbed into the passenger seat of his late ’90s-model Corolla while it idled in the January cold, a piece of ice that had been stuck to the door falling to the street as it slammed shut. After I handed him two twenty-dollar bills, he held out his gloved fingers and dropped a forty-dollar baggy of cocaine into my palm.

“I’m going to rehab tomorrow,” I said, while closing my fingers around the bag. “Probably won’t be seeing you much when I get back.”

He reached his left arm out and rested his wrist on the steering wheel, swiveled his head to face me. His expression had seemed both amused and disappointed as he pressed the brake and put the car in drive.

“Well, you got my number if you need me.”

Later that night, just hours away from the plane ride that would take me to Minnesota, I stood in the bathroom of my apartment and used an expired Chicago Library card to grind the rocks of cocaine I had bought into powder. I scraped the card across the countertop, tapping it occasionally, and divided it into two straight lines. I bent down and snorted through a Bic pen I’d emptied and cut in half, my eyes watering immediately, and felt the surge of optimism that always came with the first bump, the medicinal drip in the back of my throat, the numbness in my teeth. I stared at myself in the mirror, wiping a tiny bit of white powder off of my nostril, and felt the beats of my heart intensify. Staring down at my t-shirt, I could see the fabric throbbing.

A couple of weeks after that, when I’d spent just over fourteen days sober— the longest string of substance-free days I’d put together in eight years—the concept of rehabilitation started to seem like something I might actually be able to commit to. My counselor, Gary, had told me that the guys who made it, the ones who actually changed their lives and stayed sober, had simply become sick and tired of being sick and tired. They’d wanted to be sober more than they’d wanted to drink. And although I had a hard time saying it aloud, that’s what I was, too—exhausted to the point where I was finally willing to consider sobriety. I was also fed up with being the guy who only half made it. I had gone from being a waiter with a GED to a young businessman learning the ropes of the corporate ship, but the only thing that had really changed was my clothes. I no longer walked across the restaurant’s blacktop parking lot to the bar and pulled tip money out of my apron to pay for my drinks, but bartenders and dealers still ended up with most of my paycheck. I was sick of headaches and hangovers. Tired of half-hearted apologies. Sick and tired of wondering if I’d ever make it further than halfway to success.

When I picked up the receiver and called April from that phone booth in Minnesota, my promises sounded empty, but the place they came from, the part of my character that we’d been interrogating in therapy sessions, was just as real as the fingerprint-smudged phone I’d called her from.

***

In the first year of sobriety, I had to hire an attorney to deal with the maelstrom I’d left in Colorado after my departure five years earlier. As part of a plea bargain I’d made with the district attorney, I’d pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge in exchange for the state not seeking jail time on a harassment case April had filed against me. Though I was certainly guilty of all the crimes I had been convicted of during my time there, the harassment charge was unfounded—a result of the ongoing contempt April and I held for one another after our breakup. She’d told the police that I’d threatened her on the phone when I’d called her to talk about Haley’s upcoming second birthday.

While the plea agreement guaranteed that I wouldn’t do any more jail time, it also guaranteed that I would leave the state all together. My time in Colorado was literally up. I had thirty days to wrap up my affairs and buy a one-way ticket out of town.

In the month that I waited to leave Colorado, I drank as much as I possibly could. I’d left April’s house with no real plan and had no permanent place to lay my head at night. Every dollar I made waiting tables at Denny’s that wasn’t spent on cheap hotel rooms or hostels was spent on liquor and cigarettes. I tried to drink myself into a place where I didn’t feel so shitty about what I was doing, a place where I could be a victim of my circumstances rather than the cause of them. On a cognitive level, I knew that the ways I was dealing with my problems were wrong. Even as a young man approaching the nucleus of alcoholism, I instinctually knew that I was supposed to separate the anger I felt for April with the responsibility I had to be a father to Haley. I knew that the little bit of money I did earn should have been spent on diapers or food or little pink onesies. But instead of visiting Haley, instead of setting up times to take her to the park where I could sit on a bench and hold her in my lap, feel her tiny hand in mine, smell the lingering scent of Johnson’s baby shampoo in her hair, I drank. And when my thirty days were up and I still hadn’t left the state, the district attorney revoked the plea agreement and petitioned the judge to issue a warrant for my arrest.

