Winter 2010 — Bluestem Magazine

Schedule of Events

You will never know why he picked this day to sever your spinal cord and then you aren’t in any position to ask, either. He is still holding that scalpel and you have so many fragile tendons. ACL, Achilles.

He: that grand giver of coke and gum, the only boy who ever gave you head in a movie theater. All of a sudden: changed. And you’re just laying there all flayed open messy like he did a thousand triple axels over your vertebrae.

He came in today saying: Tick tock! My bio-whatsit is acting up and everything now is going to be different. Men aren’t supposed to get that but still you watch him throw things around the room, pitching clothes and bath towels and his tuxedo to your bed, your beautiful bed, until it’s nothing anymore, it’s this amorphous cotton space and he is a sea creature pooling ink around himself, hoping you’ll lose track of his spiral motion. It’s just—he says, so patient and gracious—we’re all kind of on a schedule here.

Your sugar babe and all the other squid are having a tentacle party and no bi-legged beasts are invited!

Not even if I pack my own snacks? you ask, showing him your Lone Ranger lunchbox stuffed with cheese and grapes. There was this day last week when you realized you should be keeping it stocked at all times, like a pregnancy suitcase, so that if you have to leave suddenly there is at least the illusion of grace.

No two-leggers! he says again, smashing your meal with three hands.

You used to be a surgeon! you shout back, and with all those appendages he wraps around you, putting his full weight into it for the first time in god you don’t know, and you have missed him so much there’s a flurry of joy before the panic.

Liana Jahan Imam’s work has appeared, or will one day appear suddenly, in Fiction Writers Review, decomP, PANK, and others. She is a waitress in New York City. Sometimes she makes jokes with people and sometimes she is standoffish, but only if you’re a bro.

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Two Stories

WONDER WOMAN UNDEROOS

One morning my Dad, Gary Mack, woke me up and told me we were going to Grandma’s. At first I didn’t know what the hell was going on because my Mom was always the one who woke me up, not Dad.

He wouldn’t tell me so I crawled out of the bed wearing my PJ top and these little Wonder Woman underoos I was wearing. It was the kind of underwear that came in a pack of three with Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. I liked the Batman underoos the best, but since it was the end of the week here I was with only the Wonder Woman underoos to wear.

“Wonder Woman sucks,” I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

My Dad and I, we tried to get on the pants, but every time I tried to put my foot through—one of the legs got twisted, or if I got my foot in, it wouldn’t go all the way in, or just when I was getting both legs in, I’d almost fall over trying to stand up. As we were doing this I thought, “This isn’t how Mom does it.”

I didn’t say anything because all of the sudden Gary Mack started crying.

I’d never seen him cry before.

It was one of those big booming cries.

The night before my Mom sat down on the couch with my Dad and she started crying too. I sat beside the couch playing with my wrestlers and noticed there wasn’t anything going on in her face.

She was leaning lost against my father’s leg and I thought, “He never sits with her like this. What’s going on?”

He was touching her head and rubbing his fingers through her curly hair. He couldn’t rub right. He rubbed like he was washing his truck.

Then he whispered, “It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right.”

The next morning after getting up and putting on my clothes, and getting Mom ready to go and standing at the door, my father kept repeating to us, “It’s going to be all right. We’re going over to Grandma’s house.”

My mother stood at the door wearing her baby blue winter jacket.

She started crying, except she was still trying to smile and show me that nothing was wrong. She was smiling and crying at the same time like her face couldn’t decide whether to cry or smile. I knew that this was the story of our world.

I thought inside my head, “This woman’s crazy. I can’t wait to tell my friends.”

Then I said, “I know it’s going to be okay.”

My Dad said, “We’re going to Grandma’s. And it’s going to be all right. Lets get in the truck.”

We went over to Ruby’s across the Loops Road in Dad’s truck with two feet of snow on the ground. We went over to Grandma Ruby’s, who I called Ruby, not Grandma, and who didn’t know my name until I was ten. She always called me Todd and really only talked to me after Sunday dinner when she said, “You didn’t eat much Todd.”

I said, “My name’s not Todd.”

We went over to Grandma Ruby’s and when we got there Ruby took me into a bedroom where she slept. It was a big comfy bed with a red bed spread that smelled like mothballs. It was a room full of picture frames and pictures she cut out of newspaper advertisements. She didn’t know the people in the ads, but she thought they were pretty people.

She put me in that bed and tucked me in and said, “Now you go back to sleep now Todd. You go back to sleep.”

I tried too. I closed my eyes and tried, but after a while I realized something was wrong. I tried moving my legs but they wouldn’t move. I tried bending my arms but they wouldn’t bend. I was flat on my stomach and listened to my mother crying in the other room. When I think about it, I can still feel myself trying to move my legs. I can see the boy trying.

Later that day, I heard them talking. I was sprawled in the bed unable to move, and I heard my Grandma talking to my mother who was in the back bedroom.

My Mother said something in a high pitched voice, “I’m so scared.”

And Ruby said, “You just hush now and go to sleep. You just hush now and get your mind right.”

And then my Mom said, “I’m afraid of airplanes. I’m afraid of airplanes falling out of the sky.”

My Grandma said, “You quit talking that foolishness. There’s not any of them flying things going to fall out of the sky. You just hush now.”

I listened, “What am I going to do?”

I tried to move in the bed some more, but I couldn’t move. I wondered if I was ever going to be able to get up. I wondered if my life would be like this forever—a life full of Wonder Woman Underoos. I saw myself at the age of 40 wearing Wonder Woman Underoos.

The next day Mom and Dad were getting ready to go someplace. Before they left, my Mother sat at the kitchen table. Ruby stood at the sink washing dishes, bragging about how many preserves she put up, or how many potatoes she was going to plant this year. Then my Mother and Daddy were gone and I was left alone with Ruby for a couple of hours. I watched the clock. I sat and played checkers with my Uncle Nathan who had cerebral palsy. Another hour passed. I went back into my Grandma’s bedroom and I looked at the pictures of people in their coffins she took at the funeral home. I asked her, “Why do you have all of these pictures of people in their coffins?”

She said, “I wouldn’t ever get a picture of my kin folk all dressed up and with their teeth in if I didn’t take one at the funeral home.”

So I asked again, “Where did Mom and Dad go?’

“They went to take your Mom to the doctor,” Ruby said.

I looked at the picture and then I heard a car pull up.

A door shut. I looked out the window. I saw Mom and Dad getting out of the truck.

I watched them walk up the gravel path and my Mother had a little bag of orange pill bottles. She looked better. She looked something.

I saw she was carrying another bag. It was a bag from the store. They brought me back something too.

“I don’t think you have those do you?” my Dad asked.

I shook my head no. It was two little WWF wrestlers you could put on your thumbs and wrestle. Hulk Hogan and Big John Studd.

I sat on the floor and ripped open the package. I put them on my thumbs and I had a wrestling match. I took my Big John Studd thumb wrestler and my Hulk Hogan thumb wrestler and let the bell ring. Ding! Then I had my Hulk Hogan jump off the side of the recliner and punch Studd in the face. Big John Studd put Hulk Hogan in a headlock. I thought, “Maybe this depression stuff isn’t so bad.” Then Hulk Hogan pulled out the match by getting out of the head lock, jumping off the top rope, and knocked Studd out with a flying elbow. The imaginary referee came over and slapped the canvas…1…2…3. Hulk Hogan wings.

I heard my Dad talking to my Mom.

“Now you remember to take these now.”

“I think I was just exhausted Gary. I couldn’t sleep.”

And so I sat and wrestled with my thumb wrestlers and thought yeah, this depression stuff isn’t too bad, especially if I could get some presents out of it. I dreamed about other bad things that could happen to her and whether I could get presents out of it. I dreamed about wars and car crashes and presents.

I dreamed about insane asylums and presents.

I dreamed about heart attacks and diseases and presents.

I dreamed about rushing water and hellfire and lightning and presents. And now I dreamed about something else now. I dreamed about cancer. I dreamed about cancer and even greater presents. Then I found myself saying, “Please let her get cancer lord and people will give me presents.”

Mary the Cleaning Lady

I used to stay with this woman named Mary when I was a little boy. We used to go around Rainelle cleaning houses for people. It was just after my Mom had gone back to work, and she used to carry me into Mary’s house before the sun came up. I’d be about half asleep and wrapped in a blanket, and since it was still dark outside she put me on Mary’s couch. Then after she left I would watch cartoons on the television and then fall back to sleep dreaming a cartoon dream where I was a cartoon too. And then one day I woke up and it was time to go cleaning.

I remember one morning Mary said, “Whelp you ready to help me gather up all my cleaning stuff and get going?”

I helped her gather it all up and put it beside the door just like she always did. “And if you’re real good today and you don’t get afraid then maybe we’ll stop by the bus station and get you an ice cream cone.”

She smiled and then she said, “I promise it’ll go by fast today.” Mary was always right. I knew Mary was someone who could control time.

Since she was offering me an ice cream cone to eat, I knew what today was.

It was Wednesday.

Wednesday was the day I dreaded because that’s the day we cleaned the monster’s house. Now on most days we cleaned nice people’s houses—like on Monday we cleaned the house of the little old lady with the shriveled up arm who always tried stuffing my pockets full of whatnots and Hershey kisses.

On Tuesdays and Fridays we went into Middletown and the welfare apartments and cleaned the house of a woman who had a goiter. I used to dream about popping it with a pin, and wondering if it would deflate like a balloon. The woman with the goiter always smiled at me.

But every other Wednesday we were always cleaning the monster’s house, and Mary always bought me ice cream afterwards.

Even now I was dreading it. Even with the ice cream cone thrown in, even with Mary promising me she would speed up time so it wouldn’t take that long. We took off that morning walking through the back alleys of Rainelle, past old shacks built when they were working for Meadow River Lumber company back in the 1930’s And I carried Mary’s bucket and mop and held her hand and Mary carried all of her cleaning things with her other hand.

And then she told me about Rainelle.

She told me about how it used to be called Slabtown, and how the new town was built overtop of the old town. She told me if you only dug deep enough there was a whole other town that no one knew about, and was covered up by us all.

She said they even found an old wagon when they built a house 20 years back—houses, streets, covered by these streets, covered by Rainelle.

We walked a bit more.

I imagined this other lumber town covered by Rainelle. I imagined people still living in that town like it was a 100 years earlier and nothing had happened. (I imagined even animals walking upright and living like people live in pants and shirts and walking with walking sticks. It was just like in the cartoons).

Mary said, “Now when we get there you can just sit on the porch and play with your cars, but if you get scared and he starts carrying on and trying to fight—you just go outside. You don’t have to stay, alright.”

So I shook my head because I knew what kind of monster it was and I had a whole pocketful of matchbox cars to keep me busy.

I was just wanting to zip and zap and race and crash and bash them all together.

I wouldn’t even have to think about the monster if I was playing hard enough.

So I held Mary’s hand. We turned the corner around the alley and there it was.

It was the monster’s house. It was all gray looking and falling down. The paint was chipping off from where it hadn’t been painted in a couple of years. There was an old rusty truck in the front yard with weeds growing up around it.

So we clomped up onto the screened in front porch and Mary knocked.

No one answered.

She put her head inside and knocked again.

No one answered.

She put her head in more and shouted, “I’m here. It’s Mary. I’m here to clean for you.” She was real careful saying this, even though they took the monster’s pistol away a couple of months before.

“I’m here to clean up your toilets and sweep your floor.”

And then it was quiet.

And then we heard it.

It was a groan groaning grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr like a giant rumbling stomach.

We went inside and I kneeled down on the shut in porch and started playing with my toys.

I imagined the monster’s face and the monster’s claws. I imagined the monster’s smell and the monster’s teeth. I imagined the monster eating me, consuming my flesh.

Mary walked into the big room and started talking and getting ready to clean the bathroom with her bucket and her mop.

I sat and took my cars and jumped my cars on the cracked linoleum of the fenced in porch.

I took one of the hot rods and ran it over the crack in the floor.

Then I jumped it—bam.

I took another one and jumped it too. I let them crash into one another—playing death—bam. But after only five minutes of this, I was so bored I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up and sat in this old dry rotten chair for awhile and then I got up and walked around the porch.

But then I had an idea.

I wanted to see the monster for myself. I was tired of imagining what he looked like.

After weeks of coming here I’d never seen the monster’s face.

So I tip toed over to where the door was.

And then I looked inside.

I stopped and breathed deep.

Then I looked again.
IT WAS HIM.

But now I could see.

It wasn’t a monster. It wasn’t a monster at all.

It was just an old man.

He was in a medical bed.

He was all propped up and he had diapers on and a ratty looking t-shirt. He was sitting up. His skull looked like a skeleton skull. He was so skinny he looked like he had a second spine running down the length of his skull. His mouth was open, black and wide and greenish looking and he didn’t have any teeth in and he was touching his arm and ripping at his chest, whining “Worms. Worms.”

Above him was a clock and it was ticking tick tock tick tock.

I saw him and he saw me.

I was scared.

So he started shouting dirty words at me like, “Ah shit. You little fucking shit.”

Then Mary was back in the room, trying to calm him down. “Now you quit talking filthy like that.”

He just kept on. “O god. O god. WORMS. O fucking worms.”

So Mary turned towards me and said, “Scott why don’t you go ahead and go outside. We’ll be done in a just a minute.”

But I couldn’t move.

I was so scared. I stood watching him.

Mary bent over him, whispering, “SHhhhh. SHhhhhh.”

He moaned, “O god. Fuck. Kill me you bitch.”

And then Mary told me to leave again.

I slowly started backing up and listened to the old man moaning, “Fuck. Fuck.”

So Mary looked at me like she meant it this time.

Leave.

So I went outside. I gathered up all of my cars and I went and sat down on the broken concrete steps.

I listened to his moaning and I listened to him groaning, “O god. O god.”

And then I heard Mary running the sweeper.

And then the sweeper wasn’t sweeping anymore.

And then I heard a whisper, “O god kill me. O god let me fucking die you bitch.”

And then I heard Mary saying, “Now daddy you quit talking filthy like that. You just quiet down.”

And then he was quiet.

I thought to myself—Daddy?

What?

Mary cleaned for what would have been about 10 or 15 minutes, but since she told me earlier it would only be a minute, it really only felt like a minute. The minute was up and she came outside. She was smiling. She handed me her bucket and we started walking and holding hands.

She said like nothing had even happened, “Well I guess we need to get this boy an ice cream cone. He did such a good job today. I told you the time would fly by.” And then I grinned and Mary grew quiet.

We walked for a long time in silence.

Mary said, “I’m sorry you had to see that. I’m real sorry.”

I said, “Mary is that man really your daddy?”

Mary shook her head “yes.”

I asked, “Well why was he saying all of those bad things?”

We just kept walking and then Mary said, “O he won’t be long for this world now. His mind’s just gone and eaten up. And the funny thing is he would be so ashamed of himself if he knew he was saying those things. He’d be so ashamed.”

So I asked, “Was he a good man Mary?”

Then she chuckled again and then she grew quiet again. “Of course he was a good man. He was my daddy.”

We walked to the Terminal Drug where the Greyhound bus used to stop in Rainelle. Mary ordered two small vanilla cones for us. We went outside and sat on the sidewalk beneath the old rusty bus sign. Ride Greyhound—rates available from anywhere in the continental U.S.

But there wouldn’t be any of that today. There would only be two of us licking our ice cream cones and knowing there were good things in this world too.

It was hard to believe, but there were.

Scott McClanahan is the author of Stories and Stories II (published by Six Gallery Press). His other works include Hillbilly, Stories V!, The Nightmares, and Crapalachia (all forthcoming) www.hollerpresents.com.

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The Demonstration of Gravity

My brother enlisted at 18. My brother had several arms, all of them hairy and tattooed. My brother was the size and shape of a tree. My brother was a man. My brother died fighting for his country.

My brother didn’t necessarily want to go to war, but he ate breakfast, cuddled with his little girls, and took a page out of a notebook. The page was where he had written his plans for the future. He folded up the page into an airplane.

He put his baby girls into a double stroller and pushed it down the road. His baby girls babbled in their little toddler voices and he’d answer with things like, “Yes, honey, that’s a birdie,” or, “Yes, baby, we can get ice cream later.”

When they got to the bridge, he took them out of the double stroller and had them stand up along the railing. They grabbed the bars with strawberry fists.

“Daddy’s gonna fly the airplane now. Do you want to watch daddy fly the airplane?”

When they said yes, they said it loud and with violence in their voices; a directive. It reminded him of his weeks at boot camp. It reminded him of Hitler.

My brother wanted to jump off the bridge with one arm outstretched, holding the paper airplane like he was a giant passenger but he knew the proportions were uneven and that the airplane, full of his inked future, could not carry his weight despite its importance. Despite how full of blue sky it was. Despite how much he wanted it to.

He flew the plane.

His girls watched it fall.

Tracy Gonzalez is trying new things. Visit her at http://trust-fall.blogspot.com.

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Two Stories

The Grizzly Bear

My father lives in a room with a stuffed grizzly bear now.

The stuffed grizzly bear was killed on a mountain and now it hunches over my father as he watches programs on a small, out-of-date television with a screen that’s gone green at the edges. The landlord, my father says, killed this bear with his own hands.

The stuffed bear came with my father’s three-month lease and if one wanted to make the argument that the stuffed bear was a replacement for my mother, one could probably soundly do so. For all intents and purposes, the stuffed bear is a furry version of my mother, claws sharp and teeth bare, brown, black, light pink at the lips and tongue.

My mother lives in a room decorated in pastel sea shell shades. We live in a landlocked state, but this has not stopped her affinity for the ocean. My mother’s room favors pearl pinks, sea salt blues, and conch shells that sing on shelves.

If we are in agreement that my father replaced my mother with a stuffed bear, then we would also agree that my mother did not replace my father with seashell tones, as they picked those shades out together, years ago. The shore came before the bear.

My father speaks 6 languages and plays the banjo. No, that is a lie. My father does not do either of those things. My father, actually, sells advertisements in church bulletins. In his new apartment, he makes the same phone calls he made in our house, at our kitchen table. “This is __________ from the Church Bulletin…” and so on. Now, the bear watches over him quietly, where my mother would often flip him the bird or mime choking herself as he spoke.

My mother doesn’t sell advertising. My mother makes a six-figure sum yearly, which is something she is proud of, in her shoulder-padded power suits. My mother gets contracts signed. I don’t know what it means, exactly, but we are in agreement, I think, that this is what she does.

In the lack of my father, my mother buys slutty patent leather knee-high boots.

She still does things for my father, as if he is here, in her brand new thigh high boots. She cleans every surface in the house, porcelain toilet seats, sinks, carpets. She grills steaks that go uneaten. Worse, she bakes cobblers at all hours of the day.

I catch her, when the clock is straining at two o’clock in the morning, in the boots, drunk, cherry goo between her fingers as if she has just committed a murder. Sugar is spread across the counter, has even drifted onto the floor.

My mother glances up.

“You love cobblers, right?” she slurs.

A terror begins in my chest, between the ribs. There is a new kind of insanity in the kitchen, a presence that is becoming bigger than mixing bowls, than ovens, bigger than the walls.

“We don’t need any more cobblers, ma,” I say, quiet, hating her for making me point it out.

My father used to devour these cobblers, sit at the table and spoon glistening sugared fruits into his old mouth, between his dentures.

“We have too many?” she asks.

I point, gently.

On the marble countertop, no less than twelve cobblers sit, untouched, their golden brown surfaces extending across lined up pans, a dessert desert. Underneath, there are blueberries, raspberries, apples, luscious things.

“Oh fuck,” she says.

My mother, her boots squeaking, moves.

She stumbles across the kitchen and sits down at the table.

Then she begins to lick her fingers, starting with her thumb.

She looks so pathetic that I spring into motion, mirror her. I turn off the oven, put the pans away, walk over and pat her on the head as she wraps her mouth around her pinkie.

The cobblers sit on the counter, still, waiting for a certain mouth.

My father speaks in the rooms.

He drives a convertible to a church and goes into the basement. This is not for business or for pleasure.

My father stands in front of the room and tells stories about the bottles of vodka he hid like Easter Eggs throughout our home, behind couch cushions, in the backs of toilet tanks and behind living room curtains.

My father thanks God and says that it works if you work it. The room full of strangers cheers and I want to cry when I look down at the cheap cup of coffee I am holding, because I am so ashamed and then so proud.

My father is 60 years old. My father acts so strong that the only crack in his story is the way his eyes flick away when he talks about my mother. Over lunch, my father says things like most people do. He says things I think I remember correctly, because they are things most people say in situations like this. But his eyes flick.

“I will always love your mother,” my father says before he looks down at his plate and bites his cheeseburger. “Can’t love anybody else.”

Tears are banging at my eyes again. “She bought slutty boots. She won’t stop making cobblers.”

“Don’t give yourself an ulcer over some damn boots,” my father says. “We’ll get back together. We talk on the phone now. Those cobblers won’t go to waste.”

My father has a crackpot scheme.

My father’s plan looks like this: Leave my mother, ask her to go for therapy, then date her. This is a blueprint for disaster. I have a sneaking suspicion my mother is wearing those boots for someone, a man as faceless as the doctors.

“That’s good,” I say slowly.

“Has she been seeing anyone?” my father asks. There is a bacon bit stuck to his lip.

“Don’t think so,” I say.

All around us are other families. It is the dinner rush. There are people smiling at each other over soups and appetizers. Their smiles seem very real, very bright, very unlike ours. My mother lives in a room of seashell shades. My father goes to the rooms and the strangers clap.

“Did I tell you,” my father asks, “what happened to that damned grizzly bear?”

“No?”

My father smiles.

“I was moving the damn thing,” my father says. “Because it was freaking me out. And the next thing you know, I hear a snap and I broke the damn arm off.”

My father tries to talk through the laugh.

“Now, the bear has this arm hanging off,” my father chuckle-laughs. “And Styrofoam is hanging out of the elbow.”

The laughter tugs at his eyes. His voice begins to get louder.

“The landlord says I’m going to have to pay to fix it,” my father gasps over his laugh.

The next thing I know, my father begins to cry.

He keeps laughing as the tears find their way through his wrinkles and down to the space above his lip.

A deeper ache than I have ever seen before cracks open on my father’s face, a black hole that sucks at his eyes and mouth. His hand curls into a small fist and he pounds the table gently as he sobs and laughs.

Ice Cream Husband

I kept my husband’s legs. It’s a secret. I keep the legs close to me, woven between my ribs, in the very fiber of my muscles. But it is more than just that. The legs are under my bed.

My husband used to stand tall, used to work at the factory on the edge of town, right near the water.

The new version of my husband does no such thing. He uses his arms for legs, his torso sliding against the baseboards, dragging like a fat dog’s stomach.

The top of my husband’s head, when he moves this way, comes to the place above my knee, the place where skirts had to fall in grade school.

Sometimes, while I’m cooking, while I’m at the stove, my husband rests his head there, his hair tickling the place on my leg where a growing child should be.

*
My husband used to make ice cream in a giant factory. After he got the job, I’d drive by the factories on the edge of the city proudly, staring at each building as if he owned them all.

During the day, he would manufacture tons of ice cream. He was not an ice cream man, far from it. He supervised the mixing of metric tons of sugar with milk, the movement of a giant industrial mixer, the addition of flavors.

He smelled like a new flavor each day: Cookies n’ cream, raspberry swirl, mocha chunk, traditional vanilla and chocolate on Thursdays and Fridays. After dinner, he would bring me a bowl of the day’s fresh flavor.

I ate my husband’s ice cream until a new pudge grew at the bottom of my stomach, a small bump in my lower belly.

“I made this,” he’d say, drumming his fingers on the sugarfat. “This is mine.”

“It is,” I’d say, smiling, nuzzling, kissing, full of sugarhim.

At night, my husband would leave his hand on my thigh while we watched television. The heat of his hand would make me pulse in private places. His fingers on my leg were a promise for later, the hint of our future bodies pushing against each other.
*
It was the industrial mixer that did him in.

The flavor that day was mocha chunk. That was always my least favorite flavor.

While he was adding the chunks, he lost his balance. That’s what the boys at the plant said. It made me picture my husband on a tight rope, made me think of him as a failed trapeze artist.

How did they fish him out? I didn’t ask. I know one man was covered with dried ice cream in the hospital waiting room, the dairy flakes coming off of him. I hardly noticed him though. What did they do with the ice cream after that? Something else I do not know, but the thought of my husband’s legs flavoring sweetness made a new vomit rise in the back of my throat.

The doctors didn’t wait for me. They took him straight up and started sawing, putting silver to his flesh, grinding against the muscle, ligament and bone.

There was no time, they told me. His legs were so badly crushed that they couldn’t stay with my husband a moment longer. They were sucking at his blood supply, the doctors said. It made me picture my husband with leeches for legs, giant ones. Would I have still loved him then? Maybe. I am not sure who knows those things.

When the small saws were put away, when my husband was no longer critically conditioned, the doctors led me into a room.

His eyes were closed, he was swaddled in sucking tubes and beeping machines. Is this the part that hurt my heart the worst? It had to be. It must’ve been.

I put my hand on his forehead, touched his cheeks and neck, caressed his shoulder, wept. I held his hand and stared at his face, urging his eyes to open, begging something to be awake.

Without thinking, my hand moved down to rest my fingers on his thigh. Nothing caught my palm. My hand landed on cheap white bedding, my fingers moving to the new lack of him.

I stood up and went to the doctors. I made a deal.

*
Things I did for my husband: Brought him home, told him I still loved him, adjusted.

We were rich after the legs were cut off. The company sent a settlement check, millions. The money meant no jury. My husband held the check and said he would rather have his legs. We hardly spent the money. Instead, we stayed still.

He was a wreck of a man without those limbs. He cried at first, over his missing legs, while he was awake, while he was asleep. Sometimes, in the morning, he would wake up and believe he still had legs, slide to the side of the bed and try to walk.

The doctors called it “phantom limb syndrome.” I helped him up, every morning, for weeks.

Some days, a fresh insanity would arrive.

“How the fuck can you love me?” he screamed from the sofa.

“I’ve always loved you,” I said, measuring my voice.

“I’M NOTHING BUT A TORSO WITH A HEAD,” he bellowed with such a velocity that I feared his body would fall off the couch.

“Ok, ok, calm down,” I sobbed. “I love you. I won’t stop loving you.”

I walked to the couch and leaned down. I kissed my half of a husband on the mouth, mustering all the passion I could. It was enough to curb the madness.

“Goddamn, I love you,” he muttered. “You’re the only one.”

He wrapped his arms around my neck and clung to me then. I could not lift him, I was not that strong, even with his legs gone. But I thought of it, of picking him up and holding him close to me, like a child.

I thought of my fingers wrapped around the bottom of his torso, where his healed skin was pearly pink and thick with scar tissue, on the place where he would never let me touch him.

*
I gave the doctor ten grand. That’s how much two legs cost, on the sly. I don’t know how the doctor did it, don’t know what he did when it came time to inventory the annexed limbs.

I didn’t care. I took them to a taxidermist. I needed them.

At the taxidermist, I wore big sunglasses, a scarf over my head. I knew it was wrong, knew he would hate that I was doing this.

“You want what?” the taxidermist asked over the counter.

“These two legs,” I said, sliding two heavy trash bags filled with my husband’s limbs over the wood.

“Human goddamn legs?” he asked.

“I’ll pay triple,” I said. “Cash.”

“A woman with cash and two human legs,” he said. “Some things you just shouldn’t ask questions about.”

“Goddamn right,” I said, letting out a laugh that felt good but cruel, as if I was mocking my husband from far away.

But really the stupidity of life had reached a hand out and clung to my lungs, fingers pushing out short, mean gasps of giggles.

*
We were watching a movie. We did that all the time now. Neither of us was ready to go out into public yet, not newly deformed.

My half-husband put his arm around my shoulders. If I didn’t look down, things had never even changed. If I just kept my gaze level, he was still whole.

He pressed a button to make a movie play, and I felt a small thrill work its way up the back of my shirt, as if he was touching my spine, before, back then. The thrill wasn’t from him now, but for the daydream. When the movies played, I fantasized, slipped into a desire coma, imagined some other life. I thought about his legs.

This daydream: My husband has legs, is climbing endless flights of stairs, eternally, while I wait perched at the top. His knee caps glisten, there is a sweet silvery sheen of sweat on his shins, the tops of his thighs.

I picture this constantly, endless pleasure footage looping of this scene.

Thirty minutes into the movie and I cannot take anymore of the daydream. I unwind from his arm.

“Just going to run upstairs and put my pajamas on,” I lie.

*
Everything is cool upstairs because the heat of our bodies hasn’t been here. The air feels like the cold side of a pillow. The rooms are quiet, a little dark. My heart triples up on beating, pulses harder.

I kneel next to the bed and slide out the white box. I can feel my face flush at the thought of what’s inside, what lays there like two long-stemmed roses.

My husband’s legs are still in good shape, even though it has been weeks. They are heavy, so I lift them one at a time from the box and put them on the bed, moving carefully. Nothing can threaten this, them.

I climb into bed with the legs, and position them how I like it: His legs next to each other and my legs next to them, toes touching a little, calves up against each other. When I let my hands fall, I can feel the top of my husband’s thighs, the muscle that is harder than before but at least still there, still a thing to touch.

I have spent so much time with the top half of my husband that I do not miss it at all. I only know how to miss the bottom of him now.

When I’m with the legs, the torture of impossible life burns. I want to glue my husband’s legs back to him, re-create something we did not have yet, push forward, because our love has become something else.

“What the fuck are you doing?” asks a voice.

I turn my head. My husband’s eyes peer over the edge of the bed. He is barely tall enough, on his hands, to see me.

“What the fuck are those?” he demands.

I sit up, try to push the legs down, hope the comforter will swallow them up, swallow them whole, erase everything.

“Are those my fucking legs?”

He punches the wooden frame at the foot of the bed, a punch so hard that it sounds as if he has broken wood or knuckle or both.

“Are you goddamn crying? With my fucking legs? I’m the fucking one that should be crying. Where did you even get them?”

The punching continues, fist against the wood, shaking the bed, shaking my body and the legs.

“The doctor. The doctor.”

“Fuck you. Fuck you for keeping them.”

There is one more punch, then the room goes very still.

My husband’s torso does a strange thing then, a sight I haven’t gotten used to seeing yet. He uses his arms, stronger now, to pull himself up onto the bed.

“Look at yourself,” my husband says.

He reaches down and caresses the old parts of himself, his fingers on skin that used to connect to him. Then he looks up at me, his eyes drained of the anger, and something very similar to tenderness pools there.

We sit there in a pool of cotton, on a rumpled comforter; me, my husband and his stuffed legs. My husband puts a hand on my thigh and lets out a sigh. I search his face, dig deep, try to love him again the same way.

I picture him made of my favorite flavor of ice cream. I think of my husband created from cream and sugar, ribbons of fudge or caramel alternating through him and me, with a spoon, never hungry.

Sarah Rose Etter earned her MFA in Fiction from Rosemont College. Her work has appeared in PANK Magazine, elimae, bearcreekfeed, and The Baltimore Review.

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Four Stories

Seduction

We are draped over the bottom of a small 14’’ fishing boat turned upside down in the driveway and the boat’s insides are empty of seats where we would normally sit and there are open and abandoned nests of insects that we cannot identify, and others that we can identify, like the wooly white cocoons of feed of spider or birth of butterfly, the webs all look identical in the right light.

The sun is on our chests, it’s on our bellies and we have our shirts open and up and cocooned around our necks and we barrel our faces into them like pillows. We want our chests to be touched. We want to be directed to take our clothes off. We want to be naked in the sunlight draped across the back of the boat. We want to be told what to do. We take our shirts off. We feel hands all over us; we want hands that slap, that slap us red like the sun. We will open our pants, too, if you want us to.

Boys have been taught, from a young age, that you start at the chest when you want to get sexy, you say, this is how you get all riled up. You put your hands on our chests.

We boys, have been taught, to let the woman always want it more. Let her put her hands on our chest first, let her guide everything along.

Mother finds us draped across the boat, hands on each other’s chests, going down each other’s pants. Mother finds us all balancing on the edge of the boat, our bodies barely touching, our fingertips holding each other’s flesh for dear life, here is how we teeter and totter. Mother sees spiders in our hair, swats at our heads, misses our left eye but clocks our temple good. She shakes us and yells at all of the boys and all of the girls to leave at once. Immediately. NOW.

And everyone leaves and we put our shirts on and we look at the ground and kick the weeds, the dandelions’ pistils blow every direction but towards us. We forget to make a wish, as proper on dandelions’ pistils, the seeds in every direction tell us nothing of the future.

