WINTER 2011

James and I sit at the kitchen table on a rainy Saturday afternoon going through the mail, drinking Bloody Marys, half-heartedly making a grocery list and teasing each other. We are just back from celebrating our two-year anniversary in Kauai: waterfalls and rope swings and beaches so empty it was like we were shipwrecked.

James has a deep tan and his hair is messy, like it still has the ocean in it. He’s wearing the bracelet he bought there—beads suspended on hemp—and his flip-flops are flecked with sand. He opens bills, lingers over the Victoria’s Secret catalog, trashes grocery store coupons. Laughing, he picks up a real estate advertisement depicting a woman with a painted face. Her red hair is obviously dyed; her curls hard, unnatural. Underneath her face, a banner reads Experience You Can Trust.

“Do you trust Patty Gilstrap?” he says in an affected tone.

I laugh and wish this post-vacation high would last, that we could continue as adolescent versions of ourselves, our relationship safely in the realm of entertainment and escape. James picks up a manila envelope from my cousin Bill. He offers it to me, but I’m reading an anniversary card so he tears into it. Inside is a card, a book on Dreamweaver, and an envelope containing photos. The pictures are from Bill’s wedding six months ago. James flips through them, showing me the highlights. Bill and Anna kissing in front of floor-to-ceiling glass; Anna sniffing a rose, lips parted; Bill and his groomsmen shirtless, only ties, drinks in hand. Then comes to one and stops.

James didn’t attend Bill’s wedding; his copy editor job had him scheduled weekends, and his father was in town. I filled him in after I returned: bridesmaids in hot pink, Aunt Mary’s tiara, the tower of Krispy Kreme donuts instead of a cake. He’d nodded as I spoke, exhaustion dimming his face at the very mention of L.A.

James tosses the photos toward me, gets up, and pours a glass of water.

The photo on top is Lauren and me. I’m smiling, head tilted down, obviously drunk. Lauren’s mouth is closed so you can’t see her big teeth. Her cleavage is ample. Our faces are pressed together, filling the frame, and we’d look like innocent teenagers—lips puckered, kissing the air—if it wasn’t for my brazenly lustful stare, the deep shine to my eyes. James didn’t recognize Lauren—how could he, they never met—but instead recognized my expression. My sex face.

“I forgot about her,” I say, and reach under the table for Isabelle, our Italian Greyhound, and realize she’s still at the kennel. We bought her at a mall pet store in Florida on vacation a few years ago. James calls her puppy mill, a joke. She’s still not completely housetrained and James can’t stand the surprise. I miss her tiny face, her delicate bones, the way guilt makes her crawl-waddle over to confess an accident.

Through the kitchen window, the rain is falling in sheets, making everything darker. It’s a typical late summer shower after which the streets will turn to saunas. DC was built on a swamp and the rain, heat, and mosquitoes are reminders.

“Why would he send us a picture with her in it?” James says finally, leaning against the counter.

“He didn’t know.”

James laughs, but this time it’s a different kind of laugh. Not our goofy post-vacation laugh. “Didn’t know?” He has to clear his throat after he says it.

“It didn’t happen in front of everyone,” I say.

He opens the refrigerator, picks up a beer then replaces it. He closes the door and eyes the postcard tacked to the door. New River, West Virginia. In it, low-lying clouds fill the gorge and the bridge looks as if it is resting on stringy wads of cotton. A Piece of Heaven it says in loopy script.

“Y’all should check out Bridge Day,” he says.

“What could be better?” I say—an old joke between us.

He laughs a little, shakes his head like he can’t believe it.

“It wasn’t that bad of a weekend,” I say.

“How is Bill anyway,” he says.

“Good.” I pretend to scrutinize the cable bill. “Him and Anna are going on a cruise.”

James walks out of the room and when he returns he is wearing shorts and a t-shirt he got on vacation.

“I need a run,” he says.

“It’s raining,” I say, but he kisses my cheek and leaves.

*
I would have told James about my night with Lauren, but my head still buzzed when I returned the day after the wedding. I came home and looked at James but thought of her tongue, fingers, mouth. The night returned in splotches: the elevator kiss, her body like soft, lumpy pillows, rust-colored cool sheets, and her smell—baby powder tinged with chocolate.

A month later, on our drive to West Virginia, I confessed. Isabelle was on my lap, burrowed under a blanket, breathing damp and hot on my leg. James was watching the road with a calm satisfaction that seemed to have within it all of our potential. I looked out and saw nothing but a soft blur of trees, green that shivered in the light. It made me urgently truthful.

I withheld details but admitted Lauren and I ended up in bed together. I didn’t mention she had sent thousands of tiny pinpricks through me, how she was masculine and strange, yet familiar at the same time. I said it meant nothing.

Suddenly we were fighting—I don’t remember about what, but it wasn’t about the cheating. Just as suddenly, we were quiet. I do remember the car smelled of fast food, the radio played bluegrass. A strong wind shook our Honda Civic like trucks did on the highway and James sipped his soda, adjusted the air conditioning.

“I was so drunk,” I said.

“That’s not an excuse.”

“I’m never a lesbian sober,” I said, but he didn’t laugh.  He inhaled through his nose, a big nostril-clearing signal that the conversation was over.

Except for me telling him where to turn, we didn’t speak. Our log cabin beside a lake had rocking chairs on the porch, a picnic table and decaying tractor in the yard. The beds were covered with homemade quilts and the floor sloped in the living room. It smelled of moth balls and wood smoke and incense. James unloaded the car while I explored and wondered if our marriage was over.

I found him in the kitchen, putting the steaks in the refrigerator. I picked up a cast iron skillet off the wall, felt its weight. “Quaint,” I said, but James continued transferring food from the cooler.

“Want some help?” I said.

“Nope.”  The back of his university t-shirt had darkened with sweat, the same t-shirt he’d worn when we started dating five years ago. “Why don’t you see about the lake?” he said.

I went down the thin wooden steps into the yard, Isabelle close behind. The blanched grass crunched underfoot. I kept my eyes down, my hand shading my face from the bright sun as Isabelle ran ahead, her tiny body getting smaller in the distance.

James and I met right after graduation, both of us shaky-legged without the shelter of academia. James lucked into an internship at The Post and I was a staff assistant for a Senator. We were career minded, harbored a need to line things up. Meeting him was like checking something off my list.

“Alex,” James shouted, his voice tiny, like it was coming from the bottom of a well.

He stood behind the car door. I waved and walked quickly in his direction.

“Heading to the store,” he yelled.

“Wait,” I shouted.

I was certain he saw me jogging toward him, heard my voice, but the door slammed and the engine started. I stopped in the center of the field and watched as the window on the passenger side slowly rose, and then was sealed shut.

*
James and I moved here, to our current house on Capitol Hill, two years before we tied the knot. It’s a three bedroom with a small deck, a parking space, and a refinished kitchen and decorated with James’ furniture—the dark dining table and wine cabinet, full leather chairs that seem like they should carry the smell of cigars and cologne. It’s elegant: our walls a deep sage, the carpet Persian.

I put the photos of Lauren in one of the end table drawers—under birthday cards and instruction manuals and recipes—with the sick feeling I am burying something alive. When James returns from his run, we work on chores but keep to ourselves. He pays bills and responds to emails while I sort the laundry and tidy the kitchen, both of us devoted to restoring life to its regimented order.

I make grilled cheese and tomato soup for lunch in the pans we recently purchased. We’ve taken up cooking as a tandem hobby, but I’m more like his assistant, relegated to chopping or draining. Mostly I stick to college staples. We eat on the couch and watch the news. A twelve-year-old committed suicide across the city, in a neighborhood we’d heard of but never seen.

“Jesus,” I say.

“My father thought about it every day,” James says absently. His voice has the bare quality of reporting. Not a trace of sympathy.

“He did?”

“When he lost his job. Thought about using a shotgun. Felt too guilty though. Funny how much guilt keeps some of us in line.”

I rub his knee, sit rigidly on the couch. I wonder what our relationship would be like if I’d never admitted my one night with Lauren, if instead I kept it as only mine to possess. I wonder how much better our marriage might be if we weren’t so hell bent on being honest.

James stands, walks toward the window. The rain pounds the roof and thunder rumbles somewhere far off.

“It was noble of him not to do it,” I say and know this sounds puny.

James’ father lives in Louisville and used to come to DC to visit us as much as for the fine dining. He paid enormous restaurant tabs and told us farm stories and his regrets about divorcing James’ mom while sipping Bordeaux or Dewar’s or Absolute tonics. He bought our time, and we listened, absorbing both what he was saying and what he was not—the engorged blood vessels on his nose and his glassy eyes had voices all their own. When he called to say the bank had fired him that morning, he was already drunk. Then he was on a plane and James was free from attending Bill’s wedding. I was alone, ready to make a mistake.

Later, James does the dishes and I check my email. I’m deleting the junk when James comes up behind me and swoops his head in to look.

“Any from Lauren?”

I laugh and search his face but he is looking intently at the computer.

I move the cursor around to avoid opening my emails.

“You ever think about her?” he says.

I think about her all the time. But it isn’t with longing or desire. It is with a fondness with which you might regard something magnificent, like art or an ancient ruin. Something you see once and that’s enough. It’s still yours to recall for the rest of your life.

“No,” I say.

He smirks and I want to punch him.

“Strange she turned up again.” He moves to the back door, rests his head against the window. Our small wooden porch is mocha-colored, slick with rain.

“She didn’t turn up. It’s just a picture.” I open a new tab and type in a celebrity gossip website to make him leave.

“I’m going upstairs to finish unpacking,” he says.

I open a file of photos, from our weekend in West Virginia, the destination chosen because there was a heritage festival that sounded charming.

The day after we arrived, we’d leashed Isabelle and gone into town, found The Appalachian String Band and local artisans selling dream catchers. We’d had cotton candy, tried on cowboy hats, and perused an entire store selling only stained glass. For lunch we stopped at Dirty Ernie’s, dogs welcome.

As we sat there, our eyes adjusting to the dim light in the restaurant, our waitress had asked if we’d seen the bridge yet.

We eyed each other. Typical us: coasting by something spectacular.

“Where?” I said.

“Other side of town,” She looked pleased to be useful. “You should come back in October, for Bridge Day,” she said. She had dyed black hair, penciled eyebrows. She smelled of cold cream and cigarettes.

“Bridge Day?” I said, stirring my sweet tea.

James studied his menu.

“People jump off the side with parachutes and everything. It’s lots of fun.” The front door bells chimed, and a little girl with pigtails ran in ahead of her family. I cleared my throat, the waitress nodded again, then walked away.

James stared evenly at me.

“I bet it’s beautiful in October,” I ventured.

“And what could be better than watching West Virginians throw themselves off a bridge?” he said.

We laughed, the first time since I’d told him about Lauren.

Our waitress brought our sandwiches and we spoke comfortably, watched the crowd.

After lunch James said, “Let’s check out this little bridge” and took my hand as we walked to the car. On the way, I read him highlights from our book. It officially opened in 1977. It’s an 876 foot drop from the bridge to the rapids below, second highest bridge in the country.

The mile-and-a-half walk promised to lead us to the best view, and the shady trail cooled our necks. Everything looked rich and smelled of mud. We walked in silence over damp ground, heard a stream somewhere but couldn’t see it. The path became rockier and we slowed, descending quietly, as though trying not to disturb something asleep. Soon, we came to the clearing. The huge steel-arch bridge loomed, connecting the two sides of the gorge. Below, the river was a streak of silver paint.

“What the hell would have to go through your head to jump off that thing?” he said.

“I don’t know. Excitement? Adventure?”

James came up behind me and put his arms around my waist. A small sign explained that the arch extends 1700 feet. I sighed, thinking how well our bodies fit. Then James turned me around and looked at me with some difficulty.

“That’s what it was with her too? The thrill?”

“Of course not,” I said, then added. “I hope you can forgive me.”

He toed the ground, looked at me and back down.

“I hope you can forgive me too,” he said.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I said, rubbing his arm.

“No. I mean, I did cheat. A long time ago. Before we were engaged,” he said.

A weird sickness washed through my gut and the air was suddenly moving in waves.

“With who?” I wasn’t sure if I had the right to react at all. What worried me, though, was how I didn’t feel surprised. “When?” I pressed.

“A long time ago. We hadn’t been dating that long. Maybe a year.”

“A year is a long time,” I said.

He looked over his left shoulder, as if he expected someone.

“Why?” I said.

“Alex. Come on. You know the answers to these questions now.”

A couple appeared out of the woods. The girl wore a white University of Maryland visor and her blonde hair swung in a ponytail. Her boyfriend was flushed, had a full head of gray hair. James and I looked at each other and headed silently back down the path.

The next morning on the drive home James passed in and out of sleep. We’d stayed up late the night before, talking about why people stray from marriages, why we both did. Mostly James talked, and I listened, sometimes chiming in to reassure him that it meant nothing, or to remind him that I’d never do it again. He told me his affair happened with a woman from work. Carrie.  The more we talked the less strange it seemed, and the less it seemed like it was even our lives we were discussing. People had affairs all the time. It was human nature. We all crave that shock of new vitality, that powerlessness against what felt preordained. It wasn’t about us, not in the deepest sense.

As I drove, I thought about having babies; the strange stretch of life in houses like the ones we passed, perched atop long driveways, sheltered behind the canopies of trees. Ahead, the road was never-ending, and this comforted me.

“I love you,” I said softly to him at one point as he stirred, getting more comfortable. And I did love him. I knew with certainty that we possessed a desperate need to understand each other, that he made me laugh, that our lives made sense. We even understood why we hurt each other, and what, if not love, is this?

*

After James finishes unpacking and I’m done checking email, making tomorrow’s to-do list, and throwing in another load of laundry, I tell him that I’m going to get the dog. The rain has stopped and the kennel closes in thirty minutes.

“Can’t you get her tomorrow?” he says as I’m lacing up my shoes.

“I miss her nose leather,” I say.

He smiles, and his expression changes to a far-away look of recollection.

I walk four blocks to doggy daycare thinking how mysterious houses are, how you can’t predict whose inside. The house next to ours has overhanging eaves and pedestal-like tapered columns; the one on the corner is Victorian: an octagonal tower and a wraparound porch. Some tilt in disrepair, others have manicured gardens, with tiny sectioned lawns. But none of that tells you who lives there.

Steam rises from the sidewalk and light will hang on for a few more hours, but the day is over. Most people are having their dinner, settling in. People pass: a man and a black lab, an older woman in a modest flowered dress, the goateed man I always see at the metro. A funeral procession rides down Constitution, slow-rolling SUVs, lights on. Above, the voices of invisible birds.

On Monday I will call in sick to work and James will go back to copy-editing until 11:30 at night and sleeping until one in the afternoon. Days will pass and blur together. The leaves will fall without me noticing and when the trees are bare, stripped to the bone, I’ll hardly notice that either. For Christmas, we’ll travel to Florida and spend time with James’ family. We’ll golf, walk on the beach, play Triopli at night. In February, my sister will tell me she is pregnant again, her third, but I won’t tell her we’ve decided against children. She’ll email me sonograms, modern ones with little arrows to indicate “heart,” or “baby’s nose,” and I will hang them on the refrigerator.

Spring will be beautiful, the cherry blossoms like pink snow against blue skies. During April and May, James will often stay out all night, saying he went for drinks with co-workers then crashed on their couch. A year later, James will decide he can’t come home anymore at all, and he will move out. He will call frequently at first and set up coffee dates, but each one will be canceled, and he’ll end each call the same, “We’ll catch up soon,” he’ll say, and part of me will want to believe him.