Looking back on it all these years later, it’s easy to see why I stayed even though it was inevitable I would be caught. Although I wasn’t seeing Haley or holding her in my lap, kissing her forehead as I tucked her into bed at night, I knew that as long as I was still in Colorado it was all still possible. Even in my drunkest hours, while lying on a beer-stained couch fighting nausea in the house of a Denny’s cook that I hardly knew, the world above me spinning ceaselessly, there was hope. Maybe I would wake up and things would no longer be spinning. Maybe I would wake up and change.

It took another month, but I finally broke down and called my mother and stepfather, sobbing and shivering, from a payphone in the entryway of the City Market grocery store. While trying to hide my tears from the shoppers walking by, I’d asked them to Western Union me just enough money for a bus ticket. The very next day I was on a Greyhound heading east, becoming the exact type of father I’d promised myself I’d never be—one who leaves.

***

Interstate 25 runs the entire length of the state of Colorado, from Wyoming to New Mexico, some three hundred and five miles. I can’t say that I know exactly how many times I’ve driven the stretch of road between Denver and Colorado Springs, but it’s been enough that I can see the view out of the car window any time I close my eyes and think about it. The landscape ebbs and flows with the curves of the interstate, the golden switchgrass and prairie sandreed banqueting under rusty barbed wire fences and over granite and limestone boulders. Overhead, transmission lines hang under the almost-always-blue Colorado sky, a steady hum of electricity coursing relentlessly through the air.

During a trip I took sometime in October of 2008, I rolled down the window of my rental and let the wind fill the car with a crispness that didn’t exist in the Midwest, the air washed clean as it traveled over the foothills to the interstate, purified by pin cherry and wafer ash trees. While I drove, I thought about what I would do once I arrived to pick up Haley. On my last trip, the hotel room I’d rented had two floors. The bedroom was upstairs, but it looked down onto the living room. We moved the couches and chairs out of the way, backed the coffee table against the wall, and laid all the couch cushions, pillows, and mattresses on the floor. I looked at Haley as I climbed onto the upstairs wall and hung my feet over the edge. Her brown eyes were fearless. “Go,” she said, and I jumped, falling the eight feet or so to the soft landing below. Laughing, I climbed off the pillows, rearranged them for her, and looked up. She climbed over the wall just like I had, caught my eye for a moment, and then she was falling, her pink shirt pulling up above her belly button, her sandy hair fluttering above her, my heart beating with pride and fear and gratitude.

I smiled at the memory and suddenly realized I was almost to my exit. I put my blinker on and merged over to the right, eyes focused on the road ahead of me. As music played inside the car, I entered the soft curve of the ramp still doing the seventy-five mile an hour speed limit I had been traveling on the highway. I’d taken that curve dozens of times before, but this time, as I stared over the steering wheel, something seemed wrong. The road in front of me seemed distorted somehow—fragmented. Like I was looking into a kaleidoscope and couldn’t figure out what I was looking at. There appeared to be two lanes where before there had only been one, and I was suddenly unsure of which one I was supposed to be on.

I stared intently, my body filling with adrenaline, my hands gripping the wheel tighter, the veins on the tops of them filling with blood. And then everything instantaneously snapped into focus, and I realized I’d somehow drifted onto the left shoulder of the ramp and was heading straight for a concrete barrier. I instinctually jerked the wheel to the right and the back end of the car lost traction and splayed outward, and then I was sideways, the tires screaming as I slid.

As the car skid, it seemed inevitable that I would crash, inevitable that the windshield would shatter and the metal would crumple and I would wake, or maybe not wake, to lights flashing red and blue.

It’s the chaos of the moment when the car is sliding, that suspended state of animation where the radio is playing and the tires are screaming and I’m helpless to do anything about it, that I return to again and again in my memory. And while I know that having one’s life flash before one’s eyes in a moment like that is unlikely, I feel as if parts of my life did. Because it all suddenly seemed so unfair, that I would crash and die when I still had so much to do, so much to accomplish, so many things that I still wanted to show and do and see with Haley. We’d once fed the giraffes together at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. Taller than semi trucks with purple tongues as long as my forearm, they’d caused Haley to laugh as they’d tickled her palm, stretching to reach the alfalfa. I wanted to hear that laugh again, to see that smile, for her to understand that the person that walked away from her was capable of coming back.