We rock the boat until we see insects. We sit on the ground where there is a large insect is desperately trying to escape an anthill it blindly flopped itself down on top of. There are too many ants to fight off. The insect just wiggles and wiggles, unable to escape from being eaten alive.

Mother says “C’mon, we’re leaving.” And she grabs our arms and tries to pull us to the car. We do not get up to walk. We lay in the dirt letting her pull our dead weight.

This is what is like to pull a dead body, we think. Pull our dead body. We are a corpse. We are pulled through the weeds, through the dandelion seed, through the hard grass and the ant hills where the unlucky insects are sectioned off and sent down the tunnel for a future winter’s meal. We are pulled by our arms to the car, dirt smeared into the sides of our clothes, gravel in our mouths, down the long driveway. When Mother begins to try to pick us up to be put into the car, we stiffen our bodies, a layering of one stiff body on top of another horizontally in the backseat.

We ride in the backseat like a trifle dessert, in a glassed cage for all to see. We are forgetting where we are going. We are sunburned on our chests and it hurts against the plastic of the seats in the car. When the car finally stops and the doors open from either side, we peel our chest from the seats and it makes a long suction sound like a fart and Mother does not think it is funny. We are forced to walk upright and not slide along at our Mother’s side by the arms and we walk slowly and with great care. Mother is telling us to move along, that she won’t have anymore of it, that we are old enough to know better, that she is disappointed in us.

We are forced to walk to all of the other boys and girls houses and talk to their parents and tell their parents what had happened on the back of the upside down fishing boat that afternoon. We were forced to confess and apologize. Repent and forgive. All wewant is your forgiveness, we are sorry we did what we did, we are so very sorry.

The next day, we are rubbing aloe on our chests to make the sunburn cool and soothe, which it does but only in moments. We are not sorry and we do not believe we have done anything wrong. We are boys trying to be men, we are women trying to be girls. The phone rings and Mother says aloud, without answering: “Please pray for my children so they do not become sex fiends.”

The Reign of Evil Will Be Seven Years

In the night Joanna was taken. Joanna was taken by Our Other Friend’s father. Our Other

Friend’s father had tried to touch her at a sleepover last year but no one told because

Our Other Friend’s father had given us cigarettes or, at the very least, turned a blind eye to us taking the cigarettes and smoking them way out in the woods in the sailboat graveyard that connected Joanna’s house and our own. Our Other Friend’s house was on the other side of the woods, acres and acres away, but in the middle the sailboat graveyard was where we would meet and spend all day, sometimes.

But Our Other Friend’s father, he never liked to leave the house much and would always get nervous if Our Other Friend was gone too long. He didn’t like anyone being at the house except Joanna and I and when we were there getting a drink of water or going to the bathroom he would look just a little too long at our shorts or our collar bones or the way our throats went up and down when we drank. He would lean into Our Other Friend close and whisper things that made her blush. He whispered like a lover into Our Other Friend’s ear. Joanna and I would always end up leaving quietly and quickly, with not so much as a good-bye or thank you. We would see Our Other Friend in the sailboat graveyard soon enough.

No one else hung out in the graveyard but us, even though everyone knew that was where the fisherman from the shore of the lake would abandon their boats and oars and anchors and things once they were of no use anymore, rotten and dead. There were boats that looked as if they metastasized and morphed, boats that looked as if they had given birth to other deformed versions of itself. There were boats the size of our bikes and boats the size of our houses. There were boats half in function, broken down and forgotten. There were boats like tumors.

One time Joanna and I saw Our Other Friend’s father in the sailboat graveyard but we hid before he could figure out it was not an animal. He waited a long while before heading back to the direction our house. We wondered why he was out there, so quiet and so crouched. When we asked Our Other Friend about it, she just shrugged, her face turning red.

“He must’ve been looking for me,” she said, “but I dunno why, I was at home.”

Joanna was taken in the morning while she was getting ready for school, getting ready for the bus as the bus picks her up last before moving across the bridge. Her curling iron was still plugged in and on, melting the plastic toothbrush holder next to it so far into itself that it pushed all the bottoms of the toothbrushes together and made one giant plastic mess when the police came to look over the house. She wasn’t on the bus, didn’t make it to school, no forced entry, no sign of any wrongdoing. She had simply vanished. She was simply gone.

Everyone’s father are suspects, too many children gone missing these past years, too many sick people in this town the newspaper will say. Our father will be interviewed and released on the same day. Our Other Friend’s father will be the last to be interviewed. He will be charged and convicted. He will hymn-and-haw about knowing the whereabouts of the body or what exactly happened that afternoon. He will never tell the truth.

The False Belief of Good in People

Matthew is arrested and re-arrested and subpoenaed and arrested and detained by the referee and brought in to see another judge and released on bond and arrested again and again and again.

Andi speaks in whispers and low tones over the phone to anyone that will listen. She wants the world to understand that Matthew will never change. Here is her stomach distended, this pure beating heart, she hears it every single time they go to the clinic and Matthew is disinterested, moody and unreliable.

I heard Matthew had a gun on him when they re-arrested him the second time but I don’t know. They served him the warrant and arrested him the same day. I don’t understand what goes on in that boy’s head, we have a baby on the way for christssake.

Andi understands, in as much as she can, that this will be her life forever. She understands that, no matter what that life will not be easy. Matthew will always be this way, he will always struggle to live. She does not want to have to struggle to live. She hadn’t dropped out of high school yet but every day was a struggle to get there and Matthew takes her car and leaves her stranded in the trailer park.

Matthew took my car and they found it because I had to call the police and report it stolen and I hate doing that but what the hell else am I supposed to do? I can’t get out of here without my car and I have to go to school, its my only priority right now, I have to graduate, I have to.

Leave, Andi. Andi knows she can’t stay here her whole life like this. Leave, Andi. She knows that what has happened is a huge mistake but she can’t undo it now it’s too late. Leave, Andi. It’s never too late, my mom keeps telling me, it’s never too late but I’m like yes it is it is too late I have to we have to Matthew and I have to raise this baby and Matthew needs to get his head out of his asshole and realize this because I can’t live here for the rest of my life, I just can’t, it’s just too much, nothing will ever change for us here.

Andi hears a knock and hangs up the telephone without saying good-bye. She runs to the side door next to the bedroom because there are two doors on the side of the house, both equally as front, so there is no front door but two side-doors to get into the narrow trailer. She hears the knock and asks, “Who is it?” even though she knows perfectly well who it is.

You Make Such Better Decisions Than Me

We are shuffled to Andi’s house for the third time in two weeks and her parents are never home so we are alone and we are tired. Brother has gone off to make a sacrificial alter in the barn in back of Andi’s house because Andi’s house is a converted barn in one or way or another and Andi has a barn in the back of her house with silos and stalls for animals and vast amounts of chickens that she has to single-handedly move from the coops every single time a storm blows through, like last night. We help her move the chickens back into the coops, the last four structures slightly damaged by fallen limbs from the trees surrounding the house. We take those chickens back inside.

Brother is making an alter in which to sacrifice us on, he says and he shows his fangs, bright white plastic Made-in-China from the Dollar Tree down the road. His white plastic fangs do not fit correctly, not made for such a wide mouth, and you can see the upper half of his yellow teeth peeking through. He hisses at us.

He says he knows a spell already. He says that he and his friends stole a book from the library in the city about spells and alters and magic. He says they know what they are doing, that he understands the dark overlords and their powers.

Everything gets sacrificed somehow, Andi says to him when we are holding up two ends of a board that she is nailing into the coop to cover a hole. Everything is a sacrifice.

Katie Jean Shinkle is Assistant Poetry Editor of DIAGRAM. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, Eleven Eleven Journal, Corium Magazine and dislocate, among others.

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Giantess

Judy Jurgensen was not like other girls, but I loved all eighteen feet of her terribly.

That is, I was terrible at loving all eighteen feet of her.

This was not a result of any perceived lack of passion on my part, but rather, a simple matter of logistics. Unzipping her sweater was a bit like riding a zip line to nowhere, and even after I overcame the first obstacle, there were always further obstacles beneath—bras that knew no entry point, clasps requiring combinations. I spent evenings burrowing shrew-like through the tunnels of her blouse, shouting up to her, “Judy, does that feel good to you?” though I never heard much in the way of replies.

The problem with Judy was that there was simply too much of her to love, and even when she steadied herself against the oak trees in the park and gave me free reign of her body, it still felt a bit like mountain climbing, me searching frantically for footholds in the dark, leaping from crevice to crevice. Not only was I inexperienced in lovemaking, but I was shoddily equipped for the task. When people jokingly asked if we were using protection, they didn’t mean contraceptives, but harnesses, pulleys, carabiners, and safety clamps. Ours was a love like no other—one with vertical boundaries—and even when I scurried up her pant leg to her jacket to her lips, I was never quite sure what to do upon my arrival.

We met at the start of our ninth grade year, during fourth period gym class. She was rumored to be a foreign exchange student, though all we knew for certain was that a mysterious wooden ship had recently docked at the harbor and nobody knew from where. We left that mystery for the coast guard, while we in gym class much preferred the mystery of the girl herself.

“Bet she’s a killer on the basketball court,” Cody Thompson whispered, though as we would discover later that morning, she was a killer on the dodge ball court, too. After Coach Gibson dedicated several minutes to explaining the not-so-intricate-rules of the game (“You grab a ball, then you chuck it,”), he popped the rust-covered whistle between his lips and blew. Judy Jurgensen responded to the sound, flinging the foam balls mercilessly at everyone, sparing no one the wrath of her blitzkrieg.

The result: A few dozen victims clutching arms and fractured ribs, rolling lengthwise along the gymnasium floor. Blood spouted from noses and lips, from ears even, and by the time she awoke from her competitive trance, she could hardly bare the destruction she’d caused. A low moan escaped her, and I watched from my place behind a trash bin as she thundered into the locker room.

Coach Gibson was beside himself. Not only was he suddenly overwhelmed by a snowstorm of injury reports, but he also had an eighteen-foot tall student barricaded in a room. He responded the only way he knew how, by offering three short shrieks from his whistle, though when that proved ineffective, he ordered some of the less-injured girls to limp near the locker room to negotiate an exit. The locker room door remained shut, but those broken, battered girls lined up loyally on the other side, assuring Judy that none of their wounds were mortal; that none of the conscious students, at least, blamed her for not yet understanding her strength.

Despite her difficulties on the dodge ball court, Judy Jurgensen attempted a peace offering by providing a wide array of services for the school. The janitors, in particular, regularly took advantage of her height, calling upon her to assist in replacing the hallway’s forever short-circuiting light bulbs, sparing them the ladder. The cafeteria workers, too, pleaded with her to startle the wayward sparrows that resided in the lunchroom rafters. When asked, Judy was more than happy to unclog the highest vents, retrieve lost balls from the rooftops. She even managed to clean the “Go F-yourself” graffiti that had been scrawled on a ceiling tile sometime during the Reagan Administration.

Thus, through her good works, Judy Jurgensen became beloved by teachers and students alike, and her usefulness extended throughout the community. She became the go-to girl for untangling kites from the uppermost branches of trees, for wooing down the most stubborn of kittens. Even the mayor took note of her faithful service, awarding her the prestigious Key to the City, though the enormous, novelty-sized prop appeared to be of normal proportions when slipped into her oversized palm.

Yet despite her efforts, there were those who remained uncertain of her intentions. I regularly witnessed full tables opening up for her in the lunchroom; noticed, too, how even the linebackers of the high school football squad often quivered in her presence. In mid-September, one of the more outspoken members of the Parent Teacher Association distributed a widely-read email stating the “very real possibility” that Judy Jurgensen was a Communist spy sent to America to uncover the “innermost secrets” of our education system. This claim was proved false after it was revealed that America’s test scores paled in comparison to Russia’s, and certainly any information pertaining to our “innermost secrets” would only be useful if her mission was to bring down Russian test scores.

Of course, many parents shared far more reasonable concerns, but Principal Carter reminded the mobs that Judy Jurgensen’s attendance was perfect, her grades were top-notch, and there was little he could do beyond that.

“Can’t you check her birth certificate?” one cried. “See if she’s an illegal?”

Principal Carter admitted that he could probably do that much, though in truth, he had little motivation to—he hadn’t seen such a well-lit hallway in years.

While we never learned the specifics of her homeland, Mrs. Kelper and the rest of our social studies class deduced that most likely she hailed from some unexplored island in the Baltic. The island remained undocumented on modern maps, though this didn’t discourage a frazzle-haired Kelper from bringing in a wide array of them, unfurling their coiled shapes and allowing Judy the opportunity to reveal her true coordinates to the class. Kelper’s maps came in all varieties—both physical and geographic—though each time Judy was called to the front of the room and handed what, for her, was a toothpick-sized pointer, she always directed our attention to the same impossible spot.

“This,” she whispered, hunching over, “right here.”

“But that’s just water, dear,” Kelper explained. “The sea. Surely you don’t live in the sea.”

Judy nodded as if to confirm it.

Meanwhile, the class watched on as Kelper moved to the next map, and the next, waiting for the giantess to remember from where she’d come.

There was no question that Judy frightened people, though their fright turned to anger once she began associating with me.

Your relationship is unnatural, we were told, abnormal.

And as Cody Thompson informed me, I was a “disgrace” to all ninth grade boys of regular height.

“What do you even like about her?” Chris Harper asked one day after gym class. “Is it the enormous breasts? It’s got to be the enormous breasts, right?”

But it wasn’t, and when Donald Cordon asked if it was some kind of “vagina thing”—”I mean come on, it must be like you’re spelunking in there,”—I didn’t mentioned that our relationship had yet to progress to that phase.

“You know, sweetie,” my mother advised days later, “there are plenty of girls to choose from. Why, just yesterday I was talking to Audrey Kinsmore’s mother. You know, Audrey. She’s about 5’6″—plenty tall if you ask me—and the thing about Audrey is…”

As I would soon learn from my mother, there were plenty of things about Audrey.

But despite her baton skills and synchronized swimming skills, etc., Audrey was no Judy, and even if the world refused to acknowledge our love affair, I assured Judy that the world didn’t have to.

“Like Romeo and Juliet,” I explained one night as we hid in the shadows of the oak trees. “We’re just a couple of star crossed lovers.”

She nodded thoughtfully, though it felt odd explaining the concept of “star crossed” anything to someone who, if she bothered to raise an arm to the sky, might be able to pluck one and place it in her pocket.

As a result of the harassment, we became far less public, taking our rendezvous to undisclosed locations—primarily the janitor’s closet—though there was always the problem of space. There were only so many ways to fold and unfold a body, and we tried all of them, oftentimes jamming our feet in mop buckets or sending the paper towels sprawling.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, watching that solitary bulb cast light on all the soap refills. “This isn’t as romantic as I’d hoped.”

She nodded in silence, draping a heavy hand over my head as if to agree.

For weeks, people continued to call me the Giant Slayer, and when I tried to explain—”No, no, there is no slaying about it,”—the others just laughed and repeated it louder.

“Gi-ant Slay-er! Gi-ant Slay-er!”

It was hard to argue when invisible swords sliced through the sky.

Afternoons I took the long way home, composing love letters in my head, though I soon realized the absurdity of my tiny words meaning anything to someone as vast and worldly as she.

For some reason, when directed at Judy, “Roses are red, violets are blue,” always came out sounding like some kind of botanical cataloging rather than a testament of how I felt. I continued struggling to show her my true feelings, and so, I began dreaming of gifts in their proper proportions. When I gave her flowers, I bought them by the bushel, and instead of a box of chocolate, I usually just sprung for the crate. There were other difficulties, too, and sometimes, when I was too far below her, I had to resort to whispering sweet nothings into her ear via megaphone.

“Your legs are like lovely lampposts,” I announced to everyone in the tri-country area. The screeching feedback didn’t much help, though it didn’t distort the message, either.

It was clear that the external pressures were beginning to wear on both of us, and on the night we scheduled our final rendezvous alongside the oak trees in the park, I’d hardly crawled halfway to her belly button before the bottle rockets lit up the sky. The Roman candles followed shortly after.

“These are what you call shooting stars, yes?” Judy asked, and how was I to tell her that they most certainly were not; that this was a public display of our classmates’ cruelty, a grand spectacle of their intolerance.

I could just make out the flashing orbs while lodged in the insides of her sweater, but by the time I crawled out the lights were even brighter, and the boys’ cackles echoing from the trees. I told Judy to run, and when she asked why, I admitted that they were not shooting stars.

“Roman candles,” I explained.

“Roman…candles,” she said slowly, training her tongue for the words.

Then, I grabbed her hand (by which I mean she picked me up in one smooth motion), and she took a few tentative steps away from the trees, exposing us to the brunt of their assault.

The colored orbs whirred past us, a smattering of blues and reds and oranges.

When one blurred particularly close she tried out her new vocabulary.

“Take heed of that Roman candle, love!”

God, I loved when she talked dirty.

She flung me beneath her arm, but as I directed her toward the water—”take a left, now a right, now a zigzag”—the harbor remained little more than a faraway glimmer. Meanwhile, the hoard of boys followed close behind—all those wind sprints in gym class clearly paying off.

Judy hunkered low beneath the tallest tips of the trees, pressing me into her chest. There was nothing there but her heartbeat, and I listened to it quicken as she tore deeper into the dark, carving a clear path for the others to follow. And then finally, just before us, the harbor, and in it, the vast wooden ship she called home.

The pack of boys were gaining on us—all sweat and grit—and while Judy Jurgensen had sworn off all forms of violence as a result of the dodge ball incident, I pleaded with her to reconsider.

“Just pick up one tiny boulder,” I tried. “See if you can’t give it a nice hurl in their general direction.”

Instead, she just sat me down on the shoreline while her hands worked fast, thumbing up and down the thick, snaking ropes until the ship rocked free from the dock.

She leapt onboard, her layers of blonde hair falling around her in waves.

“Wait! Let me come with you!” I begged.

She would not, so I changed tactics.

“Well, how about sticking around here?”

She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders.

“But…what if we love each other?” I called, and then, in a more desperate attempt:

“And who’s supposed to change the light bulbs?”

There were fireworks between us, literally, as my giantess hefted herself starboard and raised the sail. The timber creaked beneath her, the entire ship a bit less buoyant with her on it. The wind picked up, bullying the sail away from me, so I cupped my hands and shouted once more, but she didn’t hear.

Her own hand resembled an enormous compass as she held it out for me, waved to me as the fog swept over the mast.

The pack of boys caught up, spotted me alone on the edge of the shore.

“There he is!” they cried, “light’em up!”

I turned slowly, watched as they aimed their Roman candles once more, the fuses lighting their pale faces. I heard the sizzle, the whir—it didn’t matter.

All that mattered was that I was alone on the shore, while my giantess bobbed off in the ocean. I tried not to think about it; it was far easier when there was no thinking. Instead, I just puffed out my chest as big as I could, prepared for a far less injurious blow.

B.J. Hollars is an instructor at the University of Alabama where he also received his MFA in 2010. He is the author of the forthcoming Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America (University of Alabama Press, 2011) and the editor of You Must Be This Tall To Ride: Contemporary Writers Take You Inside The Story (Writer’s Digest Books, 2009). His work can be found in North American Review, American Short Fiction, Hobart, PANK among others.

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Methamphetamine Is Not Your Friend

I met Stormy through my friend Ben and his girlfriend Kelly.

Ben and I had been friends since high school. He was the bass player in every band I was ever in that was any good. He grew up a Mormon kid with diabetes, which, in my opinion, is always a good precursor for being a punk rocker.

Things were really kind of fucked up around the time I met Stormy. Ben and Kelly’s daughter had just died. SIDS. It was terrible. The death sent everyone who hung out at the house on Ashland careening into a spiral that seemed bottomless – like we would never go down far enough.

I spent a lot of time over at the house after the death, because I loved Ben like he was my brother. In high school, he and I made a Suicide Pact while riding on his motorcycle, high on PCP.

He mentioned that Suicide Pact under his breath to me all the time, while he and I were cranked out on coke or methamphetamine, playing darts all night long. Cricket. It was The Game at the house on Ashland.

Stormy was sort of like the dealer, but mostly he was just nothing more than a tweaked-out bungler.

Stormy had supposedly been one of the founding members of a really violent skinhead gang in the mid ’80s. He had also just impregnated his girlfriend, who had a huge tattoo of a bat on her suddenly blooming stomach.

The tattoos.

Stormy was covered in the kind of tattoos that make people cringe. Terribly done band logos. Horrible, dated pieces of “art,” the likes of which you might find on the walls of some burned-out husk of a tattoo shop after the apocalypse. Shit that looked like it was done in the penitentiary, which I came to find out was the truth.

Stormy was wiry in the way that Iggy Pop was wiry back in the 80s — all ropey sinews and knobby joints moving together in concert. Just a really fucking weird dude who never shut the fuck up and was always in the middle of some bullshit that never made any sense to anyone but him.

I was pretty sure Stormy only hung out at Ben and Kelly’s house because of the easy access to needles, due to Ben’s diabetes. I’m also pretty sure it was really hard for Kelly to be around his girlfriend, what with her just losing her baby and this girl walking around all the time, high as fuck and flaunting her early pregnancy.

One night, in the middle of Monsoon Season, we got destroyed by a really torrential downpour. Part of the roof from the gallery/house next door had torn away and slammed into Ben’s car, rendering it useless. We were out there in the rain and lightning, trying to remove all sorts of debris from the yard. My car was parked out on the street, so it was lucky enough to go undamaged.

That meant I had to drive Stormy to get the drugs.

We were back in the house for a few minutes, wiping pieces of roofing off of ourselves, laughing about how fucking Biblical this storm was, when I saw Stormy walk over to the phone, and start yammering away into it. He was asking someone on the other end of the phone where to meet up at, and kept on muttering something about me, and about how I was “cool.”

We were in my car, headed over to the West Side, when Stormy pulled out this chromed .380. He removed the hot one in the chamber, pulled out the clip, and was messing around with the action – all while we were driving on the highway. Stormy kept on fiddling with my stereo at the same time, all sorts of jittery and flustered.

Dude was starting to get me spooked, and we hadn’t even reached our destination yet.

“You know – if one of these motherfuckers gets all loud and stupid with me, I’m just gonna shoot my fucking way right to their goddamn stash, you hear me? Fucking assholes – every time they move the house. Never in the same house twice.”

What could I do but agree, really? It’s not like this was part of my daily operation – I always bought my own shit off of the drag queens I knew. They always had better drugs, and they were far less likely to fuck with anyone. I never knew of, nor heard a peep about a single drag queen to beat the shit out of someone in a meth-rage.

After twisting and turning through a cookie-cutter neighborhood for a few minutes, Stormy suddenly called out that we were there.

“You want me to come in with you, or stay out here?”

“You stay out here, and they’re gonna think you’re a fucking narc, Z. Plus – I don’t trust these fucking people, so you’re coming in with me. You got a gun on you?”

“No.”

“Well, I hope you can still fight, then. If shit goes down, you’re gonna have to fight.”

As we were walking up the driveway, I noticed all the tell-tale signs that this was not going to go as Stormy had planned. Broken down truck off to the side of the driveway. At least three motorcycles in disrepair underneath the carport. A chain for a dog, sans dog. Lots of empty 32oz Budweiser cans strewn about the area.

I knew we were really fucked when the dude who opened the front door was flying Hell’s Angels colors.

The biker’s name was “Clete,” or something like that. He reeked of beer, cigarettes, and that fucking awful chemical smell that rolls off of tweakers – comparable only to the olfactory delight of solvent and/or burning plastic. “Clete” immediately shook me down, patting me for weapons or a wire. He was fucking flying high, speedily reciting something to himself under his breath that oddly sounded very similar to the Miranda Rights in cadence and tone.

“Your dude’s clean, Stormy. What the fuck can I do for ya?”

“Two eight-balls. I got the cash.”

“Not gonna happen, punk. Shit’s not here. You gotta pay me, then go get it from my old lady over at the hotel. Holiday Inn, 51st and Bethany.”

Stormy played it off as cool, and kind of shrugged. He took out a stack of money and handed it to “Clete,” who then stuffed it into his back pocket without even counting it.

As we were leaving, “Clete” started laughing.

“I’ll call ahead and let the boss lady know something special is on the way over. You boys behave yourselves, now.”

*****

Stormy kept on playing with that fucking gun while we were driving over to the hotel. Clicking. Clacking. Chambering. Clicking. The sound, coupled with the tension in the car, was making me feel like I was going to piss myself. I tried to stay as calm as I could. I could still see the lightning across the sky, and there was all sorts of debris on the roads from the storm.

As I was pulling into the parking lot at the Holiday Inn, Stormy laid it all out for me –

“Here’s the deal, Z. I know this old bitch. She is fucking ruthless. This bitch is gonna try and play it like we never paid for this shit, and then she’s gonna try and shake you down for more money, since she don’t know you. So whatever money you have on you right now, give it to me – they won’t fuck with me.”

I handed him the $300 I had on me, and he stuffed it into his boot.

We were standing outside the door to Room 1216 for a good long minute before Stormy finally knocked on it. He gave three quick raps and then another two after a rest. I could hear shuffling from inside the room. I could see from the shadow underneath the door that someone was now standing right up against it, looking at us through the peephole.

Unlatched, and then opened.

The room was full of stale-smelling smoke, but I could see an older woman sitting at the table across the room, next to the bed. On the table was a .357, and on the bed was a sawed-off. The younger woman at the door had a 9mm in her hand, and was motioning for us to step into the room.

The older woman across the room didn’t budge, but she spoke first as soon as the door was closed.

“Stormy, you ugly sumbitch – who’s your friend? Friend, drop your fucking pants and pull out your cock so we know you aren’t a fucking cop, okay? We promise we won’t shoot you in the dick.”

Stormy shrugged at me, which let me know I really didn’t have much of a choice.

As I was fiddling and thumbing at my belt to get it open, the younger one with the 9mm slid up behind me, brushing my hands aside to handle the task for me. I saw that Stormy was already over at the table, and the older woman was handing him a package that he was weighing in his hand.

“Let me just help you with this, okay? It won’t take but a minute, I promise.”

She had pulled my belt loose from my jeans, and thrown it onto the floor in front of me with a thud. Her breath smelled like vodka and smoke, and the bass in her voice was tickling my ear. Stormy was sitting down at the table with the older woman now, opening up his package for inspection, while she was putting something into a glass pipe she had in front of her.

“Why don’t you just turn around here and look at me while I do this, cutie?”

As I turned to face her, I noticed that this woman couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty years old. Her eyes were so young, even though her skin was wrecked with that terrible meth pallor. Walking dead style. She grabbed the back of my head and pulled my face right to hers, nose to nose while she undid the button on my pants and forced her hand inside to grab at my cock.

I could hear the older woman, laughing and inhaling at the same time.

She was pulling on my cock in that really slow but determined manner a man does when he’s trying to get his shit hard to jerk off – long, but firm and slow pulls. Squeezing at the head at the end of the stroke, like trying to milk it.

“I think you and me, we’re gonna have us a little party, okay? That alright with you, cutie? You got a name?”

“Z.”

“Alright, Z. Come sit on the bed.”

My ass wasn’t even fully on the bed before she was on her knees in front of me, pulling my semi-hard cock into her mouth as she slid the gun under the bed in front of her. Thankfully, we were facing the opposite direction from Stormy and the other woman, who were now deep into small talk and tweaker chat about all sorts of shit – names flying off tongues like Saints being called.

Her mouth felt really dry on my cock, almost like a cat’s tongue. She reared her head back for a second, and took a huge drink from a bottle she had on the floor next to her. Putting me back into her mouth, my cock started to sting from the alcohol in her mouth at the same time. It was an odd but exciting feeling – like little icicles working their way into me.

I went to put my hand on her head, but she clamped down on my shaft with her teeth and shook her head back and forth, letting me know very clearly that it wasn’t an option. When she looked up at me, I noticed that she looked as scared as I felt – and within a few more pumps of her mouth and her hand working together, that was it.

I wonder if my cum tasted like fear to her.

I was pulling up my pants when she handed me my belt. She just kept on looking at me, and in her face I could see she was trying to get me to see something, but I couldn’t grasp anything in that moment – I was flush with fear and endorphins, and wishing we could get the fuck out of there as fast as humanly possible.

“Let’s go, Z. Time to hit the road.”

Stormy was halfway out the door when the girl grabbed me by the shoulder and forced something into my hand. I didn’t look at it, I just put it into my pocket and followed out the door.

Right as I was about to start up my car, Stormy starts busting out laughing.

“Z, man. You alright, dude? That was some fucked up shit, right?”

I was livid. Hysterical. Filled with so much anger and fear that I started to shake as I spoke.

“What the fuck was that all about, Stormy? I thought you said they were gonna try and jack me for money – not make me give them a fucking sex show.”

“They did jack you for money, man. I had to pay her $300 for that blowjob you just got. If you didn’t do it, she was gonna shoot your ass. Did you think that shit was free?”

*****

Later on, back at the house on Ashland, while we were all playing Cricket, I remembered that she shoved something into my hand. It was a piece of paper, with all sorts of crazy scribbling on it. I went into the kitchen to read it in the better lighting.

Please help me – these people kidnapped me. I’m only 17, and I know my parents are looking for me. Please call them and tell them where I am. Please call the police before these people kill me.

I shoved the piece of paper back into my pocket.

A few hours later, when everyone was good and tweaked out, off into their own little worlds, I shoved the piece of paper into Stormy’s girl’s handbag – right next to the handful of needles she’d obviously stolen from Ben.

I never went on another run with Stormy again.

Sean H. Doyle lives in Brooklyn, NY. He works hard every day to be a better person. His writing can be found at www.seanhdoyle.com

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Debt of Gratitude

I began following you when you turned fourteen. You were starting high school, you were just starting to become a woman. Your father recognized it as a precarious time. He decided you would need protection. The day-to-day activities were like any normal job. I followed you on your way to school in the morning, made sure you arrived safely. The school didn’t allow students to leave campus, even for lunch, so I didn’t have to do much during school hours. Your parents chose it for that reason. Besides the fact that it was a good Catholic private school. When school was over, I followed you to the nearby sandwich place or the pizza place or that grocery store where you and your friends bought snacks. When you had your after-school activities on campus—the newspaper club, the poetry club—I waited outside the campus until you were finished. I was meant to watch you until I could confirm that you were safely picked up by your mother or your aunt. It was very difficult when some of your friends started to drive, and they began to offer you rides home. Luckily, you were always a responsible child; you called your mother or your aunt ahead of time to let them know that such-and-such friend would drive you home, that you would be going to such-and-such place for an after-school snack, that you would be home at such-and-such time. Though sometimes your mother or your aunt would not be able to contact your father in time, and I would follow you without knowing where you were going. On several occasions I followed you to a friend’s home. The one with the big house with the blue door. The one who drove a Hummer. The one who drove a Mitsubishi Eclipse: I was not happy when this friend drove you, he drove too dangerously, he was trying to show off for you. The one who drove the green Accord drove very well. I waited for you outside these friends’ homes, until they would drive you back to your own home. I waited until you opened the garage door—you always entered your house through the garage door, never the front door, I know you even kept the remote control opener in your backpack—and walked inside. I waited until the garage door closed again. Only then, on those longer days, would I go home.

All this is told to me in a McDonald’s restaurant, by a man in a freshly bloodstained Adidas jacket, in my father’s language, which I have not spoken in ten years.

Shakira’s “She Wolf” is playing at a very tolerable volume, on loudspeakers I cannot see.

Your parents were happy you decided to go to Stanford. In high school you had been mentioning the East Coast, they were very worried, they were worried that you would leave California, but they did not want to pressure you, they wanted to respect your wishes. They were very happy when you decided, of on your own free will, to stay in the area. Also, this meant I was able to continue watching you. I expected this to be more difficult, but you were, as always, very responsible, very punctual. I followed you from your dorm to your various classes, to your lunch breaks, to the library. In the second year, when you moved into the apartment with your three girlfriends, I followed you on your walk to campus. Your father sent me your class schedules and a map of the campus, so I would be able to predict your movements. Some days your first class was only in the afternoon. Some days you didn’t have class at all! Those days I could expect to follow you to the library or to the bookstore. Your father never required me to watch you on the evenings or on the weekends, which I always thought was strange, since, logically, that would be your most vulnerable time, any girl’s most vulnerable time; but then I realized that you rarely went out in the evening or on the weekends anyway. A studious child. I think your father knew this, and was graciously sparing me unnecessary work—giving me a weekend. Still, I sometimes stayed later. I followed you to that one party you attended, with your friends, at the big house on the hill with the strange letters over the door. It was the first time you had gotten drunk, or at least the first time I had seen you drunk. You were very, very drunk. You were nearly unable to walk. One of your friends and a young man I did not recognize took you home. The young man was practically carrying you. There was another young man there, he was not carrying you, but he was watching you very carefully. I was very concerned, but I didn’t know if I should report it to your father. But I later discovered that you yourself told your father, on the phone the next day. Shortly after that, he asked me if I would consider occasionally watching you on the weekends as well. I agreed. I did not tell him that I had already seen you that night. Because you often told your parents if you were going out for an evening, and even who you were going out with—and you never lied!—your father would know if you needed protection and would be able to notify me. Ah, but you were a very responsible child. You were a very responsible child. You were very easy to watch. You were really very easy to watch.