I turn the corner and slip in before the kennel closes. The fluorescent lights buzz and it smells like wet dog and kibble. Frank, the owner, lets Isabelle out and she runs to me, bounces on her hind legs until I’ve scooped her up. She covers me with kisses, her nine pounds squirming, her skinny tongue and dragon breath squeezing my eyes shut. Her claws dig into my chest and I stroke her fur, kiss her salty black nose. I hold her and wonder if I can teach her to stop moving, if she will ever learn to be still.

Elizabeth Buchanan received her MFA from the University of Oregon in 2011 and has published writing in The Washington Post. She is currently the writer-in-residence at St. Albans School in Washington, DC.

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Although she didn’t know it, her husband had collapsed in the paint aisle at the local hardware store. Dead of a massive heart attack. It was a Sunday. He was forty-four years old.

Hours later, his car pulled into their driveway.

What took so long, she asked, when he appeared empty handed in the doorway. He just shook his head and went upstairs.

All week he had promised to paint the kitchen. That’s why he had gone to the store. For some supply that would set the whole procedure in motion. But he didn’t come down in his old clothes. The ones that always reminded her that time was just something you got dirty.

He was neatly showered, square shouldered, trim as they day they met. He sat in a chair he never sat in, a beam of hard sunlight on his face.

Are you okay? she asked.

I’m fine, he said, gazing up at her. Just really hungry, that’s all.

He smiled in that way he had, then looked at the television and flipped on the game. And yet something was off. This was the man who fathered their children, had made love to her mechanically. A man of utility in times of importance. It wasn’t like him not to finish what he started.

He was sitting there, rigid in the chair when she came and brought him some fresh baked bread. His favorite. She watched him push the bread in his mouth and chew it. He didn’t appear to taste it. He was unappreciative of all that had happened to make it arrive there.

She smiled, satisfied that he disappointed her in the same ways. When he was finished she took his plate. Where his fingers had touched, it was covered in a black dust.

At dinner, he was there at the head of the table, talking to their three children. He had forgotten they’d gone to the beach with the neighbors that day. The children stared at him. Suddenly her youngest daughter began to cry. She whisked her from the chair and sent her to watch television.

He lay beside her in bed that night. It gave her a strange feeling that she couldn’t shake. Something had happened at the hardware store. Perhaps the old men who work there, knowledgeable of marriages and inner workings of houses, who knew the ways in which they could all suddenly and disastrously fail, had shared some secret with her husband. Or perhaps, she feared, as he walked into the store, he’d been crushed dead by a passing car.

She knew he’d bought that new kind of life insurance. They had talked about it once, briefly, and then one day he said he’d signed the papers. That was the end of it. She didn’t know if she’d be informed when it was activated. It depended on how he had wanted it to be.

It was a frightening feeling, not knowing. There was no way to talk about it, as that would defeat the purpose of the insurance. It felt like she was in the story she read in college about the man who turned into the cockroach. And she would have to pretend everything was normal.

When she awoke in the morning, he was already up and making breakfast. Her children were laughing at the table. As she came into the kitchen, she looked out the window at the leaves falling from the trees. Above, the moon was a smudge on the sky.

Soon it would be winter. There would be many Christmases, and she looked at her husband and wondered what it would be like. If she could endure not knowing. Year after year, unsure if he was the same man. Same not just in demeanor, but in the cells that made up his body. She wondered if she could love him, if she could convince herself that it was she who was strange. That she was the cockroach.

No. She had a sister in Cleveland. She would tell this man that she was leaving. That she couldn’t love him. She would tell him that she was taking the children. That she had never wanted the insurance, although he had insisted, saying they would need someone to provide.

He kissed each of their children and sent them off to school, gathered his things to leave. She shivered at the way he looped his arms into his coat, fit his fingers in the handle of his briefcase. Other men and women had felt like she did now. But they had never talked about it; somehow they had kept the secret.

He kissed her goodbye at the door, his lips tight and his teeth long and hard. It had the effect of kissing a skeleton, and she recoiled. He recoiled too. And in a horrifying instant she saw that he knew. He knew he wasn’t the same.

And then that look was gone. He turned and walked to his car, and she knew that he was still her husband, even if he wasn’t the same. He looked up at her as he opened his car door. In that look was love, that same camaraderie that came from all terrifying things that had happened to them, just as years before when she had pushed a blue, quiet baby from her womb. That like all the awful, unspeakable and terrifying things in their lives, their miseries were intimate and no one else could own them.

As he drove away, she figured that in time this wouldn’t seem so strange. There would come days that would feel plain ordinary again. And she decided, as she went and scrubbed his black dust from the dishes, that she was never going to say a thing about it.

Nothing. Not a thing.

Owen Duffy holds an MFA from Rutgers University-Newark. His short fiction has appeared in Storyglossia, New Delta Review, and Passages North, among others. He teaches and mentors beginning writers in Charleston, South Carolina where he lives with his wife Liz. Lately, he’s been seriously contemplating learning how to tool leather.

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My insides have always been very hot.

I can no more tell you what’s inside of me than I can tell you what’s at the heart of a fire.

My ex-boyfriend used to ask me what the fuck was wrong with me, and as I recall it, I tried to tell him many times, but the answer, always, somehow, got lost in translation.

But in that special way that you always know what to say long after the chance to say it has gone, I only now have realized that I should have answered his question with a question.

Do you remember the subway train, the tracks, the light inside the tunnel?

~

He stopped looking at my thighs because they became tiger-striped. Faint slices of acid purple zigged and zagged across the meat. Lacerations on skin pale, same as my stomach and breasts, as the underbark of a eucalyptus. A pattern so appropriate, so natural, as though I had been born with scars, as if they had been intended. He snubbed them—my thighs, my stripes.

~

Every morning he’d hit the snooze button and move closer to me and press his nose against the back of my neck. He would lay there like that for twenty minutes until the alarm went off again, and then he would get up and go into the shower, and sometimes I would go with him because that was the way he liked it.

I made coffee and perhaps made toast and scrambled eggs, and he’d sprinkle salt, pepper, and Tapatío on both the eggs and the toast, which I thought was cute. We sat at the table together. Then he’d go, and I’d stay in the apartment all day in my dirty underwear. Most days I went back to sleep. Some days, if I could get up the energy, I walked down the hill to the corner store and bought a bottle of wine, a chocolate bar, and, if I was out of them, a pack of cigarettes. The guy in the store (I always thought of him as Dave, but Dave’s was only the name of the store, and I never took the time to learn his real name) talked to me about hometowns, mine in Indiana and his somewhere in Jiangsu Province. Dave also talked about the church he was going to. He always invited me to come along some Sunday, but I had stopped believing in God by then (now I believe in God again, at least in some Spinozist version of Him swirling up there in the Cosmos, looking out for me; someone is looking out for me; I really believe that; and these days I read the Psalms and the Song of Solomon obsessively and repeatedly; oh, that I had the wings of a dove, right? Oh, that I had the wings of a dove. And I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. But comely. Why does she say but comely?). I sat on the curb and smoked and drank wine from a flask. For a few weeks, I tried to make a few thousand bucks writing an internet study guide for John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, but I couldn’t get anywhere with it because I was stuck on the way Jimmy treated Alison, calling her Miss Pusillanimous, Miss Pusillanimous; what a cruel bastard, and also, I admit, I thought the nickname better fit me than her, and that made me feel curiously abused.

On a good day, on a very rare good day, I walked around the neighborhood and took pictures of flowers (bougainvillea, my favorite, lily, iris, passion vine, jasmine and honeysuckle, so fragrant), or I’d go and sit on the bus stop next to a nearby high school and listen to the Oakland kids talk, watch them flirt and swagger, hood rats, thugs, wiry little black things, thinking of the way it used to feel sitting in front of my high school when classes got out. All the mumble, all the chatter.

I tell you, I was so sexed for those blades, I’d get lightheaded and sweaty-palmed just thinking about them. I bit my lips, I banged my head on tables, I dug my nails into my palms, and I fantasized about drowning myself in the lake (maybe grasping a spray of bright magenta bougainvillea, maybe wearing my favorite black t-shirt, maybe blue-lipped and bald, maybe bobbing up and down in the algae beneath an expansive pale blue sky with a single heron floating in it like a twisted modern reinterpretation of Ophelia). But I always, without fail, waited until he got home. I’d get a blade, and he’d try to stop me, but he could never stop me, and when I was done and bleeding he’d clean me up and cry, and I’d say touch my thighs now, and he’d touch them, and his hands were cool against the feverish, swollen, broken skin.

~

I—barefoot—turning post-Impressionist green beneath the yellow bulb in the bedroom where our clothes were strewn haphazardly like barf from the mouths of bulging black garbage bags (the mattress sagged on one side, the bedside tables were made of cardboard boxes)—eyes red, face probably wet, pacing and/or talking about misery—I went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub, or on the toilet with the lid down, or I leaned on the sink, or I sat in the bathtub or on the floor; if I was in the bathtub, I probably pulled the curtain closed—I took one of our disposable razors, and I pulled the plastic apart with my teeth until I could extract the blades, one, two, or three, and I dug the tips of the blades into the flesh on my thighs, and I sank the rest of the blades in and dragged them across until blood bubbled out in perfectly minuscule, shiny, round spheres. Like fungus growing in time-lapse.

Like beads of water dancing in a hot greased pan.

And he sat there and watched me do it—and I could see in his face—in his eyes, in the deluge that came out of his eyes, in his quavering body, in his teeth that were bared through his tight frown, in his hands that flitted like nervous swallows through the air—that he absolutely couldn’t believe he was watching me do it, and he couldn’t stand to sit there and watch me do it—because who just sits there and watches someone do it?—and was I a poor little rich girl?—because I had said only poor little rich girls do this kind of thing. Poor little rich girls think nothing about the price. Was I thinking about the price? Was I going to think about the price? If I wasn’t going to think about the price, who was going to think about the price?—and then he wouldn’t sit there and watch me do it anymore.

Oh, Lord, he left me, not with a bang but with a whimper.

~

I miss you. I miss your body. Oh God, your body, he used to say when we were apart.

Darling, why, I could have asked, do you care so especially much about  my thighs?

I remember when we were first together, laying unclothed in bed with you while you appraised my every inch against your lithe white frame, saying your brown thighs are so much fatter than mine, among other things (my toes look like goblins’ toes next to your pretty little ones; your ass is so round; your fingers are so long and slender; your hips are so sensuously curved; etc.); but the thighs you took in your hands and kissed with your soft, warm lips and said giddily your thighs, your thighs! And then you nibbled on them like a pair of juicy, fresh-out-of-the-oven holiday pig rumps. Why such celebration? Why, exactly, the thighs?And why, when they acquired their stripes, did it mean that you had to stop loving me?

Is it because you think you’re sculpted from biscuit dough (while I have convinced myself that  you are made of paper)? Is it because you believe you are a woolly little lamb?

~

(This is what you do when a man places what you feel is too much importance on the external you while neglecting the you that you feel is the really real you, the pulsating, crackling inside you:

you destroy it

[the external you, the vessel].

You don’t paint your toenails anymore. You stop wearing nice things and forego bras so that the asymmetry of your breasts is always apparent. You stop shaving so that the hair on your pussy and your armpits grows as tangled as the jungle your ancestors came from. You cut the luxurious hair on your head [which he got used to, even learned to love, because it was so edgy and so punk]. [As a byproduct, looking like shit will make you feel like shit, and every time you are in public you will ask him if he thinks the other college girls in your town are prettier, and when he says no you will know that they are.]

Further, not only do you cut your thighs [which bothered him most of all; he probably, though he would never have admitted it, began to believe that all brown-skinned girls are “emotionally disabled,” or whatever the PC term Californians are using these days is; he certainly called me crazy; and that’s not very PC but it was in the heat of a million moments], but you also cut your upper arms and the backs of your knees [and the backs of the knees only because it hurts you more, and you really wince when you walk]. You do all this because you are trying to say to him pay attention to me. You are trying to say to him you don’t listen when I try to tell you things with my mouth.

If none of this works, you set your face on fire. And then you ask, when your face is melting off, are the other girls prettier? Do you think the other girls are prettier?)

~

During my semester off, before I ever meet my ex-boyfriend, I live with my grandparents in the room in their house that everyone in our family calls the blue room. Blue walls, blue carpet, blue ceiling, an old blue bedspread, and a big mirror above the bed that makes all the blue appear double-blue.

I spend most of my time alone, drawing Egon Schiele-inspired sketches of myself on the bed with droopy eyelids, listening to Talib Kweli (especially the one about black girl pain—they just know the name/ they don’t know the pain. What is this nebulous “black girl pain”? Where to even begin? And who, Talib, is they? Everyone?). I see a therapist who tells me that around the time of the Civil Rights Movement psychiatrists started diagnosing more and more black men with schizophrenia (did they put the men into a machine like they did to the Invisible Man; did they zap them with electricity; did they lobotomize the crazy niggers?). There are a couple of waxy, slowly dying plants that I try hard to save—though, now that I think on it, I am probably killing them with over-watering. I have my own coffee machine in the room, and I like to listen to the whir of its mechanisms and smell the steaming chemical liquid sliding into a styrofoam cup. The coffee itself tastes bad, but sometimes I run the machine just to hear and smell it.

On Tuesday, I vacuum. My Papa and his oxygen machine are gone to church, so the dust doesn’t disturb his lungs. By the time he gets back, the dust has settled. I don’t want to disturb my Papa’s delicate lungs. My dear, delicate Papa. Dust, for him, i­s like finely ground glass. Oh, my dear, delicate Papa; his dear, delicate lungs.

There’s been something I’ve been trying to figure out for years, my Papa says. I’ve been trying to figure it out for nearly forty years. Longer even.

Some nights I stay up late sitting with my Papa. We watch the National Geographic Channel or South Park, which, I think, is his favorite show. Sometimes we talk. Rather, he talks. Rather, he asks me questions. About my thoughts on politics, if I know that male Nile crocodiles can grow to be sixteen feet long, other subjects I will forget, but I will remember his voice.

And suddenly one night he says this to me: There’s been something I’ve been trying to figure out for years.

My uncle Tyrone, my Papa’s namesake, is outside banging on the door, and he’s been doing it for hours. His banging wakes me, and I go down to see who it is, but my Papa is already sitting in the den, in the darkness, unmoving, listening. He gestures for me to sit, so I bring a chair in from the kitchen, and I sit. I sit with him in the darkness. Hm, he grunts.

Everyone in my family has been pretending they can keep secrets; they’ve been talking for years about Tyrone being on and off the wagon, and they can tell whether he’s on or off because of his red eyes and his slurred speech and, in very bad times, the track marks. We forgive him. My Papa forgives him. Not just for the alcohol and the drugs, but also for the things he’s stolen, like my bike, like my mother’s car, and the ways he’s made things hard for all of us. For the time he showed up on Thanksgiving and scared all the kids, told us we’d go to hell if we watched MTV; then he said he was going somewhere and to be good, kids, and then he left, and then he came back and said he was going somewhere and to be good, kids, and then he left again.

Something I’ve been trying to figure out for years, Papa says.

And the banging keeps going for a while, and then it becomes louder but slower, more regular, like a mechanical piston, pulling away and falling back again at intervals, and I realize he’s not using his fist but his head.

A month or so later, the spring rain comes. A thousand cantankerous hands drumming.

I get out of bed and go downstairs and outside, leaving the door propped open behind me. I am soaked through within seconds, but I have this idea that I’m going to do some kind of primordial tantra in the flooded grass of the back yard. Cold fingers poke the top of my head, trace the outline of the bone behind my ear, tip-tap down the back of my neck, sink under my top, tickle down my stomach, down my thighs, down to my feet. I lie down in the grass and spread my arms and legs. I imagine that I am glowing with the cold intensity of a distant star, a ball of hot white crystal spinning in frigid space. Alone out there, but autarchic and contained. A world of complexity beautifully folded and compressed.