As the car skidded sideways, it somehow remained perfectly wedged in between the white lines of the lane, following the exact route of the ramp’s curve. After seconds that lasted infinitely long, the car was stopped, smoke from the tires rising in plumes around me, the air saturated with the smell of burnt rubber and exhaust. I looked out the passenger side window and down the exit ramp, waiting for a car to smash into me, for the sound of metal on metal, for the unavoidable pain that would come from broken bones and lacerated flesh. But nothing came.

I slowly became aware that a commercial was playing on the radio and I reached out and turned it off. Felt the momentary urge to laugh at what had happened. But as I turned the wheel and straightened the car out, slowly driving to the red light at the end of the ramp, everything came flooding in—Haley and fatherhood and rehab. All the drives I had already taken. All the drives I still needed to take.

Ahead of me, the red bulb of the stoplight crystallized as my eyes filled with tears. The steady stream of traffic blurred into a line of shiny steel and flashes of orange sunlight danced off car windows as they passed me. Moments later the light changed green and I turned toward Haley, toward my beautiful daughter, the precious enormity of second chances looming larger than the jagged peaks of the mountains around me.

Tim Hillegonds is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Brevity, RHINO, Midway Journal, and r.k.v.r.y. quarterly. He earned a Master of Arts degree in Writing and Publishing from DePaul University, and was recently nominated for an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. He’s currently hard at work on a memoir about his time in Colorado. @TimHillegonds

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“He just snapped,” I say, “He was always high-strung.” We sit together in the waiting area of the Emergency Room. It is early afternoon. The chairs are hard, with cold metal arms, and the overly heated room is decorated in a color scheme that is probably intended to be soothing. I wonder how many people think about the decoration of the space as they sit here; if they contemplate the peach and mint green and the hazy, impressionistic landscape prints on the walls of the inner waiting area beyond those wide automatic doors, the ones you get to pass through after you have been triaged. The seats are lined up around the walls. I think to myself that the decorator probably didn’t realize that this might be an awkward arrangement.

Our injuries are not life-threatening. The heart attacks and car accidents get to go first, so it is a long wait. We sit side by side, my seventeen year-old daughter and I, on those hard chairs, facing, yet trying to avoid eye contact with, the others who wait. The space is small, and we can all hear each other’s conversations and sighs of pain or worry. It must be human nature to try to listen in. To compare one’s own emergency with those of the strangers who sit three feet away. “Your Dad has taken him to be put down,” I whisper, with tears in my eyes. I am equally sad and angry. My daughter begins to sob, cradling her wounded hand against her chest. Awkwardly, in our seats, I try to embrace her and brush her hair off her forehead. She has been bitten on her hand and shin.

My fingers have stopped bleeding, and a feeling of exhaustion creeps over me. That tiredness that is unique to the draining away of adrenaline. It is a feeling of being utterly sapped and defeated. Despite the tiredness, my mind whirls. Mostly with worry about my daughter and the trauma she has just experienced. She loves that dog, and she loves the one that survived. I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if the neighbors hadn’t come. It is a terrible thought, and my mind takes it to every extreme imaginable. Among the horrible scenarios I run through is one where I come home to find the little black dog dead in the yard. Another is that my daughter has been home alone when it happens. Once those thoughts begin it’s hard to make them stop. They creep into your consciousness. The kind of visions that will make me shake my head hard, and say out loud, “Stop!”

It went on for so long. How can ten or fifteen minutes stretch out so eternally? How could this have happened? These two dogs were raised together. They ate, slept and played together every day, and had for the three years we’d had the big one. He had come from a rescue organization and we had been told he was an American bulldog. In retrospect, I think he was a cross. They say that some breeds have those jaws that won’t let go until their prey is dead.

It was the squirrel. That fucking cheeky squirrel that would hang upside down to get at the birdseed in the feeder. Siting on the sofa, drinking my morning coffee, I watched the small dog, a terrier mix, catch sight of it through the French doors. He squealed and tore outside, through the dog door, in pursuit. The big dog went scrambling out after him, his big nails digging into to the ruts in the floorboards. They’ll never catch it. They never do, is what I was thinking. When I heard the shrill barks, those particular barks that mean something big is going on, I got up and looked out. They had caught the squirrel, and by the time I got out there the big dog had the little one by the back of his neck. The little one, who weighs about thirty-five pounds, was shrieking, and the big one was trying his best to kill him.