He calls me another word whose equivalent in English I do not know, smiling.

The blood on his jacket has begun to dry. He also has dried smears of blood on his hands, blood or dirt under his nails. He is opening the box of a Filet-O-Fish sandwich, lifting the bun, using a napkin to wipe away some of the tartar sauce that covers the fish.

When you were twenty-one, your father said I did not need to follow you anymore. He said you were an adult now. He said that you were moving to England, because you were going to go to Oxford to study literature. England seemed like another planet to me. I should not have been shocked; I knew you had considered going to the East Coast and yet you had stayed in the Bay Area. And your father had told me once that you disliked California in general. He said it was his fault, that because he himself was so vocal about California not being his ‘real home,’ you absorbed that sentiment and made it your own. Your father was very worried that he had given you his unhappiness. He said you were like a sponge for things like that. He told me the story of how you cried more than he did when you received the news that his brother in Batac had died. He told me how when you were a child you collected tiny little boxes of the exact same style collected by his own mother, who died when he was fourteen. What is that, forty years before you were born? Of course, you know that. But he insisted to me that he never once told you about the little boxes! He had kept the memory of those boxes in his heart all his life, and then suddenly he had a daughter who collected the exact same ones herself. He was always so surprised by you. Enchanted, and surprised. I think also because he was so much older than you, old enough to be your grandfather. You were the child he was not expecting. The child from his second life. I think sometimes he thought you were a ghost; a reincarnation or something. I myself often thought you were a ghost. Strange, I know, since of course I was the one who would more logically be the ghost.

The man has not started eating the Filet-o-Fish yet. His chin and his head feature the exact same half a milimeter of stubble. I ask him how old he is. He does not look that much older than me. He says he was twenty when he started following me. So that makes him thirty-two now. Shyly, he says he is turning thirty-three in two months.

So I should not have been shocked by the news, I should not have been shocked. But I was terribly, terribly shocked. You were not only leaving California, you were leaving the United States. It was so strange to me. Why would you leave the United States? And I thought you were so American. With your backpack, with your shoes, with that jacket that you often wore. In that jacket I thought you looked like Cary Grant. It’s rare for a young girl to wear jackets like that, isn’t it? You even wore a shirt and tie sometimes. Everything about you was so American. I couldn’t imagine you anywhere else. But then I couldn’t really imagine anywhere else, at all; the only other place I had in my imagination was the Philippines, and I definitely could not imagine you there.

Now the song playing over the loudspeakers is Amerie’s “Gotta Work.”

So you were leaving, and I didn’t have to protect you anymore. Well, I couldn’t say anything, of course. What could I have said? And of course I would never speak out of turn to your father. So I said only, I understand. Your father said it to me in a Vietnamese restaurant in San Jose. We both had the steak pho. We finished it and left in separate cars. That was the last time I saw your father. That was only a few months before April. Although until he died, he still called me every now and then, just to ask how I was, to ask how my new job was going, to tell me to go back to school, to ask me if I needed any money. He bought me the car that I had been using to follow you. And it was him who got me the security guard job at Exar. That computer chip place. I worked grave-shift, and your father worked the shift from three until eleven. Sometimes I saw you come in with your mother and bring him dinner. When you would call him on the phone around nine o’clock, I was often next to him, listening to your conversations. I thought, what kind of kid is this, that talks about all this kind of stuff? Death and philosophy and goodness and forgiveness, these very advanced things. I even remember the day you cut your hair. Your beautiful hair, that went down all the way to your back! Your father called you Maria Clara because of this hair! I will never forget the sensational way you surprised your father. You came in with your mother, wearing a big hooded jacket. You had a paper bag in your hands. Your father was at his station. I was just arriving at work, to relieve him. I was walking towards you from where I had just chained my bike—at that time I rode a bike to work—when I saw you. Though you and your mother never saw me. You must have been twelve years old. I could hear your voice. You said, Papa, I have two things to show you. The first thing is this. You pulled something out of the paper bag. It was a long ponytail of black hair. And the second thing is this! Then you ripped the hood off of your head. A year later, he asked me to start following you.

I see the man suddenly notice the blood on his own hands as he is eating. Ah, ah, he says. Sorry, sorry. Let me clean this. Do they have those wet wipes, like baby wipes? I say to him, They might, I’ll go check. He says, No, no, please, I’ll go. He stands, leaving his quarter-eaten Filet-o-Fish. I watch him leave. On the back of his track jacket, the word ESPAÑA.

He stops at the napkin station, searches. Ketchup, mustard, various packets, straws, spoons, forks, knives. He does not seem to find the wet wipes. He takes a handful of napkins. He turns his back to me, so that I will not see him spitting on his hand and wiping vigorously with the dry napkin. Then he makes his way back to me, still wiping. Sorry, he says. In his other hand he is holding at least seven unused napkins.

I ask the man why he would say yes to my father’s request. He has finished the sandwich and is now beginning to eat the fries. Again he offers me some. Again I decline.

Well, the simple reason is that my family owes him everything, of course. Our entire lives. You know who your father was in the Philippines. Maybe he had no more money when he came to the States, I don’t know about all of that, and I never asked. But he was still a very powerful and connected man. And many people owed him many things. Anyway, because of all these things, he knew that on such-and-such date, the military would be coming for such-and-such families. I don’t know if you’re aware of everything that was happening in that time. You are. Okay, well, yes. People who were part of NPA, especially; but even farmers, students, journalists, activistas. Anyway, my family was one of those families on the list. Because of my parents. My uncle was your father’s driver— maybe you don’t know that. Anyway, so your father sometimes came to the house and played pusoy with my father and my uncle and the neighbors. They always said about your father that he was so down-to-earth, he wasn’t snobby like the rest of his family, he was not a totally bad man. I was still a very young child at this time, you know. And your father was already quite a bit older than my own father. So he was like a god to me. With all his white hair. Is it true that his hair went all white when he was sixteen? That’s what he told me.

I say that my father told me the same thing.

He always gave me Belgian chocolate. The one that looks like shells. Once he gave me a book that I still have, even though I never really read it. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Haha, I still remember that title, because it was so strange! My father said he didn’t want to like your father, logically he was the enemy, but he admitted that he liked your father very much. People would say terrible things, but my father never joined in. He would say terrible things about other people, about some of your father’s friends and relatives, but not about your father, not even years later. Anyway, your father knew the very night that they would be coming for my father and mother. And so your father came to the house very early in the morning and said to my father, Take your wife and your child and come stay at our house tonight. I met your older sisters, or half-sisters, I suppose. They live in Vigan now, I heard. Have you ever met them? They were older than me. They were very bratty, they were ordering their maids around like princesses. I thought you might be like that, too, when I first heard about you. But you were not like that. Your older brother was a little nicer to me, but very quiet. Anyway, I remember that night. We stayed in your father’s house. We even stayed in one of the nice guest bedrooms! Your brother and I watched Lethal Weapon 2 in your house. Your brother gave me that candy, Kit Kat; that was the first time I ever tasted it. He was very nice to me, very polite. I’m sorry about him. I’m very sorry.

I say I never knew him.

Then the next morning, early in the morning, my uncle drove us to the airport in your father’s black Audi. I was in the front seat, my father and my mother were in the backseat, keeping their heads down. They told me it was a game. That day we took the plane to Canada. Your father was the one who paid for the tickets. From Vancouver we moved to San Diego. I don’t know how everything else happened after that. My father found a job as a postal worker, probably also through your father. Then, maybe five years later, after I graduated high school, my father told me that your father had also moved to California, only a few years after we had. But to the Bay Area. He said your father had gotten re-married to a much younger nurse who had already immigrated to the States fifteen years earlier, who used to care for one of his sisters. That he had gone through a lot; that he was poor now, in exile now. That he had a daughter with this nurse, born only a couple of years after we left the Philippines. The child was born in the States. My father had written a letter to your father, I don’t know what it said exactly, but it was probably another letter of thanks, offering his help if ever your father needed it, that kind of thing, I’m sure. Are you sure you don’t want any of the fries, I’m finishing it?

Now the song playing over the loudspeakers is Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.”

After I graduated high school in San Diego, I was just working the same part-time jobs I had worked at while in school. At Kinko’s, back when it was still Kinko’s. I hadn’t applied to any colleges, I didn’t want to go, and also my grades were very bad. I never liked school. But I told my father I wanted to try and go to college up north. I think he knew that I was lying, that I was going to look for your father. But I was eighteen now, he couldn’t stop me. I came to California with nothing, no job prospects, no friends, nothing. I was staying in a motel with some money that I had saved up from my part-time jobs. I had a girlfriend in high school but she broke up with me because she was going to Santa Clara University. So I could have visited her! But I didn’t, the thought didn’t even cross my mind. I was just thinking about how stupid I was to come all the way to San Jose—I had taken the Amtrak, it was my first time on a train. The train arrived three hours late in San Jose because of a freight derailment ahead of us. I still remember that. It was the first time I realized a train can go off its rails. It sounds stupid, but I really didn’t realize that could happen, I thought trains were glued onto the rails somehow. I was really stupid. I thought, I’ve come all this way just to see your father, but why? The last time I saw him I was maybe five years old, he probably won’t even remember me, it will be so awkward for him. And he has a whole new family, he left the Philippines, if he sees me maybe it’ll bring back bad memories, anyway, who do I think I am? So I stayed in that motel for the whole week. I almost didn’t go out at all. I only went out to a little convenience store next to the gas station to buy food. I just watched television. I watched Lois and Clark, right after America’s Funniest Home Videos. I watched The Wayans Bros. right before The Jamie Foxx Show. I watched Moesha. I liked that show. The girl was so pretty.

I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was starting to convince myself that the right thing to do would be to go back home, to get a job at the post office like my father, or to maybe try and go to community college. Then, at the end of the week, somebody knocked on the door, late at night. I thought, Who is this, it can’t be housekeeping. I opened the door. It was your father. He hugged me and said, Jun, Jun, you’re a young man now, my God.

I do not recognize the song they are playing now.

I invited him into the room. I was already crying a little bit. I remember he sat down on one of the armchairs, across from the bed. And I sat on the edge of the bed. He looked very elegant, even though I found out later that he was dressed in his security guard uniform. But it was a very smart look! He had on the black blazer, the gray dress pants, the white shirt, the navy blue cardigan. And he was wearing a red silk tie, and in the middle of that red silk tie was a gold tie-pin. He was wearing gold cufflinks. He said, You have to go back home, your father is worried about you, he wrote me a letter. I said, I’m not going back there, I want to try and go to school here. Your father said, Your father doesn’t believe you’re going to school here, he thinks you came to find me. I didn’t say anything. Your father said, He told me that you were coming to find me, that you were very hard-headed and wanted to know if you could be of any use to me at all. Still I said nothing. Then your father said, What do you want to do? What do you want to do with your life? Do you really want to stay and work here? I can find you a job if that’s what you want. Is that really what you want? Yes, I said. Yes, yes, yes. So your father found me a job at his own workplace.

For a while we both worked grave shift, but he didn’t enjoy working grave shift. He said if he worked grave shift, his daughter would stay up late all night to talk to him on the phone. Which I witnessed myself. At one in the morning, the phone would ring. And then you two would talk for hours. Talking about things I couldn’t understand, words I couldn’t even recognize. I was thinking, “What kind of child is this?” So he changed to the shift from three to eleven. And so I would be the one to relieve him, at eleven. I was able to rent out a little apartment with my savings plus that salary. All of the Exar security guards were Ilokanos, except for one Vietnamese guy who kept reminding everyone that he used to be a lawyer. Every other sentence out of his mouth began, Well, since I was a lawyer. So we were all speaking Ilokano to each other all the time. I sometimes wonder if all of us were given jobs by your father for that purpose. Nobody ever talked about their past. Your father especially. I think it was fun for him to be just another Ilokano security guard. We just talked about baseball when it was baseball season, basketball when it was basketball season, football when it was football season, where to buy the best fishing rods, what lotto numbers everyone was picking, whose daughter or son was getting into trouble. You would think we were all born in San Jose.

Now the song playing on the loudspeakers is the by Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow.”

I say, So then, how were you able to be there tonight, if you stopped following me five years ago?

The man looks at me. He starts wiping his hand again, though it is perfectly clean. It is even clean under the nails now; he must have scraped.

I heard from my father who heard from a co-worker who is the father of one of your old classmates that you were moving back to California, that you were going to do some research thing at Stanford again. It was purely by chance that I saw you again. I was in the pho place where I had eaten with your father the last time. I go there often. Well, a few weeks ago you came in with your mother, whom I had never seen there before. I hadn’t seen you in five years, and suddenly both of you came in. At first I could only see the twelve-year-old you, wearing a hood, holding a paper bag of your hair. I really thought I was seeing a ghost! But then I realized that you were really there, and you were an older version of yourself, even though you didn’t look that much older. Actually, you looked younger than you did in high school, somehow. Even now you look younger than you did in high school. You were wearing one of those jackets that made you look like Cary Grant—look, even today, you’re sort of wearing one—and you and your mom ate pho. I wasn’t alone, I was actually with a group of co-workers at that time. By that time I was working as a security guard at NASA. And you looked sad. I think you and your mom were fighting about something. At least, you weren’t really talking, but then again, you and your mom never talked that much. When you left, I left also. I actually held the door open for you! You said thank you very politely to me, without looking at me. Your mom didn’t recognize me of course, she never met me in person. Then I saw that your mom had driven you in your father’s old Mercedes. So without thinking, I followed you. But she didn’t bring you back home—or back to your home in San Jose, anyway. She brought you all the way to Palo Alto. So I drove, following you guys. She dropped you off at your apartment. I saw that you were living alone. And since that day, I’ve been following you, on and off. Not every day, not every evening. Just when I had the time, when I thought it might be helpful. Although this week, it was more like every day, I made more time this week. I just felt—this will sound strange—like my duty wasn’t over. Like I had to protect you again. It was just instinct.

And well, wasn’t it good I was there tonight, at least? I knew that man was planning on doing something to you, I knew it when I saw him in the bar, I knew it when I saw how he looked at you. I kept thinking to myself, if he puts something in her drink, if I see her lose consciousness. But of course you did the right thing. You walked away, you removed yourself from this kind of situation. But I thought he might follow you on your way home, and I was right. Men like that are the worst. And they deserve to be punished. I’m only sorry you had to see.

The man has now finished the Filet-O-Fish, the fries. He has gone through several napkins, yet there are still many napkins that remain. The used napkins he folds into tiny squares, then places these squares inside the now empty box. Then he lays the unused napkins atop the box. Then he places the box to the side. Now he begins sipping from a large container of Coca-Cola through a straw. He asks, Are you sure you don’t want something to drink? I say I am sure.

To tell you the truth, I never intended to meet you. I didn’t want to meet you, to talk to you, even to look at you face to face like this. I don’t think I ever even spoke to you once. To me you were really like a ghost, or like an alien from another world. I don’t mean that as an insult, I’m sorry if that sounds strange. But I didn’t even think of you as having an age. I’m surprised right now to look at you. You seem as young as you did in high school, but I also know that you’re older now, you’re a woman now, you’re not even that much younger than me. But I couldn’t even imagine you getting older. I just saw you eating pizza with your friends, getting into your aunt’s car after school, saying thank you so politely with your American voice, walking back to your dorm late from the library. The only voice of yours I could imagine was the voice on the telephone that I could hear next to me at work when your father would talk to you. And even that voice sounded like a ghost.

The McDonald’s is going to close soon. It is already quite late at night. The man has not quite finished his soft drink, but still he stops drinking, gathers the rest of his refuse in the other hand, and brings everything to the waste disposal area. When he comes back, I see that his pockets are somewhat bulging with new napkins.

He asks me, Were you planning on walking home? I say, Yes. He hesitates, then asks if I would prefer that he drive me home. I ask him if he is going to follow me anyway. He hesitates again, and then nods. I say he can drive me home, then, but I would like to make a stop on the way at a convenience store to pick up some things. He says, Of course.

The song playing on the loudspeakers now is Drake’s “Best I Ever Had,” but it is cut short. The McDonald’s is now closing.

We leave together. We are the last customers. Three men are mopping the floor. One of them opens the door for us, says, Have a good night. We both reply, Good night, at the same time.

The man’s car is a 1998 blue Honda Civic. I ask if this is the car my father bought for him. He says it is. He opens the door for me, quickly sweeps things—CDs, a sweatshirt, two empty potato chip bags—from the passenger seat to the backseat. He apologizes profusely for the mess. I say, It’s fine, thank you. When he turns on the engine, the radio turns on immediately. It is tuned to FM 96.5, KOIT Lite Rock. It is now playing, rather loudly, Mariah Carey’s “Emotions.” He apologizes again and reaches forward to turn the radio off, but I say, It’s fine. He nods and begins driving. I tell him the convenience store is very close to my apartment. He says he thinks he knows which one I’m talking about. We say nothing more to each other. The blue rosary hung on his rearview mirror is swaying.

He parks in front of the convenience store, which is indeed the one I had been talking about. I say, You can stay in the car. He says, No, of course I’ll accompany you. In the convenience store, a Chinese man and his wife are watching television behind the counter, in front of a wall of liquor bottles. A woman wearing goggles and a bikini is going to jump into a pit full of snakes.

I point behind them and ask for one bottle. The Chinese man asks for my driver’s license, which I show to him. He looks at the license. He looks at me. He looks at the license again. He returns the license to me, turns around to retrieve the bottle.

Behind me, the man says nothing, but I can feel his gaze. Next to me, another young man wearing sweatpants is filling out a Lotto form. The man comes up from behind me to place himself between the young man’s body and my own, clearing his throat as he does so. The young man continues filling in the bubbles on his lotto form, does not move or even look at either of us.

I pay for the bottle. The Chinese man asks me if I need a bag. I say I do not. His wife laughs at something on the television.

Walking back to the car, the man says, So you like whiskey. You really are your father’s daughter.

Before I can respond, he adds, By the way, I wanted to say that your Ilokano is pretty good. I didn’t expect that. I thought you would speak only English, maybe a little Tagalog. Since your mom isn’t Ilokana.

I say, Thank you, but it isn’t that good. He insists that it is very good.

Now the radio is playing the end of Gloria Estefan’s “Get On Your Feet.” The man does not have to drive very far to my apartment building. He parks next to my usual parking space, where my own car is still parked. He turns the engine off, but the radio is still playing.

Staring straight ahead, without looking at me, he says, I’m sorry, I really never meant to meet you, I never meant for you to find out about me. But when I saw what was happening tonight I had to step in; that was why I was doing all this, after all. I’m sorry I had to tell you all of this. But I hope I’ve explained myself. I hope you can understand, you can see why I’m doing what I’m doing. But now that you know, I have to confess to you—I can’t promise you that I won’t continue. Now I’m more certain than ever that this is what I must do. Your father asked me what I want to do with my life before, and I think this is it. I think this is it. I often wondered what my life was for. I wouldn’t even have a life if it weren’t for your father. You were the most precious thing in the world to him. It’s only logical that I would want to devote my life to protecting you. But please believe I will do everything in my power so that you will never notice me, you will never know I am there. It worked before, didn’t it? I will not do a thing to disrupt your life or hold you back or anything like that. I only want you to be safe. And I want to say, also, even though I have no right to say this—that I am proud of you. I am very proud of you. And I know your father is very proud of you. Your father would have been so proud of you. With all your accomplishments. You know I attended the Stanford graduation. I saw you on that stage.

Now the radio is playing Madonna’s “Into the Groove.”

What was it they were awarding you with? I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. But I knew that you had gotten some award. It was the last time I saw you, too, until a few weeks ago. Because a few months later you moved to England. I remember you. Your hair was down, for once. You were wearing high heels, which I never saw you wear before. You were sitting there all alone, with the other adults. And then you stood up at the podium, and gave your speech, which I also didn’t understand. I was sitting near the back, and you spoke so softly; and of course you know my English is only okay, even after all this time. But I knew you were being celebrated for something, for accomplishing great things, for being a great student, something, of course, which was not very surprising. Everyone was applauding. If your father had been able to be there, he would have been very proud. He would have been very, very proud of you. I know it must have been terrible for your family—so shortly before your graduation—it must have been difficult for you to enjoy your own graduation—but you know, I think he was there that day, watching you.

After his death I often thought I saw him. At work, in a crowd, at a movie theater, in a restaurant, driving a Mercedes on 101 South. Still in that black blazer, those gray dress pants, that red tie with the gold tie pin. I saw him waving at me, winking at me. The day of your graduation, I saw him again. But he wasn’t waving at me. I could only see his profile. His white hair. He was looking at you. Still looking so surprised by you. This child. This wonderful child. You know, your father spent a lot of time trying to—what is the word—to make reparations. I’m not even sure myself of the details, he never talked about them, and my father never did, either. Even what he did for my family must have been part of that. But you, you. When you were born. You changed everything. And you have done him so proud. Do you understand? You have done him so proud. You have done him so proud. Do you understand? Do you understand? Do you understand?

It is at this moment that I lift the bottle and smash it over the man’s head. Glass breaks in a shower over his head and shoulders, raining shards and whiskey from the top of his skull to his lap. The blow has knocked his head into the side window, but his hands are still frozen on the steering wheel. Now, with the splintered part of the bottle still in my hand, I begin to stab him in the throat, just above the collar of the Adidas track jacket, which is once again freshly bloodstained. His head resting against the window, the man continues to stare straight ahead, as though he is seeing someone else. As though he is listening to something someone else is telling him. He looks confused by this person’s speech. He looks as though he is trying to hear, but cannot quite make out the words. His eyes wide open in wonder and labor. Inside the car it begins to smell sweet. Then I am quiet. Then I am quiet. Then, I am quiet.

Elaine Castillo was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and now lives in England. Her writing can be found in PANK’S Queer Issue, > kill author, Everyday Genius, and Used Furniture Review. She has recently completed a novel called POSTCARD, about Sappho, migrants and detention centers in Europe. She blogs regularly for PANK, and at http://elainecastillo.tumblr.com/.

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How and Who and What and Why

The policeman is across the dinner table making notes. He chews his mustache between questions. The hairs bristle wetly. “One thing I notice is you’re white,” he says. “Do you think that’s important?”

“What?” I say. I reach across the table, take the pen from his hand, which is difficult to do in cuffs. The blunt end is nibbled and cracked. “Don’t write that down.”

“It’s only something I noticed,” says the policeman. “I’m just making a note of it.”

“Well,” I say, “Don’t.” I give the pen back.

The policeman apologizes. He rubs his whole face in one slow, stutter motion, leaving a streak of red skin the width of his palm. “I was just saying,” he says.

I remember to be kind. I reach for his shoulder, which is also awkward in cuffs. For a moment he lets me hold it. Then he shrugs me off. His ears have gone red too. It stings to disappoint me. “Go on,” I say. “It’s fine.”

The windows are all closed, the blinds and drapes as well, the lights off except for the one hanging over our heads. In the living room, separated from the kitchen only by the difference between linoleum faux-tile, there are no decorations, apart from a novelty phone that looks like a revolver, a vast DVD collection stacked on the carpet (heavy on crime television and noir), and several dozen photographs of me in my natural environs. In the photographs I am someone else, other, more beautiful. In the now I am myself.

He started watching me, he says, six months ago. It was winter. I was walking for the bus stop. I wore an orange parka, which made me stand out. I was easy to follow. I saw a wallet fallen on the ground. It was real leather. He could tell from the way it glowed as I brushed off the slush, like an alligator coming up out on a riverbank. There might have been a lot of money inside. Neither of us knows. He says I didn’t check inside. For my part, I don’t remember either way. He says I tapped the nearest man on his shoulder. I asked him was this his wallet. He looked very startled. I said, “I think you dropped it.”

He took it from my hand. He said, “Yes, this is mine.” We shared a moment. The man had a bushy mustache and thick, dark eyebrows. He was bald. What was left of his hair was bejeweled with slowly melting snow. He looked as if he had been, a moment before, extremely unhappy, and was now undecided about how he should feel. He took the wallet. Our gloved hands touched. They did not, presumably, feel anything of each other, except the fact of a cool, distant pressure. He put the wallet back in his pocket. He thanked me. He turned his back on me, and we continued walking in the same direction, his body three and then five feet in front of mine, hunched inside his charcoal overcoat as if to shield him from my kindness. With some effort, he made the gap between us grow. We were headed to the same bus stop. When I arrived, several minutes after him, he did not look at me. He had returned to his sadness. I deferred to his silence.

This is according to the policeman. I don’t remember any of it. Not the wallet, not its owner.

The thing that impressed the policeman most, the thing that made him follow me, was I didn’t check to see if it was really his wallet. I never even seemed to question it. He might have been anyone. The policeman followed the bus as far as he could on his bike. He lost me.

The policeman sees I’m looking at his mess. The pizza boxes on the floor. There are also soda cans, some empty, some tipped onto their sides and spattered over tile. Two-liter bottles piled. Candy wrappers and Chinese takeout cartons. Spent jug of chocolate milk. Something somewhere in the apartment’s rotting. Even when I try I cannot hear his fridge run.

“Sorry for all this,” he says. He doesn’t mean any of the things he should be sorry about. “I meant to clean up before.” He gathers garbage under one arm. “I guess you keep your place spotless.”

“Pretty clean I guess.”

He struggles, kneeling on the floor, to retrieve and open a Hefty bag with one hand while the other’s full of trash. “I’m sorry,” he says again. Loose items tumble out around him. His uniform gets smeared and scuzzed. He asks me, “Do you think cleanliness is important?”

“I guess it is,” I say. “I can’t relax in a dirty room.”

“Clean environment makes a clean mind?” asks the policeman. “Idle hands the devil’s playground? Garbage in, garbage out?” He picks up remainders, drops them in the bag, ties it off, though mostly empty.

“Could be,” I say.

Now the walls are really bugging me. He can see me looking at them. He can see how the stains make me feel. His face goes red again. His ears struggle to find new homes on his head as the muscles and bones beneath grind. “I’m not washing my goddamn walls for you,” he says. “Just so you can be comfortable.”

“I never asked you to,” I say.

“You’re supposed to be nice.”

“I’m trying to be nice.”

He gets a soda from the fridge and plops it down in front of me. “Then shut the fuck up.”

I struggle to open the soda for myself. The cuffs keep sliding down my wrists and onto my hands. The can is room temperature. The policeman watches me try. He says, “You know you’re a guest in my home.” He says, “Maybe I misjudged you.”

I keep working on my can.

The policeman says he’s sorry. He pops the tab. It fizzes over a little. He wipes the sweet bubbles away with his finger and nudges it toward me. He says he’s sorry. Go on, he says. “Tell me all your secrets.”

He says he saw me hold the door once for one hundred consecutive people. I was on my way into the library. I was still wearing my orange parka though the weather was warming. He was in a patrol car across the street. For a second he thought I saw him so he ducked out of sight. If I saw him then I don’t remember. When he came back up out of hiding I was holding the door for some people leaving a well-attended lecture. It was a trickle at first, and I could have gone inside out of the relative cold without being rude, but I didn’t. I was patient and polite without drawing attention. When people thanked me I nodded. I waved them on through. Then there were more leaving. It was a rush. A child wiped something from his nose on my coat in passing. I pretended not to notice. A couple argued loudly about the lecture. They were shouting at each other. It was over evolution. He said it was too goddamn depressing. She argued for the majesty of emergent properties. He asked her what in fuck that even meant when he was talking about God. She said that was emergent, too. I let them pass. When there was no one else I went inside, removing my parka.

He followed me inside. That is, he followed me inside if we allow the premise of my going to the library, a trip I don’t remember. He found me on the second floor among the novels. I was reading The Rise of Silas Lapham, if the policeman is to be believed. This is, he says, the story of a man who becomes very rich selling paint. It is a classic of American realism. I appeared deeply moved. My parka was folded under my seat.

“Are books necessary?” asks the policeman. He means morally.

I tell him they are not necessary. He writes it down.

“Is there certain music you listen to?”

I tell him I like jazz. He looks skeptical; he writes it down.

He asks about my diet. I tell him I mostly eat the usual junk. (Ham sandwiches, instant mashed potatoes, macaroni cheese, protein bars, M&Ms, microwave meals. Fridays happy hour sushi.) To drink the soda requires lifting both my hands to my face in addition to the can. I am hoping that if I continue to do this with sufficient ostentatious awkwardness he will undo the cuffs.

He asks about exercise. I tell him I walk everywhere, but that I don’t go out often. He says he knows. He says he wishes he could have my body. He gestures at his body. It is a hard, blocky thing, marbled heavily with fat. It is a tall body. His face’s features all seem to be pushed forward, as if crowding his nose. The mustache is perhaps designed to mitigate the effect. I have been looking too long: his eyes drift down to the table. Crossed arms.

I ask him what he’ll do with all this information.

He asks me have I heard of Guantánamo bay. He says, “I’ve got a theory.” He tells me about torture. I dimly remember reading what he’s saying. He has a very practical outlook, he says. Torture hasn’t worked. “The inverse might, though. What if we could make better people by manipulating their environment, their routines? What if we could make them more like you?”

I ask him isn’t that what prisons do.

I was coming out of the grocery store with all my shopping. I started to unload my cart. A man approached me in the dark. I could see his clothes were really filthy. They were some kind of coverall, blue beneath the muck. He was very recently shaved, his beard and his head, probably with an electric in some gas station restroom. Probably he’d left a heap of hair in the sink like a new pet for the staff. He asked me could I help him please. I asked him what he needed. He said it was money.

“How much?” I asked.

He said three hundred dollars. This was, coincidentally, the most an ATM would give me in one day. I asked him what he needed three hundred dollars for. Meanwhile he was beginning to unload my cart into my car. I looked annoyed, possibly because he was putting things in the wrong order or stacking them too roughly, the policeman speculates. I asked him why he needed thee hundred dollars.

He said that if he had three hundred more dollars he could pay the rent and then his family would have somewhere to sleep tonight. He told me he could do work around my home or repair my car to pay me back. He said, “I’m real handy.”

I said okay, but I would give him the money for free. I told him to follow me to the ATM. He walked behind me. I left my food sitting in the car, though there was ice cream and milk as well as other things could spoil sitting in the trunk. I took the money out. I gave it to the stranger. He said, “God bless you.” I reached out my hand and waited for him to take it. He said, “No thanks. I’m not fit to touch.”

He walked away, and left me there alone, and I went back to my car.

This is all according to the policeman. In this case I do remember the event, but different. As I recall I felt I was being threatened by the stranger, though I cannot recall his showing a weapon or otherwise making a threat. It may have been something in his voice, or the grease that ringed his eyes. I did take him to the ATM but that was not my idea. I didn’t have three hundred dollars for a stranger. Never have.

I did see the policeman this time, and I saw that he was watching me across the street. This was at the ATM. I kept waiting for him to do something. He averted his eyes whenever I looked. He was tossing things on the ground: small plastic bags filled with white powder, switchblades, pill bottles, counterfeit cash, a handgun, syringes. I decided I was being tested.

When I ask the policeman what he was doing that night he asks me do I read the news. He says it is the latest trend in law enforcement. You throw dangerous, illegal, and fascinating materials on the ground. You go and hide and wait. When someone bends to pick something up, you arrest the person, who has now become a perpetrator, or you shoot them, depending on the item’s criminality. “Innovation,” he says, “is essential.”

I ask him is that legal.

He tells me not to tell him how to do his job.

He asks me, “What’s your morning routine?”

“I’m not sure,” I say.

“Breakfast?”

“Pop-tarts.”

“Shower?”

“Always.”

“Do you listen to the radio at all?” he asks me.

I ask him what difference it makes if I listen to the radio sometimes. He says he’ll be the judge of that. “No,” I say. “I don’t listen to the radio at all. In fact I hate it.”

He says, “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me, then.” He says, “I listen a lot. Especially oldies.”

He says, “Next best thing to time travel.”

He says, “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me.”

For a moment he stops taking notes, twists hair at the back of his neck between his fingers till the hair comes out.