After some time, I feel weak, so I get up and go back to the door, but it has closed and locked itself behind me. I ring the doorbell. Ten or fifteen minutes pass before my Papa answers, frowning but unsurprised. I can’t feel the cold, but he says I’ve turned blue. He sends me upstairs to get a towel and some clothes on while he puts some water on to boil. He tells me to come back down once I’ve dried myself and changed.

You ever sleepwalk before? he asks.

No.

I sip hot chocolate. He grunts, hm.

You believe in demons?

I don’t answer for a while. Then, I don’t know.

He says that he’s been teaching this demonology course at the church where he’s been a deacon since before I was born. He talks, in his slow, fathomless way, about Asmodai, the Nephilim, the group called Legion in the man of Gadarenes, incubi, succubi, and Samael, chief of all the demons. He says what separates demons from angels is that demons are fallen because they long to inhabit our physical world (and what makes humans sinners, he adds, is our quest to comprehend, no, to conquer the metaphysical one).

I don’t answer.

He gets up and rifles through his desk. I watch him, shivering, rain dripping from my hair and wetting the plastic cushion of the chair.

My Papa pulls out a single photograph from one of the drawers of the desk and hands it to me. What do you think?

It is of Tyrone as a child, taken in the kitchen some thirty-odd years ago. The kitchen still looks the same, cream yellow cabinets, dappled turquoise epoxy flooring, 1940s GE electric stove, vintage lace curtains embroidered with peaches and strawberries, all of it almost as grungy back then as it is now. Tyrone looks almost the same, too, though pudgier in the face despite his much scrawnier body. He is smiling, and his arms are thrown out as though he is about to embrace someone. Behind him, his shadow looms, swallowing half the kitchen. The more I examine the shadow, the larger it seems. It brings to mind the dusky lighting in one of those old silent horror films; Nosferatu’s hunched shoulders and bony fingers projected on the wall above the stair.

Shadow’s too big, right? my Papa asks.

Seems that way.

My Papa takes the picture from me and stares at it a moment (Something I’ve been trying to figure out for nearly forty years. Longer even, he says)  before replacing it in the drawer. I want to ask him how long he’s kept it special like that. How many times he’s taken it out to gaze at it, at the hovering black shadow. Many times after that, in secret, I take the picture out and stare at it, too.

~

(To me, he was a boy of exquisite and astounding beauty, but I never think of that now, do I? Now I only think of him, endlessly, always, as a figure backlit by a small distant light which he seems not to see. A figure made of paper. A figure who is nearly see-through except for the black letters I have printed onto his two-dimensional form.

He had perfectly shaped lips. Perfect. Golden brown hair and golden agate eyes with a special shape of their own, like a treble clef, I’d say. Soft skin like the skin of a fruit, man-parts that hung like fruit. Hips like a woman, smell like a little girl—“brown” like Lolita. He was a man, but there was something innocent about him that makes me think of him to this day as a boy. Something naive, delicate, fragile, blind, so lovely. It caught me off guard.

He wrote a poem: Look, I can catch up a piece of your hair/ And… something about curls recoiling, springing. Words that reminded me of love, life, spirit. Like I was a garden, or an exuberant green vine. Words I no longer remember. Words I no longer remember because, after all, they were only about my hair.)

~

He said, Don’t, and then he asked when it was done, in a flat, hurt voice, Why? and God, what’s wrong with you? and I smiled as blood puffed out and then dried and crackled and floated away like dust—

He said he had to take me back home.

I made a stripe for every mile. In the passenger’s seat with my pants down somewhere in the Central Valley near Fresno while he pumped gas several feet away, on the curb in Topeka after I threatened to throw a brick through his windshield if he didn’t leave me to it, under the lamppost at the stone picnic table near my mother’s house where there was so much blood he tried to pick me up and take me to the hospital (and where two months later I saw a coyote as we spoke on the phone; I mused that it had come from the west because it could smell the months-old blood dripping from my cracks)—

Lord, I was sweating like dynamite.

Lord, I was trying to puncture through to the explosive stuff inside. The thawing blood that was as viscous and volatile as nitroglycerin.

I tried to explain it to him way back then, really I did. I spoke slow and deliberate and with the precision of an actor.

I said watch out, the ice is falling off, put me back in the refrigerator!

I said I’m scorching from the inside, and I’m going to spontaneously combust!

I said I am goddamned hot! Shoot me into outer space!

But words failed; I said I was going somewhere and to be good, and then I’d leave, only to come back again. Words failed; until soon there was nothing but me laying naked and stinking and waiting on the bed when he came home from work. Words failed; until I only wanted stripes; stripes all over me, zigs and zags, popped out eyes, a split lip, torn out hair, a cracked skull, broken toes. Me, wanting to go back to my quiet blue room. Me, alone on the toilet with the lid down, on the edge of the sink, on the floor, in the bathtub—alone in the bathroom—alone—alone, repeating, I’ve got the demon in me. I’ve got the demon in me. I’ve got the demon in me. I’ve got the demon in me.

~

He asked me what was wrong with me, and as I recall it, yes, I do believe I tried to tell him many times.

Do you remember the subway train? Do you? You don’t, do you? You don’t remember, do you?

~

Let’s not quibble over details. Let’s not talk about what set me off, things to do with being a brown-skinned girl, lost friends, death, etc. Really, let’s not delve into that world of complexity that I’ve sent spinning into outer space, back where it belongs.

May I simply answer your question with a question?

I remember so vividly a moment some time ago when I first knew I was violently exploding. I was still so calm then, so wonderfully calm and cool and, yes, contained, so contained. I remember telling you I needed to leave you. Do you remember what you did? You stood on the edge of some subway tracks when a train was coming—I could see its light inside the tunnel, and I begged you to step back, I begged you, I begged you—but you stood there and stared down at those tracks and swayed back and forth—and I swear, dear, I swear, I thought you were about to kill yourself. And you were really thinking about killing yourself! splat, ripped off limbs and a shattered head all over the tracks, yours the story of a shocking Boston suicide. Your only story. So I never left you.

My spicy darling. Don’t you ever tell yourself that you haven’t got a demon in you, too.

Camille Graves is a second-year graduate student in the MFA program at Mills College in Oakland, CA. She is always wandering but never lost.

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By dawn the smell had crawled out of the oven, up the stairs, and inside the fibers of Elise’s cotton pillowcase. She lifted the blanket and noticed Jeremy’s hand tucked halfway down the waistband of his boxers. The house reeked, and there he slept as serene as the baby rolling over inside her.

“You smell it too, huh?”

Elise had been a vegetarian since she was sixteen, half her life. She’d never once felt she was missing out. But now, after all those years, her baby demanded something she denied.

When Jeremy turned over on his back, she noticed the stream of orange koi on his boxers leaping in an arch, rising with his hard-on. She sighed, remembering how he’d tried again last night.

“Remember, Dr. Vickser said that sex is perfectly safe. The baby is protected by the…” He’d reached down to find his wallet in his jeans and pulled out a folded index card scribbled with writing. “The amniotic fluid in your uterus.”

“Oh, that gets me hot,” she’d said.

In the flickering candlelight Jeremy looked tortured, driven.

“You’re just so beautiful. I want to show you how much I love you, how much I love our baby. I still think you’re the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen.”

He’d slid his hand over her belly and the extra large t-shirt she’d had to buy because none of his shirts fit her anymore. The third trimester had brought night sweats, seven more pounds, and steady waves of anxiety. It had also stripped her of a sex drive. Elise felt like a tortoise with its shell flipped the wrong way. A sweaty, bloated tortoise that now wanted to devour a double bacon cheeseburger with extra pickles. No, forget the pickles, she thought. Add extra pepperoni. And sausage.

Trying to ignore the koi and the memories of last night, Elise lumbered out of bed, and snatched the lavender spray off her dresser. She doused the room, but the moment she opened the bedroom door there it was again. The baby threw a fist.

The smell swallowed her in the hallway, and she held her breath all the way down the stairs to the kitchen. She clicked on the oven light and looked at the gleaming, golden brown skin sizzling inside. She checked the progress without really knowing how. It looked beastly and delicious. Another punch.

“Really?” she asked. “You can eat whatever you want when you get here, but let me do what I want now.”

Dr. Vickser had told her to talk to the baby, not scold it. She wasn’t preachy about her choices, and she simply wouldn’t tolerate this kind of demanding behavior from her own child.

“It’s like going to a Bar Mitzvah,” she’d once explained to an awkward first date, slightly drunk, nursing her fourth glass of wine. “I can go to temple, pin a black doily on my head, and listen to a language I don’t understand. I respect it, but I’m not going to convert to Judaism.”

He’d signaled the waiter for their check, but she hadn’t noticed.

“I can slice up the ham at Easter without taking a piece for myself, y’know?” She’d dipped a slim carrot stick into a dish of hummus, and pointed at him. “And that, my friend, is that.”

If only it were that simple now. She opened the oven, braced herself against the wave of heat, and sucked out the drippings with a pink baster. Simple. This had all been Jeremy’s idea. She thought about the moment four days ago when he’d walked into the house, arms full of paper grocery bags. Eric had called him that afternoon about a huge post-Thanksgiving turkey sale.

“With thirty-pounders this cheap, Eric thought I should go for the gold.” This meant making a Turducken. She had almost been too afraid to ask.

“Oh, it’s a chicken stuffed inside a duck inside a turkey. It’s going to be epic.”

Now, it took her three minutes of annoyed rearranging, lifting plastic takeout containers full of stock and stuffing, to locate her orange juice. After taking the first sip she poured it into the sink. The glass tasted like gravy.

He’d spent the past three nights diligently working. He’d even asked her a second time if this was okay. He was practically drooling and giddy as a young boy with a fresh box of crayons – how could she say no? He’d told her she wouldn’t have to be involved at all. He warned her that the whole production could get pretty savage, but Eric would be there to help.

She’d stayed in the living room for the deboning. Even with the radio on and the guys talking about iPhones and football brackets, she could still hear each gruesome step: the metallic scrape of blade against steel, the sharp crack of splitting wings, the delicate pop of hammer breaking bone. Eventually, curiosity overcame her. She poked her head around the corner and saw the birds spread open, both men wrist deep in cavities. She wanted to watch. She wanted to see how three things so different could fit together so well.

“It should be good to go in about an hour,” Jeremy announced.

He parked his elbows on either side of the doorframe and stretched, then walked over to kiss his wife. She offered her cheek like she had for the past three weeks.

“Morning, baby,” he said to both of them.

She hadn’t noticed the red light blinking on the answering machine.

“Hey, Lise, it’s Anica. I’m in town for a conference and today’s afternoon sessions look kinda dull. I thought I’d pop over for a visit. Hope that’s ok! I gotta go. See you tonight.”

“Typical,” Elise said.

“It’ll be fine. She’ll be here for the great unveiling.”

She stood in front of the stuffed refrigerator trying not to scowl. “Will there be anything for me to eat tonight?”

“Of course. There’s cranberry and corn stuffing and I’m gonna make a vegetarian lasagna this afternoon. Are you okay?”

When she looked back at him, he was flipping through a green Meade notebook searching through recipes. She felt like he didn’t really want to hear her answer. The kitchen felt too crowded, too ripe with the smell of cooking flesh.

“I have to go out for a while,” she told him.

Elise filled the afternoon with errands that could have waited for another day. The air outside felt frosty and refreshing against her face. As she drove around town, a powder of late November snow hit the windshield and instantly dissolved. By the time she turned back onto her street, she could see the kitchen window glowing from halfway down the block. She parked behind Eric’s maroon Toyota Camry.

Again she was struck by the powerful smell inside the house and a distinct yearning to devour the entire Turducken. She looked up to find a beautiful woman, no older than twenty-five, sitting on her living room sofa. She had nutmeg skin and bright red lips and was leafing through a coffee-stained New Yorker.

“Hi, you must be Elise. I’m Illana. I came with Eric.”

She put her glass of white wine down and rose to shake Elise’s hand. Illana had long fingernails like talons painted bright orange.

“Is that you, honey?” Jeremy called from the other room.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

He walked in with a glass of orange juice for her.

“Sweetie, this is Illana. Eric brought her over for the feast tonight.”

“We’ve met,” she said, taking the glass, knowing she wouldn’t drink it. “Have you heard from Anica?”

“Yeah, she called a few hours ago. I told her we’d be happy to have her over for the big event. She was in a banquet hall or something, somewhere loud. That’s all I got in before she hung up. Gotta love Anica,” he said.

Elise all of a sudden felt defensive, even though Anica’s inconsiderate tendencies annoyed her too. She clapped a hand over her stomach as the baby turned.

“Ah, sisters,” Illana sighed.

Elise couldn’t tell if the woman just wanted to add something to the conversation, or if she also had an intense relationship with a sister of her own. The door slammed behind them.

“I come bearing gifts!”

She turned to see Anica, her conference nametag still dangling from the lanyard around her neck. She carried a canvas bag stuffed with books, a bouquet of wilting hydrangeas, and two bottles of wine.

“Sorry I’m late. I can’t really drive a stick but it’s all the rental place had. It’s been an uphill battle for about sixty miles.”

“No problem. You’re actually right on time. Let me take that. Elise just walked in and Eric is in the kitchen finishing things up.”

She quickly turned and eyed Elise’s stomach.

“So?” Anica asked, pulling the word out slowly, like a magician revealing a stream of colored scarves from his sleeve.

“So, what?” Elise said.

She took a seat on the striped sofa opposite Illana and poured the orange juice into a potted plant on the windowsill.

“Boy or girl?”

“I told you months ago that we want to be surprised.”

Anica’s eyebrows dropped and her mouth fell into a pout. She turned to Illana as though she would provide some reassurance.

“Didn’t Jeremy say this was a dinner with some big surprise?”

“It’s the Turducken,” Elise said.

“A turd-what-in?”

“A Turducken,” Illana echoed.

“Exactly,” Eric yelled into the living room. He took cautious steps into the dinning room as he and Jeremy each held one side of a massive metal tray. Bordered with cherry tomatoes and potato wedges, the Franken-bird took up half the dining room table. It drew everyone under its spell and the house fell silent for a moment.

“That’s the big surprise?”

Elise nodded and wiped her mouth. She willed her stomach to stop grumbling and her child to stop turning.

“What’s wrong with it?” Jeremy asked.

His words seemed both protective and pleading. Elise realized he sounded just like he had last night when he wanted to make love. What’s wrong with this, he was asking. What’s wrong with us?

“I don’t eat meat anymore,” Anica said.

“Since when?” Elise asked.

“I’ve been dating this guy Jacob for the past few months and he’s vegetarian. It’s just been easier for me to make the switch. I don’t cook anyway.”

“I could never be a vegetarian,” Illana conceded.

Somebody else might have sounded insulting, but Illana just put her opinion out there. Simple. Anica rooted through her canvas bag while Eric came in with a bottle of Chardonnay. He emptied two inches into Illana’s glass and wedged himself beside her on the armchair.

“What’s he like?”

Just as the question left her mouth, Anica pulled out a photo and handed it to Elise.

“Okay, that’s weird,” Illana laughed.

“I knew she’d ask.”

Elise studied the new vegetarian in her sister’s life: long blond hair, faded t-shirt, hands caked gray.

“What’s that?” she pointed.

“Clay. He’s an artist.”

“Dinner’s ready,” Jeremy called from the dining room.

“Try and be nice, okay? He worked hard on this,” Elise whispered to her sister.

They sat next to each other at dinner. Elise had to drag her chair back to the wall so she could fit. She’d almost forgotten about the overwhelming aroma, the sweet, smoky message from the center of the table.