I started screaming, and tried to pry his jaws open, to release the small one, and I could not do it. The big dog’s teeth cut into my fingers. He dragged the small dog away from me. I screamed, and screamed, and my daughter ran outside, in her slippers and pajamas. My screams had awakened her. She tried to separate them, pounding on the big dog’s back as I ran to fill a bucket with water. I could not think of anything else to do, but to throw water on the big one. I could barely breathe. My chest was pounding, and my throat felt raw. My daughter was bitten, by the little one, in his desperation to escape. By the time the neighbor men came running I was just screaming, “Help, oh please, somebody help us.” They kicked the big dog until he let go, and the little one ran inside through the dog door. My daughter was crying and bleeding.

Inside, the little black dog sat on the bathroom rug, shaking violently. His long fur covered his wounds. I wrapped a paper towel around my fingers, and when I tried to dial the numbers I knew by heart my hands shook. I called my husband, to meet the neighbor with my daughter at the hospital and I took the little dog to the vet. They kept him there and told me to go to the hospital, to get my hands looked at. When I got to the Emergency Room my husband was there. We spoke and then he left, and I sit there, with our daughter, in the soothing waiting area, holding her as she cries. My husband returns after about an hour, and just nods at me. It is over. I feel relief, which is unexpected. Also, a strange calmness, a certainty, and an odd sense of gratitude that I had actually seen what happened with my own eyes.

The eyes of the big dog haunt me still. The dog I had raised and loved. While he had the little dog by the neck they were crazy eyes, mad-dog eyes, killer eyes. That’s what made me angry. I felt betrayed. He wouldn’t let go. Not even for me.

Liza Nash Taylor received a BA in Fine Arts in 1981 from Mary Baldwin College. Five years ago, her love of literature prompted the pursuit of a degree in English, but that was sidelined by a novel writing course in 2013. She has attended the Novel Workshop at the Vermont College of Fine Art and has completed the One Book program at Queen’s University, Charlotte, and the St. Augustine Writer’s Workshop, and is currently studying at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. This summer she will attend the Left Bank Writer’s Workshop in Paris. Her short story Scrapbook is currently appearing in Microrchondria II, the literary magazine of the Harvard Bookstore. She is working on her first novel. Her website is lizanashtaylor.com, Facebook: Liza Nash Taylor

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I figure
just get rid of every other thought at least.

Or sit bone-still on an April morning
in the middle of a crowd,

staring straight ahead
at an all-out purple house,
which has to be proof of something.

Anyone interested in mystery
has to be OK in the gallery
if some paintings are titled
“Untitled.”

Who gives a name anyway
to the next thought, the next…

The

plus whatever word following
most soothes.

Laughter Coming Through an Open Window,
which isn’t a title,

just an actual event
—chosen by no one—

which just brimmingly appeared
with someone

nearby
listening.

Jeff Hardin is the author of two chapbooks, Deep in the Shallows (GreenTower Press) and The Slow Hill Out (Pudding House), as well as two collections, Fall Sanctuary, recipient of the Nicholas Roerich Prize from Story Line Press, and Notes for a Praise Book, selected by Toi Derricotte for the Jacar Press Book Award. His third collection, Restoring the Narrative, received the Donald Justice Poetry Prize and is forthcoming in 2015. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Hotel Amerika, Southern Poetry Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. He teaches at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, TN. His website is www.jeffhardin.weebly.com.

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for Paula Capps Kyser

When the Oster finally bites the dust
of slaw and salsa, I wish my hands were pestle
enough to confetti basil, crush garlic, pignoli,

parmigiano, olives’ first pressing, the only
false note my rings against the bowl. Something
about me that doesn’t love a food processor—

the suave machinery, beveled blades, trigger
pulse. Though the old muscle worked its heart
to the bone, whipping pot roast and peas into

baby food for my youngest, weaned to modernity,
thirty years faithful. New engine on the counter
revs up, grinds our voices to memory, calls

to gather and sit at last light. Plastic and metal
purée what remains of undying summer, frenzied
bees, high sun preserved in pesto spread like

royal jelly on ciabatta and linguini. I’ll freeze
or gift the fine excess with all that emblazons time:
my daughter’s milk teeth clamping the spoon,

those days lemony sweet on the tongue,
jeweled jars stored for winter’s dearth. Something
about me that doesn’t love the dissolution

of things held beloved, a too-simple plugging in
that slices and dices, cuts with cold surety
the incomplete past.