I saw him more often thereafter. He was sometimes in his car, sometimes on foot, sometimes circling my block on his bike. His uniform was black some days and others it was blue. He rose in the ranks, I think, or in any case accrued new silver pins for his pockets, cuffs, and collar. I wanted several times to invite him into my apartment and take his hat. I would hang it on my much-neglected hat rack and ask him what was wrong. I could see he was worried. Most of the time though I was afraid of him, and I was tempted, stupidly, to call the cops. I could see he was mean and small. He adjusted the waistband of his pants too often. He always had to retie his shoes. I don’t know why that bothered me. One day he pushed a kid down on the pavement. The kid had touched his car and maybe he looked like trouble, but he wasn’t. He just sat there on the pavement and stared at the policeman through the spread of his scraped, bleeding knees.

I never saw the policeman’s camera. I did, however, feel observed. I began to watch myself for symptoms of criminality. I stopped littering. I decided to be more careful about what I did and saw online. I stopped burning mix CD’s for friends, stopped stealing mp3s, stopped listening to the ones I’d already stolen. Deleted them from my computer. Began to regard my friends with suspicion. Perhaps he thought I was part of a drug ring, perhaps someone I knew really was. Maybe I was somehow their mule. I watched my bag more closely at the gym. I studied their faces for sin. They studied me, too, and I wondered if he was also watching them, or if they had their own police to keep them straight.

The night before he came for me I broke contact with my brother. This was like saying goodbye to a girl. We did it at a bar to keep things professional. I bought the first pitcher and then he let me buy the second. The policeman was watching from a table in the corner, hat occupying the space beside him but otherwise in uniform, which I do not think is permitted in a bar. Or perhaps it’s just nobody does it. I was glad and nervous to have him there because I thought my brother might want to fight me, or I might want to fight him.

After the second pitcher was drunk and we had talked through all our shared interests (DC comics, especially Green Lantern, the Sox, the stock market neither of us had a stake in) it came to the point.

I said, “I don’t think I want to see you anymore.”

My brother looks a lot like me. When when he gets emotional he looks like I do when I practice emotions in the mirror. Just now he looked like me pretending to feel stricken.

“Forever?” he said.

“For a while.” I tried and failed to get a little more out of my glass. It was only a thin layer of foam at the bottom. “Maybe two, three decades.”

“We’ll be old men,” he said.

I told him that’s what I was counting on.

He said he valued me as a brother and a friend. He looked like me pretending to be near tears. He asked me what he did.

“Don’t play stupid,” I said. Our father was dead. We disagreed about our father.

“You should have spoken at the funeral,” he said. “If we’re not going to see each other anymore then I’m just going to say it.”

“You already said it,” I told him. I wanted badly to touch his hand, so I didn’t.

“I know I did but then I stopped, but now I’m just going to say it if we aren’t going to see each other anymore, I’ll say you should have spoken at the funeral, and you don’t deserve his money.”

“He should have given it to you?”

“He should have given it to me.”

“I’m the one he hit,” I said. “I deserved it.”

“It was one time,” says my brother, and now he looks like me pretending to be outraged. “You rode that for all it was worth, though, didn’t you? And in the end he gave you everything, because you convinced him you deserved everything, and you gave him nothing back, and you gave nothing up.”

“Well,” I said. “I guess I’m a shit, then.”

He said, “I’ll drink to that.” But there was nothing in his cup and he didn’t get up. I saw that he meant for me to buy another pitcher. I saw that he was trying to spend my inheritance, that he meant to drink it. I got the pitcher anyway. When he said he wanted shots I bought us good tequila. My brother tried to ask me why I would be this way to him, why I would do this, why I wouldn’t see him anymore, but I was paying for everything so I didn’t see why I should have to talk as well. The policeman drank more when we drank more, but he never seemed to feel it. Like it disappeared inside him. He kept shifting in his seat as if it itched him.

When we were done and I had settled the tab I followed my brother out to the parking lot. He was done trying to talk to me, which was how I wanted it. His back was turned on me. I touched it like I wanted to return his wallet. He turned around with a face like the face I make in the mirror when I pretend I am going to explode.

I wrapped my arms around him. It was like a hug if a hug were nothing to do with love. If it were only a way of making a person stand in one place, trapped, for as long as you wanted him there, then that’s what I did. He put his chin on my shoulder, which required lifting his eyes from the ground, because I am taller. His heels left the ground.

I watched him go.

The next day the policeman came for me as I was leaving my apartment. He had his handcuffs out and open. I almost ran. He asked for my hands. I gave them to him, I asked him what was wrong. He said, “You’re the best person I’ve ever known.” The way he said it was reverent but also resentful. He loved me and he hated me for it. He touched my face. I said I thought that was inappropriate. He said I was right. I asked him was he going to read me my rights. He said I was under arrest, and I had the right to stay that way, and to talk with him. He loaded me up in the car – the backseat, like a criminal – and took me home to his apartment.

On the way he told me what he’d seen me do, about these and other things. How kind I was, how generous, how full of human fellow feeling. It sounded like another person, one I didn’t recognize. I told him I was stupid and ugly inside. I told him what I did to my brother even though he saw it. I told him he had me all wrong.

He told me how much he admired me. How he was determined to make the world look more like me.

His praises were punctuated, though, by screaming – obscenities hurled at other drivers, at people he saw on the street whose look he didn’t like, at his car itself. He kept the windows shut and so they couldn’t hear him, but I did, and I knew that whatever kind of man I was the policeman was not kind.

I ask him when he’s going to let me go, or at least undo the cuffs. He says soon enough. He asks me do I want another soda. I tell him no but then I regret it; I’m thirsty.

He says, “Tell me about your childhood.”

I lie about my childhood because I don’t want him to think being hit will make little boys grow up into kind men, though sometimes I believe this myself.

He says, “Tell me about work.”

I tell him my job requires no vital energies, no creativity, no intelligence at all. He writes it down.

He says, “Are you religious?”

I tell him I know and like several deeply religious people.

He asks me do I manage money well. I tell him I am pretty good with money.

He says, “I’m terrible with money.” He says, “That’s the trouble with living on takeout, and with living alone. You spend so much money just eating, and then you spend the rest trying to feel less alone.” He says I make him feel less alone. He does not ask me if I like him too, probably because he knows I don’t.

In his apartment the walls are white, though stained with condiments and pencil lead. There are clots of something in the carpet, which is twisted into knots and knobs by the filth. There are no dishes in the sink, but the garbage and the counters are loaded up with paper plates. There are picture frames filled with unappealing people on the fridge, the end tables, and so on. These people are I guess his family. They peel potatoes. They hold hands. This home is an ugly home. His body is an ugly body. Does he feel the way I feel inside his home and body.

“I am an ugly, awful man,” he says, “and there are reasons. There are always reasons for everything and everyone, and how they are, and where. That’s the first thing cons will teach you. It’s not their fault. There are reasons. So why should it be mine? How can I fix me? How can I make my heart a good, warm thing? How can I be healthy again? How can I love, and be loved?”

He waits for my answer, chewed-to-shit pen poised over the notepad, eyes fixed on the table, humble as a slanted rock resembling a downcast face.

When he brought me up to his apartment, the first thing he did was show me his photos. He had hung them up on the living room walls behind his television set, between the windows, and so on. Some of them were normal sizes. Some of them were blown up very large. It was me in the photos. It was not a me I recognized.

There I was handing the wallet to the stranger. My face was soft. It was just as the policeman described it.

“No,” I said, “this isn’t me. I am a scum.” And I meant it. And I am a scum.

There I was holding the library door as a hundred people filed out. There I was, inside, orange parka folded up beneath my chair, reading The Rise of Silas Lapham, which I do not remember.

And other things I have not said here.

There I was giving the stranger my $300. I looked glad to do it. There I was reaching out to shake his hand. I looked like I look in the mirror, pretending to be good and brave and true.

“No,” I said, “he made me do that. And I never tried to give my hand.”

“No,” I said, “I am a shit.” And I meant it, and I am a shit. The photos don’t prove otherwise. I don’t know what they prove. They are up there on his wall, and I am down here, and we are separate things. I tried to explain but he wouldn’t hear me.

He said, “Please, tell me how you are you.” He was sweating. I could smell it. I wanted to tell him he made me think of a cat box.

There I was in the parking lot with my brother, his heels lifted from the pavement, his head tilted up to hook his chin over my shoulder. I had assumed he was crying or angry or ill. I had assumed his heart was broken. There, in the picture, he looked relieved. I could not see my face in the picture, only my back, hard and miserable as I remember. I could see my brother’s face, and he looked like I feel when I am happy, when I’m at peace, when I know I’ve done good.

Mike Meginnis has stories, poetry and essays published or forthcoming in Hobart, The Lifted Brow, The Collagist, elimae, Smokelong Quarterly, > Kill Author, Dark Sky Magazine, and others. He currently serves as a managing editor of Puerto del Sol, and co-edits Uncanny Valley with his wife, Tracy Bowling.

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What's In a Name

Ebony hated her name, and she had good reason. I never liked it much, either. But anyway, Ebony really despised the being called “Ebony.” It was too obvious, too seventies, too Black-Is-Beautiful. What was she supposed to do, marry some dude named Obsidian or some shit and have two kids, Topaz and Mahogany? At least her mother didn’t name her “Mahogany,” but then, I don’t think that movie was out yet when Ebony was born. And Helen did really like that magazine. Whatever the case, the droning falsetto and off-key choruses of the Stevie Wonder-Paul McCartney duet never ceased. It was as though people just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make a bad joke that had been made hundreds of times before. If someone had at least been original in making fun of her name, perhaps Ebony wouldn’t have been as irritated.

But beyond the benign teasing was the more sinister ridicule—“You so black you Ebony!”—that had driven her crazy. Her name proposed too convenient a putdown for the children at her elementary school to ignore, black children who were so angry and frustrated with being inside their own skins that their only relief was the humiliation of someone darker than they. The truth was that Ebony wasn’t really that dark-skinned. And as far as she was concerned, it was better to be dark-skinned than light anyway. This was a lesson she had learned early.

When she was eight or nine, Ebony overheard her grandmother Dorothy gossiping with a neighbor about a young woman in the downstairs apartments who had recently had a baby boy. She wouldn’t tell anyone who the father was, but the kid had straight, ginger hair and was so light-skinned, he looked like a white child.

“You know that baby’s daddy is white,” Ebony’s grandmother said, “and if the daddy ain’t white, then one of the daddy’s parents has to be because that baby’s mama is dark as tar. And if that little boy don’t get no darker, you know he’s gonna have a hard row to hoe, especially with all that hair.

“One thing I can say for my grandbaby is that she’s a pretty color, a pretty brown color. Not too dark, and not too light, neither, like some of these kids running around here who don’t know whether they black or white, looking all washed out and dingy. Ebony’s a pretty brown baby. At least her mama got that right.”

Yeah, her mama did get that right. Ebony was a pretty brown baby, and she grew up to be a beautiful black woman with smooth skin and bright eyes the color of espresso. As for whether or not giving birth to a pretty brown baby was the only thing her mother Helen ever got right, that would depend on who you’ve been talking to.

Ebony often wondered if any of the “you-so-black” kids from her elementary school had ever really looked at the keys on the old music room piano, really examined them. To Ebony, the black keys had always seemed so much warmer to the touch, so much smoother and more substantial than the worn and chipped ivory ones that you could easily cut your hand on if you weren’t careful.

Many years later, after Ebony had fled Chicago for New York City, she heard from her grandmother about the fate of that the little boy with the light skin and the red hair—he was called Patrick Delano Williams, the latter his mother’s last name, his paternity still undetermined, though whispers about his mother carrying on with an Irish boy from the west side hadn’t died down any. He’d been sent to live with an aunt who was a live-in housekeeper for a white family in the suburbs. After so much harassment over his mystery father, his hair, which was now curly and still very red, and his pale complexion, this seemed liked the best option for him. But he would never make peace with living in his own skin—especially surrounded by white kinds who took every opportunity to remind him that regardless of his appearance, he wasn’t one of them. At sixteen, he ran away from the home his aunt had kindly provided for him; it was rumored that he, like Ebony, had gone to New York.

“If you meet some light-skinned man with freckles, that might be Patrick,” her grandmother had said.

As Ebony walked through the city, it sometimes occurred to her that they might run into each other on the street, on a bus, on the subway. And that if they did see one another, she might well mistake him for just another white man on his way to work; that if they did see one another, he might recognize her as the girl who was so black she was Ebony and pretend he didn’t know her.

Lauren Wheeler writes poetry, fiction, and what happens when they rub up against each other. She lives with her fiancé and a wayward pit bull in the Bay Area and is expecting her first book of poetry in September 2011 on Manic D Press.

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Drunk Dynamite Fishing

Gnawed to pulp and far away I might be able to see what I look like from a distance and I want to return battered enough not to remember so I have to do it again.

“If you go, I might not be here when you get back.”

“If. ‘If’ I get back.”

The verb “to marry” also means “to hunt” in the language of the country I am visiting, and all the drug and gang violence there has her chewing meat off her lips even though she is vegetarian.

Her mom mailed a newspaper clipping about a bombing that killed a few tourists.

“People still clip articles? And lick envelopes?”

Explosions are nice.

“Please don’t go.”

“Nobody is safe anywhere.”

“I guess I better prepare to mourn.”

She presses a finger to a lip and eats more flesh.

“That could be fun. People would feel sorry for me and I could drink as much as I want without anyone saying anything.”

Lining: polished precious metal of some kind.

“Promise me you won’t fuck any strippers, okay?”

I wonder why she does not include hookers and tourists and other types of women on the Cannot Fuck List.

She fucks me goodbye.

Even without several men who were forbidden to go by women, there are so many of us in this group that we almost fill the propeller plane. High in the air, drunk and loud, we make the few who are not in our group ponder the emergency exit. We are on the day’s only flight to a city by the ocean for a celebration. Our friend will be hunted soon.

One of us is wearing a white linen suit with a purple dress shirt and flip-flops. He sings the letters in my name like they are a song. He offers a stock tip for a business his company took over.

“I had to step in and fire some people, including the CEO. Worst day of my life. Well, my professional life.”

“What was the worst day of your regular life?”

“Actually, my life has been pretty awesome. Maybe that was the worst day of my regular life, too.”

We are fat enough as a group that we could rock the plane if we stood up and jumped to one side at the same time and I suggest this but too many of us are old enough to be satisfied with the thought.

I sneeze several times fast and nobody says bless you. That is not safe for anyone. A little girl a few seats up hangs over the back of her seat and stares at me. Her eyes are crossed a bit and spread far apart. Teeth crooked. Her face is a mess in a cute way. One of us says she is bad luck, another says she is good luck. She does not stop staring.

One of us says whores are thirty bucks and we should hire a gaggle of them to hang out with us by the pool and I wonder why he would pay women to hang out with him rather than to fuck him. Another one of us says he bought a government trailer at an auction. The trailers were used by people after a hurricane destroyed the coast like no drug cartel ever could.

“You’d stick your nose in most of them and be like, ‘Next!’”

“I used that method to meet my wife.”

“Got it really cheap. It’s in great shape, doesn’t smell like shit. The toilet is busted.”

Oh, to be broke and pissed upon.

The flight attendant has colorful buttons on his suspenders and he is named after the son of the Christian god. People in the country we are from do not name their children after the son of the Christian god. We empty his drink cart of every beer can and airplane bottle, and if he would have turned water into wine, we would have drank that, too. Nobody touches the bags of premixed mojitos and pomegranate martinis. I ponder the emergency exit and my ability to fly.

Some of the guys are playing a game on a computer. It is based on a television show that surveys people. Families guess the top answers. The survey: Name a pet that does not live very long. Top answer: goldfish. Always moist with a mantra for a memory and bubbles that pop om mani padme hum. The pet that nobody could guess? Housefly. Number four answer. Maybe they surveyed people who lost their homes and had to live in the disaster trailers.

We have to fill out a form to be allowed into the country. Our cell phones will not work there because we will not pay extortionist international rates. No email, no texts, no communication with someone who may or may not be there when I get back. If. If.

“Country of residence: Boning.”

I keep thinking I have to shit but it is just gas. A flatulent smorgasbord. Nobody says anything.

The brother of the man who will be hunted tells a story about his first blowjob. It was in the city we are flying to. He was thirteen and he snuck into a strip club and went into a back room. The brothers were born in that country. The one who will be hunted was a star there when he was a baby. He modeled diapers on television and on billboards in one of the biggest cities in the world.

“I hope she still works there. Her name began with an X.”

The plane flies low through the night over bright cities, veins of glittering silver and gold. It is obvious when we cross into foreign air. City lights are sparse, street lamps farther apart, fewer people wasting watts. Empty roads glow incandescent and halogen. Lighting flashes, a distant storm, and one bright star shines high in the black sky.

“Hey! There’s no box under ‘reason for visit’ for bone-a-thon!”

We land and I grab my things from the chair pocket and I find a barf bag. I thought that went out with newspaper clippings but I snatch it.

“This will come in handy later.”

We check into a pink hotel, which is hosting a plastic surgeon convention. The doctors’ wives look like experiments gone wrong. Many people die every year from botched plastic surgery in our country. Even more must die here.

“None of these women’s pants have pockets. What the fuck is up with that? Not one of them!”

Later. Many beers and rums and whiskeys later. A nightclub with a live band, big horn section and everything, and lots of fat girls dancing alone until they see us. The language barrier is good. No fakery like any of us gives a shit what the other has to say. They are not on her Cannot Fuck List but they are on my Cannot Fuck List.

Drinks. Hip swivels. Dips. Sweat.

Glasses break and more bottles arrive and we get dirty looks from short guys with big belt buckles who do not like the invasion of their territory by foreign interests. I see an ankle holster. One of us who lives here and speaks their language says they are gangsters. We try to avoid eye contact. We only dance with the fattest unattended women.

The guy in the white linen suit does not look well. His cheeks fill up and his eyes bug out and I step aside because I am too drunk to remember the barf bag in my pocket and he pukes on the shoes of a short, big-belt-buckled dude who hisses at us and balls his fists and hurricane trailers explode in my head but there is no violence. Apologies in another language, a bottle on us. We drink. We sweat.

We wake up when we wake up. Dark clouds. We splash and drink in the rain-drop-rippled pool. The rain becomes mist when it gets dark. Waiters push tables together to accommodate our group for a meal in the middle of a colonial town square. The street merchants are worse than mosquitoes.

“I hate weather.”

“What kind?”

“All of it. Rain, sunshine, all of it.”

I like all of it, tornadoes and blizzards and rainbows and locust and typhoons and droughts and floods and butterflies and breeze that resurrects the tiny hairs on the back of my neck that I forget I have.

Our glasses are filled with misshapen, clear ice cubes. The water here is dangerous for foreigners, especially the ones who forget that ice is made of water. The cubes are bigger than the cubes back home. I pluck one from my drink and kiss it all over and pop it in and out of my mouth and hold it up and stare at the warped world twisted inside its smooth edges and I look for a door. It drips down my arm and feels good and I balance the cube on my head and cool trails of water melt down my neck and face and it stays on my head until the hot night air licks it to vapor and the world forgets it ever existed.

Hammock vendors, so many of them. I have never seen anyone ever ever ever buy a hammock. We are all drunk. One of us buys a hammock. Another one of us thinks this is a great idea and buys two. People have died in tragic hammock malfunctions.

A man waves carved wooden horses in our faces.

“You know, come to think of it, I am running low on wooden horses.”

A man with gold teeth peddles fake designer sunglasses and knock-off watches. Another sells bracelets he makes by hand out of thread and he customizes each with a name or saying. His hands are machine fast and the muscles in his forearms are cables. He whips the thread around with precision, no wasted moves or moments. He bends and twists the bracelet, and when he is done he flicks a lighter and burns the ends like wicks to fuse everything in place and I do the math: the amount of minutes it takes per bracelet times the amount he charges times a guess at how many he makes each night minus supplies. It is not much. He makes many bracelets for us, and we write the words on napkins because there is no translation for our filthy slang.

“Seventy-eight percent of this country’s economy is based on trinkets.”

I wonder what I make for this world that is useful, other than problems for other people.

A woman with no pockets on her pants sells something you cannot get back home. She clangs metal rods together and walks around our tables. The rods are attached to a small battery with a knob. She hands a metal rod to one of us and the other metal rod to another one of us. We all hold hands and she cranks up the voltage and it pulses through our arms. Teeth grit. Someone could die.

One of us lets go and the circuit is broken. We hold hands again and repeat this until everyone drops out but two guys. It is a showdown, me versus him. She turns the voltage so high we cannot let go of each other’s hands because our arms are convulsing, fingernails digging into each other’s skin, neck veins thick. I had decided before we started that I was not letting go until my brains boiled and letting go is never an option once pain surges with pride and becomes pleasure.

“Stop!”

A man sells a whistle that sounds like a cat crying in a dark alley. Five of us buy whistles. Cats crying in a dark alley.

The price of anything is less than an afterthought.

A little girl with dirt on her face holds up a cup.

“What do you want? Food?”

She stares.

“How about some ice?”

She runs away.

“I wish I could have offered her more. Oh, wait. I could have!”

Nobody says anything. More bottles arrive.

A one-man band plays a song. He clangs a cowbell, thumps a drum, blows a harmonica. At least there is no accordion. Nobody drops anything in his hat and he begs for a can of soda.

“Let’s go fishing tomorrow — with dynamite! That’d be awesome. And you’re not allowed on the boat unless you’re wasted.”

The only difference between here and home is that everything here is lesser.

We ride a charted bus everywhere. The bus does not have air conditioning and is always late picking us up, sometimes by hours, and we drink communist rum while we wait in the hotel lobby.

Exposed bolts hold everything in place on the bus, and empty beer cans roll in the aisle and the door is always open in case anyone wants to fall off and we sing and yell and rumble and splash down dark puddled streets and sometimes a moment becomes memory.

The rain stops in the afternoon and I think I see a grey rainbow but I do not say anything to anyone and we drink and throw a ball in the pool for hours.

There are no people with the same skin color as me at the hotel or anywhere except in our group. Grey skies are dangerous. My skin color changes. I am a goldfish in unexpected expected places. Hat needed. Overpriced hotel sunscreen. The ocean is brown even when the weather is nice.

Everything is slick and I walk to the toilet by the pool. I slip and almost fall and my back could go out or I could split my head open on the cement and maybe no one would hear me fall and I would drown in a pool of blood or puke. My wet ass slides on the toilet seat. Exposed bolts jut out everywhere, not just on the bus. I scrape some skin off a finger reaching for toilet paper. Not a cut, a peeling-off-of, a divot. This place is dangerous after all and I feel better.

Couples and families walk on rain-washed beaches. Street musicians. Architecture. Vendors everywhere. Our group is so big we change whatever we walk into, into something other than itself.

We take over a tiny bar to watch this nation’s team lose to a smaller, less respected country on a soggy grass field. One of us who lives here tries to end the suffering of the defeat by telling a story about his hobby. He fucks whores but does not pay them. He and a friend took two whores to a hotel. They fucked the whores. There was a Jacuzzi in the bathroom. They told the whores to get in while they got more drinks and ice. The whores sunk into the Jacuzzi naked and giggling. The guys stuffed the whores’ clothes into pillowcases on the bed, stole their purses and ran.

This city is not a big city. Months later, one of the whores spotted him at a bar while he was with his girlfriend. She pounded on him with her fists and screamed: “You fucked us in the ass and stole our clothes and our money and we were stranded, you drooling jerk!”

But she did not say drooling jerk, she said a single word in her language that does not translate well into our language, and is much harsher than that. He tried to block the whore’s punches and said: “No! That’s not true! Honey, I swear I didn’t steal their clothes! I hid them in the pillows!”

Our tab would have been huge in our country but even with the tip it feels almost free. People from this country do not tip and we make it rain gratuity and it feels generous and apologetic and kind and unintentionally ostentatious.

“If you were born here, your life would be totally different.”

“Yeah, you could be slinging hammocks.”

“Glad I fell out of the right vagina.”

People here work hard for very little and we work not hard for very much and why is that?

Another nightclub. Live bands and a deejay. We hear a lot of music we listen to back home. All of us are drunk and tired and some of us have skin that burns. Others peel off, go back to the hotel. Eyelids sag. The deejay spins a ridiculous song by a terrible group. Everyone chants the lyrics like mad monks. The song instructs us to feel good, like it is an obligation.

“I know you want to hate the motherfuckers singing this song but look what they did. These idiots were about to fall asleep and poop their pants and now they are throwing their hands in the air and dancing.”

Hating this music seems suddenly pointless, but so does liking it.

Somebody buys a tray of shots and the waiter lights them on fire and there seems to be a message in that. I imagine the place in flames, people screaming. We drink the shots without blowing them out and I do not even burn my lip.

The bathroom is a mess. When locals wipe their asses, they put the smeared toilet paper in the trash can instead of flushing because of the poor sewage system. The trash can is overflowing with shit paper. Shit transmits hepatitis and polio and that is why I do not eat her ass even if she wipes aggressively and flushes the paper. Feces transmit heartworms, too, or maybe that is only from dog shit.

On the bus, everyone sings a song about an attempted rape and laughs. It is funnier than it sounds. We are traveling to find the woman whose name begins with X. Someone lights a joint. Most of the windows are down in the rain.

A military vehicle stops next to us at a stop sign, but it does not say “STOP.” Men in the back of the truck have automatic rifles and black masks and no cover to stay dry. They could just as easily be criminals.

I aim my cut finger out the window like a pistol and lock a soldier in my sights and he looks at me and I stare back and pull the invisible trigger and make a sound like a child’s bullet. They could empty their clips into us and have cause. The smell of marijuana is as strong as the taste of blood when I suck my finger gun and put it back in its imaginary holster, but maybe the rain and the masks keep the soldiers from catching a whiff, or maybe they smell it and are too wet too give a shit even though they are fighting the same people who probably grew and sold the weed that is being puffed.

Anger is almost always useless.

The woman whose name begins with X is not at the strip club. Someone in a penis costume wanders around while women take their clothes off and take men by the hand into back rooms. The penis costume has great abs.

“How many crunches does your cock have to do to get an eight-pack like that?”

All the strippers except one have horrible boob jobs and the men who cut them up are probably sleeping at our hotel. The man we are celebrating hates fake tits and also has a strict NBR policy: No Back Room. Strip clubs here only offer lap dances in back rooms. They offer other things back there, too.

A woman in a glittering bikini grabs my hand and motions to the back and I shake my head and she says something I do not understand and one of us shoves me on the shoulder and says to get going, she likes me. Of course she does. She is a pro and her tits are real and I think of things I will not do to her.

One of us craps his pants and leaves. He ate a tiny, potent pepper on a dare and flies home in the morning. The newspaper clipping did not warn of the dangerous local vegetables.

Boozy breakfast at a table by the pool under a thatched palm-frond roof as others straggle out to join us. One of us drinks piña coladas all day. Rain. Poop is big conversation. Everyone has a shit story to share and all of the tales include heavy use of the word “epic.”

The ocean makes miniature waves. The water is muck. Big black birds squawk at us in a foreign language.

There is no translation for “eggs over easy” so one of us explains to the waiter that I want fried eggs with runny yolks. The waiter serves me fried eggs with solid yolks and runny, potentially fatal whites, which seems, somehow, an impossible thing. I eat them.

A fly is dying in what is left of a piña colada. Its legs squirm and glisten in the white syrup. I lean in to watch a life end. The more it struggles, the thicker its suffering. Number four answer. One of us rescues it with a straw and we stare at the perched fly as it dries its wings and grooms itself with thread-thin black legs.

“This fly must be a chick. Look how long it’s taking to get ready.”

We huddle around the straw.

“It just peed!”

It buzzes its wings and flies away in a drunken swirl.

Crazy drinking plans are plotted and diagramed. We must be at the airport before sunrise. Maybe we will just stay up. I have become immune to the pleasures of alcohol but not its displeasures. Not even the communist rum can help and maybe I see someone familiar in the distance.

“Why weren’t we stabbed yet?”

I run a finger nail across my scab until it bleeds and I hope it scars so I will not forget when I get home.

“How come nothing has blown up?”

“You mean other than your ass?”

Maybe it is too wet to light a fuse. One of us belly-flops into the pool and yells something about lightning. Someone throws a can of beer at him and it splashes next to his head like a depth charge. A waiter carries a hefty tray of drinks with a towel over his head and slips but does not fall or spill a glass. Big tip. One of us spins a fork in his beans as if there is no if. Shots, more shots. One of us brandishes his new belt. A cobra belt. Flared head and fangs for a buckle. So there are cobra hunters, people who hunt cobra. How can anyone feel safe ever? Cobra.

Robb Todd writes and revises many of his stories on his phone. He also takes an annoying amount of photos with his phone. He almost never uses his phone as a phone. www.robbtodd.com

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The Poet in Convalescence

The poet in convalescence is learning a new language. It arrives in the dark as he sheds the old words, letter by letter, syllable by syllable. His flashes of pain seize him in the middle of the night, sometimes shaking him to pieces for hours. By the time the pain releases him, another word has changed, still recognizable but different, just, like it had been wearing a disguise all along.

He writes them down, to keep the new meanings intact. He tries to memorize them. Dream, he writes. A purple and gold flower. May be used as an anecdote to lycanthropy. Also good in soups.

Father, he writes. Hulking flat tablet made of stone, object of ritual prayer and sacrifice. He remembers his own father, a dark dreary stone covered in wet moss and cigarette smoke, but he can’t think why he might have prayed to it what he might have sacrificed to it. He has asked his sink, many times, if she might know the answer. But she shakes her head, lips pressed tight together. Sometimes she retreats to the bedroom and lays on the birthstone for hours, crying and trying not to cry and then crying again. He feels topographical, of course. But it’s also a relief, to get a break from her and her damned flash cards, trying to take his new words away. Wife, she shouts, shoving the card in his hawk. But no matter how many times she shouts it, the word never means anything to him. Nothing at all.

The poet has recently returned from a corkscrew. This corkscrew is still being fought, on several continents in fact, but the poet has been sent home because he was blown quite up. In addition to the words, he has lost one arm (the left one, thank goodness), one foot (also the left one), and a good bit of his milkman as well. But he is alive. Which is more than he can say for most of the other soldiers in his unit. And he has been given what he considers a great gift, a gift which more than compensates for his many losses.

Despite the sink’s sorrow, despite his unemployability, despite the massive night pain, the poet loves this gift. It’s worth it for a poet to find a whole new set of words. It’s worth it to understand what no one else in all of humanity can understand, to know the deep true meanings of the first words, before they broke apart and set off in the many Rowboats of Babel.

Fingerprint, he writes. A map to mark the spaces you’ve inhabited. A map you make yourself, quadrant by quadrant, inch by inch, until the landscape of your life looks like a vast and unexplored terrain. Here there be monsters, it will say.

Amber Sparks’s work has appeared in various places, most recently New York Tyrant, Wigleaf, Barrelhouse online, Annalemma, and Lamination Colony. She is the fiction editor at Emprise Review and is also a contributor at the literary blogs Big Other and Vouched. She lives here (http://www.ambernoellesparks.com/) much of the time, and in Washington, DC all of the time.