They let Illana and Eric carry most of the dinner conversation. They learned that Illana worked at Fresh Mart where Eric had found out about the major post-Thanksgiving sale. Elise knew Eric loved to pick women up at grocery stores, but he usually browsed for conquests around the produce section. This time he found Illana behind the deli counter. Elise imagined her describing how to cook a roast beef and why that might be sexy for Eric.

Elise did not give in. She listened to Eric and Illana praise the Turducken. The meat was so tender, the breast so juicy, the skin crispy with just the right combination of spices. The baby banged its tiny fists against her belly throughout the meal, but she did not try a single taste. As she scrubbed dinner plates caked with stuffing and streaked with gravy, she wondered if she had already planted a seed of resentment in her child.
“Please understand,” she said, glancing down.

“I do,” Anica replied, walking into the room. “I get it. It’s not my life.”

She placed five glasses on the counter.

“I apologized to Jeremy. I even tried a bite. When you meet Jacob, promise you won’t tell him, ok?”

She nodded. “I promise.”

“Are you guys going to raise him as a vegetarian?” she asked, passing Elise a glass.
“Or her.”

“Right – or her,” she said.

“Nah. She’ll have to make that decision on her own,” Elise said.

“So you do want a girl?” she prodded.

Elise rolled the idea around in her mind for a long time that night, even as she said good night to Anica, hugged her, and thanked Illana and Eric for coming. She thought about it while Jeremy took a shower and she scooped portions of Turducken into half a dozen Tupperware containers. Sliding the lid off of the last tub, she tore off a small section, reclined on the tile floor, and lifted up her shirt. She placed the slippery piece above her bellybutton.

“I’ll let you decide some things completely on your own, okay?”

She wiped away the grease and walked upstairs to her bedroom, knowing that when Jeremy came back she would let him in, let him join her and the baby, like three Russian nesting dolls fitting snuggly into one.

Sarah Kendall is an MA candidate in the Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Halfway Down the Stairs, Dragnet, The Legendary, Ink-Filled Page, and Barely South Review. She prefers her coffee cold and her eggs piping hot. Ideally, her world would revolve around stories and breakfast foods.

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At times, many women dream of killing their boyfriends, but few are lucky enough to follow through.  Ally is fortunate.

A bruised sky, no stars to light it, hangs overhead as she walks hand-in-hand with John down a quiet city street.  Summer night, far from the bustle and chaos of the main thoroughfare.  She hears only the wind and his footsteps snapping across the pavement.  Friday, the promise of a long, lazy weekend stretches out ahead.  Late mornings in bed, curled about each other, afternoons with no one else around – hours to unwind.

Warmth seeps from his hand and she clutches it harder, not wanting to let go.  He squeezes back, saying, “I’m still here, honey.  Always.  Not going anywhere.”  She smiles, breathes deep the cool night air.

Ahead, a lone, boxy white city bus rolls to a halt, groaning, sighing, headlights carving out cones in the dark.   Inside, an old man with a tan tweed cap pulled low stands and walks stiffly to the exit.  A short woman, a few years younger, (his wife?) follows, comparatively gliding along.  He climbs down the steps slowly, carefully, and turns to proffer his hand.  She takes it and gracefully descends, kissing him on the cheek.

A week before, on Saturday, John proposed.  They were dating for nearly two years.  In Grant Park, on a bench, they sit together as wispy, lamb’s wool clouds drift across the cobalt sky and children bike by, shouting at each other.  He turns, drops to a knee.  Takes her hand.  Offers everything.  Says she is his reason for living.  Says she makes him happier than he ever hoped to be.  Then he promises her love and asks her.  She accepts without a second thought.

And a week later, the elderly couple steps slowly away, down the street, the city bus rumbles to life, rolling forward, and Ally shoves John in front of it.

Of course, nothing changes during the week.  She doesn’t spot him with a mistress or staring at a waitress.  There are no incriminating emails or even any suspicious ones.  He doesn’t watch Cubs night games, though he clearly wants to, but instead bends all his attention on her.  The same man as always: flawed, yes, (cooking too spicy of food and laughing too loud at sitcoms) but caring, sweet.

They go for walks every night.  He gave her a ring in the park, a gold band with a small diamond perched precariously in the middle.  It didn’t fit, sticking on her second knuckle, so they brought it to the jeweler.  She still doesn’t have one for him.  So their hands are bare, but the extra weight is palpable when they are joined.

It is the very same day he proposed, when a car comes fast down the street by their apartment, too fast, that she first has the thoughts

her bumping into him hard, shoulder to shoulder
him tilting sideways, falling, the car speeding onwards,
closer, closer, as his arms reach for her, for help

and subsequently forces them from her mind.  It is sick, unnatural.  He has done nothing wrong – has only kissed her temple and promised to love her more and more for every day they are together.  She grabs his arm, pulling him close instead of pushing away, kissing hard.

Later that night, their floral quilt bunched at the foot of the bed, him on top of her, moving rhythmically like the swells of an incoming tide.  She stares past him, up at the light mauve ceiling.  A million things to plan for the wedding.  The first thing is to choose a date.

His hands brush along her body, almost tickling.  She always dreamed of a spring wedding, right as the flowers break into full bloom, the air pregnant with their scent.  But John has allergies.  At that time of year, his eyes become burning tomatoes, his nose a broken faucet.  She can only imagine the wedding photos.  She doesn’t want a long of an engagement anyways.

He grabs her by the hips, pulls her to him, pressing deeper.  She shifts under his weight, trying to relieve the pressure.

He stops panting in her ear for a moment.  Asks, “You alright, honey?  Anything I should do different?”

“Keep going.” Grips his back, runs her fingernails along it, makes him tremble.

They set the date for early November.  It only gives about four months to plan, but it should be enough.  Her mother always says short engagements are happier.  Ally has to agree.

She thinks about pushing John into the street every day.  Usually, if something is bothering her, she talks to him about it.  Or her mother.  But they would make a joke of this, turn it into jitters or something sweet, something innocent.

But it isn’t.

On Monday, she leaves for the office, dreading another week of useless tasks, of bosses putting their names on her efforts.  He stays home, works there, freelance advertising, mainly children’s stuff.  Always at the apartment, in the extra room he calls his headquarters, designing at night sometimes, on weekends, at a drafting table, stereo playing.

She comes home exhausted, a bad day, most are.   He is cooking.  Pad Thai.  Her favorite.  The peanutty, spicy smell permeates the apartment.  He whistles as he stirs the noodles, tofu, and bean sprouts around the pan.  A glass of sparkling chardonnay sits bubbling on their little pub table for two, next to new taper candles, still unlit.

“What’s all this?” she asks.

“You deserve more,” he says.

She wishes it was because he snapped at her when he shouldn’t have, or because he forgot about date night and went for drinks with the guys, hell, because he was caught flirting.  But it’s not.  It won’t ever be.  That night, as they step outside their four-story brick apartment building, she feels the urge growing inside of her, pressing against the giddy, drunk feeling from the wine

his legs cross, he stumbles over the thin strip of grass,
his ankle turns and slips over the edge of the curb,
his mouth gaping, a look of confusion, of terror

and it isn’t the type of thing she wants to be reassured about.  She makes sure to walk closer to the street than John so the temptation isn’t as pressing.  She knows, just knows, if she doesn’t act, the thoughts will pass away on their own.  They have to.  She’s not like this.

But, on Wednesday, she starts experimenting.  Like the previous days, she carefully sets herself closer to the street.  A few blocks on, John gives her a devilish, guilty grin, where only one side of his mouth seems to move and his eyes pinch nearly shut.  “Let’s do something bad,” he says.  “Let’s get some ice cream.”

He takes an abrupt left at the intersection, tugging her along behind.   And on the opposite side, there isn’t even a strip of grass.  Just the sidewalk, the curb, then the street.  She is nearly shaking as they walk.  More than anything, she wants to switch sides, to force him away from the road.  But there is a stronger urge to give a little nudge and see that nothing happens.  That will set things right.  The hairs on her arms prick up.  Her breathing, heavy, rasping.  How can he not tell?

But she waits until it is safe, feeling the need expand against her ribcage, against her hands so they ache.  Then there are no cars.  Though they are on a one way street, she looks back several times.  One can never be too safe.

“Something wrong, hun?” he asks the third time she glances over her shoulder.  “Worried someone will catch us?”

She doesn’t answer.  Instead, she lowers her shoulder and gently bumps into him.  Playful.  But not nearly hard enough.  He doesn’t move.  Doesn’t budge.  Far too tender.  She tries again, harder this time, jabbing her elbow into his side.

“Did you trip?” He stops, releases her hand to rub the spot.  “Are you okay?”

He has still barely moved, just an inch or two to the side.  She either needs more momentum, or she’ll need to use her arms.

“I’m fine.” Grabbing his hand, pulling him forward.  “I want some Rocky Road.”

On the way home, she switches sides at every turn, just to make sure he is safe.  In the ice cream parlor, she’d looked forward to another chance to test her technique

tilting into the street, his arms flailing,
trying to twist, to brace himself
scoop of cherry vanilla flying, plopping on the pavement

to get his sticky, sweet hands away from hers.  But no, she holds him close, her arm hooked around his waist, his resting across her shoulders as he tentatively licks his melting cone.  She leans against him, pressing him away from the road.

The next day, she calls her friend Casey and takes a long lunch.  They meet at a trendy bistro downtown where the servers wear Castro hats with bright red stars.  Like always, it is crowded with people in business casual complaining loudly about unfair lives, so the conversation while waiting for lunch has to be yelled over the din.

“I have to tell you something,” Ally says.  “I might want to kill John.”  Not blinking, she stares right into her friend’s eyes, which are painted with far too much makeup, lined with green and purple and caked with sticky mascara.

Casey glances away, laughs.  “My god, Al, already?  You’ve been engaged, what, six days?”

“I’m serious.  I’m starting to think I might do it.”

Casey’s plump face hardens, a frowning grimace befitting a Greek tragedy mask.  She reaches across the table, holds Ally’s hands.  “What did he do?  Be honest.  All men are pigs.  I mean it. If you need a place to stay for a few days, I’m happy to –”

“No, no, it’s not like that.  He’s a sweetheart.  Last night, he wanted ice cream.  He was so excited, like a kid.  And he gave me a back massage.  I was lying there afterwards, completely relaxed, when he kissed me on the back of my neck.  Shivers, down to my feet, swear to god.”

“Gross.  T-M-I,” Casey says.

Just then, a server comes by and snatches the plastic number from their table, replacing it with sandwiches that spill out over thick focaccia buns plated next to freshly made chips, still warm from the fryer.  There isn’t much talking for the rest of lunch.

After they step out of the restaurant, Casey grabs Ally’s arm.  “I want you to stop worrying.”  She leans in, kisses her friend on the cheek.  “You two are the cutest, happiest couple I’ve seen.  Besides, it’s normal.  We’ve all wanted to kill our boyfriends at some point.  There are several I wish I had.”  She smiles.

“But he’s my fiancé now.”

“See what I mean?  You’ve already missed your chance.”

Those final words won’t leave for the rest of the day.  Ally hasn’t missed her chance.  She hasn’t missed anything. The marriage is months away.  But even after, she can still walk, can still file for divorce.  Nothing is permanent.  If she ever becomes unhappy.

Throughout the afternoon, the doubts rumble in the back of her head.  It is Casey’s fault.  Lunch didn’t work.  It was the wrong confessional.  The wrong priest.  When Ally started going out with John, Casey called them “the old couple” and “Mom and Dad” like they were geriatrics.  Sure, John is a few of years older, but still not yet thirty.  And Casey is just immature.

That night, Ally barely holds herself in check for the first block.  But her feet keep stepping steadily forward, as if nothing is wrong.  John mentions catching a movie this weekend, where they will sit in the dark, leaning against each other in the back row and she’ll latch her hand onto his crotch, but he’ll gently move her arm away.  Point to the screen.  Laugh.  Say, “Not here.  You don’t want to miss this, hon.”  Not an action movie.  Not a comedy.  But that new chick flick starring the guy with the British accent who seems a bit bad on the surface, but is really a good person underneath.

She still checks for traffic.  Once it is clear, she lowers her shoulder and gives him a solid knock, thrusting with her legs.  Putting her weight into it.

She gets up under his center of balance and he stumbles to the side.  She watches his feet with anticipation, knowing just how it will happen.  But instead of falling, he only steps clumsily off the curb, into the street, and plants himself, still upright.  Only a foot away.

“What was that about?”   Smiling, his hand out, ready to take hers again.

She waits for him to get close and then shoves out with her hands, knocking him away.

He has more trouble with the curb this time, his foot tilting backwards over it, and takes a few steps into the street.

“Come one, hon.” He’s almost pouting.  “This isn’t funny.  What if there’d been a car?”

There isn’t, but that is the real question.  A car would have him

not falling into the street, but stumbling,
only a few feet out, so the car swerves,
horn blaring, front fender clipping him,
throwing him forward, twisting him in a tight spin

spinning, spinning, like a top.  She jogs and stumbles forward on the sidewalk, away from him, sniggering.  Drunk.  He runs after and catches her from behind, folding her into his arms.  She plays at struggling, but doesn’t really because it is just a game and is meant to be fun.  A game, nothing more.  He holds tight.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately.”  His breath hot, wet, on the back of her neck.

She twists around, kisses him on the lips, parting hers, gentle.  Let him move forward.  His arms lose their tightness, they lower until his hands rest lightly in the small of her back.  Her nervous date for the middle school dance.

But her arms are free. She grabs his head and forces it towards her own.  Turning her head, opening her mouth, she kisses him deeply, there on the sidewalk, flicking her tongue past his lips.  Let Casey call them “Mom and Dad.”

“Let’s go home,” Ally says.  She takes him by the hand.  He follows like an excited dog, almost prancing.

She wrestles him over and is on top that night, propped high, her hands on his shoulders, pressing with her weight.  She thrusts her hips down, again and again, trying to force him into the mattress.  He grunts softly beneath her, hands trying to caress, trying to pull her close.  But she won’t allow it.  She watches him squirm.  She is persistent, relentless.  When he finally finishes, it is with a drawn-out sigh, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, mouth hanging open.  It is called la petit mort.

Afterwards, he curls up against her like a child, his head resting between her shoulder and breast.  She lies on her back and plays with his hair.  It is still thick and dark, but it won’t always be.

This has to be the root of all her thoughts, her worries.  Back in college, her freshman psych teacher called it a defense mechanism, a means to divert excess anxiety.  She loves John, more than she thinks should be possible.  Running her fingers along his arm, she never wants to live without him.  That’s what marriage means, getting him for the rest of his life.

But he is a few years older.   A male.  Statistics aren’t good.  He’ll be the first to go.  And if it is fifty years down the line, will it be any better, any easier?  No.  Just harder, harder than she can bear.  A whole life spent and gone, only to lose him, only to spend those last years alone.

But it is worth it.  It has to be.  She isn’t running off now.  She looks down at his face, his eyes closed, lips softly twitching.  She runs her hand up his back, feeling the solid mass of his shoulders, rubbing them gently, kissing the top of his head.

He tilts his eyes up to look at her.  “What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing,” she says.  “I love you, baby.”

“I love you too.”  He smiles and leans up to lightly peck her cheek.

She kisses his temple.  “I can’t wait for the weekend.  Get you all to myself.”

In the morning, she feels better, cured.  She doesn’t want to push him or hurt him.  He squeezes her fresh orange juice.  She goes to work happy.  It’s Friday.  Everything is better.  She barely works through the morning, writing and rewriting the story on her blog.  She tries to include all the details, but tones it down, turns it into an anxious bride story.  A joke.  She ends it with an a moment

they walk hand in hand down the street,
he trips, stumbles, a car is coming
but she pulls him tight to her side

which is far too much.  She considers deleting it, but can see the middle aged women tearing up, nodding with approval.  She wants nice comments, supportive ones.