Linda Parsons Marion is an editor at the University of Tennessee and the author of three poetry collections. She was poetry editor of Now & Then magazine for many years and has received literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, as well as the Associated Writing Programs’ Intro Award and the 2012 George Scarbrough Award in Poetry, among others. Marion’s work has appeared in journals such as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Shenandoah, Birmingham Poetry Review, Nimrod, Louisiana Literature, Negative Capability, in Ted Kooser’s syndicated column American Life in Poetry, and in anthologies including Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia, The Movable Nest, Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Contemporary Appalachia and Volume VI: Tennessee.

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Ellene Glenn Moore is a poet and MFA candidate at Florida International University. She is the recipient of a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellowship in Poetry and is a 2014/15 Artist-in-Residence at The Studios of Key West. Ellene has taught poetry workshops in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and throughout South Florida in prisons, women’s shelters, and high schools. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Caliban, Ninth Letter Online, Chautauqua, Jai-Alai Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her at elleneglennmoore.com.

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My 4th grade hiding place
was between the mattress and boxspring–

safe-housing Captain America,
a pack of Bazooka Joe, maybe
an unsharpened Ticonderoga #2
…

Hotel comforters with cigarette blisters.
Concussion morning. Hot showers–

shattered medicine cabinet with a single punch.
Jigsaw me, porcelain bowl of my sink.

Wrapped my fist in a pillowcase, dismantled my bed
like I was looking for a dog-eared Avengers #145.

Wrote an apology to the cleaning
staff.  Left my last twenty bucks as penance.
Three days of laundry spilling out of an undersized suitcase.

Jim Warner is the Managing Editor of Quiddity Literary Journal and the author of two poetry collections: Too Bad It’s Poetry and Social Studies (Paper Kite Press). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals including The North American Review, [PANK] Magazine, The Minnesota Review, and Smartish Pace. @whoismisterjim

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In each issue of Fifth Wednesday Magazine, a different poet is featured. In the past, some of these poets have included Sterling Plumpp, Roger Reeves, Laurence Lieberman, and Elise Paschen. This writer’s work fills several pages of the issue, and s/he answers questions in a series they call “Poetry Around Us with James Ballowe.” In the Fall 2014 issue, Richard Jones’s poem, “Ten Cantos from Italy,” guides the reader through the landscapes of Rome, Venice, Chicago, and a Franciscan monastery. The immersion into place is made immediate through images of “glistening cobblestones” and “the cavernous Termini,” and holds the reader through the poem’s 310 lines. Regardless of whether it is in memory or in the immediate action and reflection of the narrative, Jones offers imagery ripe with season and weather, texture and shape, size and line. What Jones does so well is to explore the insistence of aloneness. In family, in place, in thunderstorm, in writing, and in self.

Rome, where we begin, is desolate as Jones emphasizes the theme of loneliness that is central in the series. Here in Rome, the speaker and his wife, Laura, come together and part geographically throughout the poem, so that even in their partnership there is aloneness. The busy city, too, conveys the same paradox in its portrayal:

Rome was sleeping.
Church domes shouldered the night sky filled with stars.
Over Vatican Square, the statues of the saints
stood at rest. The piazzas were still.

Here the paradox of the city of people that appears to be empty serves to help the reader understand the sense of aloneness and reflection the speaker deals with throughout his journey. From this moment in Rome, Jones moves back in time, one year prior, to explain how he got to Rome, while his wife is in Venice. We return with the speaker to Chicago where his wife first proposes the pilgrimage:

Laura had seen this same pattern many times –
had seen me going into myself.
Writing and not writing had made me soul sick,
as if writing could save me.
She had seen that brand of madness in me before –
a cold sun over a frozen sea. One night,
the dishes done and the children gone to bed,
she suggested something she’d never considered before –
that we go to Italy without the children.

To cure the speaker’s soul sickness, the trip takes him away from Laura and into the monastery where – in six of these cantos – he connects with himself and his home. It is seamless the way that Jones does this. He finds “solitude both dreadful and sweet,” and in this space he repeatedly fantasizes a narrative of what his wife is doing in Venice, also alone.