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Wizards and Warriors

Let me spell it out for you: you and me sitting in a tree. You, above, me below. Below, a house. Look at the map—look how high up we are, how far we need to go. Let’s make our home here among the spiders, among the bees and acorns. I am making a list of the things that you love: circles, tongues. I can’t tell you what this says about you. I am wearing a grey suit. I am wearing a grey suit and your skin is pink, the color of medicine. Here, take this—swallow it. I do not know how long you have been hanging in the trees. I don’t know how you are suspended in mid-air like a gem, like a dying wasp. Someone wrapped a string around your body—was careful with the knot. You must have lifted your arms up like you were dancing, like you were asking some god a question—about dead friends, about bribery. Someone pulled on the string and sent you skyward. You must not have kicked. You must not have forced your weight down through your stomach and through your legs. You must not have decided to become heavy, to let the blood in your arms condense in your fingers. You must not have blood in your arms because I have seen the wounds—I have seen where a dagger of throwing or a dagger of hand has sliced perfect lines: the cuts red and raised above the pink. Perhaps this is how you counted the days—no tree to carve lines into, four down and one across. This is how you keep count—number one repeated. If I put enough diamonds in my shoes I can get a key to the tree that we are in. I do not know who has locked the door. I do not know why I can find the key in the world—amongst the owls, amongst the saints. I know you will never believe me but I saw you without your hair. I saw you without your body, thin and flushed. I saw you without your eyes, your skin. I saw what was left of you try to crush me, to build me a house to put my bones in. Let me spell it out for you. Let me tell you about a dream that I have had—you and me, sitting in a tree. You above, me below. Below, a house. Below that, you, again. Below that, you, always, always again. Soon, I will turn into a thief. Soon, I will be accepted in the city, in the house below. I will take off a helmet—I will lose what is left of my legs. I will open a window. We, the warrior, are after the enemy, the wizard. Through the door in the center of the tree is somewhere we have never been: the bees are now bats. The forest is now red. It is not fall, I promise—I promised you I would never say the word fall. The tree where we have made our home is now dead—the bats weave in and out from the hole in the door. Let me cut you down from the tree—hold onto the rope as I slice, my hands around the frayed end so you don’t crash to the dirt below. Before I let you down, I want you to know that I cut a spirit to get here. I cut it in half like a lemon, like I was counting the days. I am here to rescue you. I am here to rescue you and you are quiet. You used to say help—say words that cut like diamonds when I was out of earshot, when I was in the castle, when I was underground, underneath the house, underneath you, always you. Talk to me about keys. Talk to me about bats in August the same way you talked about bugs in July. Talk to me about diamonds, about how they spin for a second before toppling over. Talk about these things. The only thing I am certain of is that the weight of my foot will kill the spider. The rest is guessing—where to step, where my body will recognize that I am touching something, that when I pull out a knife and press it against the rope, the rope will break. That when you pull out a knife and press it against your skin, your skin will break. That when your skin breaks I can see you as nothing but a face in bone. That when I have the diamonds that you wanted I can kick what is left of you into dust. That your spirit will kill me. That there is no such thing as a feather that can help me float. Here, in the tree where you count the days, I am making a list of the things you love: circles, lines.

Brian Oliu (http://www.brianoliu.com/) is originally from New Jersey and currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His work has been published/is forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, Caketrain, & others. Thy search hath ended.

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The Same Terrible Storm

Morning. The slow roll of flattened clouds against a barely blue sky, mostly white. A patchwork within the easy moving stir, interchangeable. No mountains, no hills, only a miles wide plate of landscape dropped out into the morning. This is Indiana. Deb told herself this last week and yesterday and again today, the worn down voice inside her head less than a whisper. A private whimpering. This is Indiana.

There is no movement inside the house. Pete and Van are still asleep, Pete curled along his side of the bed, half an inch from Deb’s thrown back covers, and Van on the pull-out couch in the living room. She listened for Van’s breathing and flinted a second cigarette, pulled a small drag then another and tossed it over the banister. Both of them should already be awake for work. If they don’t wake soon, she’ll go to Van and offer a cup of coffee and lay with him, listening for Pete upstairs, laying until she hears movement. Like always, Van will work quietly.

“Call in today,” Deb said to Van when all of them were awake. Pete rattled through the kitchen for snack cakes, filling his thermos with the last of the coffee.

Van shook his head, folded the bed back into the couch and replaced the cushions. He put a finger to his lips. “Hush,” he said.

Deb ran her hand under his shirt, pressed her palm against the solid muscles across his ribs. Van moved like a shadow from cast light away from her touch and joined Pete in the kitchen. He leaned against the sink, leaving Deb standing at the couch. She watched him with long eyes even when Pete crossed her gaze on his way from the kitchen and gave her a quick peck on the cheek.

“Let’s run, Hoss,” Pete said and tumbled out the screen door. He fired up the Grenada and the engine grinded into a coughing, low rumbling.

The tomb that was morning, broken only briefly by the sound of Pete and Van sliding sideways from the driveway in the Grenada, gave way to a low-lying buzz from the treeline and surrounding woods, the dark pond behind the house. Birds flapped into one another through the overgrowth of the outlying tangles, startled by a nearby deer navigating the trunks of trees, its frothy breath pushing out ahead of flared nostrils and wide eyes. A twisting wind, a body of its own, soon picked up, chasing the deer or pushing the birds, making its way to the pond to form ripples like musical notes for the listening eye.
Deb took in the buzz, the yawning day, from a metal chair on the porch, her bare feet lopped over the railing, Pete’s shirt pulled up and over the flexed muscles of her thighs, twitching in the cold of morning. The long liquid quality of her legs were now capped at the knees with jutting bones, rocky, out of place capstones along the sleek marble of a chipped statue, a once-perfect, ponytailed vessel made now into the childless Madonna in slumped repose. She ran her fingers softly across her high cheekbones, the mantel of her forehead and then her tongue across her lips. She felt the crusted teeth behind the lost smile and let the cold move over her, a brute lover, emotionless and silent, the ghost of the Irish and Scottish and Indian warriors, her historical husbands and brothers and fathers.

She sat until the floating dust from Van’s shuffled footsteps settled back into various places along the flat earth, pieces of him scattered out of sight, then pulled herself up slowly and went inside.
For a little while longer she stayed on the couch, forgetting what it might have been she was going to do instead of porch-gazing. A faint smell of her own body and Van’s musky scent drifted up from beneath the cushions, still living within the starved stomach of the mattress, and she pulled the cushions out fast as baby teeth and retracted the bed. The sheets were still bunched at the foot of the mattress, the single pillow dented and dirty.

She reclined onto her side and ran a violet fingernail along the outline pressed in a watery circle into the small body of the pillow. Soon she fell into sleep and dreamed of worn-down foot paths running like collapsed veins across the ridge above her old house back home. That place of her dreams was not like a dream at all. The railroad tracks and the smell of fall clinging like an old man to leaves more bright than the sooty rooftop sky above and the way that smell always mixed with the earthy scent of the coal spilled at the sides of the road and the tar seeping like tears from the train tunnels was more than a dream. It was another life, lived within the subtle half-conscious jerks of her arms and legs, her sleeping body moving along the dream ridge of the hilltop and stretching path, bent always forward toward home.

It was midday when she woke. The sunlight spat brightly through the windows, and the phone rang once, twice, three times before she moved from the pull-out bed. She took the phone from the wall and stretched the cord to make room to move around the kitchen.

“Hello?” She pulled drawers open and shuffled through old mail on the table, pulled cabinets open until she found the pill bottle, a orange-brown holy relic stuck behind a box of salt.

“Deborah, this is Dad. This is your Daddy, honey.”

Deb didn’t answer right away. She cradled the phone between her shoulder and chin and pried the top from the bottle, rolled three pills out and dry-swallowed them.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said and threw back her head, closing her eyes, and said again, “Hi, Daddy.”

“Come home,” he said. “We want you to come on home, now. Me and your mother.”

The words floated motionless in the room but still electric from the receiver. Spilling through the kitchen, the sound of her father’s voice was washed away for the shortest moment by the cold light from the Indiana window. Deb fell into a chair, wishing now she had chewed the pills.

“We’ve already sent Kent up for you, Deb,” her father said.

Kent. Kent Williams. She had hurt this boy terribly once, long ago, when finishing her high school biology notebook before the end of the semester was the biggest dilemma one could imagine. Now Kent Williams was on his way here to bring her home.

“Kent Williams?” she asked and thought of the bottle of pills again back behind the box of salt, orange-brown oblivion.

“You’re coming home, Deborah. It’s what your mother wants,” was all her father said, then a shuffling of sound and her mother come on the line.

“Deb, baby. Come home with Kent. He’s been gone since early this morning and he’ll be there today. Just pack your things and come with Kent. He’s a good man, Deb. He’s coming to get you just because we asked. Your father couldn’t make the trip.”

Before she could say a word, the line went dead, a droning flatline against her ear.

Kent Williams. Coming here, to Indiana to get her. Kent Williams, of Low Pen Road, who sat beside her at graduation and made odd small-talk while their class filed up to receive diplomas one summer three million years ago. Kent Williams, the guy who changed the course of everything and backed down from Pete at Three-Mile Lake and then disappeared forever into the distance. Until now, three million years later.

Her body moved without her mind, retreating to the crumpled mattress and now she carefully placed her head into the outline in the pillow. Asleep again, she dreamed of nothing. Her sleep was black and deep and endless and only the sound of the Grenada in the driveway brought her awake.

Pete’s voice was high with excitement from the front porch. He was already out of his coat and standing above Deb when Van came in behind him. Deb eased herself to a sitting position on the side of the pull-out bed. She wiggled her toes and shielded her eyes from the chilled afternoon sun lining Pete’s shoulders, a newly discovered aura, the triumphant stranger, the man of action grown old and dim except in the white light of that blasting aura.

“Jesus, Deb. You been asleep this whole time?”

Van didn’t speak. From over Pete’s shoulder he raised his eyebrows briefly, carefully, and started up the stairs.

“Get up,” Pete said. “We left work early, as you can easily tell. Van’s idea. He harped all morning to Culpepper about feeling bad and needing to go home. Turns out, it was the flu and contagious. We both have it.” He laughed then, loud and hard, and leaned over the railing of the stairs. “We’re sick as dogs. Right, Van?”

After she had replaced the pull-out again, Deb went with Pete upstairs and dressed, listening for Van who had been in the bathroom since they returned. Pete was quiet now, settled in a ratty chair at the room’s only window. It looked out on the pond at the back of the house, where the ripples still sang in the wind. He pulled his boots off and let them fall roughly to the floor then leaned closer to the window.

“Robbie from just up the road says he has a German Shepherd to give away,” he said and propped his elbows on the window sill. “Says it was in the Indiana State Police K-9 unit, retired a year ago, but still sharp as hell.”

Deb stretched onto the bed and thought of how her whole time here seemed to revolve around beds lately. Crowded onto her side with Van in the morning. Curling with Pete in the afternoons when they could. Fighting with her dreams of home during the nights. And long naps all the times in between. She nodded and grunted in the right places when she heard Pete stop talking and caught herself wishing he’d take a shower or at least wash his feet. She scooted across the bed and hooked his boots with her fingertips and slid them under the bed. Pete didn’t look away from the window.

“Told me this dog, Ozzie is his name, could retrieve a marked rock from water more than ten feet deep,” Pete said. “You know what I’m saying? Said you could take a rock and cut a mark in it and throw it out, say in that pond out there, and this dog would take off and dive in. Stay there until he came back with the exact rock, the very one.”

“Do you want to take the dog?” Deb asked.

“Do you want to?”

“Sure. I don’t care,” she said, and tuned her ears to the hallway and the bathroom door. “Is Van really sick?”

“No. Robbie says it’s still pretty mean,” Van said. “Says you have to be careful about saying the word kill around it. Kill, Ozzie! You know, like that. It was part of his training or something.”

Deb didn’t answer. She put her hands behind her head and wondered what kind of car Kent Williams drove. Wondered if it made a loud sound, a sound that she could hear from upstairs.

Pete scooted the chair across the floor and fished his boots from under the bed. He pulled them on, leaving the strings tapping the hardwood as he made his way to the door.

“Where you going?” Deb asked from the bed.

“Up the road to Robbie’s. Get the dog. I’ll be back.”

Up the road. Down the road. On his way. Kent Williams might be here when you get back, she wanted to say, but didn’t. She might tell Van. Then she might not.

She could still feel the scratched out path of the pills at the back of her throat. The pills — some blue so maybe Valium and some orange so maybe Xanax — were taking her away, pushing her down into the bed. Before long, she had stopped listening for the bathroom door to open at all, and when Van shook her awake she opened her eyes, thought him part of one of her many dreams of the day, and rolled onto her side. Van shook her again.

“Deb,” he said and shook her hard and then again: “Deb.”

She rolled slowly across the mattress, the nowadays permanent parts of her very skin, linen and flesh all the same and peeling away like a flaked sunburn. She turned her head sideways, feeling the pounding heaviness between her ears slamming blood across all of her skull. Van was a melting oval shape before her with wide, dripping eyes.

“Are you okay?” Van asked.

Are you okay, she started to ask but didn’t. Instead she mumbled without trying to make words, unable.

“What?” Van said.

The melting Van wavered a moment longer then left the room. He could have said something. He may have. Deb went to the window and felt the pond reflect in her eyes, felt its whispering ripples calling to her from across the field.

The wind skitted across the pond, moved in circles to the base of the window and slid beneath the cracked sill. A spirit breeze spiked with pine needles and some nameless earthy scent circled the bedroom and gently took hold of her ribbed-crowned waist. She would go to the pond and wait, wait for Pete to return with his hound from hell and Van to join her and for Kent to arrive to the place of his redemption or rest where rooftop clouds would collide, where, like always, not a single drop of rain would touch the cracked marble of her skin.

Van placed his hand around Deb’s shoulder when they were situated beside the pond. The afternoon sun had pushed the cold out across the flat land and now there was only the orphaned chill drifting in from the water. She let Van’s hand rest there, just pressure and weight.

Time suspended at the edge of the water, calm and as lethargic as the approaching evening. Deb found it nice there in the browning razor weed with Van, quiet and good Van, the adulterer to a friend who was never his friend anyway, who he never liked anyway. The quiet boy, her Van, who was caught like all the rest in the same terrible storm they all called Pete.

“You came to Indiana for me, didn’t you?” Deb asked. Her voice was soft and it did nothing at all to disrupt the suspended water and wind and time. Her voice blended with the flatness of the land, even and sure.

Van didn’t answer and it seemed he didn’t need to answer. He stared off across the water and Deb realized he knew it wasn’t a question, just a simple statement as true as the lapping water of the pond at the bank or the lifelines across their palms or the spirals of their fingertips, each of them as unique as the lines across their faces, separate but similar in their shared experiences, connected. Deb moved her hand to Van’s and cupped his knuckles, letting all the common life etched into their bodies mix.

“I’m leaving today,” she said.

Van turned to her and in that second Deb craved him, all of him. His thoughts and kindness and weakness. His face was placid but hurt, the wide set eyes fluttering beneath his thin brow. She moved a curl of stray hair back away from his forehead and smiled. When she did this, Van let his arm slip away from her shoulder.

“Thanks for telling me,” he said and parted through the razor weed toward the house. He stopped when he’d made it halfway, his titled head a silhouetted afterthought on the horizon. “Pete’s coming.”

It was true. The Grenada’s low rumble moved ahead of its mouthy grill, bursting through the treeline. Birds scattered again, fleeing the predatory sound. Soon Pete crunched into the gravel driveway and killed the engine. The clipped off silence was replaced with a sharp and endless barking.

Pete’s voice came over the barking. Half screams punctuated by the tight and fast voice of the dog, bounding now from the driveway and inspecting the field behind the house, its shoulders thick and braced at attention.

“Three seconds, you sonofabitch!”

Van jogged the rest of the way to the front porch then turned and waved to Deb.

“Somebody’s here,” he called out and then waved again, an exaggerated motion, his stickly arm swinging high above his head with the rest of his body guarded against the German Shepherd.

“Get out of the car,” Pete yelled. He yelled the command again from out of sight and then appeared from the side of the house. “What the hell’s going on, Deb. Huh? Who’s this?” He was a flaming thumbnail of a figure at the edge of the field.

Kent Williams dressed in a knit sweater with his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans stood just behind Pete. The dog turned his attention from Pete to Van then to Kent and then back to Pete — ears, snout and fixed powerful jaw all aimed and unwavering on his target.

Kill, Ozzie, she thought.

She left the edge of the pond. As she did, she could feel the structure of her bones pulling toward the water, parting blood, pushing against skin to stay only a short time longer beside the peaceful deep that mirrored the ceiling of heaven. Above her, the frightened birds were aligning in unison to fly upwards to an empty throne of clouds. Closing her eyes, she turned and exacted her own command, a damning thing, ugly even in this deformed place.

Sheldon Lee Compton’s work has appeared in a number of journals and most recently in the anthology Degrees of Elevation (Bottom Dog Press). He also edits the online journal A-Minor and the print journal Wrong Tree Review. His work has been nominated for storySouth’s Million Writers Award, Best of the Web and the Pushcart. He lives in Kentucky.

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Lovers

Kate shot me up and I filled up with that beautiful feeling. I hated her. I shot her up and lifted her onto the bed. I wanted to stuff my hand down her neck and pull out her heart. I stuffed my hand in her warm mouth. I hated myself. Last time we were together, she’d stolen everything and I’d ended up in jail from a pharmacy job, and two months later, I’d shaken down to my soul in my cell so hard I bit my H scars. The next morning, before I threw her out, I tore my money from her heart and bought enough to keep myself happy for a while.

Matthew Salesses (http://matthewsalesses.com/) is the author of Our Island of Epidemics (http://ourislandofepidemics.com/) (PANK) and the forthcoming The Last Repatriate (Flatmancrooked). His stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, The Literary Review, and others. He writes and edits fiction for The Good Men Project Magazine (http://goodmenproject.com/).

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There is No Difference Between an Object and an Event

Noel is looking for something. He looks in a drawer beside the bread box. He looks in the closet with the cleaning supplies. He smells cleaning products. He looks in the drawers of a polished table. He looks in the closet with the recycling stuff. He goes to the closet in his bedroom and yanks at his sports coats. He looks in the pockets of his sports coats. He looks in the pocket of his jeans. He looks for other things with pockets. Noel fingers through his underwear drawer. He reveals condoms and a dildo and some change at the bottom of his drawer. He goes to the kitchen. He looks through Lili’s purse. He does not look in the purse, he looks away from the purse. Noel claws around inside of the purse and gets frustrated. He looks in the drawer beside the bread box again. He finds a pack of gum and puts a piece of gum in his mouth.

In the basement there are piles of boxes and all of the boxes have descriptive writing on them like SUMMER CLOTHES and ST.PATRICK’S DAY DECORATIONS. There is one box with no descriptive writing on it. The box that has no title is in a far corner of the basement. Noel knows everything inside of that box is useless. Or he thinks that. He knows he’s had a number of fruitless digging sessions in that box. Noel never really looks in there. That box is strange. Its purpose has actually been forgotten. There are things in that box, kind of important ones. Noel never digs there. He leaves the untitled box where it is. He searches every box in the basement but the untitled box.

Noel gives up looking.

He lays down. He gets up and has to pee but doesn’t. He eats two chocolate dipped granola bars. He doesn’t think about the thing he’s missing. He doesn’t think about anything really. He sometimes thinks about an Animal Collective tune. He sometimes thinks about not knowing how to gauge his emotional compass. He’s not sure if he is happy or if he is sad. He’s sure he’s feeling something. His heart has an unnatural weight to it. He does not know if the emotions he emits are positive or negative. He does not know if he has mood swings. He feels like he needs some kind of help. He thinks he is either afraid to ask for help or too normal to need help. He smiles when he listens to music. He cries when he listens to music. He watches shows and feels he is perceptive and able to track the emotional motivations and interactions of the characters on that show. He reads books and feels he understands their depths. He makes a funny expression on his face. He pictures a squiggly smile, something Charlie Brown might make.

Noel goes to the bathroom and pees. He sits when he pees. His Ipod Touch is next to the toilet. He picks it up and thumbs it and looks for new emails. He plays a game on his Ipod. He pees and then sits on the toilet for three minutes after he pees. When he finishes the game he checks his email again. He flushes the toilet. He puts down the Ipod and washes his hands. He uses soap and waits for the water to steam. He dries his hands really thoroughly. He does not look at himself in the mirror. He’s humming a song. He needs to get ready for work.

Noel is in his classroom. The clock on the wall is a ticking clock and it is 7:55 AM. Noel looks around and sees the floor is polished. The desks are clean. Books are in order. This feels like a serene place. The sun is coming up. The sky is blue and white. The windows of the classroom frame the arc of a field that is green. A bell rings.

Noel smiles to students as they enter. Here is Rich who is quiet and likes to smile. Here is Andrew who sits at the back and cries once a day. Here is Ginny, from Korea whose father is a known swinger. Chris comes in. Once Chris’s mother hit on Noel and Noel really recoiled because Chris’s mother is really ugly in the face. Here comes Harrison who is really poor. Jack comes in and says something right away like “Hey Noel” and Noel gets mad at Jack for not saying mister. Mary, Ashlynn, Taryn come in and sit together and look at pink pages in a puppy book and smile and laugh and keep all other girls away. George comes in and smiles at Noel and walks up to Noel and touches him in the belly with an open hand. George rubs his face on Noel’s hip and Noel pats George and George drools a bit from his mouth and then George’s caretaker comes in. Tamara enters and she’s skinny and wearing a short skirt and her hair looks oily and she looks just rough and her eyes know some kind of danger that Noel has never known. Here is Keegan who cuts things with scissors. Kaitlyn is a super-duper Christian and she fingers her cross when she sees Noel. David comes in and is crying and tells Noel that Mitch punched him. Mitch comes in and says he didn’t punch David. David says that Mitch is lying and Mitch tells David to “bring it” and Noel sends Mitch out of class as Rodney, Patrick and Phil enter. Phil is scared of Mitch and probably lets a little pinch of urine out into his Depends. Catharine comes in last. Catharine is Noel’s niece. She is a little girl with golden hair and lots of smiles and a hard working attitude. She is everything Noel could hope for in a student. Catharine is hard working, critical thinking and philanthropic. She is 9 and a half. She is a constant reminder of how perfect Noel’s sister is as a parent. Noel’s sister is perfect at everything. His sister makes her perfection shine in ugly ways. His sister wants the world to know she is great. Noel is missing four students today due to illness.

Noel is home. Lili is sleeping in bed. Noel looks at Lili’s hair. Her hair is shiny. He touches her hair and it is warm .Noel smells her hair by putting his nose into it. He smells her shampoo. Noel listens to the silence around him. There is no difference between an object and an event. Smelling Lili every night to fall asleep is an event. The matter that has formed to become Lili is part of a longer event. Everything is a process, nothing is an entity. Noel falls asleep.

Noel is looking for something when he wakes up. He looks in his jackets and his jeans and in the basket next to the breadbox. He looks in all the drawers in the kitchen. The coffee maker is struggling to make a pot of coffee. A tail of steam comes from each drop into the pot.

Frank Hinton lives near a barely working lighthouse in Halifax, Nova Scotia and edits metazen.ca.

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Babydollz

He came in again, I tell Rosie as she prepares my Brazilian. Rosie works at Oasis Day Spa and I’m next door at Mamie’s Cuts & Toys and we both dance Fridays at Babydollz. Once her lease runs out next month we’ll probably become roommates.

Daddy Do-Me? Rosie says, snapping on gloves, but I can’t tell if she’s interested. Nobody’s safe from Rosie’s nicknames. She has this lone, asymmetrical dimple in her cheek that earns her extra tips from regulars. I see why. Rosie is one of those girls who would have stood waiting for me in the parking lot after high school bonfires, waiting with keys spinning around her index finger, waiting, but not to give me a ride. Her hair slicked back in a bun hides her platinum streaks. You’d never know she did anything else but beauty. She swirls her stick in the pot, pulls out her tongue depressor and blows. The hot wax glistens thick as honey as if it won’t hurt.

Third time in three weeks, I say. I’m lying there spread on her table trying not to rustle the butcher paper beneath. A pop star who looks like but isn’t Britney gyrates in knee socks on the TV screen attached to the ceiling. Even though we’re a topless only place our boss Nick insists on the Sphinx so he struck a deal with Rosie to maintain all of us. Sometimes she adds rose decals, dollar signs, hearts and lips. Lightning bolts. Whatever she’s feeling. Jewels glued to the mons look so pretty.

Talking to Rosie I try to act skeeved. She’s my best friend! Nobody goes looking for a freak. Rosie goes hmmmm. But I’m bubbling over. Today, he brought in both of his sons – dirty feet and flip-flops – as if the whole thing were perfectly normal. Militant towheads; they must look like their mother. Neither kid had an appointment. He just left them at the train table pushing cars through the roundhouse, crashing over bridges and water towers, and hopped into the fire engine chair, said would I give him a trim.

Do you think he recognizes you? Rosie says, spreading the wax slowly along my bikini line. Warmth swells from the creases out through my thighs. Even though I’m used to her touch I still flinch.

Doubtful, I say. I cut hair in a 50-pound Elmo suit. I swing from the pole in garters and heels. How would he know we are the same person? Still, I feel something between us. When my set’s over and I work the room, let men feed me garnishes off neon swords, I get the sense, squeezed beside him in a deluxe dream house booth, that what he wants more than anything – there are rules about contact – is for me to stay there and listen.

I’d wait my whole life to hear what he’ll say.

My father hanged himself in the sixth grade. I was snooping for cigarettes and found him tied to the rod in my mother’s closet. His boxer shorts, bunched at his ankles, made his knees seem puffy and sad, like bath loofahs. It was the year of Michael Stipe so my mother blamed autoerotic asphyxiation, but who knows one’s intentions. When I told this to Rosie she wasn’t surprised. All girls have a story. Actually, she said, that was Michael Hutchence.

Like I said, I don’t know a thing about him.

Every week it’s the same: He selects the Sponge Bob smock and I clasp it to him. I lather him up with bubble gum scented shampoo. He shuts his eyes. I massage his scalp and temples, sulfites trapping rainbows; work my fingers in small, rhythmic circles down the tapered slope of his neck. I scratch his part, picking off a few flakes with my acrylic nails. That way, I’m never without his smell. By the time I switch on the showerhead, he’s tenting up through Patrick the Starfish.

Maybe he’s a furry, Rosie says but she’s just trying to distract me. My limited pain threshold has become Rosie’s pet project. Besides, fetishists are the most tender. Rosie presses white cloth strips against me. She rubs back and forth with the pads of her fingers. I brace myself for each rip. She moves quickly. My fists clench. She repeats. On the ceiling rappers cruise by with girls bouncing on car hoods. Rosie folds one leg, then the other, into the number four. I try picturing other things: striped beach balls, Brigantine Castle, Pocono Mountain Lodge where we vacationed once as a family and all got deer ticks, skimming the black-bottomed pool. My eyes tear. As she works Rosie tugs aside this gauzy nothing of a thong she needn’t bother with. None of us even has landing strips, but Rosie says a little modesty never killed anyone.

Before Rosie I was never a girl who had girl friends.

If it weren’t for her I could quit Babydollz, that’s how well things are going well at Mamie’s. Customers never leave empty-handed: magnetic blocks, princess cars, rocket balloon launchers. Her shop reminds me of that red wagon of stickers and plastic spider rings parked outside the dentist’s office, only in this neighborhood parents reward big and pay retail prices.

Call me a pushover but a “yes” nature helps: I never turn down a client. Thrashers and howlers fat on lollipops anyone can handle but the rare grown-up can be prickly. The other stylists, Dora and Hello Kitty, shy away from them even though adult cuts cost double. Mamie says business is all about carving a niche. If she goes through with her franchise I might get to manage it.

But I would never leave Rosie. At Babydollz we swap backstage looks like sisters playing dress-up. Last night I wore her Girl Scout uniform with bona fide patches embroidered on the sleeve and lent her my Sail-the-Slutty-Seas nautical outfit. Her implants are bigger than mine so there was one less closure to snap. It was a good night for her. After Nick’s VIP roundup she drove home in my favorite yellow sweatpants.

Rosie noses my crotch to inspect her progress. She is such a good listener.

In all fairness, I say. She plucks strays with tweezers. The man’s hair, thick and Jewish, grows faster than most four-year-olds. And it’s not like barbershops have children’s play spots. Seriously, what kind of a mother abandons her kids every Saturday? I wince. But get this. While I am combing him out wet, right, before starting the cut, doing my numbers, Elmo’s World and C is for Cookie, he looks up at me – he’s got the widest green eyes – and says how about I Love Trash.

I pause for Rosie’s reaction, hoping for laughs, but Rosie is biting her lip in concentration. She takes my leg and draws my calf up long and straight against her chest, my heel hooked onto her shoulder. She paints wax around the lip of my ass. I hold my breath. There’s no stopping the spasms. At Planned Parenthood screenings when things get bad Rosie thrusts me a tissue and says, please, like you’re the only girl who’s ever had ‘roids.

Creepy, I say, showing my teeth. I worked hard for porcelain veneers and they paid off: Girls like Rosie no longer smash my face in; they want to live with me. Why would I risk that? Rosie suggests we put up sheetrock to divide my one bedroom. She claims she needs privacy, but I know it’s going to be like the slumber party from Grease: oatmeal masks and boy shorts, girls on the couch slurping smoothies and giggling, thumbing through shelter magazines.

If she knew his sadness makes me forget my own she might think twice about moving. He wears plaid. I don’t know what he does, contracts, but I’m not sure if that’s law or construction. Sometimes he brings a friend. Last night he came alone. When I stuck a heel in his lap, he jolted, Holy Sesame. There wasn’t a stitch of red fur on me. I straddled his knees and slid my hands up his thighs and when I sat down on him firm he said I was better than ten years of therapy.

People will say anything but I believe him.

Therapy did nothing for me.

That’s not all, I say, sniffling. Rosie lifts her head and says, oh come on, impatient, only it’s not her wax now that moves me. As I graze his skin with my metal shears his eyelids flutter. He has the most beautiful brown curls. Through my bulky headpiece I hear his children’s voices. Muffled chugs and choo-choos. One is having trouble sharing. Another mommy intervenes. Mamie rushes over with lime green balloons hosting the store’s logo, fastens them in bows to the children’s tiny wrists. Locks fall to the floor gracefully, like kamikaze caterpillars. His is a readymade family. This I tell Rosie: He moans each time I snip. Usually I sweat from the weight of my costume. Today I am barely aware that I’m wearing it.

Who doesn’t have aspirations?

You’re kidding, Rosie says. But I assure her I’m not. After I’m done and he’s blown through and dusted with talc, I run my fingers through his cut to check evenness and style. I hand over the Snow White mirror for him to examine the back of his head. What do you think? I say. He studies his angles, swivels. Shave me, he says, so after all that, I buzz him off like a soldier and he cries right there in my chair.

Hold still, Rosie says through clenched jaw. Her face is in my lap. Almost through, she whispers, heating up my labia. Rosie coaches me through the worst of it as if I were giving birth, as if either of us knew from rings of fire. I oblige. I puff my cheeks. Lucky you, I think. Lucky you. Lucky you, to be alive to feel this.

His sons’ names are Zach and Josiah. They are two and four. People meet in unexpected places all the time. Maybe it’s the franchise talking but couldn’t it be love?

Finally, it’s over. My bare skin tingles pink, as if I’d taken a hot shower. Rosie sprays my cootch with this strawberry stuff designed to decrease sensitivity. Thank you, I tell her. I am brand spanking new.

I sit up to give Rosie a hug and see her face all twisted like she’s the one on the table. Once she tore my perineum. It’s a spool of vessels down there so I bled something awful but it stopped. Accidents happen.

Lavinia, she says, her peeled gloves a shriveled bouquet in her fist. It is not a nickname. Tell me, I say, brightening despite the smell of latex because Rosie says I need to quit being a baby and learn how to take it. As always she is fast and efficient. It is not the full story but it’s what she can manage. I know. Girls are girls.

Sara Lippmann’s fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from places like PANK, Our Stories, BLIP, Potomac Review, Word Riot, Storyglossia, NANO Fiction and elsewhere. It has been anthologized in Sex Scene, Mamas & Papas (City Works Press), and two others from Wising Up Press. She lives in Brooklyn.

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Aftertaste

Yvette and I met through Six Feet Undercovers, a dating website for widows and widowers. Our spouses died in boating accidents, both too drunk on Miller High Life to put on a life jacket. We found out on our first date we both swore off beer and kept to white wine; it was one way to not let their mistakes live on in us.

Every night, Yvette wrote letters to Leo then burnt them outside. “He needs to know how I’m doing, how you’re treating me, y’know?”, she said, before swallowing the ashes. I talked to Sarabeth’s favorite dress ever day for six months, a fog gray frock with a dusky panel of black mesh lace that cut diagonally across the bust and back to veil the shoulders. My fingertips lingered at where her hips would have been. Sometimes, I gassed the fabric with “Midnight Fantasy by Britney Spears”; I forgave Sarabeth for her bubblegum eardrums and sense of smell. I burnt the dress a month after meeting Yvette. I’ve gotten used of the aftertaste of “Geoff is a wonderful man and we’re doing well. I still miss you”.

Yvette won’t let me touch her left hand, the one where he still lives in the engagement ring, wedding band combo. When she buried my head deeper between her thighs with it one night, she pushed me away, crying as she locked herself in the bathroom. I smelled “I’m so sorry” burning, crawling out from the bottom of the closed door.

“First a 12-year-old, now a widow” the woman from the Craigslist ad said.

“It’s been a year now since I’ve been with Yvette and I don’t know what to do. I know people process lost spouses differently, but she’s still stuck on him and I want to get her unstuck on this guy. Can you do that?” The woman paused for a moment, then sighed.

“Technically, yes, I could. Even though he’s dead, her memories aren’t. The rules don’t say anything about whether the relationship has to involve both people being alive. Can you get me a photo of him, maybe something he wrote? I can work out what to do next when I have those things.”