Then she wants to call Casey during lunch to go over it all again – how she found the source of the problem.  To tell someone the truth.  Instead, Ally pages through bridal magazines in her office’s lunchroom.  Better to get the entire thing off her mind.

After work, at home, John has a hurt look on his face. “You wanted to push me in front of traffic?  Did I do something wrong?”

Of course he read the blog.  She brushes the back of her hand along his face, freshly shaven, smooth. “No baby.  Don’t worry about it.”

But he does.  “If there’s anything, ever, just tell me.  Please.”

“I will.”  She won’t, won’t need to.  He’ll know before she does.  “I love you.”  She means it.

She doesn’t think of killing him again.  The elderly couple step from the bus.  The younger woman.  The older man.  Him fighting to walk, her gliding.  A chivalrous hand.  The tiny kiss on the cheek.

As the bus approaches, Ally coils like a spring.  She puts her full body into it.  Crouches, pushes off with her legs, snaps her arms out.  She wants to make sure John gets well out into the street.

Luke Thominet studied Creative Writing and International Relations at the University of Southern California and then moved directly from the sunny beaches to the frozen tundra.  He is now pursuing an MFA in Fiction at Northern Michigan University and has recently finished a first draft of his thesis, a novel entitled Falls, all the while teaching composition.  In addition, earlier this year, he had an essay on the war in Iraq published in Politics and Culture. He is honestly afraid that his girlfriend is plotting to kill him.

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One day it occurred to Cunningham that he might benefit from exercise.  He began to take longish walks every Saturday or Sunday or both and once even found himself fingering a pair of ten-pound barbells in the sporting goods section at Wal-Mart.  This madness soon passed, of course.  No sooner had he resumed his sedentary ways, however, than his wife decided she’d take up walking.  Wouldn’t you know it?

A stroll around the neighborhood wasn’t good enough for her, though. Oh no, she had to drive to the indoor mall, ignoring Cunningham’s righteous indignation at this further depletion of our dwindling fossil-fuel reserves.

“Just don’t blame me when our oil runs out and we have to go to war with the Arabs again.”

“I promise I won’t blame you,” she smirked.  “Now go get the car out of the garage.”

Although she was perfectly capable of driving herself, she refused to go to the mall without Cunningham.  Once there, she would seat Cunningham on one of those torturous steel benches with orders not to move a muscle until she returned for him.  And there he’d sit.  Five nights a week, 6:15 to 7:00.

In truth, his outrage at being enlisted against his will in her exercise regimen was more rhetorical than actual.  Heck, those trips to the mall were the highpoints of his week.  No telephone calls, no little brats at the door selling popcorn or magazine subscriptions or wrapping paper, no abuse from the ol’ ball and chain, whose eccentric orbit brought him within her event horizon eight times during her circumnavigations of the mall.  (Though the reigning Queen of Nag, she apparently hadn’t mastered the art of doing it on the move while her victim was stationary; give her time, though.)  The one negative was the sore ass he inevitably endured from sitting on the bench, but even this was ameliorated somewhat once he caught on to her routine.  He was out of her field of vision for approximately three minutes on each of her laps around the mall, and during that three minutes, Cunningham could do whatever he damn well pleased.

What mostly pleased him was skipping down to the It’s a Kid’s World toy shop, where he would stand staring rapturously through the window for precisely 150 seconds before discretion urged him to retreat back to his bench.  The marvels that awaited children today!  Electronic robots, magicians’ kits, remote-controlled race cars, wooden block sets in the shape of Russian onion-domed cathedrals, on and on and on.  Cunningham had grown up in, not a poor family, but a family with little left over for frills after the bills had been paid.  His birthday gifts were clothes for as far back as he could remember, clothes, too, for Christmas except for one toy, always only one, which he looked forward to like a, like a . . . . Well, Cunningham couldn’t complete the thought.  He couldn’t conceive of a human being looking forward to anything like he looked forward to his one toy for Christmas.  He’d dream about that toy—speculate about what it might be, hope and pray, oh yes, when he was a lad endlessly pray for what he hoped it would be—for days and weeks on end leading up to Christmas morning.  The toy would always be wonderful at the same time that it was never quite so gloriously wonderful as the toy he’d hoped and prayed for.  Like the year he’d seen a pair of cowboy pistols at Woolworth’s—silver barrels, black handles embedded with silver stars, gleaming black plastic belt and holsters.  His parents had seen how his eyes lit up and his heart went out to those pistols, he was positive they’d seen it, and every night he prayed and every day he hoped for that set, nothing else for the rest of his life, please God, just that set of pistols.  Come Christmas morning and he opens the last present, the toy always being last, and there is the pistol and holster.  Pistol.  Holster.  One of each.  Not the two guns in their twin holsters in which he’d seen himself swagger down the street, equal of any kid in the gun-totin’ world.  His parents had gotten him all they could afford, he knew that, but, oh, that two-pistol set, to have had the two-pistol set . . . .

Kids today, they had so much–look at all that stuff in the window.  Not many guns, though.  Gun-poor, these kids.  Cunningham almost felt sorry for the little bastards.

Boy, did Cunningham like looking at all those toys!  It didn’t occur to him to feel a little foolish, a man in his mid-fifties, staring nose to the toy-shop window like some street urchin, until one night he looked up and saw the clerk inside watching him, a smile on her face.

Cunningham blushed and was ready to head for the hills when a shockingly pleasant realization froze him to the spot:  that very pretty girl’s smile wasn’t derisive, not a bit of it, but was friendly, warm.  Cunningham smiled back and her smile broadened, became warmer, more cordial.  Cunningham blushed again, but a different sort of blush this time.  He raised his right hand as if to doff his hat—but of course he wasn’t wearing one.

Thoroughly discombobulated, Cunningham retreated back to his bench, where he spent the reminder of his wife’s walk-time wondering if this wasn’t indeed the most wonderful thing that had happened to him since, well, birth.

The next night he couldn’t wait for his wife to march off, swinging her arms dangerously high up and back—she’d annihilate anyone who got in her way; she was no doubt hoping that someone would be Cunningham—until she was out of sight beyond the martial arts weapons stall manned by the Korean-looking kid with dyed blond hair.

Cunningham trotted down to the toy shop.  He pretended to look at the toys for two or three seconds before his eyes found the girl.  She was talking to a customer.  Cunningham felt disappointed and, irrationally, betrayed—but only for a moment.  No, this was good.  It gave him the opportunity to look her over:  wow, she was really something.  Cute as a button.  No, beyond cute, way beyond, damn near beautiful with big probably brown eyes although they could have been green and thick brunette hair that fell to her shoulders in waves, a hairstyle like movie stars wore back in the ‘40s and ‘50s.  Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth—like that.  “Lauren,” that’s the name he’d give to the girl in the toy shop.

“Cunningham!  What are you doing?”

Cunningham jumped six inches.  It was the ol’ ball and chain herself.  She’d caught him away from his post.  She said nothing else but just glared at him murderously as she motored past, those ham-hock arms pumping up and down, back and forth.

Cunningham slunk back to the bench.

His wife made two more loops before Cunningham worked up the courage to sortie out to the toy shop once more.  There was Lauren, looking right out the window at him.  She smiled.  He smiled back.  He pretended to be casually surveying the toys, but he couldn’t keep his eyes down.  Every time he looked up, there was Lauren smiling at him.  Oh, life is good, my friends, life is good.

Their relationship entered a new phase a few nights later.  His wife was a half hour into her routine with fifteen minutes to go.  Cunningham had already made three trips to the toy shop window.  Three was his limit.  He didn’t want Lauren to think he was some kind of stalker or, worse, much worse, just a foolish, pathetic old man.  So three times, that’s it.

He’d had moderate success.  Twice Lauren had been busy with customers and hadn’t even seen him.  The one time she did see him, though, she smiled.  Cunningham could live with that.  Hell, Cunningham could thrive on that.

He was sitting contentedly on his bench watching the people traipse by, nothing much registering on him, about to doze off.  Then, all of a sudden, there she was.  Lauren!

It didn’t occur to him until afterward to ask himself how she could be coming from that direction, walking past him toward the toy shop.  Had she walked past him once and he’d missed her, and now she was coming back?  Had she taken an entire circuit around the mall?  And who was minding the store?  Cunningham had never seen another employee besides her.

He was too surprised to consider any of that at the moment, though.  He had just enough time to think, She won’t even notice me, not out here, face to face, when she looked right at him, did a sort of double-take, and then without breaking stride smiled that glorious smile, fluttered her fingers at him, and said, “Hi, there!”
Cunningham’s heart did a two-and-a-half gainer into the Sea of Love.

He watched her walk on to the toy shop.  Ohmygod!  Since she’d always been behind the counter before, he’d never seen her full-figure.  Wearing a form-fitting sweater, impossibly tight blue jeans, and high-heeled shoes, she was built—as the boys used to say, and still say, and will always say—like a brick shit-house.

She kept right on going past the toy shop.  Maybe she was getting some exercise, just like his wife.  Maybe she did this every night at this time, and Cunningham, unlikely as it seems, had never noticed her.

Cunningham jumped up and went after her.

He’d gotten maybe twenty paces past the toy shop when something—some inner, subliminal warning device, perhaps—caused him to turn his eyes away from Lauren’s precious derriere and glance across the mall, where he saw his wife barreling down the other side.  If she happened to look over now, he was done for.

Cunningham did an about-face.  Instead of fleeing like a rabbit with its ears on fire, though, he came to an abrupt stop.  He was standing right in front of Victoria’s Secret.  The entrance was bracketed by two display windows on each side.  In one a saucy mannequin in panties and bra thrust her pelvis at him.  In the next window, another bra-and-panty-clad damsel stood hands on hips, looking fetchingly bored.  In the third window a young thing in a very naughty nightie reclined, right bare leg straight up in the air.  The fourth, in something shimmeringly transparent, reclined on her side, one knee canted upward, head turned toward Cunningham.  She stared him right in the eye.   She seemed to be asking him a question.  Cunningham dared not attempt an answer.

Somehow, Cunningham made it back to the bench.  He could see them, the four of them, in his mind’s eye, one right after another.  He closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to dislodge the absurd vision, but, here come the four again.  This time, though, each one was Lauren, Lauren in each pose.

Cunningham looked up and saw his wife galumphing up on him.  He lowered his gaze demurely.  He crossed his legs, crossed his arms over his lap.

Yep, Cunningham was packin’ wood.

*

            For a number of nights following the miraculous finger-wave, the happy-to-see-you smile, the “Hi, there,” things were as good as they’d ever get for Cunningham.  Not that he had any hopes of something tangible (heh heh heh) happening with Lauren, but he was content to fantasize.  His fantasies—all involving Lauren variously arrayed in scanty transparent garments from Victoria’s Secret, in various unlikely if not anatomically-impossible poses accompanied by Cunningham behind the toy shop counter, in the men’s or women’s room, on the floor of the momentarily unmanned martial arts weapons stand as unwary shoppers strolled past—were juvenile, grossly obscene, and embarrassing.  But so what?  At the cost of a blush Cunningham entertained himself mightily, and nobody hurt.  He knew it would come to an end, of course, as good things inevitably do, and sooner rather than later.  He figured the agent of his dreams’ demise would be his wife.  Always a good bet, that.  But he was wrong.  It was Harry Pine.

The mall was littered with husbands dumped by their shop-‘til-you-drop wives, and Cunningham frequently had to share his bench with one or even two on busy nights.  Often no communication would pass at all among this marital flotsam.  At most a nod and a “Hi.”  Harry Pine, though, liked to talk.  It made no apparent difference to Harry if Cunningham talked back.  Harry could handle the talking for both parties.  And so he did, from the first night he plunked himself down on the opposite end of Cunningham’s bench through the next three successive nights until the Big Blow-Up of Ought-Six, Harry talked.

At first the incessant chatter so distracted Cunningham from his fantasizing that he even considered moving to a new bench.  But then Cunningham actually listened to what the guy was saying:   vile, slanderous, cynical, profanity-laced commentary on anyone who happened to fall under his gaze.  Right up Cunningham’s alley, in other words.  Harry was hilarious!  He had Cunningham in stitches!    Cunningham laughed so hard his sides ached, the tears rolled down his cheeks, he feared he would wet his britches.

“’Harry Pine.’  Is that your real name?” Cunningham asked between volleys of laughter.

“Sure, why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know, no offense now, but it sounds like a made-up name.  Like the name of an actor in a porno movie.  No offense, Harry.”

“Porno movie!  Damn, wouldn’t that be a job?  I’d give my left nut for a job like that.  Come on, sweet thang, take a ride on Harry Pine!”

Oh, how Cunningham laughed.

What was Harry doing in the mall, Cunningham asked.  Waiting for his wife like all the other poor saps?  No, Harry was there “hunting chicks.”  The mall was prime hunting ground, damn near a baited field.  Harry the Hawk would do a little scouting, find the chick he wanted, then swoop.  “Lay the Pine to her good.”

This was the funniest thing yet.  Just look at the guy.  Short and sallow-faced, with a smoker’s cough, damn near as old as Cunningham.  Cheap blue jeans and dirty sneakers, a straw fedora of the type one might win in a carnival coin toss, a sport coat that looked like it was made behind the Iron Curtain, circa 1940.  No George Clooney our Harry, Cunningham smirked.  Funny, though.  Funny, funny guy.

The downside of the Harry Pine thing for Cunningham was that not only couldn’t he indulge his fantasy-lust with Harry doing his monologue two feet away, he couldn’t spend time in front of the toy-shop window without explaining himself.  And what would Harry’s machete-wit do with that?  Cut Cunningham to ribbons, that’s what.  Worst of all, though, was the possibility that Lauren would take another stroll around the mall—so far it had happened only that one time—and fall under Harry’s lascivious gaze.  Cunningham didn’t want to think about it.

Here, the Cunningham Law came into effect:  i.e., the worst possibility is the most likely to occur.  It happened the third night that Harry graced Cunningham with his presence on the bench.  This time Cunningham saw Lauren leave the shop.  She turned to her right—away from the bench—and strolled off down the mall corridor.  She’d take a circuit around the mall, probably, and come up on Cunningham’s right.  On Harry’s right, too.

Good lord, the vile things Harry said about even some of the very average-looking women.  What would he say about Cunningham’s lovely Lauren?  Cunningham couldn’t bear to consider it.

He was still thinking about what he told himself he couldn’t bear to think about when Lauren came into view on his right.  Cunningham tried to shift his gaze left, hoping thereby to draw Harry’s attention away, but he couldn’t do it.  He looked right at her.  Harry Pine looked right at her.  Lauren approached the bench.  Then she smiled that smile that lit up the murky world, raised her right hand and cocked her finger and thumb like a gun, and said, “Hey!”

Cunningham was devastated, destroyed.  No, not because of what Harry said or did.  It was worse, much worse than that.  When Lauren smiled, made the gun-cocking gesture, said “Hey,” it was Harry Pine she smiled at, Harry she gestured toward, Harry she spoke to.  She hadn’t even glanced at Cunningham.

“Sweet piece of ass there,” Harry said.  “Gonna get me some of that real soon.  Put her up the pole, know what I mean?  The Harry Pine pole, 100% hardwood, guaranteed to please.”

Cunningham felt himself swooning.  He could not speak or hear or see.  Disillusionment can do that to a man.

When he “came to,” Harry was still in mid-rant, but no longer about Lauren:  “Look at that cow, would you look at that?  And unless my eyes are lying, she’s wearing a wedding ring.  How’d you like to wake up next to a side of beef like that on a cold morning?  Holy mother of crap, look at those arms going back and forth!  She starts listing a little bit and she’ll take out a whole frigging wall.”