The third canto takes us to a description of the monastery where most of the poem is set. It is again a reminder of how important setting is in this poem, as well as a part of what the poet seems to remind us throughout, “‘All the world is holy ground.’” To each piece can be attached a setting, each tonally similar but often with oceans’ distance between them: Rome, Chicago, the Italian monastery, the monk’s cell, the speaker’s childhood home, vegetable gardens and stables, Virginia, a chapel, and fields of sunflowers. In our introduction to the monastery, Jones forges a connection between the manual labor of the monks and the writing that the speaker will do at the monastery – both rituals almost like prayer under “high walls, tower, chapel, / and cloister stones […] quarried from the mountain.” This landscape resonates with how small each of us is – monk, wife, mother, father, sister, speaker, and reader alike.

We zero in then on the monk’s cell where the poet resides. This is a testament to the impossibility of being anything but alone. From this seclusion, the speaker imagines again the small moments of his wife’s day in Venice, connecting to her despite the loneliness. This broadens when he connects his vision of Laura in Venice to one of her in Chicago, imagining her as being “just as attentive to the crumbs of Venice / as to the crumbs in our kitchen.”

In the next section the setting is the monastery’s dining hall, but is dominated by the speaker’s memories of his father’s inability to communicate about anything but the weather, leading us quickly to the understanding that such speech may have always been metaphor, but that the distance this sort of communication created necessarily created a distance between a son and the wisdom he sought from his father. In the next canto, the speaker recalls from his childhood arriving home one autumn to find his mother alone in the kitchen ironing shirts, her dining room table set for dinner but no one else in the room and “‘from all the kitchen cupboard knobs, / a dozen white shirts hanging silent as ghosts.’” The speaker’s mother serves to illustrate a history of loneliness; the image of her husband’s oxfords replicating one another emphasizes not only the emptiness the characters in the poem feel but also the inescapability of a lineage of loneliness.

The seventh canto transitions from his mother’s dining room to his sister’s home, the home where she watched her son drown. In this scene we are walked through a hopeless search for a hiding boy whom we know already is gone, and then we confront the mother confronting the water, at a moment where she is able to say goodbye to her brother who is leaving the country and also connect for him all the world in its holiness.

The lines “and empty bed, / and empty desk” in the eighth canto illustrate the highest point of solitude the speaker reaches in the poem. In his last night at the monastery the loneliness becomes so clear that even the speaker’s self has left him alone, as he sees his own room empty of everything including himself. In the ninth, the speaker shares the last scene from his pilgrimage from the chapel, where he leaves his writing on the altar as an offering.

I walked down the aisle to the altar
and placed the bundle of poems there,
the only thing I had to offer,
the lightest thing I’d done in months.
“Straw for the fire,” I said.
That, and so much more, now understood.
Then I walked out of the chapel,
stepping over the door’s high threshold,
back into my life.

This life that the speaker steps back into is one that we have seen glimpses of in the memories he sorts through while at the monetary, and this offering seems to be one that will allow for the stepping back, the work of the poet’s words and the act of leaving them freeing him to return to America and to his family.

In the first line of the final canto, the reader enters “fields of sunflowers,” the image notably brighter than most in the poem. The speaker here imagines what his wife, Laura, is seeing as she is on her way to reunite with her husband and imagining this reunion. The mood is significantly lighter here, though still deeply pensive. The images offer positive connotations leaving the reader with a sense of hope: “daydreams,” “Grand Hotel,” “sleek black gondolas,” “Spello shines golden,” and “content and at peace.” This eases the reader out of a sequence that has confronted deep solitude and thought, and allows the reader to soak up a bit more of the landscape that has hypnotized him through ten pages.

The poet’s ability to connect the landscape of the Roman monastery to the landscape of his family’s home to that of his childhood home to that of where his wife is in Italy to that of his sister’s home is a beautiful way to increase the reader’s sense of isolation. The ten sections compose the narrative each stands alone quite successfully. These cantos stand out in that the scenes stay with the reader and echo so clearly the lives of the speaker and the people he offers portraits of, such as “The monk’s leathery face / and halo of wild white hair.” It’s nice to find in a literary journal a series of poems with such continuity, with image that is memorable, and with something at stake that is universally understood.

In addition to this well-crafted, well-organized narrative poem, you can find in this issue of Fifth Wednesday an interview with Jones, who is the author of seven collections of poems including A Perfect Time (2000) and The Correct Spelling and Exact Meaning (2010), both from Copper Canyon Press.

Emily Schulten is the author of Rest in Black (New Plains P). Her poems have appeared in Mid-American Review, North American Review, Salamander, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, New Orleans Review, and others.