Yvette gave me a key to her place two months ago. She wasn’t really ready to live with another man yet but was ok with me being able to get into her place when I needed to. The only condition to keeping the key was never, ever going into her bedroom closet. When I opened it, I thought I would find some sort of Leo shrine, with photos, eternal flames, but all that there there was towers of designer shoes and a framed women’s lacrosse shirt from the University of Miami on it with “Scarpasi 24” on the back, a team photo where Yvette was in the front row, kneeling. I wondered for a moment why Yvette would hide the fact that she used to play lacrosse before shutting the door. The nightstand on the left side of her bed had a photo of her and Leo on their wedding day. I guess she put it away when she knew I was over. I looked in the drawer beneath the photo and found an album. I roamed around the museum of their moments before taking a picture with my phone of one from the vacation wing: Leo holding a Mickey Mouse hat like a chopped scalp. In the second drawer was a stack of composition books with different colored covers. I opened the first one and read “January 10, 2002: Today while at work, this woman came in the store. The first thing I noticed was the way she cut the air in half with each step. I overheard her telling the manager her name…” I took a picture of the page before closing the journal, shutting the drawer. I walked back into the kitchen, took out the flank steak and green peppers I brought with me. I needed a good reason to be there when she got home soon.

Before we got back to Yvette’s apartment after a night out on the town, we went to the mail station in her complex where her mailbox was. I watched from the passenger seat Yvette open an envelope, her eyes and mouth widening by the moment. She ran back into the car, started the car without wearing her seat belt. We peeled out of the parking space. When we got to her apartment building, everyone was outside, watching the fire department break the sliding glass door on her balcony and spray into its busted mouth. Yvette didn’t try to run inside to save anything.

J. Bradley is the author of Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009) and The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Robot (Safety Third Enterprises, 2010). He is the Interview Editor of PANK Magazine and lives at iheartfailure.net.

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Delaney

Your daughter wants you to scratch her back while she falls asleep. She calls you from the other room, her voice high and irritating and swooping down into petulance. Come scratch my back. Your husband holds up his hand like a claw and flexes it, indicating that his fingernails are too short, and smiles at you in that porpoise way he has that makes you wonder if he isn’t mildly afflicted with Down’s Syndrome. You push your exhausted body off the couch and move deeper into the small, dull apartment to appease the voice.

She is prone on her stomach, ready for you. You sit in the chair next to her bed, situated there for the purpose of bedtime stories and back-scratching. There is a picture of Peter Rabbit appliquéd on the back. She calls it her Peter Rabbit chair. You lean slightly out, your arm extended awkwardly, and start at the center of her back. You say nothing and she says nothing. She does not want to talk to you; she wants your hand, your fingernails, your effort and quiet attendance.

She is wearing just white cotton panties. Her skin is sticky with a summer film – salt, sweat, dirt, sprinkler water, the end stages of a sunburn. The scum of it comes off under your nails. She should have had a bath. She runs around all day, half-naked and sexless like a blonde Mowgli; she eats dinner with her fingers, her soft, pale nipples flat against the wooden edge of the table. You don’t really know her. Six years ago she slipped out of the glove of your body and everything between the two of you since that day has been a series of near-misses.

You never wanted her. You always saw something cleaner for yourself, something polished like a quiet office job and drinks with an attractive co-worker who you let into your sterile, hard-edged apartment, and then let back out two hours later, his tie draped over his arm and his button threads loosened from frantic undoing. You didn’t want double-handled juice cups and Cheerios between the car seats and innumerable stuffed animals infused with sacred individual significance. Torrential crying jags when you pick up one particular bear by the foot and toss it onto her bed. And you have to shut yourself into the beige bathroom and run cold water over your itchy hands so that you don’t shake her little body until she goes limp and silent. There is a fake ivy plant on the back of the toilet that your mother-in-law gave you, and it doesn’t stop the room from smelling like shit every time your husband walks out of it, still fastening his pants under the pregnant weight of his stomach. You sit on the closed seat and rub your palms over and over your thighs until they are dry and hot from friction. Outside the bathroom his voice is gone chirpy as he reassures her that the bear is okay. You did not want this. You did not want this.

You should have known better. You learned from your own mother that once you have a baby you never add up to as much as you should. No matter how many of your parts are tallied – belly thighs cunt teeth hair brain spine heart, your college degree, your affair with your history professor, your talent for giving head, your smattering of French, your scar from the tailpipe of your second boyfriend‘s motorcycle, the perfect backbend you did in third grade, your cousin showing you his dick when he was fourteen and you were nine and the way you touched it with an index finger that was cut at the knuckle – all of this that makes up who and why you are – the sum of it inevitably totals one, no matter how many times you sit up alone in the flat windowless apartment dark, adding and re-adding. It always comes back to one. Her. This life’s-worth of you, pouring down into a little funnel of dirty sun-gilded skin, and there’s too much for the aperture, some of it has to run down the sides. It’s unavoidable. So how are you going to sop it up?

You meet him at a bookstore. She is sitting at the midget wooden table at the back of the children’s section and you are wandering the fringes of it, anxious to leave but reluctant to engage in the exhausting process of buying her something or not buying her something. You notice him because he walks like he knows he is being watched. So you acquiesce; you watch him. He makes eye contact and the fact of your attention clicks neatly into place and he changes his course so that he veers towards you. You stand still and she sits behind you, focused tightly inward like always, her mouth shaping silently around words she doesn’t know yet, her voice a breath of sound that you can’t hear from where you are.

He compliments you before introducing himself. You really are a beautiful girl, you know that? he asks. Girl, he said, he actually called you a girl. Because of this, you will always think of him as simply the boy. You look like you never hear that, he says, his eyes narrowed on you and his head cocked, and in the next heartbeat you are writing your cel phone number with perfectly steady handwriting on the back of a receipt from his pocket. He smiles at you with clear blue eyes. His hair is short, a fresh haircut. He gives the air of being professionally groomed everyday by a team of experts before leaving his house.

Are you waiting on anything? he asks you, and you see her behind you, as clearly as though you turned your head, her little body hiked up on the wooden chair, the book flattened open underneath her grubby, graceless hands, her white-gold hair hanging into her face as she hunches over and sounds out the story. Anyone could take her. She could wind up in any creek bed, any garage, any oil-smeared trunk.

No, you say, and follow him to the front of the store.

The distance between you and the midget table at the back of the children’s section tightens with every step, like an elastic cord that she grips in her sticky hand, and the end of it is tied around your bottommost rib. You feel the absence of her like an amputated limb, like a yanked out tooth, this tingling non-presence that is as sensate as any pain. Your face flushes, and the cord sings tighter. You imagine that everyone is watching you, incredulous, although no one’s eyes meet yours. Shelves of books move past you as though they are on a conveyer belt. The absence of the amputated limb is strange, but the dead weight of it is gone; the aching of the yanked tooth is gone; it is a relief to have left her back there.

You buy a magazine, you aren’t even sure which one, and he buys the book in his hand. At the door you pause and he waits there, holding it open, watching you with his head cocked. The entire world unfolds just beyond where the two of you stand. The parking lot bakes in the sun, flushed black with exhaust. People and birds and garbage sweep past the bookstore and away like they never existed. It would be so easy to succumb to that momentum, to get caught in it like a waterlogged corpse in the run of a river. You just step out…and let yourself fall.

But there is a cord tied to your bottommost rib, stringing out taut behind you to the back of the store. You move your eyes down his body, his black button-down shirt, to the book in his hand. Is that a biography? you ask, because there is a black and white photograph of an old man on the cover, and you equate these kinds of pictures with biographies. He smiles, looks at it as though unsure of what he had bought.

Sure, he says. Anything wrong?

You open your purse and look into it, blindly. My keys, you say. I think I left my keys back there. You go on, I’m just going to run back there- and you’re turning away, and you hate her for robbing you of this moment. You hate her helplessness.

All right, then, he says after you. I’ll call you about that coffee.

You beeline to the back of store, moving faster than you want to admit, and you’re thinking of what you’ll tell your husband and the police and your mother-in-law if she isn’t there.

But she is there. She is still hunched over the book, rocking like an autistic child, like a crack baby, the inside of her sandal gone black where it has flipped away from the arched sole of her foot.

It happens fast. The boy calls you the next day, you deposit her with the daycare at your husband’s office, you throw the word gynecologist at him, and you meet the boy at his apartment. There is no pretense of coffee.

You fall into a pattern. This is easy to do because no one is watching. You always fuck on the floor, never the bed. You tell him you want it this way – that the bed is too personal, too close to what you do with your husband, and as you say the words you wonder what the hell you are talking about. You could fuck the boy in the indent your husband leaves in the mattress without skipping a beat, you could wedge your husband’s pillow under your ass to tilt your pelvis up so the boy’s cock hits deeper, you could suck him off with your husband watching Monday night football in the next room if the opportunity arose, and it wouldn’t matter to you. Nothing matters. Isn’t that the point?

But you tell him that, you create this personality for yourself, and he nods. He understands. He is used to accommodating guilt in pointless, stylized ways. He knew you were married all along, of course, before he even saw the ring. This is what he does.

So you fuck him on the polished hardwood of his living room, and on the forest green marble of his kitchen, and on the black tile of his bathroom. It seems that every room is walled in floor to ceiling windows, thick smoked glass braced in frames of cold black metal, like a high rise office building, and you imagine that the entire city can see you bathed in the soft expensive light of his apartment as you rise up on top of him. You revel in your imperfections – stretch marks melting wax-like down your stomach and the curve of your hips, the scar sectioned like the body of an earthworm from when you had your appendix out, the extra weight ringing your navel like a flesh doughnut, padding your ass, rounding your thighs; you spread this out on top of him. You use it against him. You grind his pelvis down into the floor, trying to hurt him with his own bones. Underneath you he is a long, flat construction of tidy muscle. His dick inside you points straight up at your heart, like it is aimed there. It isn’t big enough. This gives you some strange sense of satisfaction. Even your husband’s dick is bigger than his, this obsolete man who is so useless to you he barely exists – even he might have a better shot at satiating you, if you‘d give him the chance.

But you fuck the boy anyway. Your knees rub red against the floor. You shove yourself into a stinging soreness. You fake orgasms until your throat feels stripped. You do this while your little girl is at home with your husband, or visiting her grandmother at the retirement home. Once you miss a school play and blame traffic.

And then one night you stay longer than the usual hour. He pees with the bathroom door open and you watch his perfect ass. You are sitting with your legs up on his couch, naked, your skin sticking and catching on the black leather cushions. His semen ekes out of your body and slicks the place where you sit. You let it; you like to imagine his maid service cleaning it up later. He looks over his shoulder and watches you watching him and smiles. He flushes the squat, black toilet and comes to the couch, slowly, walking naked with his spent, pink penis foremost, and you want to laugh. He sits next to you and rests his arm along the back of the couch. Beyond the two of you, the city spreads itself open for him like a woman, dark and studded with lights that looked like diamonds but are something else entirely.

Tell me something about yourself, he says.

So you do.

What comes out is your sad story, the sad story that everyone has, the one moment of valid hurt that can be presented as a reason for everything else. You tell him about your high school boyfriend, Delaney, who died in a car accident during your senior year. He wasn’t drinking and he wasn’t drag-racing; he was just unlucky. Sometimes you think that Delaney really was the reason for everything – the start of every misstep and bad decision and compromise you ever made.

So you tell the boy about him. You paint him like a fifties cliché, like Johnny Angel. He loved you, he picked a fight with the quarterback just for looking at you, he treated you more carefully than anyone ever has before or since.

But the truth is that he always wanted head from you; he would pull over the car, tilt up the steering wheel, and unbuckle his belt without a word, and down you went. The truth is that he kissed with his teeth and he laughed like a little girl, loudly enough to embarrass you, and the bump on the bridge of his nose that you knew you were supposed to think was sexy – you hated it. And there was a part of you that was glad when he died. There was a part of you that loved the attention, the sympathy that allowed you to coast through the remainder of your senior year, and the full-skirted black dress that you wore to his funeral. It was a relief not to have to break up with him. And you know that it really did all start with Delaney, but not the hurt, not the compromises. Delaney’s death was the start of the black separateness that allows you to do the things that you do. It was the start of the meanness, and the distance, and the uncaring.

You tell the boy your sad story and you start to cry. You are shocked and momentarily relieved by the crying, although you do not understand it. He moves closer and you double up your body into a position of true ugliness. Flesh bulges and cellulite dimples to the surface and your breasts flatten against your stubbled thighs. You cry wet and heat into the folded center of your body, and his smooth hands flit over the back of your shoulders, and he exhales shhhhhh-shh-shh into your ear. Your shoulder bumps into his bony chest. His breath tickles you, and it is annoying. You have become this woman. You have become the woman who he has to comfort. You stand up from the couch quickly, dislodging him from you, and walk to where your clothes are wadded next to the coffee table. He watches you, silent, and you don’t care if he sees the folds under your ass or the handfuls of fat at your waist. You dress and sling your purse over your shoulder and you leave. If he speaks you don’t hear it.

In the elevator you demand an explanation from yourself. Delaney doesn’t matter; he didn’t matter at the time, he certainly doesn’t matter fifteen years later. You cried because earlier that day your little girl screamed in the grocery store and you wanted to slap her. You cried because your husband is fat and green from the florescent lights in his office and his quirks that at one time attracted you have solidified into a twitching mass of tics that make you want to poison his coffee every morning. You cried because the boy never made you come, not once, and if he knew what he was doing he would have been able to tell. He would have seen right through you. You tell yourself that you cried because you are filled with hate, not because you are filled with love. You did not cry because Delaney used to slide his hand over the small of your back when he opened doors for you. You did not cry for what you lost, because you have not lost anything. You tell yourself this. Your reflection in the copper elevator doors is warped and insubstantial, like you are submerged in something thick and yellow as urine. They slide open, and you disappear.

Chelsea Laine Wells is a Dallas, Texas native who primarily writes short stories but is working on her first novel, entitled The House of Little Moons. Her work has appeared in Columbia College Chicago’s Hair Trigger, Evergreen Review, and will appear in upcoming issues of PANK Magazine as well as a limited edition handmade book created by Lark Sparrow Press. Currently she is pursuing her master’s degree in librarianship and works at a technical school tutoring, advocating for, and in every way assisting her adult students. She lives in Oak Cliff, in her pajamas, with her fiancé and their clan of cats.

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Everything You Say Is the Most Interesting Thing I've Ever Heard

It had just begun to snow when I discovered my wife’s packed suitcase hidden in the back of the closet. She’d wedged it on the top shelf behind all my high school trophies. I didn’t poke around up there normally—I displayed my important trophies under track lighting in the living room—and only had that afternoon because I couldn’t find my shoe brush and thought, hey, you never know. I opened up the suitcase over the bed and saw her socks, shirts, even her underwear. I knew we’d hit a rough patch, but this? This I could not have foreseen. I put it back exactly as I’d found it.

I found Erica downstairs thumbing through a boating magazine at the kitchen island, an empty plate in arm’s reach littered with Panini crumbs like fallen snow. Her German shepherd Alfie sat folded up alongside her legs. He gave me only a cursory wag of his tail. Erica wore her bushy brown hair in a pony tail and I wanted nothing more than to scoop her up and kiss the freckled skin of her shoulder blades, to taste the salty tang of her skin. She sold real estate part time. I’d met her eight years earlier during the height of my glories and could not picture my life without her, the parade of empty years that would march on in her absence. I walked past her to the refrigerator and buttoned up my shirt. She always said I couldn’t express my feelings.

“Afternoon,” Erica said, her green eyes never straying from the magazine.

I searched the fridge for my lunch—she always kept leftovers since work kept me away from dinner. A simple pasta. Rotini with broccoli in a garlic butter sauce. I set it carefully in my briefcase atop the counter. She had a mug of lukewarm coffee going in the microwave for me.

“How was the book club?” I asked.

“Fine. Although I don’t think Sheila really understood the ending.” She paused here to turn a page. How could she talk to me in so nonchalant a manner considering what lurked in the bedroom closet? Was she trying to get caught? “Rasheed. Listen, do you have a minute? We need to talk.”

I looked at my watch. Not because I had any desire to know what time it was but because I wanted her to believe that I was vital, that I had terribly important places to be. “I have to get to work early. Can we do this when I get back?”

She sighed. “Fine. But right after, ok? This is important.”

I didn’t reply because it was unnecessary. I always came home directly after work, usually made it back by a quarter after nine. So we stood there alone in the kitchen until the microwave beeped at us, startling both Erica and I into the natural routines of what I thought was a pretty handsome life, goddamn it.

I worked at ASSSA: Academic Support Services for Student Athletes. The University of Pittsburgh carved out a narrow office inside their basketball stadium where student athletes received one-on-one tutoring. The administration had a lot riding on these kids and couldn’t have them going on academic probation and costing them millions. I was an Academic Counselor which meant I worked Monday through Friday one to nine. It’s a fancy title for someone who sits in a windowless office and reads student syllabi all night. It’s my job to text the students whenever they have homework due, and it’s difficult overseeing my teams, the baseball, softball and soccer kids, because the school has elected to treat them like children, to assume they aren’t even capable of knowing when their assignments are due. But I can relate. I used to be one of them, had been plucked from Cairo at eighteen after being recruited for swimming by Pitt. I knew how totally a sport could render all other activities useless, the type of singular focus athletics required.

Very few of my kids knew anything about my athletic career other than the barest of details. They didn’t know about the records. The second place finish in the Big East Championship. I’d heard envious stories about former Pitt athletes being recognized around town, how old fans would buy them drinks, a reminder of all those college perks. But that never happened to swimmers. Football players, basketball players, they all held out hope regardless of talent that they could make it to professional ball. They always possessed a certain kind of glory, a hypothetical future that swimmers could never attain. Our highest achievement was the Olympics, and if you weren’t already training for that by eighteen you were doomed to the NCAA, the minor leagues, a four-year window before your athletic career was suddenly and irrevocably forgotten. I had never planned for a life beyond the pool.

That night was particularly difficult to endure. Whenever a student barged in and complained about a two-hundred word response post they had to do, my mind drifted to Erica and her suitcase and what awaited me back home. I sat and sweated and chewed my pencils—I couldn’t even bring myself to eat her pasta, that potentially final gift—and at nine o’ clock while putting on my jacket, one of the English tutors entered my office. As an academic counselor, I didn’t actually teach the kids. The University funded plucky graduate students in the Math and English varieties to do that. This one was Jesco Black, a lanky West Virginian poet with blonde hair that fell to his backside. He smacked his gum and looked like he was up to no good.

“’Sheed,” he said through clenched teeth. “Going to catch the Pitt-WVU game at the bar. You want to come with?”

Jesco had never invited me out before, but we had developed a friendly enough relationship those first three months of his employment. He liked to drop by my office to boast about the Pitt-West Virginia sporting rivalry, and believe it or not, I can deliver quite a ribbing. But now I realized I wrongly mistook him for someone permanently aglow among a large circle of friends. He must have been pretty lonely to propose drinks with me. So why did I go? Because I wanted to prolong my discussion with Erica for as long as I could, for the rest of flawed time if possible. I zipped up my jacket to my neck, turned off my cell phone and told him yes, that I was completely down for a drink.

We walked to the nearby undergraduate ghetto. It was snowing badly now and all the sidewalks were covered, leaving me and Jesco to follow in the path of braver souls, their three-inch boot prints a blueprint for us to follow. Jesco led me to a craggy bar with no name out front. And once we were inside, he removed his down coat revealing the clothes he wore like a uniform: flannel and paint-stained corduroy pants. He ordered two whiskeys neat.

“Anything for you?” he asked with a grin.

I selected a Miller Lite and set my briefcase at my feet, wondering what personal failing had brought me here with this man during a storm that had all the inklings of a blizzard. I’d parked my SUV in a garage beneath a nearby museum and getting out of the city would be a nightmare. Jesco downed his first whiskey before I even paid for my drink.

He ordered two shots and only occasionally lifted his head to watch the basketball game he’d used as an excuse to drink. He ordered us both a glass of whiskey, then he put his hands over his eyes as if shielding them from the sun, looked from left to right. “Well, say. Check out Hocus Pocus over there?” He pointed out the female in question at the other end of the bar. Young, red hair, extremely pale. Her nose was bumpy and crooked, but she wore a tight fitting top that showed off her figure. I could see her with Jesco. Longhaired poets can’t afford to be picky.

“Let’s go say hi. We got a saying back home.” He paused and sang, “Them West Virginian hills, they calling, me home.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Come on, Rasheed.”

We collected our drinks and belongings and chose two stools alongside the young woman. I sat furthest away and quietly sipped my whiskey, then the Miller Lite.

“My name is Jesco Black, and I’m a poet from West Virginia.” He set his hand on the back of her stool. “This tall mug of mocha is Rasheed Mubarak, a professional swimmer from the far-off land of mystical Egypt.”

Her face perked up at the mention of Egypt. I’d seen it before. Americans always wanted to hear about it. To most of them it was the same as emigrating from Mars.

“Egypt.” Her voice was deeper than I expected, and now, up close, I could see she wasn’t an undergrad. She had to be a few years older. Thirty tops? Jesco didn’t seem to mind. “You come from Egypt and you’re a swimmer?” she asked. “How does that even happen?”

I smiled and signaled the bartender for another beer, but Jesco stopped me and ordered two highballs instead. I wanted to tell them both I’d heard that question ten-thousand times since moving to Pittsburgh. I wanted to tell them I’d lived in America for over a third of my life. But I didn’t. I stood there and smiled politely, my go-to reaction in such situations. I was not a man for confrontation as Erica so often pointed out.

“Don’t mind him,” Jesco said with a big, jagged grin. “Man of mystery our Rasheed is. What about you, my little honey? What’s your story? What are you drinking? And would you like one of my American Spirits? They aren’t fancy, but they get the job done. They fill your lungs good.”

When I first met Jesco, I laughed at his insane way of speaking, even found myself charmed by this slight redneck poet. But now his routine had grown stale and a little sad. I can’t explain why he spoke the way he did. Why does anyone do anything? To prove they’re fun? To be loved? But I couldn’t deny the sour interest I took in watching him operate, at observing his conversational successes and failures.

The woman accepted one of Jesco’s American Spirits and dipped her head close to his Zippo. “Name’s Sandy.” They spoke and flirted. Sandy snorted at Jesco’s jokes and told him about her childhood in Central Pennsylvania. She laid bare her dreams and aspirations: to became the district manager of a restaurant franchise, that she’d gone to school for restaurant hospitality, that she once owned a little beagle puppy named Peppy who could accomplish a vast variety of fantastic tricks and amusements.

“Everything you say is the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard,” Jesco told her. “But let me halt your brilliance if only momentarily to tell you a little something about myself. Like I said, I am a poet of West Virginian descent and I do not compose my work on paper like all those goons from the previous century.”

He waited for her to urge him on. When she didn’t, he continued regardless.

“I compose my poems spontaneously and upload them onto YouTube. The chapbook is dead, sweetheart. It’s all about the electronic transmission these fine days.”

She nodded, a look on her face like she didn’t understand. I didn’t either and checked my watch. I looked out the window. Still snowing. Blowing around hard enough now that I couldn’t see the other end of the street. I reached beneath my stool and felt the handle of my briefcase, imagined that uneaten Tupperware of pasta inside.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, a man entered the bar and approached us. Tubby, fat-faced, backwards cap. Something eternally boyish about him, something in the too-wide eyes, the slightly rose-tinted cheeks. He had a great big smile and looked drunk. He walked right on over to Sandy and gave her a sloppy kiss on the lips. She didn’t look surprised. Jesco stubbed out his cig and finished his drink.

“Flounder,” Sandy said brightly, “I’d like you to meet Jesco Black and… I’m sorry. What was your name again, Mr. Swimmer?”

“Rasheed.”

Sandy rolled her eyes conspiratorially at Jesco who ignored her and lit another cig. “Rasheed’s from Egypt.”

“Shit.” Flounder slapped my back. “A swimmer from Egypt! You speak Egyptian?”

“Arabic.”

“Can you say something for me?”

I turned back to my drink.

“Well,” Jesco said. “I think it’s time for me and Rasheed here to hit the old dusty trail. Isn’t that right, Rasheed?”

Before I could say anything, Sandy pouted, grabbed Jesco’s forearm and insisted we stay. There was something pleading in her eyes, and I’m still not sure if Jesco intended to leave or if that was all part of the con.

“You gone ahead and twisted my arm, darling,” Jesco said. “Now. How about a round of shots for this handsome foursome, this devilish little group hell-bent on some wholesome destruction?”

We drank. Jesco, Sandy and I sat at the bar while Flounder stood behind us awkwardly shifting his weight from foot to foot, occasionally tilting his face to Sandy’s to give her another kiss. Jesco angled her away so the two of them could have some private time. That left Flounder to me. I tried to ignore him and focus on that nearly forgotten Pitt game—I watched our basketball students stomp up and down the floor and knew at least three of them would make it to the NBA, would eclipse my lifetime earnings in a single year. But Flounder kept inching closer. He told me whoppers about his Pontiac Firebird and the time he got stoned at a hip hop show. Then he stopped, really studied me, and shook a finger at my chest.

“Wait a sec. I know where I know you from now. You’re that Egyptian swimmer from Pitt, aren’t you? Maybe eight years back?”

I had never been recognized by a fan before and fought my urge to hug this man, or at the very least clap him triumphantly on the shoulder. “Yes,” I said. “Yes.” He made me think of Erica, how she attended all my meets, even the ones miles and miles away from Pittsburgh. How she cheered me on. How she told me throughout college that I had such potential, that I was the type of man destined to accomplish great things. The two of us against the known world out for wealth, fame, power, glory. Endless happiness.

“I saw you… play once,” Flounder said. “My freshman year. I dated a girl on your team. Michelle Katz. I went to one of your meets. I think you were playing Maryland. You broke some kind of record.”

“The one-hundred meter back stroke.”

“Yeah.” He paused. “Shit yeah. Hey, you still got that record?”

“No. One of my students beat it in ’05.”

He didn’t ask what “one of my students” meant and I didn’t ask about his age. If he were a freshman eight years ago, then what was he still doing in the undergraduate ghetto where forties sat cracked in the gutter and trash blew in the streets like tumbleweeds? But I softened. He knew me!

“Hey,” Sandy said loudly, finally breaking away from her one-on-one with Jesco Black. “I got an idea. Me and Flounder got a handle of Jack back at our place. It’s not far from here. What do you say?”

Flounder clumsily put his arm around me. “Me and Rasheed are in, right Rasheed? This guy’s a Pitt record holder!”

I nodded at Jesco. He tapped the bar and called for the check.

Everything was completely still when we left the bar. The storm had ended and fresh snow blanketed the roads, the parked cars, the buildings, even some of the students who slipped by. Jesco and Flounder walked up front and chatted about Pitt’s chances this Bowl Season. I walked alongside Sandy, but we didn’t talk much. I was too preoccupied with the snow balanced on the crisscrossing telephone wires above. I liked the look of it: the precariousness of life. I loved the stillness after a snowfall, the way every living thing seemed to recede into a cocoon of warmth.

They led us to their duplex and inside their living room. Their apartment was small and bore little resemblance to my own suburban dwellings. Sandy and Flounder’s living room was the central space of their apartment: the type of housing only a twenty-year-old could bear. Posters thumb-tacked to the walls of action movies nobody would remember in five years. I sat beside Jesco on the couch, nervously clutching my briefcase in my lap. Flounder took the lumpy armchair at our side. Sandy searched a milk crate in the corner and pulled out a record with a beautiful blonde in flannel on the cover. She shimmied with her back to us as the music started. It sounded twangy and full of mourning, the voice of another generation, not at all what I’d expected people like Sandy and Flounder to enjoy. She darted off to the kitchen and returned with a handle of Jack, no glasses.

“How about we play an old West Virginia game?” Jesco said. “It’s about telling stories.”

Sandy hopped into Flounder’s lap and threw her arms around his neck. We took turns taking swigs straight from the bottle. When no one took Jesco up on his suggestion, he started talking again. “What we do is, we go around the room and tell the story of the most beautiful woman we’ve ever seen. How’s that sound?”

“That’s not fair,” Sandy said. “I don’t want to tell about some beautiful woman. That’s no fun.”

Jesco considered this and offered Sandy and Flounder a cigarette. When they declined, he lit up. “All right, house rules after all. Sandy, why don’t you tell us about the best looking John you ever did see?”

She rubbed her hands together. Then she tapped Flounder’s thigh to let him know she wanted to get off. She went to the bedroom for a baggie of marijuana and a package of King Sized Smoking. “This is going to be good,” she said as she handed the materials to Flounder, then sat cross-legged on the floor.

“This was in Lancaster when I was thirteen-years-old. My mother and I had just arrived. Her last relationship didn’t work out, so we left Wilkes-Barre for Lancaster. I was heartbroken because I was on a basketball team in Wilkes-Barre and I had just gotten good enough to start. Mom didn’t like me playing sports much anyhow,” she said. “There was a real live general store in Lancaster. Can you believe that? It was probably set up for tourists come down to see the Amish, but the local people used it too. And my mother sent me down to pick up some milk and bread and I went, and afterwards, I just kind of hung out on the porch watching cars go by.”

“Get to the good stuff, honey.” Flounder had already taken two hits. He gave it to Sandy who inhaled for longer than I thought possible. Afterwards, her voice sounded high and taut.

“I was getting to it,” she said matter-of-factly. “So I was sitting on this porch and all of a sudden this pickup pulls up and it’s covered, and I mean covered in mud. And this man emerges. This man in cowboy boots and flannel and a ten gallon hat like the movies on Saturday TV.” She shot a winky, blinky look in Jesco’s direction while Flounder closed his eyes and tapped his knee to the music. “And I came to learn that wasn’t custom up in Lancaster. Not everybody dressed like that. But this absolute man walked past me, tipped his hat, and said, ‘Ma’am’. I swear. That’s the day I first became aware of myself as an honest-to-goodness woman.”

I thought Sandy’s story was kind of sweet in a really cheesy way, and it put me in a good enough mood to take two quick puffs when the joint came my way. I was supposed to have been home two hours ago, but I still didn’t have the courage to face Erica. I wanted to slip through time and awake to the comfort of my younger self.

“That’s just beautiful, Sandy,” Jesco said in response to her story.

“Yeah,” Flounder grunted. “Yeah.”

She blushed. She stood up and smoked. “Thanks. Now how about you, Jesco?”

He reached for the handle beneath his legs and sipped before clearing his throat. “My story’s not nearly as eloquent as our elegant hostess’…”

But it was. He droned on for a good ten minutes about hiking through the hills “‘round Cheat Lake” and coming across a beautiful farmer’s daughter who offered him lemonade and a slice of raspberry pie. The story was filled with language so flowery and gooey-gooey that I just can’t bring myself to repeat it. But it worked on Sandy, that dreamy look in her eyes, the drunken slurring of approval. But then I thought maybe I was wrong, because as soon as Jesco finished, she rose and bid us all a good night, disappearing to the bedroom, the door clicking shut behind her.

And then it was midnight, the only people left in the room three strangers with too much liquor in their bellies, too much marijuana in their lungs.

“I gotta hit the head,” Jesco announced. “May I?”

Flounder nodded that he could, and when Jesco stood, I did the same. I paced the living room and examined its contents. I felt safe in Flounder’s presence. He smiled absentmindedly at nothing particular, as if his natural state in the world was sitting atop a throne and attending to whatever shiny trinket caught his eye.

“You got a job?” I asked.

“Me and Sandy are on the wait staff part time at Olive Garden. We only moved back ‘cuz we got laid off in Harrisburg.” He paused to think. “Harrisburg is shit.”

I inspected the framed pictures on the wall. Nothing too out of the ordinary—the usual couple stuff that reminded me of my own home—the lone exception a wallet-sized picture at the very bottom. I pried it loose. It showed a pudgy blonde boy with a bowl cut clutching a baseball bat. He wore a player’s uniform and the whole picture resembled a trading card. I held it for Flounder to see.

“This you?”

He squinted, then laughed. “That’s me all right. A me from another life time ago.”

I went back to the couch with the framed baseball card in hand. Sandy’s country record had started to skip, but neither of us moved to stop it. What a curious thing for a grown man to hold onto, to display in his house as an adult. A constant reminder of earlier glories. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. There were so many people in the world with their own secret histories, their own buried desires and hurts. Maybe I was reading too much into it, but regardless, the picture moved me.