It was Cunningham’s wife goose-stepping past.  Harry had to have seen her before, but he’d made no comment that Cunningham could recall.  Maybe after just seeing Lauren, the contrast was so great that—

“Look at those legs!  Damn, like two fireplugs with shoes on.”  Cunningham’s wife was almost out of sight, but Harry wouldn’t let up.  “How’d you like to have those legs around you?  And that mug on her!  Swear to God I had a bulldog looked just like her except it had less hair on it’s chin.  I wouldn’t touch that with—“

“Shut up!”

Cunningham was up off the bench, glaring down at Harry, hands at his sides clenched into fists.  Harry instinctively leaned back way from him, looking more confused than alarmed.  “Huh?” he said.

“I told you to shut up.  That was my wife.”

Harry peered down the corridor in the direction Cunningham’s wife had gone.  He continued to stare for several seconds.  Then he looked back up at Cunningham and said, as if asking for clarification, “You mean the cow?”

That’s when Cunningham fell on him with his more than ample girth, punching and elbowing and biting and scratching and crying, too, since for Cunningham from his earliest memories fighting meant crying because he always lost them.  Always.

*

            Mall security released Cunningham into his wife’s custody.  No charges were to be filed, but Cunningham was banned from the mall for three months.  They had taken Harry Pine away in the opposite direction.  Cunningham never saw him again.

Cunningham’s wife had her finger hooked in the collar of his shirt, and she led him that way across the parking lot to the car.  “I’ll drive,” she said.  She put the key in the ignition but didn’t start the car.  Instead she sat there, ominously silent, hands on the wheel.

Finally she said, “Well, are you drunk?”

It was her fondest theory that Cunningham spent every waking moment hatching schemes to get away from her long enough to “swill beer.”  The last time he’d had a beer, gas was fifty cents a gallon.

“No, I’m not drunk.”

“Humph.  If you haven’t been drinking, then what was that disgraceful exhibition all about?  Fighting!  Wrestling around like a hooligan, and in public!  I’ll never get over the humiliation!”

Why didn’t she just go ahead and slaughter him?  He was weary, too weary for questions.  Death seemed pleasant indeed.

“He made comments,” Cunningham said, just to get it all over with. His wife would never let up until she got her answers.

“Comments?  What kind of comments?”

“Well . . . they were comments about you.”

She lurched back like he’d taken a swing at her.  “About me?  What on earth did he say?”

“Well, things.  Unpleasant things. . . . Things of a sexual nature.”

She tried to lurch back even further, but she was up against the door.

“Things of a sexual nature! . . . About me?”

“Yes, well, yes.  Things he’d like to do.  I’d rather not say more.”

She stared at him a moment, eyes wide, then stared blindly out the window another moment.  Her mouth was working, but she couldn’t immediately utter words.  Finally:  “Well, I should say not.  I don’t want to hear it.  I should say not.”

They drove home in silence.  They watched TV and read the paper, passing each other sections they’d finished and saying “thank you” and “you’re welcome” with studied courtesy.

Later, in the bathroom preparing for bed, Cunningham gazed at himself in the mirror.  He looked like he’d been through it, all right.  Smudge of dirt on one cheek.  Two-inch scratch on his jaw.  What little hair he had left was mussed, sticking up on both sides like the tufts of feathers on an owl’s head.  He washed and dried his face and looked again and only then realized that his eyes were still red from crying.  Crying.  Fifty-five years old . . .

How had his life come to this?  What was left to him now?

He started to open the door, then froze.  What was that sound?  It was his wife.  She was humming.  Humming!  What did she have to be so happy about?  Unless . . .  Harry Pine?  Could it be this thing with Harry Pine?

He peaked out.   She was sitting on the side of the bed, her legs crossed, a bare foot going up and down, humming.  She was wearing a nightgown he had never seen before.  Wait.  He thought perhaps he did remember it, from years and years ago.  It was lavender, silky.  Not like those Victoria’s Secret things, no, it was ankle-length and long-sleeved and rose to a little lace ruffle tight around her neck.  Not Victoria’s Secret, but, still, lavender, silky.

There had been a time, surely there had been, before all the bitterness and coldness and silence, there had been a time, when they were younger, years and years and years ago . . .

Cunningham took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, opened the door, and, like a veteran of the wars called to battle one final time, stepped forward, prepared to do whatever was required of him.

Dennis Vannatta has published stories in many magazines and anthologies, including CHARITON REVIEW, BOULEVARD, ANTIOCH REVIEW, and PUSHCART XV, and three collections:  THIS TIME, THIS PLACE and PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD, both by White Pine Press, and LIVES OF THE ARTISTS by Livingston Press.  His first novel, AROUND CENTRALIA SQUARE, is forthcoming from Cave Hollow Press.

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She was leaving Culver City and wanted to do it right, but the three-man moving crew showed up over an hour late.  After she signed the forms, they avoided her, as if their lateness were somehow her fault.  “The grown-ups are working here,” their expressions seemed to say when she advised against, for example, stacking boxes labeled “Encyclopedias 1945-1981” on top of boxes labeled “Tiffany-style lamps.”  “Can you direct us to the man of the house?” their expressions said when she explained what Alvin Sterling was, and why it was fragile.  But she knew enough about men to not completely hate these three.  And after all, they were carrying the literal weight of the upper middle class, especially on a cloudless July afternoon.

But then she saw them dragging her new couch, its Iroko-wood legs skidding across the lawn.  The damage was beneath, invisible, but the cracks would splinter upward.  She jogged to the moving truck.  “My husband,” she said, grabbing their attention for the first time.  She didn’t have a husband, but they didn’t know that.  She motioned for them to set down the couch, and they did.  She grabbed four Frisbees, wedged between the cargo blankets and the dolly, and tossed them to the movers, who reluctantly caught them.  “My husband uses these to move heavy stuff.  You just put them under the legs and slide the couch.  Work smarter, not harder, he always says.”  The men cocked their heads, pursed their lips, as if to say “Sounds okay.  Why not?” And thus, her furniture was saved.

The rest of the afternoon, she passed on her imaginary husband’s advice.  It was better to store framed photographs against the truck’s side, where they could be protected by loose blankets and blouses.  Once, just once, someone asked what her husband might do, and she was almost too taken aback to answer.  She found herself pleased to direct them, happy knowing that she wouldn’t have to catalogue broken items as she unpacked.

Later that evening, she sat Indian-style on the empty living room floor, sipping whiskey from the bottle as the sun’s rays retreated across the hardwood floor.  She’d spent the day discussing her imaginary husband with the movers, and even though they were gone, she wondered what such a husband would be like.  Definitely in his late forties, like her, tan with gentle lines across his forehead.  But as much as she could picture his face, she couldn’t imagine him in motion, couldn’t picture how he might walk through the door.  Certainly not with a rose between his teeth.  Maybe he’d enter quietly with a joke about drinking alone in the dark.  But finally, she decided, her head nodding a little from the liquor, he’d open the door just enough for his face to show and would eye her warily as she did the same.  And when he entered the room, she’d stand and they would circle, each waiting for the other to speak first.

Robert Yune was born in Seoul, South Korea.  He currently teaches at Chatham University and the University of Pittsburgh.  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Avery, and Connecticut Review, among others.  In 2009, Yune received a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.  His website is www.robertyune.com.

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Aaron Anstett’s collections are Sustenance, No Accident, and Each Place the Body’s. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Cellpoems, Fence, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Colorado with his wife, Lesley, and children.

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Beckoning sky and a dizzy heart again tonight
my stripped down skin goes reptilian—
arms arming themselves against the tossing air outside
my clothes, a day-old against me, offer
shields too thin for the likes of this skin
I need reassurance tonight.

My grandmother wished me a painless life and sure,
I possess a body with no surgical scars
nesting on me like grave mounds—
However, I do have you,
you, who are inescapable and untreatable and dry
like a throat newly caught in the common cold—
you seem to always be at the back of my tonsils,
no medicine to fight back the adrenaline
you bring with those terribly harsh clear eyes
just have to wait it out I suppose.

And please, tell me, are you that way with every ear when you speak?

Those sweet, rough wounds that climb out of your voice—
because for me, it is like cozy hot stacks of laundry
or the comfortable squeeze of a car braking.
The past is half a room—recently unpacked
where you tossed me into your arms
my unknowing lips and fingertips tracing you like a stencil.
It’s also stairwells, café tables, boiler rooms,
and a leap, hands clasped like champions in mid-air,
into dead color-drained leaves.
Some days my thoughts desperately brush
your name and I pray that you are not another fiction.

Emily Corwin is currently a junior at the College of Wooster and is majoring in English and Film Studies. She has published in Scholastic’s The Best Teen Writing of 2009, Teen Ink, and two of Wooster’s literary magazines, Year One and The Goliard. She was a participant in Kenyon’s Young Writer’s Workshop in 2008 and was editor of her high school’s literary magazine, Spectrum, and the previous issue of Year One.

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For Carter Monroe

An old man listens to Eddie Vedder
wonders what exactly is he trying to say
beneath the tension
beneath the power
chorded mystery
of his lyrics. He, this old man, raised
on the juice of soulful men
plied up from flophouses and poverty
up from segregated South
with voices dripping
in grandma’s Sunday molasses
giving him a beat and an angel’s voice, questions.
An old man listens to Eddie Vedder
and knows it is all about age, always has been—
some soul’s ride old,
some infinitely young
wrapped up in the violence of society.
He knows it all boils down
to degrees of passionate love
slipping quietly from his hands.

Aleathia Drehmer is the editor of Durable Goods and In Between Altered States.  She is also the poetry editor for Full of Crow.  Her most recent collection of poetry “You Find Me Everywhere” is available from Propaganda Press.  Aleathia makes her home wherever her feet land and makes it a point to notice the little things.

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I like this guy
before we even meet.
He’s the only one
who called me back, and then
he wipes his feet
for a very long time
on the mat
before coming inside
with a little bow
and setting out bravely
for the upstairs bathroom
a few steps behind me
like a lieutenant
or a constable. I look up
“meticulous‟ after he leaves
and am startled to find
it comes from fear
in Latin. Because he seemed so
fearless, knowledgeable,
mindful of the whole long
history of flood. He was
a very good listener. “It could be
the spindle in your shower valve,
or it could be something
in the drain assembly,” he said
as he drew the bath,
then drew a wrench
from his plumber’s belt
and climbed into my tub. His entry
in the yellow pages
was the humblest
of all the plumber ads
with their splashy logos
and trite slogans. It read, simply:
C. Bowen, Plumber,
with a number
that rolled off my fingers
like an arpeggio.
He nailed it in under
an hour. And his bill
which has come in today’s mail
like a coda
is simply too beautiful
to contemplate.

Paul Hostovsky is the author of three books of poetry, Bending the Notes (2008), Dear Truth (2009), and A Little in Love a Lot (2011). His poems have won a Pushcart Prize and been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and Best of the Net 2008 and 2009. To read more of his work, visit his website at www.paulhostovsky.com

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I asked the nurse to leave
and she did,
followed by my weeping mother.
I was left alone
in that dark room,
my father’s body still,
silent,
small on the hospital bed.

I sat down on the beside chair
and lay my head
on his cold hand
and breathed him
in,
breathed him in
beyond the stale sweat
and sickness,
breathed him deep
into myself,
into I
who he
had created 27 years before.

His hand felt false,
fake beneath my hot cheek
and I knew it would never
feel real
again,
never again.

I pressed my cheek
hard
into his hand
until spider crack shots of pain
eddied through my skull,
then I lifted my head
and looked at his closed face,
his pale face,
his sunken face,
his dead face.

I began to cry.

Edward Lee is from Dublin, Ireland. His poetry, short stories and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Acumen, Smiths Knoll, The Shop, The Moon, and The Sunday Tribune New Irish Writing. His debut collection of poetry Playing Poohsticks On Ha’Penny Bridge was recently published by Spider Press. He is currently working towards his second poetry collection, and a photography exhibition entitled “Lying Down With The Dead”.

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Shirtless triplet ghosts hovering behind j & p gas pumps in amber dime store shades
remind me of tommy from ”carrie.” that popular blond guy phlegmatic congeniality that
makes shy awkward virgins caress their dirty pillows mouth his name as a cherry prayer.
Shadows and aliens and skeletal robots convince susan dey doppleganger to light her
virginia slim and squint hard ahead. Here comes jesus disguised as peruvian youth on
little cocoa pony. Act surprised.

Misti Rainwater-Lites is the author of expired nickel valentine and several other collections. She also enjoys photography.

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…you did not
choose to be in the story of the woman
in the white dress which was as cool and
evil as a glass of radioactive milk.
–“Like, God,” Lynn Emanuel

Except that I did. I stood beneath the chokecherry
tree stunned by the welter and muck of June

(bugs trilling in the bog, insects thick-bodied
as fingers, fists, the sweet weight of a baby’s
wrist—), I professed loveandfidelity and till-death-

do-we-pluck-out-our-eyes. And before someone could sling
a shotgun and shanghai me out of that wet dream, I was the cream

in his coffee, before grace and bereavement milkpoured
themselves like honeysuckle (a child suckled

at my breast three years later and I knew
out of this life is the only living left) vines across my throat:

I clutched that clot of the cosmos, love, faced the forced
march of the hamstrung heart
into a swarm of angry bees—

Sara Quinn Rivara’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems Magazine, The Cortland Review, The Crab Orchard Review, Blackbird, and Literary Mama. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in the Best New Poets Anthology. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and teaches at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with her son.

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I slit the longitude of an orange
the dog thought was a baseball
and almost got, the grocer wished
was a wad of cash to eat and eat,
the grove owner saw as his fist
grown triumphant against the fist of his father,
the migrant worker, her very first day,
believed was the sun.

Angela Rydell’s poetry has been published in The Sun, Poet Lore, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cortland Review, Barrow Street, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.  She is a recipient of Poets & Writers’ Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

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Barely noon and already the sun
strong enough to melt middle class skin.

On the lawn, croquet balls have formed their own cliques,
mallets lounge, waiting.

Litter of cigarette butts in a starfish ashtray an aunt made,
I smoke too much and acknowledge the fact as I let beer bottles
congregate under the porch.

From around the pond’s bend you can hear
the rap music waking closer. A small skiff
appears with two pre-teen boys wearing lifejackets
and expensive sunglasses. I wave, but my twenty something
body is already too close to middle age for them,
something of disgust and authority.

They’re too cool for politeness, that age when their small pale
bodies want nothing more than to rebel against their parent’s
Suburbans. If they’d leaned closer, I could have told them
that they will end up fraternity men with trophy wives
and they’ll stop listening to that rap music, replace it
with Widespread Panic, Dave Matthews Band.

In these details, under the midday glow rests a poem,
but I’ve long given up apologizing for how I was raised.

I bite into a nectarine expecting the expensive white flesh
I paid for, but it’s turned mild yellow. Tastes tart, lost
its sweetness.

Ashley Shivar received her MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from thewritingdisorder.com, Pinion and Black Heart Magazine, among others. She teaches English at Cape Fear Community College.

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I am no queen
No superwoman
No starlit of
the silver screen

I am a gob of spit
glowing in the dark
The saliva on your shoe
when you step out
onto the sidewalk

But I know these streets
breathing hot fumes
into your lungs
I know the clock
that melts your days away

I am the nothing
you will wake up to one day

Stephanie Smith’s debut poetry chapbook, Dreams of Dali, was released in 2010 from Flutter Press. Her work has appeared in such publications as Danse Macabre, decomP, The Horror Zine, Gutter Eloquence, Not One of Us, and Pif Magazine. She lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

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Vermillion started it—a thousand
times the hue of life—and taupe
or fuchsia. Complicated memory
and the syllables of spectra
too much a failure again
of a language which, in its quest
to name a shade, loses its way,
gains weight of intent. So then
not teal, not aquamarine—a spring
sign, an electric growth—
new hosta, novelty sliver, algae
in a humid sun—I sound maroon,
but it fails, too. A memory seldom
greens beyond its first slate rush,
and sepia we learn after we know it—
and the neurons burn, the char,
the vivid truce of the mind,
how suffused with crimson now used
to feel the hue recalled: chartreuse.