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A lifelong Georgian, I was raised by parents who often indulged in the Southern-style yarn—stories infused with place, people, and a little faith and sinning—filled with meandering sentences and well-worn colloquialisms. This is, perhaps, the logical background of a narrative poet who has the fortunate opportunity to study under writers like David Bottoms, who spends time reading the work of Marie Howe, Beth Bachmann, Mary Karr, and Mark Doty. And while I don’t write in form, I still seek regularity—of lines, of rhythm, of a poem’s overall shape. I’m too young to be stuck in my ways, but I already find myself resisting poems that seek to break down these structures. My first encounter with Claudia Emerson’s “Metastasis: Worry-Moth” was thus memorable in light of her recent death and in the initial resistance I felt toward the form’s unfamiliar terrain.

The Emerson I know best is that of Late Wife (2005), particularly the piece “Surface Hunting,” with its dropped tercets, tight line breaks, and remarkable sense of control:

You never tired, you told me, of the tangible

past you could admire, turn over

and over in your hand—the first

to touch it since the dead one that had

worked the stone.

“Metastasis: Worry-Moth” disoriented me on first read: neatly organized in couplets, but with lines sketched across the page, filled with breath and space, and a narrative thread that jerks around in the absence of punctuation:

                                          this is
the unseen    closeted    unassuming
gray that seeks out last winter’s
cloth    another season    drawn
to the body’s scent

While “metastasis” is a medical term that refers to a disease’s move though the body, it can also refer to the rhetorical technique of suddenly shifting from one point to the next in an argument. In this light, the poem’s form resonates more in intent and effect, the small leaps throughout attempting to relay the lived experience of illness, the listlessness of worry. And the rhetorical construction of this examination of illness is indeed effective in its structure, the speaker first noting which species of moth this metastasis is not—not  “Gypsy / Codling     Luna     Wax     or grander // Atlas.” The use of litany, paired with the exactitude of biological nomenclature, is pleasurable. I love poems that hinge on the precision of naming, that identification loaded with meaning. This worry-moth is not the emerald Luna moth or the gargantuan Atlas moth, but is that any comfort? Though the moth calls to mind the oft-cited beauty of the butterfly, it is an unsettling creature, “with the appetite / of a plague     entire fields // succumbing to them     whole / generations of bees” their victims. The moth, and thus the metastasis of the cancer, is a quiet sort of terror.

The poem then shifts, examining what the worry-moth must be if it is unlike the other moths listed. This metastasis, this worry, is “unseen,” an “unassuming / gray,” a sort of household pest slowly eating through stored-away clothes. The overlaying of the experience of cancer with the humble, domestic image of mothballs is clean, simple, startling. As I considered the frank beauty of “that scant / much of you     fragile     lace-like,” I had to remind myself that this is a woman examining the incremental death of her body.

This brief poem’s final image is the most evocative—“the constellate     erasures     of the coat / it makes for you to wear.” In the act of destruction, the worry-moth creates a death shroud of sorts. In my first reading, I misread the line as “the coat / it makes you wear.” The fact that the worry-moth instead creates a physical offering that the speaker might choose to wear, as if there is any sense of choice in the matter, is even more unsettling.

This poem, in subsequent reads, haunted me. Foremost, in light of Emerson’s premature death, it reads like an archival piece of her firsthand experience with illness. And in what initially felt like a patch of brambles, the spaced-out lines seem to hold self-contained fragments of memory and observation, a salient marriage of form to content: the poem itself is moth-eaten. Beyond this, the white space between these fragments disrupts and halts the rhythm, reminiscent of a panicked shortness of breath. The fragments of phrases and images are richly suggestive of the fragments of what we leave in our wake, even our personal, incomprehensible mystery and heat—“that scant / much of you.”

“Metastasis: Worry-Moth” is Emerson wielding her control and precision in a deft, startling way, using cool, clinical language to sublimate the panic and fear of death, the love of the heat of the body—of life. The lines skip around like the wingbeat of a moth, heavy with silence, with foreboding. The publication’s heartbreaking timing makes this an all the more weighty, crucial read.

Paige Sullivan ‪is currently an MFA candidate in the creative writing program at Georgia State University, where she also works as an English composition instructor and an assistant editor for Five Points. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from The Red Clay Review, Naugatuck River Review, Sugared Water, and other journals.

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