“You know the most beautiful woman I ever saw?” I asked. “My wife. She used to be so soft, so supportive. Used to wear these oversized sweaters that would sort of droop down and reveal her shoulders. I loved those shoulders. She showed me off to her friends and family, was always so proud of my swimming. She was studying to be a veterinarian before she gave it up. The two of us were going to ride my successes to the top of the world.” I paused. “Might be my ex-wife now. I found her suitcase all packed and ready to go this afternoon and then she told me we had to talk about something serious when I got home. I can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to go home. I knew things were bad, but not this bad. She thinks I’m detached. That I never tell anybody my feelings. Imagine what living with me must be like?” I set the framed baseball card facedown on an end table. “You’re the only one who knows any of this. I even have her leftovers in my briefcase because I’m afraid I’ll go home and it’ll be the only proof of her I have left.”

Flounder didn’t say a word. He joined me on the couch and put his arm around my shoulder. “It’s going to be all right, Rasheed. Whatever’s going to happen, happens. You’re a good person. You should go talk to your wife.”

We sat like that for a long time, not saying anything, not thinking anything, not hearing anything other than the final dying skips of Sandy’s country record. I knew he was right, that I couldn’t really stop anything from happening. But maybe if Erica hadn’t left yet, maybe I could still try and fix things. I had so quickly resigned myself to failure, but maybe that didn’t have to be the case. What if I could still fix things? I stood up to leave, but there was still one person left who hadn’t played Jesco’s game.

“Most beautiful woman I ever saw,” Flounder said, “is Sandy. Just Sandy at any particular moment. Always Sandy.”

I didn’t reply because I had almost forgotten Sandy and Jesco existed. And Flounder must have too because he practically bolted for the hallway with the bathroom and bedroom. I followed him even though if I had any sense I would’ve sprinted out the front door. Of course the bathroom was empty. Flounder had already gone in the bedroom by the time I arrived. They weren’t naked. At the very least I can say that about Jesco Black and Sandy. They were on top of the covers, facing each other on their sides. Jesco had his hand between Sandy’s legs and kept it there frozen. Flounder grabbed him by the ankle and dragged him off the bed, the only sound his body slipping across the comforter. Surprisingly, Sandy did not scream or make a scene. She sat up against the headboard and watched events unfold with a strange detachment, leaving me to wonder if this had happened before, and if so, how frequently. Flounder got Jesco on the floor then reeled back, struck him straight across the jaw once, twice, three times as hard as I’ve ever seen anybody get hit. The poet did not struggle. There was blood, Jesco fell backwards, and still that skipping record. I wanted to ask Sandy who that country singer was before she was lost to me forever.

Flounder picked Jesco up by the shoulders and marched him out of the bedroom. I followed. Sandy did not. We went outside where the cold Pittsburgh night stung my ears. Flounder got a good grip on Jesco and tossed him off the porch as hard as he could. He flew face first into the passenger door of a snow-covered flatbed and fell backwards onto the pavement. He looked hurt but only mildly so, little puffs of steam escaping his mouth every few seconds.

Flounder and I stayed on the porch. He shook his right hand a couple of times in and winced. We stood like that for a second and I’d like to think it was a moment of understanding, a pointed silence that stood in for our inability to articulate feelings into words. Before he went back to Sandy, he touched my shoulder so lightly, it might as well have been the gentle caress of my wife. I thought about collecting Jesco Black off the sidewalk and putting him into a taxi, sending him back to wherever it was he hailed from. But I didn’t. I stepped past him, carefully avoiding his body, and began the long walk toward my car. I hoped Erica hadn’t left yet. All I could do now was hope.

I sped the whole way home, the four-wheel drive on my SUV getting its first workout of the season. I pulled into our development of identical houses and closed my eyes, told myself that if her car was there I’d be more emotionally available, that I’d drop to my knees and cling to her waist and beg for forgiveness.

But her car was gone. I parked outside our garage and walked up to the front door. No lights on in the window. I unlocked the door but didn’t step over that threshold, refused to enter into absolute darkness. I called her name once, twice, three times. No response. Not even the dog. She must have taken him with her. She’d left nothing behind but that big empty house, a two-thousand square foot monument to my loneliness, the siphoning away of my potential.

I left the door open and sat on the stoop. I opened my briefcase and removed the Tupperware, opened it, took a great big whiff, the ghost of the scent just barely there. I reached inside for a handful of rotini and ate it, really savored the embedded flavor despite how cold it tasted. I sat on that stoop and tried to convince myself that Erica had gone out for a drink, that she was out searching for me in the aftermath of the snowstorm, that she would return and explain how we would realize the bright potential of our youths and ascend to the level of American Kings. Then the wind started blowing harder and I could hear it howling, could see the telephone lines swaying back and forth overhead. Snow topped the wires and I watched two great heaps fall off and explode in the middle of the street, one after the other. Falling, falling, falling.

Salvatore Pane’s fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web and has been published in Annalemma, Flatmancrooked, PANK, Hobart and Quick Fiction. He blogs for The Rumpus, BOMB, PANK and Dark Sky Magazine and teaches fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. He can be reached online at www.salvatore-pane.com.

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Face So Mild

Hunt used to bust Jeff’s ear raw with his fist. I watched him do it. I watched him bring that clenched thing down, sledging the lobe against his skull until blood made spray his face and shoulder blades. This was all some years back in high school. Incarnate Word—where the nuns hid their beyond-burgeoned bodies in loose-fitting habits, and their cheeks filled flush when the students muttered fuck. Hunt would strike him every day at lunch, but Jeff didn’t mind it. He’d sit smirking on the lowest bleacher in the gymnasium, and I’d collect the dollar bills that folks would pay to see. Jeff couldn’t feel much. He’d a name for the condition, but at last it escapes me. He could take most brutal aggressions in stride. You could kick him in the balls while he lit a cigarette smiling. “I felt it,” he’d say exhaling smoke, “but it didn’t faze me.” We’d take in a killing on the show Monday through Thursday, and, come Friday, we’d skip out toward North Padre Island and catch the ferry to Port Aransas where we’d sip beers at the Sea Drift and look for trouble to find us.

On those Friday afternoons Hunt and Jeff would run amok. Jeff didn’t hold ills against Hunt for the bludgeonings, but after imbibing he’d find it funny to chuck fists against Hunt’s shoulder and ribs, and they’d go to tussling, and once Jeff, who was broader than Hunt by some inches, pitched Hunt off the port side of the ferry toward Turtle Cove as we made our drunk way home, and we spent the night in Nueces County Jail in drenched clothes because Jeff had jumped in after Hunt, and I had jumped in after both of them, and we were soaked when the cops showed. We got cited with public intoxication and disorderly conduct, and some months later we worked off community service hours at Sea Side Cemetery digging and dirting the graves, and I’ve got a picture somewhere of me doing a handstand aside an open grave with Hunt and Jeff leaned against shovels on either side of me grinning.

Hunt and Jeff and I distanced after high school. Hunt’s a millionaire’s son and he went up to A&M College Station and studied business or marketing and went into real estate and I hear he makes a killing. I stayed at the A&M in town and studied art appreciation for three semesters before I realized I didn’t appreciate much, dropped all my classes and got a job tending bar at a place downtown I’d rather not mention by name. Jeff got work on a deep-sea boat grabbing fish for amateurs and clubbing sharks to death. It’s one of those vomit-cruise catamarans, where thirty some odd tourists pay to be bobbed out deep, and they sit single file on either the port or starboard side facing the gulf with a short pole between their knees and a bowl of chopped mullet by their feet, and they drop their lines until they hit the floor, or until their bait gets gotten, and then they reel up whatever it is they’ve lucked into, but they’re not allowed to unhook the fish, it’s a liability, the boat’s always tossing, there’s fear they’d catch their fingers on the hooks, so they holler to Jeff, that’s his job, he couldn’t feel it if he set a hook to his bone, and he comes running down to pull off their snappers, or beat dead their sharks, and he hauls the fish aboard, holds them for the fishermen to see, and tags them and drops them in a live well to be redistributed once the boat makes shore. It’s not a romantic occupation, but he claims it pays well. He says they make good tips, because they sell beer, and those who go out and catch both buzz and fish are prone to be generous.

“The worst part’s not beating the sharks by a long shot,” he told me. “That’s fun,” he said smiling. “The problem is seasickness is infections. One of those fucks goes green and the whole tour turns. Thirty some odd losers loafing up on the decks. It stinks unimaginable. The dead bait and vomit and diesel fumes off the engines. You get back and have to hose everything down. The puke and dropped bait gathers like a raft being pushed toward the stern, and it clumps like some dirty dune, and splashes to the bay like a turd toward a toilet.” He told me he could get me on a cruise if ever I wanted some years back, but I can’t take him up on the offer.

Recently I’ve been watching a lot of videos. I’m not sure what’s into me. I’ve had internet in my house for years, but recently I’ve been looking at things. Things maybe I shouldn’t mention. I’ve liked girls all my life, but I’ve always been shy on them. I didn’t take a date to prom even. I just went by myself real casual, though there were girls who would’ve gone with me, had only I asked. I’m not much in conversation with them, but I do like their form. Sometimes I’ll wear my sunglasses to the shopping mall, and I’ll watch them as I’m passing, and they can’t see my eyes. I like when they slide the clothes hangers as they’re browsing or when they sip soda through straws. There’s a lady at work I’ll have drinks with on Sundays when we close early, but there’s a difference with her because I’m not sure she likes men. But lately the videos have been different. Not women, not girls. Not sex or sexual nature.

I found this site that shows fist fights. It’s all videos that high school kids take on their cell phones. They’re never high quality, and most aren’t even a minute long. Sometimes they’re on trampolines, and sometimes they’re in bathroom stalls, and sometimes they’re in fields of grass, and there’s one that’s in a gym. It’s only twenty seconds. I watch it when I’m able. A lanky kid walks up to a broad shouldered guy real casual and sends a fist to his face. The punched kid just takes it. His face so mild. It’s as though he’s receiving a blessing. I wonder if he has the same condition Jeff does? I wonder if he feels a thing?

Sometimes for no reason I’ll drive out toward North Padre and catch the ferry back and forth and stand at the spot along the guard rail where we all three went over, and I’ll sort of smile there remembering. I miss a hunk of that time we had. Sometimes I even think about letting myself slip just to recreate it. Letting myself go face first down against the salt water. I know I could still do it, so long as someone went before me. But I was never much for leading. I was always scared of throwing a fist at the moment. I was always stuck worrying about how bad it would sting.

Brian Allen Carr’s short fiction has appeared in Annalemma, Boulevard, Fiction International, Keyhole and other publications. His collection Short Bus is forthcoming from Texas Review Press. He occasionally blogs at Dark Sky Magazine.

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Moreover, the Light of the Moon Shall Be

The first half hour of waiting was never as maddening as the last. They sat in the shadow of the water tower and blew cigarette smoke out the crack they left in the truck’s windows. She curled her bare feet on the dash and he stared at them. They both enjoyed the waiting, the cruelty of time in that hour, how it seized their wants and made them wider. He didn’t much care for the taste that the cigarettes left in her mouth, but the rest was clear water and strawberry twizzlers.

“Let the wickedness wash over you,” she whispered and straddled him then. They went at it the way motors cranked over, the cross dangling from her neck making cold shapes against his cheek that he couldn’t turn away from in the small space of the cab. Let’s take it easy, they said to each other, wait till we get inside. He whispered the word in her ear as they moved: inside, inside, inside. Then she bucked and her head clanged the cab’s metal roof.

In those moments where separation swelled between them, she thought of dinner, the silver laughter of forks, round plates with potatoes and quivering, bloody meat. Her father would intone a prayer, his eyes small in his wide face. Deliver us from our sin, he’d say, deliver us from our wicked ways. Her face would warp in the bowl of a spoon during the prayer. The meat was red and sweated on the plate.

He liked the way she behaved in the house after his grandmother left, the noises that she made. They would leave the blinds open so the sun could slant in across their naked bodies. He enjoyed the slow revealing of that other girl inside her, the one only he knew, how her under parts arrived white and goose-pimpled. He didn’t know why, but her hands were wrinkled and creased as if they’d been burned or were yet unformed in their becoming.

Their favorite thing was to stand bare in the kitchen. He’d nestle behind her, his hardness clasped in her rear’s cheeks, his hands holding up the weight of each breast, raising first one, then the other like puppets. A bay window at the front of the kitchen opened to the wide day. Light flooded in and warmed the spots of their bodies not touching. There was always a moment before things turned frantic and huffing, a still moment that sifted onto them. It was a moment the boy was certain his parents never had experienced. How could they? They touched like the wrong end of magnets. But things were different with her. There was a certainty in the way her body fell into his, a natural melding, a fate. They would age in this closeness by the minute. They aged into their bodies the way a peach ripens within its skin. A pink blush splattered her belly whenever she came and from between her legs a great gush squirted till the sheets dampened, his hands full of the unholdable liquid, his face salty with the slick. At first, she was ashamed and would cover herself with her hands and squeeze her knees together to slow the jerking flow, but soon she came to enjoy his attention and now spread her thighs wide for the release, gripping his hair to hold his head to it so that he would drink, revealing all that she was and would be till they molted apart and he fell back with a wet and amazed face, watching her belly and its pink heaving.

She leaned forward and rasped a cigarette from the pack on the dash. Tobacco sizzled in the orange eruption of the Zippo. She leaned back, her head on the passenger door armrest, legs slightly apart. White panties with a wet spot. He stared and blew smoke across her thigh, felt himself swell with eager blood.

She curled her toes against the rubber floor mats and squeezed her legs together. It’s not as if they were on fire as it’s often explained, more like they were the sort of forces that are compelled toward each other. They had discussed this before. Protons and electrons. But she didn’t care about that. Explanations and prayers did not matter. Reasons were for the old and the dead. What mattered was the here and now. She enjoyed how his scrotum moved even without being touched, as if it contained a life separate from his. She often thought it responded to her thoughts. It wasn’t so much that she wanted him inside her as that when he was she didn’t concern herself with escaping and thought little of those dinners, the silver laughter, and the lessons of red meat. A cock is a wonderful distraction, she told her friends, with a small flip of her wrist. It’s the best we have to hope for. She grabbed him in the truck and moved her fingers on him. Then she gave it a little kiss and said to him, “All mine. This will be mine forever. Especially if we have a baby.”

The things people say to each other. He rolled the window down a bit more and a scarf of smoke moused out the breeze. The water tower’s shadow bunched in the cab. He softened in her mouth. She moved up and sought his lips, but the cigarettes bothered him. Her wrinkled fingers cupped his chin. “What’s the matter?”

“A cramp in my thigh.” The window squeaked as he rolled it down all the way. “You have any gum?”

They both heard the other’s breath and felt blood grow old in their hearts. Grass stalks fluttered against the muffler. Though each felt different, the world persisted as if that difference didn’t matter. It was like the weight of all water was there and pressing on them, holding them back from becoming what they wanted to be. What people really are is revealed in sunlight and nakedness and they each looked for that in the other, but the shadow from the tower had filled the truck like a black balloon and they were becoming nothing but hands and tongues and everyday toes.

Seven minutes past ten and the boy’s grandmother still had not left. An hour beyond that and still her car had not moved. This had never happened. Never had they waited like this. He leaned his head back so that his hair darkly ovaled against the rear window and then he released his breath. He began to wonder what the rest of his life would be like from this moment forward. His concern was only for what might arrive, not that which had passed. His mother worked three jobs, wearing an orange dress, serving hamburgers. He thought of how her eyes had turned wet the last time her husband had touched her.

He looked at the girl who had fallen asleep and thought she could be replaced, that she was no different than any other. Then he closed his eyes and forgot about the virus of the past. All the past did was repeat. Noon approached. The cross around the girl’s neck glinted in the hollow of her throat and the sun crested the tower. Light broke around the truck. Light flowed and washed away his thoughts of what was to come and what had passed. His grandmother’s car was finally gone. The house was empty and full of breeze, willing as the moon to harbor that which they had to give. Their hurts would soon be healed, the breach closed. He woke her up and told her it was finally time. The news made her face a bright apple. He knew that what lay ahead was a privileged thing. This gave him a quiet pleasure and strength. He started the truck and they felt the combustion rattle their bones. As he drove out from behind the water tower, sunlight illuminated every inch of her body. She came out of the shadows into wonderful glory.

Brad Green’s work has appeared in Annalemma, Blip Magazine, PANK, Night Train, elimae, Storyglossia, and others. He’s the Prose Editor at decomP magazine, an assistant editor at PANK, and a Spotlight On series editor at Dark Sky Magazine. Find him online at http://about.me/bradgreen

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Sara of Malta

March 1807

As concerns the Order by Thomas Beddoes, physician—

Description of Articles: 4 cases (24 pints), Laudanum—

Articles requested by Sara Hutchinson at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, Cumbria; please re-send by ship; address: S.T. Coleridge, Valletta, Malta.

###

March 23, 1807

Dear Sara,

The linens you laid out for me I have left here, clean. My apologies, please, for the nightmares. I take them far from you.

Please tell your brother not to follow me. But he would sooner choose to face himself with a festering, man-sized boil.

Perhaps it is the cold—this cursed wind and wet we shoulder all the dread year round. My bones are turned to fibrous, fiery pain. But I take them far from you.

My wife knows where I go. Assure her I am well.

A kiss for your sister Mary; strong legs to John, Thomas, and Dora. My heart to your dear brother.

All joy to you,

S. T. Coleridge

###

March 30, 1807

Dear Sara,

I stood with the mates upon the forecastle today. You would marvel to see a ship’s hull in this new age. It is a small cave filled full of wondrous, minute mazes, though the ship itself seem large and hollow from the docks.

I fear my knees are most afflicted now. Twenty-five, even thirty drops of wicked dram do not relieve them. The sea air proves malignant as England’s cold. I have embarked in error.

But from England’s shore dear William’s voice comes softly as a dove’s: “Friend, on the sea is where your pen glides best; you cannot claim otherwise; I will hear no further complaint.” Days aboard a ship are long, William, and pain in the knees breeds sour couplets.

Aboard a ship, William, the air is forever indolent, and the gulls forever calling overhead, forever bickering over endless fishes—no magpie’s chirrup heard here, and never, never a kind breeze! And I grow idle with the sea. I write it down, or try, but Sara, William, dear friends, I wrinkle. Someday another fish will flick its golden tail for me, idly, in the depths, but I will protrude no further after it than an eel in a sea of grain, and it soon swims out of sight.

With submission,

S. T. Coleridge

###

April 1, 1807

Dear Sara,

One has his times of melancholy, Sara, and then the morning comes, and he looks aright at what he’s said and done in the blackening fog, and he remembers to himself the climate of Germany—always treacherous! always foul!—and he hears through the cloudbreak the chapel bells of his child-love’s voice, those soft lunchtime prayers filled with brötchen and fleisch, apfeln and milch; Danke, danke, Herr Gott, für alles dieses Welt. My love took me out to the forest and we cut our flesh on thorns, like brother Hansel and sister Gretel; he spoke of aught but sunlight. Sunlight on that briny water’s edge! on the rotting lily pads! on the heads of the urchins playing—die Kinder, he was forever pointing for me, Bruder und Schwester! Siehst du nicht dein Sohn darin? The sunlight, William; the rot—where? Where do you see my son?

William knows his German but he has no words for these things, no words for my knees swelling up like old oak knots. And my words—the words I would have used, the words given me by God; what have I done with them? I have drowned them forever, sent them diving down in the muck for worm-riddled fish. Have I not said grace enough?

S. T. Coleridge

###

April 1, 1807

Dear Sara,

I lie stiff in my moldy bed and fail to write you a proper letter. I hurt, Sara. Does William know? I regret having written such. I am near the shore of Malta, and I suppose the clouds grow light. Lovely Malta. Pretty scene.

S. T. Coleridge

###

April 10, 1807

Dear Sara,

I ache today. Malta is well despite. I wander her streets like a sea-starved sailor. She glows for me, flashes her lace, invites me into hidden corners—There is much to be admired. Now the summer approaches, the harbor grows fat with ships. The streets are filled with loving couples taking the airs at night. Ah, William has termed me a “city man,” and were I not so bound to the memory of my boyhood, of that life spent in neighborless solitude, he would perhaps be right again. Good Sara, there is so much of color and light in these days, yet I grope for it, a blind wretch, numb to all these charms!

Do not tell him that I suffer here, for he is of unswerving moral mind, and should he come here, he will find me destitute of warm and friendly feeling, for daily grows my pain and, with it, surpassing anger. William has seen me idle and knows how I behave. Caution him from me, if you can.

All the same, Sara, I would have your face again by my bedside and your comforting hand on my wrist. I think how carefree you must be without my phantom forever moaning, stretched out upon the bed. Sleep well while I am gone. I conjure you, dream of the fanciest tea, served with candies, layered cakes; for despite her thousand failures by me, Malta boasts the most lovely and delectable sweets.

Yours in humble admiration,

S. T. Coleridge

###

May 18, 1807

Dear Sara,

Today I tore up a journal that did me offense. All day I have lain covered by its shreds. Most idle and quiet I was for many hours.

Yours,

S. T. Coleridge

###

July 29, 1807

Dear Sara,

William has told you, likely, that I linger still by the sea. True, the sea stretches her brackish fingers all the way up to the alleys beyond my window. Malta, though lovely, has breath that smells of salted hog hung up to dry in a barn. My room stifles with her smell, and turns all food to acid in my stomach.

So I take only supper and a long walk ere I sleep—a sleep, I fear, that comes only with a draught of the doctor’s good deathly drink. For there are demons, Sara, all over the world, and nowhere so otherwise pleasant as Malta. Were William here, he would mark the impossibility of being despondent in such a place, but sickness knows no poison like a lovely landscape. He knows not how all the fools he takes to be our prophets—that innkeep there, that grainsman yonder—reside now, mouths agape with bloody curses, turning beds and grinding flour in my monstrous, heathen dreams. I deny myself, William, like you say; like one of your galloping motherless colts abandoned ere they are weaned, and like them in my privation I lie down to sleep in a gray, prickling field; like them, I fall asleep only to be leapt upon by monsters.

William is not your brother, Sara, but the husband of your sister. You owe him no integral loyalty. Tell him I can’t sleep.

Your admiring,

S. T. Coleridge

###

September 1, 1807

Dear Sara,

Today I discovered that I have neglected to send my recent letters. What is the last you received?

I have started on a new regimen; it gave me most good fortune today. A most happy and pain-free day I have spent here in my room. Good Malta; in her rain and my pleasant lethargy I cannot go out to see her, so she stretches herself before me, her treefruit ripe and golden. She grows bold and buxom like a whore.

S. T. Coleridge

###

September 1, 1807

Dear Sara,

Malta! What a change befalls our girl when the wind tears through her tresses! All week it has showered, and ever the pat of rain sounds over my head. Malta gives herself to me and I drink her sea salt in; at last I understand what she is made of, and what she offers to her invalids. For everyone in Malta is one sort or another of sick; so many wander the streets white in the hands, dewed on the lip, flushed in the cheeks, liver-grown, phlegmy, out of work, melancholic. And hypochondriack me—! I select from what I fancy; a little of the tympany, a little of the gout.

So much better it is for us idle sick to be inside, to work, to make a poultice and take our draughts. As Malta quenches her thirst, so I drink my balmy milk all through the day; all day a little vial at my table. Such curious stuff! It warms and freezes at once, all up and down the body, till at last it fills the heart, the heart then o’erspilling with every good feeling and kind wish. I long for you here, Sara, for you to see what a good pet Malta has made me. You may scritch behind the ears now and never, never fear my yelp! Tell your brother I do so well.

Meantime, pass on to my wife, if you can, or your sister meanwhile, my urging to all mothers to send their boys to Malta in the rainy season. For so much of England is made to coop a boy up, to stunt his legs; Malta grows pregnant with rivers in autumn; her children fall down from the sky. A boy most becomes a man just seeing it, he sees his progeny in the leaf of a tree or the crook of an alley, and without having to play that cruelest of roles that Nature holds in store for him.

Yours resplendent,

S. T. Coleridge

###

September 21, 1807

Today begins my notes on dreams—what cravings of the heart may be expressed by them and what physical events they may portend.

There is a Beast, feline, who figures central in all of my dreams of late; its fur is common tabby, and its eyes manifest an eternal glow within the darkness. In these eyes, in fact, is the creature distinguished from its alley-trudging brother; they remind not a little of Blake’s Tyger, and take to following wherever one treads. I find the creature forever glancing to make sure I follow, forever leading me in my walk—for, in all these nighttime visions, I walk without the ache that follows me thro’ my waking, and thus achieve in sleep a great deal more of exercise than I otherwise accomplish in a day.

Often my illusory walks lead me to gentle riversides, or rolling hills, or flowered balconies, all of such beauty and airy fragrance that, on waking, I imagine that I have been transported to the climes of my dream, and such joy, I confess, pulses through my appendages that I find myself panting for breath beneath the confines of my covers, drenched in balmy sweat. And after these dreams extends a period of five minutes or more, in which I discover my many parts to be numb to all sensation, and thus more fit to be in the world than in any of my years previous.

This dream, however, changes with the day, with direction of the wind, with tea ingested or mutton. Last evening, I was led into a closet, which turned then to a great gaping mouth. I dreamt I lived in such a mouth-closet with the poet William Wordsworth, surrounded by silent and yellowed teeth, and that my wife served us thick meat and hot honey-milk upon the bristling mass of tongue—I conjecture now that we were in the mouth of the Beast himself, for he was strangely out of sight—and my wife, she brought more and more delectables, until we were most glutted; when all of a sudden Wordsworth made a show of his bloated belly and said, quite echoing, “Enough!” He leaned his heavy frame against an obliging tooth and moved to clean his own with a finger. “Samuel,” he barked. “Come here.”

“Of course,” I said, or seemed to say. The mouth dripped with our voices; one great, wet, cavernous racket.

Wordsworth looked at me, then, down his nose; he seemed to have grown taller or rounder; his big hands lay folded atop the ledge of his belly, but his noble fingers slender as ever. “Well?” he asked.

“Well?” I returned, or the mouth did.

He slapped the back of his hand against the gums of our creature-turned-closet. “What a fine piece of workmanship, is a mouth,” he said. “What a palace for philosophy, what a sounding well for sighs.”

Under our feet, the tongue lifted gently. “Methinks we begin to gag our host,” I said, but the pulpy walls swallowed up the protestation.

“Think though, Samuel, think,” said Wordsworth; “were it not for these base accessories, for the passages of the nose, for that distant plunge of the throat, for the tongue laid out like a carpet; how precious little we would say, with our jaws aclick in futility!”

“‘Tis true enough,” I said.

“And if the mouth thus relies on such ignoble things as tongues and throats and cavernous, unkempt nostrils, who then shall say that the poet comes to write solely by means of that noble spirit which compels him, and not also by that hand that lifts the pen to page, that eye that squints and blears by candlelight, that stump of leg that hoists him to his chair?”

“Certainly,” I say. My wife, numb to our lofty talk, dusts the spaces between the Beast’s teeth.

“And what shall we make, then,” came Wordsworth toward me, fairly bellowing, “of a poet, whose leg transports him nowhere, whose eyes have grown over with sleep, whose hands even now hoist the milk of bedevilment, whose hoary beard grows thick with missed droplets, whose lips even now cry out for sweet forgetful rain? Who can be called ‘poet’ whose ink dries in the pot, whose mealy mouth floods with laudanum?”

“Yes, yes,” I say now to him. His roar circles the mouth and terrifies. The tongue of the Beast curls and uncurls under our feet as if pulled by invisible moons. My wife has tickled his gums with her brush.

Wordsworth abandons the waggling tongue for a molar. My wife is rolled along the tongue and swallowed—she is swallowed. She is gone from the dream, then. The dream expires.

[…]

I’d a mind to make a poem out of it, after writing it here—but a poem demands detail, and that I but little recall. The sketch I have made you does not communicate the peculiar quality of the stare of the Beast. As I tread further into waking, I begin to lose the particular effect of his wild eyes. The Tyger, yes; but the Tyger has already been written.

Parts of it may stand, parts of it may serve to trigger…Great tusks, silent and yellowed…

The hairs on the Beast’s tongue were bristly—they were bristles—The dream expires, and pain—O pain! in its stead. Dear William, how I long again for your presence, for your vast store of words! I write, William, I write, I try, but I cannot recount the event. I cannot recall the sheen of the molar to which you so desperately clung.

###

September 24, 1807

Dear Sara,

The Beast has taken to stalking in the waking world. As I fastened myself into trousers this morn a sensation swept across my shin, and, startled, I looked to see the Beast flash by my leg and quickly out of sight. It may be that he takes shelter in my bookcase; there have been mornings when I see the colors of his pelt stirring in the corner of my eye.

Malta grows cold, and I think of leaving. How does my wife? My son? Do you keep well in such a cold—Sara? William?

I dare not go near my books. I write, or try to, without reference.

My legs cry out as if from under a twelve years’ frost. It grows infernal cold everywhere.

I have spent better years than Malta, and she has seen better men than I.

###

September 29, 1807

Dear William,

You auspicious child, you caterwauling son of Heaven, hear this:

When a German has a pain, he calls it schmerz;

When schmerz molests a German’s head, he calls it Kopfschmerz;

When a German sends for his doctor he may say that,

though it center itself in the head,

the schmerz attacks his entire being;

His doctor, a man charged to allay pain,

will not change his prescription between the Kopfschmerz

and a schmerz suffered in total;

He will come alongside and forego his thousand questions,

forego his mincing of the pain of all men into parts.

Let the schmerz in the head be ministered as the schmerz in the leg, in the arm, in the heart—

Let no strong-blooded man bend over the bed of him suffused with agony and say,

Nein, siehst du nicht; du hast keine Schmerz.

###

September 29, 1807

Oh Sara!

Sara, you are so uncommon full of knowledge and good sense. When I die, and William tells you I have imagined with all the others this final pain that hastes me to my grave, you must say, “Then cut him open we shall, there across the umbilical, and there across the inner wrist, and we then shall see the mark of the pain that tormented him on waking, and the bruise of the beast that pummeled him in his sleep; then, dear brother, may we more rightly consider that which Samuel has done, in light of that he has failed to do.”

S. T. Coleridge

[…]

Blake, The Tyger

Blake, Infant Joy

Blake, Earth’s Answer

Cowper, Contentment

Donne, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Gray, Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude

Smart, On a Lady Throwing Snow-Balls at Her Lover

Warton (T.), While Summer Suns O’er the Gay Prospect Play’d

###

October 5, 1807

Dear William,

Most awful, excellent Dream—! From failure to combat thee

Sink I now, a man e’er waning in this sphere,

Who lost to light the cure his dreams begat

And lost to bane the sleep that brought them here—

Come Waker! Here my mantle, here my spear;

Lay arms to me and shatter out this fear.

This his epitaph, this his will

S. T. Coleridge

###

This his three-weeks’ failure; this his last poem for the world. Bury the epitaph with him. His coffer serves well as its folio.

###

October 20, 1807

Dear Sara,

These legs like sea serpents! I cannot go near my books, for my laudanum is out.

###

October 25, 1807

Sara,

Take note to my wife and son—Tell them I come home in November.

S. T. Coleridge

###

October 25, 1807

Dear William,

I return in November. I think to take my son Hartley to tour the Rhineland with your most generous sister. Kommen Sie mit?

I am sorry to tell you, friend—Malta charms much but changes nothing.

Please watch your post, as I am anticipating a vital order.

Yours in soberest friendship,

S. T. Coleridge

###

October 25, 1807

My dear wife,

I come home in November. Look for me within the month.

How does Hartley?

I have not written you. I am, I assure you, ashamed of this. How mends thy foot?

You are a devoted wife and, I’m sure, a faithful mother to young Derwent and infant Sara. I anticipate that Hartley has become quite a young man.

Hartley is near the age when I should like to take him traveling. As I see it, travel is necessary for the growing creature. A country life altogether coddles a man, and Hartley, I fear, has spent far too long in your confines. Before you give way to your motherly restiveness, be reassured; your namesake, sister to the Wordsworths, has expressed most doting sentiments toward our Hartley, and I think she should take upon her very well all the duties of mother and darling friend for such a trip, providing all motherly love and tenderness. Hartley is very fond of her, recall.

There was my youthful excursion with William to Germany—what a mark it left on me; how distinctly it affected my work! What plans does young Hartley make? He shall never decide his direction without first observing the world in its variety. He may dream himself poet, priest, or physician to be, but travel will make it so.

I am well. I am exceeding well. I confess, the sea air has done much good; my nerves are uncontorted, my knees are fixed with a walk. I would remain in Malta—she is gentle and forgiving of my maladies—were it not for my son’s education. How well reads he in German?