Gabriel Welsch’s collections of poems include Dirt and All Its Dense Labor, the chapbook An Eye Fluent in Gray, and The Death of Flying Things, forthcoming in summer 2012. Other stories and poems have appeared recently in Southern Review, PANK, New Letters, West Branch, Summerset Review, Broadsided, Whiskey Island, and Chautauqua. He works as vice president of advancement and marketing at Juniata College, in Huntingdon, PA, where he lives with his wife and daughters.

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black eye—sharp
in the tender blade
spherical and swift
as a bead of oil
on wave
flung through with arcs
of light

how fleeting—you think:
the look, the grasp,
the spark against bone

Jessica L. Wilkinson lives and writes in Melbourne, Australia. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in books, newspapers and international journals including HOW2, Ekleksographia, Overland and Cultural Studies Review. She is the founding editor of RABBIT: a journal for poetry. In 2011 she received a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne. She teaches at RMIT University.

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Big Rick stands beside the sixteenth green, thick hands pressed against hale thighs. He peers across the turf, examining dinner plate sized brown patches.

“It can happen overnight,” he says, then plunges the blade of his pocket knife into the grass to cut free a two-inch square. The turf is solid at least, no sign of grubs. But so dry that some of the patches are bare, the grass having simply blown away in the desert winds. Over his shoulder, thunderheads rim the Mule Mountains, but rain hasn’t fallen on the Turquoise Valley Golf Course in more than a week. Already, the greens seem to be enacting a sort of desert entropy, drying up, blowing away, heading back to their natural state. For Big Rick, the job is to fight the dry, to keep the grass alive until the late August heat of southern Arizona breaks, until monsoon thunderstorms reignite and flood the course with rain.

Part of the problem is the nature of the soil here, a desert mix of clay and sand officially called caliche. Others call it desert pavement, a name that better reflects the soil’s state, that it’s good for not much more than rattlesnakes and mesquite, that the limestone within the dirt mixes with water to make hard cement. Like pavement, caliche sheds water instead of soaking it up. Dry spells are particularly difficult, since the sun bakes hard all day.

Big Rick bends, folding his six-and-a-half foot frame into itself. He tweaks the brown spots with his fingers, feeling the depth of the damage. Silently, he returns to his golf cart and pulls out to survey the rest of the course. A hundred yards down the cart path, he slams the brakes, sliding the cart on the gravel.

“Lookit that,” he says.

In the caliche, under the shade of a brambling mesquite, a small volcano points out of the reddish dirt. It’s an anthill a foot across, eight inches high. Ants flood in and out.

“They think it’s gonna rain,” Big Rick says, citing the folk wisdom of ants, that they build high halls when rain approaches, to protect the nest. “Hope they’re right.”

He’s not taking chances, though. Big Rick plans to draw a rain turtle tonight, a trick he claims to have picked up from a Seminole while working a golf course in Florida. Draw one on a piece of paper, pin it under a rock on the course, and wait for the skies to open up.

“Gotta be careful, though,” he says. “I drew a big turtle in Florida once, and we got a tropical storm, eight inches of rain.”

Over the course of a career teaching biology and environmental conservation, my father ultimately settled on Aldo Leopold. Already wary at the prospect of a semester catching grasshoppers and surveying deer damage in the fields of Western Pennsylvania, his students no doubt grumbled when they saw a book, a real book, on the syllabus, Leopold’s classic Sand County Almanac. “There are two spiritual dangers to not owning a farm,” Leopold writes. “One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” More than anything else, these lines serve as philosophical mooring for my father.

To him Leopold’s suggestion is, on one level, quite literal. He bought a farm in mid-life, moved the family there, raised cattle and sheep and horses and chickens and goats and pigs. Every morning he changed from overalls to shirt and tie, then drove in to campus for class. Our food often came from the animals on the farm, in fact often came with a name. I raised a hog named Skywise from piglet to lumbering side of bacon. We were aware, then, of where it all came from. We were aware that the clinically shrink-wrapped steaks in the grocery cooler began life as wide-eyed calves. We were aware, too, that cutting and stacking wood takes effort, and that such effort is usually applied when cold November winds bite your hands, make your nose run.

Yet the essence of Leopold is, of course, not literal, even for those who seek the life of the gentleman farmer. Instead, his suggestion is akin to that of Scott Russell Sanders, who says we’re missing something if we don’t know where our weather comes from, if we don’t know which way the runoff flows. The point is to be aware, to inhabit the world in a more than tertiary way. He encourages us to understand the intersection of human life and natural life and to accept that our own lives are essentially natural. Without the farm, we can still understand the farm, can appreciate in an unsqueamish way that meat can only be the result of death.

Technically, it’s not desert in these parts, Turquoise Valley sitting in a narrow strip of grassland sandwiched between the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts. But grassland sounds more majestic than the reality of the landscape, a stretch of earth covered as much with spindly mesquite and barbed ocotillo as knee-high fields of grass. Yet there’s more water here than elsewhere, a gift from the nearby San Pedro River, a slender trickle that rambles northward in a corridor of cottonwood trees. Still, the valley depends on the weather patterns of the Arizona desert. In the summer, the winds shift to blow up from the south, across Mexico. With this wind comes heavy moisture from sources scientists can’t quite pinpoint, maybe the Gulf of Mexico, maybe the Gulf of California. Summer heat radiating from the desert mixes with the moisture blowing in, and the results are monsoon thunderstorms, brief, often strong late afternoon boomers that drench the desert. Most of the region’s annual twelve inches of rain come during three months of this wet monsoon.

The effect of these storms is sudden and dramatic. The saturation of the ground releases the scent of sagebrush and soil, a loamy must that resonates within the nostrils. This is a smell of freshness, of renewal and release. For plants and animals, too, the rain rejuvenates, and a land that looked dried, cracked, dead emerges green and lush. Golf courses thrive as well, and men like Big Rick don’t have to worry about loss of grass or job.

Right now it’s dry, though, the monsoon thunderstorms scooting along the peaks of the tall Huachuca Mountains and the shorter Mules, puffy clouds teasing the dry plains below. In these moments, it’s easy to wonder why anyone bothers building golf courses in the desert. The weather’s perfect — blue skies and sunshine nearly every day — but grass needs water, and golf courses need grass.

Arizona has its charms, celebrated graphically on the state flag as a blue field dominated by a blazing, stylized sun. Simply enough, it’s sunny in Arizona, and that alone is the draw for millions of Easterners who have tired of winter slop, and gray spring skies, and washed-out summer picnics. For more or less the entire state, a resident can depend on the sun shining more than 300 days a year. Yet the oddity of that sunshine is the excitement with which real Arizonans face rain. Unbroken blue skies gets boring. Sometimes, you need the gloom, if only to appreciate how nice it is to avoid.

I grew up in the gloom, in a small Western Pennsylvania town tucked unfortunately between mountains and three coal-fired power plants. From the top of my parents’ farm, I could look out across the rolling landscape and watch the nearest generating station churn plumes of white vapor into the air. Weather stuck between the mountains, mixed with the stations’ exhausts, and it rained often. In the winter, gray clouds rolled in low, capping the area with a claustrophobic ceiling that hardly lifted from November to April.

But I was used to it. It wasn’t until I moved to Arizona that I began to feel weather, to react on a subconscious level to atmospheric change. A day or so before the occasional gray periods rolled into our Arizona mountain town, I got grumpy, tough to live with. I’d quickly grown accustomed to Arizona’s typical high pressure, the conditions that brought wispy high clouds, sunshine, and blue. When weather fronts pushed the barometer lower, my internal mood dropped too.

This may seem like a reaction of the spoiled; only the insufferable white about a rare cloudy. Yet the reaction was at least partly natural, a body’s response to the atmosphere we live in but typically ignore. I felt the drop deep inside. I grew antsy, irritable, wary of coming storms. Once I realized the source of the shift, I came to at least appreciate the sensation. It offered a reminder that weather doesn’t function as a mere backdrop to life. Indeed, weather is life, a fact that a desert confirms better than most other locales. Without the pressure drop, storms had no chance to enter the state, and without the storms, even the drought-hardy plants of the desert had no chance of survival. Feeling crummy, then, connected me to life-renewing weather.

Certainly, the rain offered its own reward. I used to ride my bicycle around town often, and the best rides were those that came just after the summer storms. The hot air had been doused and replaced by the coolness that follows thunderheads. Puddles filled the gutters, and rare standing water reflected the variegated light of the sky: sunshine streamers ducking between lingering gray clouds, halos and shafts and luminous spots in a place that was typically, boringly blue. Beauty is often best revealed in quick glimpses. It’s too much all at once. Thus the beauty of the sky deepened when shrouded by these clouds. Thus the beauty of the Huachuca Mountains heightened when mist obscured the peak. In those precious hours after the rain, when the barometer lifted along with my mood, the desert danced in light and shadow, showed itself capable of nuance and awe.

From a distance, the San Pedro river looks like a mighty flow. Its path can be traced from miles away, as the moisture it offers creates a dramatic change in the landscape. In gentle summer winds, dry grasses wave on the western side of the river, flatland hemmed in by the San Pedro and the craggy Huachucas. On the eastern side, the land climbs out of the river into rolling scrub, and here the spindles of mesquite, creosote bush, and ocotillo take over. Along the river, there are trees, and greenness, relief from the muted ochre and olive that dominate elsewhere.

To the south of Highway 92, the gorge of Greenbush Draw ushers water from Bisbee, and from the golf course, toward the river. Much of the year, the draw runs dry, or barely runs at all. During the monsoon, it often gurgles as heavy waves of chocolate water sling toward the river. On mornings after heavy rains, muddy streaks five feet wide cut across the golf course, residue from the water that rushed from Mexico into the draw, from there to the San Pedro and on north.

As far as rivers go, the San Pedro hardly seems to deserve the name. In most spots, it looks like little more than a ditch, a flattish, slow-moving trickle that carries less water than the tiny unnamed stream in the backyard of my parents’ Pennsylvania home. Yet the San Pedro must be considered mighty. It remains one of the last free-flowing rivers in Arizona. This alone is praise worthy. Other, grander waterways have been dammed, hemmed, redirected to hydrate cotton fields north of Tucson or to provide drinking water for the millions who have come to call Phoenix home. No one has bothered to tinker with the San Pedro, perhaps because of its relative insignificance. In that, the river lives on, offering to the parched landscape between Sierra Vista and Bisbee what it can, a riparian zone of lush grass, turtles, snakes, frogs, trees, a year-long flow of water in a region that typically follows a drought-flood cycle. Above all else, the San Pedro is steady.

Water, of course, defines the desert. Or, rather, lack of water. The great distinction of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert is its abundance of rain, twelve inches a year that create a thorny desert tapestry of saguaro cactus, barrel cactus, cholla, ocotillo, creosote bush, palo verde, yucca, agave, mesquite. The saguaro, notably, drops away in the higher, cooler Chihuahuan Desert that most closely resembles the land around the golf course. But it is this scant amount of rainfall that creates lushness in the Sonoran Desert, a spring bloom of immense beauty and a year-round cover of vegetation that stands in contrast to the clinically arid and empty Mojave Desert of California and Nevada. There, only the Joshua Tree seems to suggest life. The rest of the land stretches on flat, dry, crusted.

It is surprising, then, that the WPA decided to build a golf course here, scraping Turquoise Valley out of the caliche. It is even more surprising that they chose to follow an Eastern template when doing so. The old front nine of the golf course could just as easily sit in wet Pennsylvania as dry Arizona, except for the views. Grass covers every possible inch of the nine, short in the fairways and longer in the rough. Mesquite and other desert scrub were eradicated, taller cottonwoods planted in a spot too far removed from the San Pedro to use its water. As a result, present day Turquoise Valley pumps 200,000 gallons a day in the winter and 800,000 gallons a day in the hot parts of the summer to keep the grass green, all of this drawn from fresh water wells that lie beneath the course. Nearby Bisbee has talked about building a new wastewater treatment plant and delivering reclaimed sewage to the course for irrigation, a notion in full practice in cities like Tucson and Phoenix. But this hasn’t happened yet, so the water that seeps through the fairways at Turquoise Valley could just as easily be used for drinking, could just as easily stay in its subterranean aquifer as it had for millions of years before the course was built. Aldo Leopold, I’m sure, would not be surprised to hear what the WPA wrought.

The locals played early in the summer, the old-timers gathering at the first tee each morning by 5:30. Doing so allowed them to play in the cool, when the overnight chilling of the desert left fresh mornings. I played occasionally with a retired banker and a former mayor, Gay and Lefty, a tall Georgian and a crusty old cowboy. They hurtled down the fairways in their personal golf carts, contraptions older than me, with retro styling and rebuilt motors. Gay did so with Hills Bros. coffee cans on the dash, each filled with snacks: peanuts mostly, fitting his Georgia upbringing. They played quickly, finishing by nine, when they retired to the bar for a quick beer, Gay pleased that he’d make it home in time for The Price is Right.

They played early partly because they couldn’t sleep, but mostly to avoid the sweat I usually relished in the summer. I often golfed at noon, the fool’s tee time. But I liked it for the solitude, the summer regulars having long since gone home for the day. In the mid-day heat, I listened to cactus wrens twitter in Greenbush Draw, and I enjoyed the relentless sunshine baking my neck leather brown. It wasn’t bad, as long as I kept drinking water, refilling a Gatorade bottle at the yellow jugs stationed every few holes. I rarely felt the sweat of the day on my body, only found it later as an uneven white line left on the front and back of my golf shirts. This is desert. This is dryness. This is where water goes in the hot Arizona day.

There are two spiritual dangers to damming a river. The first danger is assuming the water belongs to you, the other that the river ceases to be.

There are two spiritual dangers to building a golf course in the desert. The first danger is thinking that golf courses must be green, the other that water isn’t precious.

There are two spiritual dangers to moving to the desert. The first danger is thinking lawns must be green, the other that dryness cannot be beautiful.

Flying over Arizona, the view from an airplane window can be startling for those unfamiliar with the Southwest. There’s emptiness, miles of uninhabited desert stretching out in each direction. There’s starkness, rocks laid bare, the state appearing like a topographic map unshielded by the heavy vegetation of the East. And there’s water, a long ribbon of gray-blue stretching down the middle of the desert from Lake Pleasant through red dirt desert into Phoenix. This is the canal of the Central Arizona Project, a 336 mile aqueduct that diverts water from the Colorado River, dammed at the California border to make Lake Havasu, into central and southern Arizona. Pushed through by Barry Goldwater, the canal was meant to distribute the state’s negotiated share of Colorado River for municipal and agricultural use.

I remember seeing this canal for the first time, on a visit months prior to moving to the Southwest, and I remember wondering why someone would build an open canal through a hot desert. Evaporation alone must eliminate a hefty portion of the water. The canal’s existence, however, offers a poignant visual example of water usage in the desert Southwest. Certainly, the people living there need the water, at least if need is based on a right to grow a water-intensive crop like cotton, or a right to erect multi-million-person cities in an arid region with limited water supply. So it is that experts proclaim that the Southwest will run out of water at some point, that the high population and relative lack of water conservation will, eventually, catch up. Desert entropy again, the landscape working to reclaim itself for plants and animals better adapted to the natural cycles of the region.