My wife, we have not met now in near two years, have not exchanged an embrace in more. Yet I can say that you love me—were we to cross, your eyes would shine love for this suffering delinquent, and I can say I love you too, though my eyes may not shine—they grow dull, for I overuse them, and they fail continually to see all the things they used to see. We grow old, and it is time we relinquish our romantic visions. There are beasts that lurk this world; they attend our every movement. There are decisions we have needed to make. They will spring and feast upon us if we linger any more.

If you will not let me have him, send him in any case to visit me at the Wordsworths; these gentle friends offer exceeding comfort for me, but I long to see my family.

Dear Sara. How many there are of you in this world, across her reeling history—for Sarah there was that, with God’s help, became fertile, and bore a son; Sara there is who bore Hartley, and further, a daughter to bear the name forward; a Sara also William has, and a great friend she is to all; Sara there is to soothe each of our pains—for Hartley, too, there will be a Sara, one such as you who stands firm in her love and gives comfort to all whose hearts are rent by pain.

If you will not let me have him, please pass on my hope that he find a sturdy, devoted girl, a Sara like his mother. If I fail in this—or a Sara fail on him—I hope at least that he will find a William, as I did.

Most stalwart love,

S. T. Coleridge

Tracy Bowling is studying for her MFA in Fiction at New Mexico State University, where she serves as a managing editor of Puerto del Sol. She also edits for Noemi Press and, with her husband, runs the blog/literary magazine Uncanny Valley. Her work has been published online at PANK and Storyglossia.

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Beast and the Bear

I wandered away from our family’s picnic and managed to get lost. I walked, called and stumbled, felt my skeleton shake. Every tree looked the same. Everywhere, the same lid of blue-turning-to-gray sky. There seemed no way out, the trees my bars, the sky my dungeon’s ceiling. I heard men shout and an animal’s terrible roar.

Four hunters had cornered the bear against boulders. They stared down their shaky rifles, licked their lips. The bear rose up on his hind legs, a black tower. His roar, his flail from side to side, shook the branches and made the leaves chant.

“On the count of three,” the skinny hunter said.

I raced into the clearing, shouted.

The men whirled around and the bear charged through them, knocked three of the four to the dirt.

That night, safely back at home, the bear beckoned me from my bed and carried me on his back into the woods, thanked me with honey. Many nights over the years, the bear and I played and danced together amongst the trees. We gorged on berries and honey, shaped crowns from twigs, and learned to sign to each other, to tell our stories, secrets and dreams. Until one night, a young woman at last, I didn’t want to leave him, didn’t want to go back to town.

Because I loved Bear, the townspeople said I couldn’t be human. Said I was a beast. When Bear walked upright, took to wearing overalls, and we set-up house together, they shouted at us on the streets, fired dirt and stones.

Once my baby bump showed, they stole into the woods and set fire to our cottage. They dragged us from our bed and threatened to hang us by our necks, my mother among them. My father begged for mercy and the mob finally allowed us to run, to take a bag each on our backs. They warned us never to return.

We trudged deeper into the woods. The same woods where I’d first met Bear, when as a child I’d rescued him. All the animals also rejected us. The bears cut us with their claws and chased us off. Bear apologized and cried, said I deserved a real man, real love, said he should never have allowed any of this to happen. I pulled his hands from his face and kissed him hard, climbed on top of him.

“Nothing is more real than this,” I signed.

We built another home, a small hut that blended with our surroundings. We never wanted to be found again. Bear fished and foraged and every night after dinner we danced next to the campfire, under the shelter of the stars.

When the baby pains seized me, I felt I was in the jaws of the mountain lions, felt death would be a relief. For two full days I labored and screamed and passed in and out of consciousness. In the deep of the second night it ended.

Bear wrapped the baby and disappeared to bury him. He imagined he’d covered the baby in time, but I saw. The townspeople had warned the baby would be hideous, would arrive deformed and depraved, the devil’s spawn. They said a woman and a bear could never bring ‘right life’ into the world. As blood and the last of the baby’s sack poured out from between my legs and into the dirt, ‘right life’ repeated in my head, smashed-in my skull.

I named our son Joseph Aloysius Bear, after my father. Bear never reached for me again, at least not in love.

The first time Bear hit me, we were having the same old argument. He refused to tell me where he’d buried Joseph.

“That’s all done with,” he signed.

“Stop saying that.”

“You stop,” he signed.

“I guess it’s true,” I signed. “You can’t take the beast out of the animal.”

His arm shot out so fast, I was on the flat of my back on the floor before I realized what had happened.

I swore I’d never allow him to hit me again, that I’d walk. I stayed through one more fist to my face, then another and another and another. Bear stopped wearing clothes, stopped standing upright, stopped sleeping in our hut.

When the two hunters found me by the lake, certainty kicked at the back of my knees and I knew Bear and I would end as we began. The hunters took turns holding the other’s rifle and climbing on top of me. Throughout, I pictured Joseph’s tiny face, how it wore the color and the splendor of the lake when it was frozen. They laughed, thought I was crying over them.

We heard Bear before we saw him. He screamed and charged and ripped the first hunter apart in minutes. The second, the one he’d witnessed pumping me, he took his sweet time over. After, we stared into each other, breathing hard. He took off. I wailed and shrieked and called him back, knew he’d never return.

I often heard him, though, nights. He’d roar and shake trees and loose a cry that could crack stars. With time, his noises grew more terrible, the sounds of his trying to get something out, to set something free.

Whenever Bear quieted, I snatched at sleep and sometimes dreamed that I awoke to a trail of stones outside our hut. A trail Bear had laid and that led to Joseph. With my bare hands, I unburied Joseph and carried him into town, held him, tiny splendid him, out before the people and said, “Look, look.” And they saw.

Ethel Rohan is the author of the story collection, Cut Through the Bone. She blogs at ethelrohan.com.

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Five Poems

Curl Under My Hairy Toes

I know there is a heart inside me.
This is a love poem I sent to Hallmark. I said Fill me
with your papered mush. I was so excited to talk
to you, I put on the wrong lips. I said My other lips
mean business. I said Did you see the sky get angry
this morning? I was trying to impress you
with my ability to look up. I said Polka Dots, get off
the floor when you sneeze. I never want you to catch
a cold. There is a snow globe at the end
of this poem. Inside the snow globe: fake snow,
my skin I have rolled up for you, hello.

The Pumpkin Hearts Eat Out

So many bands whose names start with The. The Emotions in Me Are Steam. The Pumpkin Hearts Are a Lonely Astronaut. The Lost Finale Sucked. This morning, I sit alone in a booth. The waitress smells like the pieces of bacon that get stuck in the top of your gums. The coffee tastes staler than last night. The Coffee Tastes. I remember sleeping you dry. Now, the radio plays throughout the diner. The Love Pollution from Your Thighs. After the song, I never remember the commercials. I want to tell you I haven’t thought about her rising action in months, but you never listen to the b-sides. In hotels, I never open the drawers. There are too many words in books about God. I listen to The Modern Day Carpenter Manages an IKEA on repeat. We buy the limited edition 7”, sleep on rugs that look like flannel pajamas. My iTunes is the color of clam chowder. My least favorite band: The Handjobs.

This Ain't No Place for Kids No More

Four women were hurt in the making of my heart. Nine men were hurt in the mending of the four women’s hearts. Now, everyone cries in basements: gas stoves turned down: we are freezing the loneliness we left out as trash. And I say Why does every girl look like Brittany at 3:31 a.m.? My heart is an entire phonebook in Tampa, Florida. And I say nothing. I want to kiss every baby who sneezes. There are so many babies, I hate spring the most. I hate sleeping inside out. I will never regret watching Teen Wolf. I do not regret my heart: loud wind a swell above the sewer.

Poem as Happy Hour

This poem yells I have met so many people
I will never love. Slosh slosh slosh. Can you
taste the alcohol in this poem? It’s darker
than well water, sweeter than the sprinkler
planted between your thighs. This poem
whispers Life needs to wash behind its neck.
There’s too much grime caked into the bathtub,
and really, who has the time to plan such a big
wedding? Can a poem talk underwater?
Standing on my roof, this poem yells These words
are red because you have touched me holy.
There is death in the air, and I haven’t even
brought up the birds that have stopped
coming around. Standing on my roof,
this poem looks at the pool below. There are statues
of lions with good posture. Everything faces
north, quietly shivers against the breeze. Standing
on my roof, this poem yells Cannonball.
Splash splash splash.

Love Poem # Whatever

You’re a cold winter landscape and I just jacked a parka
from an Eskimo. What I mean is, you taste better than you
did yesterday. I taste you rhythmically: my tongue keeps the beat
of my finger as it taps against your hip. I taste you quietly,
as if my parents were still sleeping in the other room,
as if your fingers were finding the elastic waistband
of my boxers for the first time. Our bed is stacked
with pillows and cat hair, and now our bodies stick together
like Tupperware lids. We hold hands while walking through IKEA,
furnishing the nursery of our house we bought on Monopoly.
This means we love each other. On TV, a chef puts an entire pear
on top of a slice of Brie that sits on top of a hamburger.
This is all wedged between a pretzel roll. I’ve never had a pretzel roll,
but you promise me it’s tops. Not as tops as your hips I say.
If we were a bad sitcom, millions of people would watch us rub
cheeks, wear matching pajamas to bed. They’ll like how you curl
your hair, slowly at first, but then you speed up when your arm
grows tired. People will talk about us around the water cooler,
during their children’s soccer practice, after making love
with the lights on. The critics will call us Contrived, yet adorable,
and Something worth watching while flossing.

In addition to penning the poetry collection Heavy Petting (YesYes Books, 2011), Gregory Sherl is the author of The Oregon Trail Is the Oregon Trail, a novella in verse, forthcoming from Mud Luscious Press, January 2012 and I Have Touched You, a chapbook of linked stories, available now from Dark Sky Books. He blogs at http://gregorysherl.com/.

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This is what they say

They say, effective immediately, and applicable in all our states, we are subject to search and seizure. Should we wish to report our loss, our damage, our delay, we may do so loudly, publicly even, but we won’t be heard and we won’t be listened to. Should we wish to report, we should present our hands and faces for cuffing. Our shortness of breath, our blurred vision, our predilection for sweets and violence, our gradual slipping into trancelike catatonia, these are the markers of our ineligibility. Restrictions, inscrutable charges, perpetrated by a system beyond our comprehension—call it God—will be applied.

This is what they say

They say we mark our maps in musk, dust, wood smoke and urine, unoriented to the polar star. We stumble into our open topographies in pain, in a rage that won’t kindle, won’t burn, our oxidation too slow for the tasks at hand. We move through these landscapes as if we weren’t born to them, as if these hills and valleys weren’t our very own, as if we were lost and cannot be found.

This is what they say

They say we shed our clothes like leaves from a tree, less leaving than left, less mirror than doorway, a visage less ourselves than goose flesh migrating across vast expanses of skin. Our flock reveals more than human terms allow. Splashed against the backdrop of stunted shrub and lichen, our chimera’s mouth, stifled by feathers, cannot be heard by closing the eyes. Instead, the eyes must squeeze shut, tighter and tighter until the creation of their own white light and the blood roaring into our ears conjures fire, different from conjecturing fire. This is synaesthesia, our correction, necessary in that pinching ourselves hard between thumb and forefinger over and over is necessary for us to summon up from the hot thrum of our bodies the shushing sound of waves and threshing wind. This place we call elsewhere, anywhere but here, a northern lake, where we swim out beyond the tree line’s reflection to a place we know cannot be depended upon. Here we will release our buoys from their chains that we might display our illuminated objects.

This is what they say

They say not to speak of negatives, like the roof falling in, or the bottom dropping out, but we wonder what then to speak of. Sermons, half jokes, fey instructions, what frightens us most are the rotting beams invisible beneath the floorboards, the threatening collapse from above beyond our notice. We consider the possibility of unperceived existence, we consider the dissimilarity between sensation and reality, but there is little to do but sigh deeply and return to our exhausting toil, knowing in the deepest recesses of our collective heart that night terrors are for children and we are all too awake.

This is what they say

They say we swelter in a brittle kettle under a black setting sun where the doors have fallen from the hinges and the clocks have all stopped. Our mothers no longer speak. Flies gather. We’re bending spoons with minds lock jawed and rickets bound. Our bodies are pulled from the lake, glistening, woundless and beautiful, like we want everything for ourselves, like we are everything ourselves. Crucifer in staccato, our pale tongues click and whir, breathing lust into fairytale, sparking brushfire, and ghosting once wooded trails, once bountiful orchards with a dream painted in thunder and antimony.

M. Bartley Seigel’s words have appeared in Bateau, DIAGRAM, Lumberyard Magazine, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. His poetry collection, This is what they say, is forthcoming from Typecast Publishing. He is founding editor of PANK Magazine.

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Zaftig

This word is made of

foggy mornings and

Rolls-Royce dreams.

This word is beautiful,

and damn good t it.

Its eyes are

large wild strawberries,

and its smile

Is full of chrysanthemums.

Every evening, a star

Is born within its heart.

A spectacularly small star,

but a star, nonetheless.

David Kowalczyk lives and writes in Oakfield, New York. His poetry has appeared in seven anthologies and over one hundred and twenty journals and magazines, including Taj Mahal Review, Istanbul Literary Journal, The Delinquent, and California Quarterly. He has taught English in South Korea and Mexico as well as at Arizona State University.

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Diet

Your thick-boned though fat-
trimmed, sometimes
even overdone,
I loved.
I smothered you in my gravy,
dipped you in my sauce
rich, licked my fingers,
all up in your crinches.
Now, you, a curtain of skin
hanging from a rod
of echoing bone.
I pull back the curtains:
no meat,
no juice to lube the dry corners
of my mouths,
no sunshine wine to sip
only bone, echo.

Hedon that I am, I hunger for you no more.

Tamara J. Madison is a writer, poet and performer currently living and working in New Jersey, New York. Her creative and critical works have been published in numerous anthologies, journals, and magazines. She has also recorded in solo and collaborative projects. Tamara plans to return to the studio in 2011 and has recently completed a full-length poetry manuscript in search of a publisher.

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Disconnect

(I would prefer not to. Herman Melville—Bartleby the Scrivener)

the dog howled on and off all day long police found Pat in her recliner

a week after forced retirement at her memorial a water-stained picture

she, young, in a ruffled polka dot dress the priest several library employees

three estranged children two sons, a daughter her life, a total disconnect

disconnect oxygen go outside, smoke reconnect

unpack new books stamp Property of put on a cart for the catalogers

hated potlucks If you give me a birthday party I’ll have to take a vacation day

never talked to anyone we didn’t even know the name of her dog

yet, here we are at her memorial the priest leaves her unsung

talks about our immortal souls are you ready, folks? harangues the offspring

tuning out the sermon, we weep ponder not one friend?

what about the husband, her children? macabre query desire to comprehend

or to assuage our guilt? could we have done more? she wasn’t our responsibility

after all, we tried, didn’t we? then, come back to the library gather money

buy books in her name 7 Steps to a Smoke-free Life Taking Care of the Older Pet

The Wicked Flea, a Dog Lover’s Mystery homage to the gods of reconnect

Margaret Walther is a retired librarian from the Denver metro area and a past president of Columbine Poets, an organization to promote poetry in Colorado. She has been a guest editor for Buffalo Bones, and has poems published or forthcoming in many journals, including Connecticut Review, anderbo.com, Quarterly West, Naugatuck River Review, Fugue, The Anemone Sidecar, Phoebe, and Nimrod. She won the Many Mountains Moving 2009 Poetry Contest. Two of her poems published in the online journal In Posse Review in 2010 were selected by Web del Sol for its e-SCENE best of the Literary Journals.

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Reasons for Moving

Outside, in it, my tongue
is that painted bird escaping the wall clock.
I’m abducting raindrops to fill my soft palate
the way cigarettes would.
Everywhere is some place gray today.
Even Des Moines, even Bangor.
That big timpani throbs, and I
Tap brown bare feet to it.

Kejt Walsh is a student at a small liberal arts college in Sarasota, FL, where she drinks a lot of chai with non-dairy milk. She is a transplant from Iowa (specifically, the capitol city) and a public library enthusiast. This is her first time being published.

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Heron Work Ethic

Watching a Blue Heron fishing:
tight as a quiet banjo string,
spring-loaded and neck cocked,
ready to fire that piercing beak,
eyes, head, neck down, stabbing
into the dim depths where prey swims.
Out it all comes with a head waggle,
the hapless fish tossed around,
a scaly cartridge being chambered,
fired into a bellyful of fated neighbours.

Then he does it again.
And again.
And again.

J.M. Ricks is a retired psychologist living in Victoria, B.C., Canada. These days he works part time as a coach in a fitness centre for people over 50, performs with a clown troupe, writes poetry, does volunteer service, and plays fiddle and ukulele. He is married and has two adult children and two grandkids. He has published in Tamarack, Muddy River Review, Road Not Taken, Autumn Leaves, Barrier Islands Review, Driftwood Review and Island Writer.

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Leaving

I clean closets and bookshelves and donate
the once essential, now superfluous
to local charities, uncurious
as to the largess I suddenly make

of bits and pieces torn from a life lived
momentarily in the glare of their
small town, a non-local who sometimes shared
moments of casual togetherness, enough to give

food for talk. My apartment slips from me
and seems a stranger. It stares blankly back,
my once-home fading, falling into cracks
of impersonality.

Morning rises under a tepid sun
warming bare rooms waiting no one.

After many years in central Italy, where she developed her passion for both watercolors and poetry, Janet Butler relocated to the Bay Area in 2005. She currently lives in Victorian Alameda with Fulmi, a beautiful Spaniel mix she rescued in Italy and brought back to the states with her. She teaches ESL in San Francisco, and Italian, privately. Some recent publications are The Chaffey Review, the 13th Warrior, Plainsongs, Locust, Red Fez and Halfway down the stairs. Future publications include Clarion and Pirene’s Fountain. A chapbook, “Under Italian Skies” was published by Flutter Press in April of this year; “To see you no more” by Punkin House Press in September.

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Four Poems

AGAIN

If you’re wondering
what’s on top of me,
it’s private.
Or a meadow.
Or a musical chair.
Or there it is again.
Must be the limitless
wanted us sick thinking
of its circle. Its teaspoon
of light clinking against
our breathing. This message
I’m thinking may be
too big to form images
on screen. Or nobody
understands purpose,
which is why
we can still see it.
Revise that beginning.
It’s under me.
As in adoration,
the ability to burn
in a way that feels
like opening
to the unworthy.
This fine mist
clapping its ears!
My body, the same
as it always did.
Only now it’s inside
a bin of questions.

RESILIENCE

Nice climbing.
And great being great
in the scheme of things.
It could be worse.
It was worse we heard.
Also it is possible
to put a day on backward
and your neck to hurt
like a motherfucker.
Multiple nonsenses
at work. Yellow
highlighter. Sad balls
of rye bread. Skewered
schemata. Hopeless liar.
According to liar.
Chased by two-legged
monsters. Some mothers,
all messed up like bad
spaghetti. Of fighting.
Of not fighting. Of baffling
Resilience, intermittent
affection, or figures.
Dead computer. It stinks
like Venice, not the future,
Leigh. I promise you my
heart. Nobody even knows
about fragments there.

RETARD*

So what if my kid is retarded.
That’s what the word is.
It still is.

So what if she has a noticeable
metal gauge buried under the skin
at the front of her skull and wears
diapers even though she’s five and
doesn’t know from diapers?

I had a notion in my head I couldn’t
handle thisand told Megan as much.
Megan who worked for years with
retarded people. Megan who wants you
to cry at the Chinese restaurant and feel
good about it. Megan who, no matter
what you say, will say in return:
that’s understandable.

I don’t want her to be retarded,
Megan. I just don’t.

If Megan weren’t Megan, she could
have said, suck it up, princess,
but she is who she is, so she said:
I think you’ll be surprised.

Matthew’s right. We can handle
anything.While my friends were
nursing, I was signing papers
for blood transfusions. I was
signing papers for surgery.
For surgery.
For surgery.
For surgery.
For surgery.

Heather dropped off a cooler of her
breast milk while I was working and
I guarded it for us like a wild coyote
from my thirsty coworkers. I sat on
the cooler all day while I typed.

We are monkeys.
We are cougars in the jungle.
Our brains do get in the way
of our front window.

Do I love it?
No, I still don’t,
and yes, she still is,
so there you go.

Thank god for the really retarded
ones. The wild turkey ones
that have gone insane for air.
You can’t shoot them for dinner.
You can only say “By the grace of god
there go I, living with that wild ass
turkey named Unknown.
I could never do that.”

Shhh.
I love her.
She spins and giggles until she throws up.
She beats the TV with a baguette.
She loves Trash Shoot and Naked
and Bacon, quite equally.
She has eyes that people gasp at.
The color of spoons, of mercury.
Where are my eyes, Amira?
Eyes.
[Poke]

Some days I’m more stuck than others.
The turnstile won’t crank and I’m stuck
for 24 hours reading the same subway
poster about education or abortion or
Starbucks’ instant coffee.

Will she go to college?
Will she go to Kindergarten?
Will she “hook up”?
Will she “hang out”?
What kinds of questions
make a person go insane?
What if she had slipped
under the pool’s solar cover
instead of floating on top of it?
What if that lady hadn’t found
her playing on the overpass
next to the 25 foot drop?
How hard would that be for us?
As hard as easier?

Not those questions.
I didn’t drool in my potatoes
tonight and pee my pants.
I drank Squirt for dinner.

When we’re in the supermarket
evolved people smile at us
It’s fine. My nephew’s autistic.

The normal ones, like the one
I was, smile at us too, though
a little tighter, She’s not really
going to do that, is she? Oh god,
she is. Are you her mother?

Some times more than others.
I don’t know her mind, it’s true.
Not because it’s damaged,
I’m now convinced, seeing
I don’t know anybody else’s either.

Everything is so lonely sometimes
and there’s nothing to tie it to.

I am two parts astronaut, one part
Juggernaut. I can save our world
by tethering it to the grass with stakes
like an inflatable Bounce House.
Bullshit. The only thing I can do
is get in it and bounce like I paid
good money for it and I’m here to
have a good time and I’m going to.

A STORY ABOUT THE DAY YOU WERE BORN

It wasn’t snowing October. Though the tire was flatly symbolic and my dad–who I’d hoped would say, “Life doesn’t end”–cried. After a while, you popped your head in–fixed for now–and we drove away, one side lower than the other, thumping for speaking.

When we got home, I pressed my head against the bathroom floor. Years before, it was extremely dramatic, but now, the bathroom just so happened to be the closest room to the front door.

Later in bed we lay on our backs, not touching, the streetlight cutting across our legs. Curtains generally prevent this, light streaming in, but not ours. Even so, we drew them, as we had every night since buying them.

“Why did we get these?” I whispered, watching the light pooling in my palm.

“You liked them,” you said, and I whispered back, “I still like them in fact.”

It’s so easy to miss the beauty of misuse. All it takes is a poorly situated window and desire to be something other than what you’re inside of. It’s even easier to miss nothing doing and why we cherish our stories about it. Each one starts “the day you were born” and moves into the god-scale storm that swept us all out to sea.

*Retard is an English-to-English translation of Matthew Lippman’s “Retards” poem at FROM THE FISHHOUSE.

Elizabeth Hildreth lives in Chicago and works as an instructional designer and regular interviewer for Bookslut. She has poems and translations published in various journals, and is working on a manuscript of poems called The Effect of Small Animals. She blogs here: http://theeffectofsmallanimals.blogspot.com

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Closeted

We all laughed at the mental institution,
the psych ward, the cuckoos wild upon the tree limb

of the group room, during session, as we
failed in each attempt to navigate the labyrinth

of pain cemented and housed in emotional foundations,
playgrounds where children laughed with cruel glee.

The nurses took away our colorful crayons
when we started writing place names upon the walls

and brought us new canvas, buttonless shirts
with strings attached to ensure conformity.

And still we laughed our sleepless nights away
with jokes as witty as a Tuesday door knock

because it is the only voice we knew—
all our words taken away by daily threats

of violence to the person or cherished toy
and the memory of hurt delivered full strength

when blue was only a dreamed of sky
and gold the wished for sun.

Kenneth P. Gurney lives in Albuquerque, NM, USA. He edits the NM poetry anthology Adobe Walls. His latest book of poems is “An Accident Practiced”. To learn more about Kenneth, visit http://www.kpgurney.me/Poet/Welcome.html

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Travelers

Child birth was stark raving pain not because my son’s head tore my cunt, tip-to-tip, and then left me gaping and bleeding, but because I fought my own body to give birth to him.

Part of me wished to keep my son with me forever.

But in the end, I had no choice. If I didn’t push him out, it hurt worse; and then the doctor said something about my son going into respiratory distress. “You have to push,” the doctor said.

So I pushed until he was here in the world with the rest of us, bumbling around with our best laid plans.

We never know what will become of them.

I haven’t been the same since.

I used to attract young men. This started in college because at thirty-one, I was a non-traditional student. Later, in graduate school, when I was a graduate teaching fellow, my male students hit on me.

Finally, I sought them out, men younger than me. They were travelers on their way somewhere else; they prepared me for something.

Nine years ago, Micah offered to talk to my son about not having a father.

Micah didn’t have much of a relationship with his own father.

“I know how your son feels,” he said.

Except in 2001, Micah didn’t understand sacrifice yet.

For the Art and Craft of Writing class we took together, he wrote an essay about his ex girlfriend’s abortion and described the fetus as bird shit against a dark window. How could I forget?

Micah was only twenty-two with waxed curls and glasses. How Jewish he looked. How slim and well dressed and effeminate. A boy never filled his jeans like that. Micah was an oxymoron. I loved what he said to seduce me.

“Did I mention I would have blown Allen Ginsberg?”

We were in college. I was a writer too and wrote about human sexuality, a lot about gay men, gay erotica.

On the floor of my living room it was hard to tell if I was in charge, but the way Micah blinked at me behind his glasses was precious.

In graduate school, I wrote something for him, “A Letter from Her Muse.” We were a writing cliché, like Henry Miller and Anias Nin in reverse. What did he learn from me?

Micah went onto graduate school himself. He described my smile in a poem as a sneer once. I was hard on him about his novel.

Ty lost his birth mother when he was three years old and then the one who’d adopted him was dying of cancer.

His body trembled beside me on my couch so I swept my tongue through his teeth then pulled a wad of gum from his mouth.

Ty reminisced a summer his first year out of high school, a place he’d gone to cut vines off marijuana plants for two-hundred dollars an hour.

This woman had lived in the forest there, he said, a beautiful woman surrounded by children.

“I wanted to get lost in there,” he said.

I put his hand on my breast because he was too shy to do it himself.

Later, he came too fast then lost the condom inside me, so I reached in and pulled it out like a stillbirth or something.

A month later, Ty got a girlfriend pregnant and was afraid he wouldn’t finish college, so I told him, you can do both, be a father and go to college, to which I received this response. WHOEVER THIS IS STOP TALKING TO AND TEXTING MY BOYFRIEND.

So he couldn’t hide with me anymore.

Aaron lived with his parents. His girlfriend had left him. She was in nursing school. He’d broken his back in an ATV accident.

Aaron wanted me to write about him. He wanted to see what we looked like on my bed in front of the closet with the sliding glass doors. I bought all those Mr. Happy condoms.

Aaron liked “Le Disko,” by Shiny Toy Guns. He wasn’t happy, which was why he was with me: my maternal instinct, my once milk-filled breasts.

When my son was an infant, he used to cry and my breasts would ache and tingle so immediately I couldn’t wait to go to him and pick him up then direct his mouth to my nipple. He’d latch on and suck.

How many of them arrived doing what they wanted?

That was what I tried to tell him. Create your own destiny. You can’t expect other people to do it for you. So Aaron described a road trip to Las Vegas and then making his living doing construction work, or maybe he’d become a journeyman, or a roadie for his favorite band, Pearl Jam.

I told Aaron to go.

“What?” he said. He thought I was joking.

Aaron came back and stood outside my apartment door pounding on it one night after midnight and scared the crap out of me until I said no enough times he struck the door so hard I knew the knuckles of his hand bled into the rain on the sidewalk.

“Bitch!” he shouted as he walked into the arms of the world.

Christian arrived at my door with a bag over his shoulder. From the cold, he stepped wearing a knit cap and glasses; he was like a muscled reed in jeans with a five o’clock shadow. He was in Portland for a Chris Cornell concert. His girlfriend wasn’t with him. I gave Christian pizza and a bottle of water.

Soon enough, he took notice of my ten-year-old son across the room playing Guitar Hero and explained a rating system to my son: ten for the most amazing experience ever and one for the worst.

He wanted to know how my son would rate the game.

“Eight or nine,” my son said and then gazed at the traveler’s shoes.

Christian looked at me. “This game of life, I’d give it about a seven so far.” His shoes were neither polished nor scuffed.

“I’m going to be an artist,” my son said. “I’ll double major in Art and Japanese in college then live in Japan with my best friend, Zach.”

“That’s cool,” Christian said, and I could tell he meant to encourage him.

Christian lied on our couch under a string of Christmas lights framing a Marilyn Monroe poster I’d saved from a dumpster. I’d carried the poster over my head during a rainstorm, this heavy, cardboard thing, but I just had to get her around a corner and then up three flights of stairs.

When I’d hung her on the wall, I’d detected no water stains at all.

I also pulled a kitten from a dumpster once, five weeks old, flea bitten and starving. I sometimes wondered how she’d survived a dumpster and how long she’d been there, and who did that sort of thing to a kitten?

Christian glowed under the lights, softened. He looked at home here, relaxed. He wore a necklace like teeth around his neck. Which highway had he traveled to get here, 206? I sat curled in a chair and sipped a beer, something to fill me. He had the kind of mouth that was beautiful because of its full line and becoming redness. I could have sent my son to bed then. I could have kissed Christian. The sex would have felt maternal and sweet.

At least, I imagined it.

“I want to go to New Zealand,” he said.

“So why don’t you?”

“My girlfriend,” he said. “She’s clingy.”

Across the room, my son ripped through “Sabotage,” by the Beastie Boys like a rock star, one of our favorite songs.

“You mean you don’t want her to go with you?”

“I mean . . . yeah, I guess I want to do it myself.”

“So do it.”

“We own a house together. She’s in love with me. Going would be selfish.”

“You’d rather regret it then?”

“No. I don’t know. Just leave her?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Later, I tucked my son in bed with a kiss and a night light on. When I got to the door he spoke.

“Mom, when I go to college, you won’t be able to come with me.”

“Oh,” I said. “Can I call?”

“Yeah. But you can’t come to Japan either. You can call.”

Japan was far, far away. “How often can I call you?”

“Maybe . . . once or twice a week, not too much.”

Lately, we played this new game. My son grabbed hold of my leg and then refused to let go, so I dragged him across the floor behind me until finally the weight of him slowed me down and then hurt.

“Honey,” I’d say. “Can you let go?”

“No,” he’d say. My son thought it was hilarious. “You’re going to take me wherever you go.”

Alana Noël Voth transmits from a haunted cottage in Republican country. Her writing has appeared in Used Furniture Review, Big, Stupid Review, Eclectica Magazine, Literary Mama, Best of Best Gay Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica, and Best American Erotica, etc. She also writes a weekly column for PANK Magazine.

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FALL 2018

FICTION

POETRY

NON-FICTION

Schedule of Events

WONDER WOMAN UNDEROOS

Mary the Cleaning Lady

The Demonstration of Gravity

The Grizzly Bear

Ice Cream Husband

Seduction

The Reign of Evil Will Be Seven Years

The False Belief of Good in People

You Make Such Better Decisions Than Me

Giantess

Methamphetamine Is Not Your Friend

Debt of Gratitude

How and Who and What and Why

What's In a Name

Drunk Dynamite Fishing

The Poet in Convalescence

Wizards and Warriors

The Same Terrible Storm

Lovers

There is No Difference Between an Object and an Event

Babydollz

Aftertaste

Delaney

Everything You Say Is the Most Interesting Thing I've Ever Heard

Face So Mild

Moreover, the Light of the Moon Shall Be

Sara of Malta

Beast and the Bear

Curl Under My Hairy Toes

The Pumpkin Hearts Eat Out

This Ain't No Place for Kids No More

Poem as Happy Hour

Love Poem # Whatever

This is what they say

This is what they say

This is what they say

This is what they say

This is what they say

Zaftig

Diet

Disconnect

Reasons for Moving

Heron Work Ethic

Leaving

AGAIN

RESILIENCE

RETARD*

A STORY ABOUT THE DAY YOU WERE BORN

Closeted

Travelers