I think, then, of the golf courses I’ve played in the area, acknowledging my own complicity in what could easily be called irresponsible resource management. Some get it as right as might be possible, limiting irrigated acreage to small islands of fairway, foregoing grass roughs for thatches of desert, prickly areas out of play that make a ball lost for all but the bravest of golfers. Plants and animals, both, bite in the desert. Some of these courses allow for hard fairways, too, accepting the limitations of the region. But others do not, instead dumping water on the desert until the fairways are soft, thick, lush. They grow trees that love water, and have lakes, and look both lovely and out of place.

Turquoise Valley, for its part, does both of these things in its design. The old nine follows the pattern of hubris, ignoring locale to make a golf course that could fit in rainy Scotland. The new nine limits grass, leaves the mesquite thickets, plays like a desert. And in many ways, the golf course seeks to limit its water use: the urinals in the clubhouse are high-tech jobbies that use no water at all.

Part of this, maybe most, comes from simple economics. Just running the pumps in the summer costs $3,000 a month in electricity, a hefty outlay of cash to pull water from the ground to the ponds and onto the fairways. If it works, Turquoise Valley is happy to get the reclaimed water from the proposed Bisbee plant. It would save money. And that, of course, is probably how environmental protection really needs to be seen. The planet, the desert, these things don’t exactly need saving. We can’t destroy them, only offer wounds deep enough to destroy ourselves. Running out of drinking water means little to the Sonoran Desert, but it means a lot to the people who live there. That is, the monsoon storms will return, rain turtles or no. Whether anyone remains to see them, to pull the heady aromas into their lungs, to feel the blessed cool of a thunderhead, to hear the frogs emerge from the mud, that’s something else altogether.

September and May are the hottest months. The sun is full, still high in its summer position, but the monsoon is not in effect. There are no thunderstorms to mitigate the temperature. For Tucson, late May usually marks the imaginary “breaking of the ice” on the Santa Cruz River, an annual rite that marks the first 100-degree day. There’s rarely water in the Santa Cruz, though, even when the ice breaks. Instead, like most of the rivers in the hot Sonoran Desert, the Santa Cruz traces a sandy, shrubby line through the city. Except for monsoon washouts, the river is usually home only to off-road motorcycles and four-wheelers.

On the other end of the monsoon, ripened September grass invites swarms of grasshoppers into the late summer heat. My last autumn at Turquoise Valley, the swarm arrived in Biblical numbers, a plague that covered the ground in bodies. Grasshoppers popped and burst beneath the tires of golf carts. The sheer numbers crawling the paths made it impossible to dodge the crushing. Within a few days, the back nine took on the stench of rot, a combination of decaying grasshopper bodies and grasshopper waste.

I always walked the course, and that September I did so with sudden flutters of grasshoppers erupting around me. They banged off my shoulders, my knees, my golf bag, hard impacts from insects as large as two inches. Among the swarm I found tiny neon green hoppers; two-inch brown hoppers; half-inch brown hoppers. I found large black horse lubbers, a variety the locals call Mexican Generals, stark black insects with neon-colored piping around the legs and abdomen. I found a single specimen of the aptly named painted grasshopper, a smallish animal with orange, blue, and yellow splotches startling in their brightness. I took that one home, put it in the freezer to show my biologist father on his next visit west.

For the course superintendent, the grasshoppers proved more troubling, since their presence equated to threat. They covered the course because of the grass, because it offered food that the surrounding scrub did not. That year’s inordinate hatch came as a surprise, and the super found himself unprepared to deal with the infestation. The hoppers found the grass he’d planted on mounds left of the fairway on number 12. “That’s like tenderloin to ‘em,” he said of the fresh shoots, then hurried off to order pesticides.

Unimpeded, the hoppers would have eaten away the irrigated grass and left behind the same brown desert that thrived outside the borders of the golf course. And maybe someday they’ll succeed. On the greens that autumn, large brown females dug their rear ends into the grass, ovipositors injecting eggs directly into the soil. The eggs will wait out the dry, watch the sky for gathering clouds, moisten and hatch alongside the cycles of desert rain.

Matthew Ferrence is an assistant professor of creative writing at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. Prior to returning to academe, he played golf professionally on a German tour. Essays from my golf collection in progress have appeared in several journals, including Blue Mesa Review, Crab Orchard Review, Puckerbrush Review, and Concho River Review.

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In English, my father, like many intellectual men, could be cynical and world-weary, but in Yiddish, he was his better self: generous, humorous, a little sentimental. My father loved us, his three children, in Yiddish. Even then, though, it was a tough love.

Straightforward phrases like “I’m proud of you” did not roll off his tongue. “Ziskeit!” he exclaimed when I came downstairs for breakfast. “Bas malkah-meins, shaina maidel, good morning.” From that, and from the fondness in his eyes, I extrapolated. Still, I was the lucky one. I got the “shaina maidel” treatment; my older and younger brothers, Adam and Judah, were “kunielemel” (mooncalf) and “teivel” (devil), respectively, and that was on a good day.

Neither of my brothers was a mooncalf or a devil, although they both had their moments. I’m not sure what bothered my father about them. Some days their very presence in the kitchen, where my father held court at the table, seemed to irritate him into hiding behind the New York Times, and he would emerge only to sigh and roll his eyes at their narishkeit (foolishness); other days, I sensed he felt affectionate toward all of us but could only show it to me. Maybe he felt obligated to toughen up his sons, not coddle them. Whatever the reason, Adam and Judah grew up knowing they could do little to make my father explicitly happy. Whereas all I had to do was walk into the room.

Even in Yiddish, my father’s emotional vocabulary was limited. Growing up with him growling at my brothers, I learned several colorful synonyms for a fool, starting with the easiest (“Tippish!” [idiot]), and several more for threatened violence (“I’m going to give you such a shmeis” [smack]), but nothing to approximate “I love you.”

My mother-in-law Trudy had a similar experience growing up with old-school Jewish parents. In her Spartan childhood, she and her older brother were raised without presents or vacations. On a visit to the sunny, spacious home she had built for herself in North Carolina, far from her past, I asked her whether her parents had been measured in expressing affection, too.

“What did they call you, Trudy?”

“Mama’s neshama-leh, nachas-ul,” she recited immediately.

“Did they ever say ‘I’m proud of you’? Or anything in English?” I asked.

“Never!” she said, her eyes widening over her mug of tea. “No, it was ‘mama’s neshama-leh, nachas-ul,’ or ‘mama-leh,’ those kinds of endearments.”

“That’s how you knew you were loved?”

“Right. Of course I had no idea what the words meant,” she said with a shrug.

Mama’s little soul, bringer of joyous pride. How does it form a person to have one’s value articulated only in a language one can’t understand?

Deciphering my father’s Old World language code was a skill my brothers and I learned. When my father called Adam “Kaddish” instead of “tippish,” we knew he was thinking of Adam fondly—though since “Kaddish” referred to Adam’s responsibility, as the first-born son, for saying ritual prayers after my father’s death, the fondness came striped with morbidity. When Judah was “Shmudel,” or some Yiddish-y variant on his name, instead of “teivel mazek” (trouble-making devil child) we concluded he was in my father’s good graces—for the moment.

Remarkably, my brothers weren’t resentful of the unequal treatment we received. I did do what I could to help: I tried not to exploit my position as the princess. Because I knew he would try to give me anything I asked for, I didn’t ask for things. That seemed only fair. My brothers ended up with much more than I did—TVs in their bedrooms, video games, stereos—because they were willing to ask, or because my father’s preference was so clear that my mother felt guilty. Anyway, all I wanted was what my father wanted to give me: books.

My father loved the classics, the Victorians, the Russians, the French, the Yiddish-ists, the Modernists, the British, the Romans, the Greeks, virtually all literature created until the Second World War, but that war was, for him, what the Russian front was to the Nazi army, an insurmountable obstacle. It was as though, in some indefinable way, Hitler had won—a post-Holocaust world could produce no fiction worth reading. When he did pick up a contemporary book, it was non-fiction: history, politics, biology. Rumor had it that he read some Updike, once, but I never saw it happen. Henry Roth, sure, but Phillip Roth? No way. The most abundantly curious and well-educated man I knew was completely uninterested in any Pulitzer Prize-winner published after 1946.

At the peak of his career, as General Counsel for the Department of Energy during the Carter administration, he helmed lawsuits that successfully forced oil companies to reimburse the American people for price-gouging them; but when Reagan came in, my dad went out, and from then on, he worked for himself, which left him lots of time to devote to us and, primarily, me. My education was a pet project for him, less strenuous than tennis and a good break from crossword puzzles. When I was three, he taught me to read, and shortly thereafter we sat together in the old family room rocking chair, me on his lap and the Yale Shakespeare on mine, and made our way through Macbeth. On long car rides, when we didn’t listen to tapes of “the Canterbury Tales” or the famous British actor John Gielgud reciting Robert Browning, he fed me Hamlet’s speeches line by line until I had them memorized.

I never asked him why any of this mattered; I didn’t need to. I absorbed his self-evident pleasure in the words themselves (the mouth-feel of gey gezundterheyt [go in good health], how it rolled around in your cheeks like marbles in your hand) and then his even deeper, more nuanced joy at the stories that words, when wisely arranged, could tell.

In fifth grade, my English teacher sent us home with an assignment to present a poem. Everyone else came ready with a stanza or two of Shel Silverstein. Thanks to my father’s coaching, when it was my turn, I stood in front of a sea of desks, looked levelly into the glazed eyes of my classmates, and launched into verse 33 of Sir Thomas Macaulay’s epic “Horatius at the Bridge:”

… But meanwhile axe and lever / Have manfully been plied;
And now the bridge hangs tottering / Above the boiling tide.
“Come back, come back, Horatius!” / Loud cried the Fathers all.
“Back, Lartius! back, Herminius! / Back, ere the ruin fall!” …

I pulled to a halt only after Horatius arrived safely back on Roman land.

Though I had adopted my father’s patron saints as my own, and could always make him smile by turning to him and proclaiming, with a nod to Lewis Carroll, “You are old, Father William,” it was only natural that I rebel. I refused to ignore post-WWII lit. Instead, I embraced it.

This drove him to distraction—because it was a rejection of him but more importantly because it took me to a place he couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, follow. Trollope? He offered. Chabon, I retorted. Dickens? Atwood. I tried to lure him into coming in after me, bought him contemporary classics I thought he would like. He pushed them aside, groaning like Tevye and asking the Lord where he had gone wrong.

We both knew that one day I would present him with a modern novel he wouldn’t ignore, one, in fact, that he had been anticipating since I was 3: the one I wrote myself. If anyone could redeem a literary world in the wake of the Holocaust, it would be him, as channeled through his daughter.

In high school, I took a Yiddish class and, on a whim, tried calling my father “Tateh,” which means “Dad.” Rarely have I ever done anything so right. From the happiness that flooded his face and brightened his eyes, it seemed as though he had been waiting his whole life to hear that word. “Stera-le, maidel-meins,” he said in response, my little Ester, my little girl. From then on, he was always “Tateh.” The umbilical Yiddish connection this created went only between the two of us. My brothers and my mother were shut out.

While at college, I called him once a week, sometimes more. All I had to say was “Tateh” and from 200 miles away I could hear him smile, even if we then went on to argue about why I didn’t want to read more Tolstoy.

Senior year, I began worrying he would die. In the space of a few months, I had lost my dog and then my grandfather to cancer, and I felt certain that the next calamity would fell my father, who ate like he was twenty and looked like he was seventy-five.

I had predicted the what; I had not, however, predicted the how.

The heart attack that shook him in New Mexico was a fake out, and the skin cancer barely registered. But the dodge ball game was just heating up. The next two shots hit him squarely where it counts: first, a diagnosis of colon cancer during the run up to my wedding, which he managed to fight off, barely; and then, after giving him a chance to catch his breath, cancer again. Pancreatic cancer.

I don’t know the Yiddish word for cancer, because my father referred to it simply as his “dybbuk,” an ancient literary Jewish demon that took possession of him. He went to Johns Hopkins for treatment to satisfy his family but he knew that what he needed, and lacked, was a more drastic remedy: an exorcism. In a technological fight against an evil spirit, he did not assume that he would survive.

For the next year, I traveled home as often as I could, coming for weekends so that I could watch his face change, squeeze his hand, talk to him about my writing, and read to him from his books. My presence seemed helpful, but as he got sicker it mattered less. My mother and my brothers stepped in to do things I couldn’t. As though they had never been bruised by his preference for his only daughter, Mom nursed, cleaned, and fed him, called the doctors and administered the pills, while Adam helped move my father around the apartment, and then, as he weakened, the bed, and Judah set up an iPod and speakers so that even in Hospice, floating in and out of consciousness, my father could listen to Chopin. The day he died, when we wheeled his bed outside into the autumn sunlight, each back was as good as the other in shielding his eyes from the glare, and later, hours before the end, one voice blended into the next as we took turns reading to him from Isaiah. “We love you,” we all told my father, in English. “Thank you.”

And if I murmured, “Goodbye, Tateh,” there was no extra significance to it. He was beyond knowing.

Now that he’s gone, we mourn my father bilingually. We laugh about how when we invaded his realm, the kitchen, to watch “the Simpsons,” he would chuckle over things we couldn’t understand but would still declare it, like all pop culture, “schlock” (junk) or even “dreck” (trash, excrement). We quote his favorite string of Yiddish curses for bad drivers: “Schotzim banditem gozlanem mamzerim!” (Idiot non-Jews, bandits, robbers, bastards!) Once, as a little girl, I asked him, “What does that mean, ‘bastards’?” and he answered me, “Someone who doesn’t know his father.”

Wow, I thought. Bastards must be really dumb.

I was lucky enough to know my father: his prickliness, his inconsistency, his vulnerability, his fear. His inability to communicate was his fatal flaw, not because of how it affected his family but because it prevented him from being a writer. He died before seeing me succeed in his place, but he must have known that he had set me on the path, and that I valued his investment in me too much to let him down.

At the unveiling of his tombstone a year after his death, my family stood by the grave sharing memories and thoughts, one by one. When it was my turn, I said, “I don’t have anyone to speak Yiddish to me anymore.” An understanding laugh went around the circle. “He taught me how to read,” I said next. I thought of saying more—that words were my sword and shield, and no one would ever understand that better than the man who taught me to use them, the man who was no longer there; that losing my father felt like being thrown out of the Garden of Eden without even a gey gezundterheyt—but all I could do was repeat myself and hope everyone understood. “He taught me how to read.”

—

GLOSSARY

Papa-loshen – n. “Father tongue.” A play on the common expression that Yiddish is the “mama-loshen,” or mother tongue.

Zieskiet – n. Beauty, lovely one

Bas malkah – n. Princess

Maidel-meins – n. My little girl

Shaina maidel – n. Pretty girl

Kunielemel  – n. Mooncalf

Teivel  – n. Devil

Narishkeit – n. Foolishness, nonsense

Tippish – n. Fool

Shmeis – n. Smack

Neshama-le – n. Little soul

Nachus – n. Joyous pride

Mama-le – n. Little mother

Gey gezundterheyt – n. Go in good health

Mazek – n. Troublemaker

Tateh ­– n. Dad (familiar)

Dybbuk – n. Evil spirit that possesses a human body until it can be cast out

Shlock – n. Junk

Dreck – n. Trash, excrement

Schotzim banditem gozlanem mamzerim – n. Non-Jews (impolite), bandits, thieves, bastards (i.e., people who don’t know their fathers)

Ester Bloom’s writing has appeared in Salon, the Hairpin, the Awl, Nerve, the Morning News, Thought Catalog, the Film Experience, PANK, Hello Giggles, Phoebe (upcoming), Zone 3, the Apple Valley Review, Conte: A Journal of Narrative Poetry, and other venues. She just completed a fall residency at VCCA and will be at the Vermont Studio Center in Summer 2012. Her collection of lighthearted essays about serious topics, Never Marry a Short Woman, is represented by Michele Rubin at Writers House.

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