WINTER 2012

He arrives alone, with a shiny suitcase and a limp in his left leg. His jeans are ringed with snow at the ankles, his face pink and damp. He checks the large clock above the ticket booth. Ah, but no need: he is not confined to a schedule.

At this eerie hour the ticket line is one deep: a young woman, perhaps a student too, in some sort of hurry. She is dressed in a knee-length high-collar coat, tan with furry white trim. He waits at a distance. Even if she is a student there’s no chance he knows her. Girls in the Institute (rare as they were) didn’t own coats like that. No chance.

The young woman gathers her things – ticket, purse, luggage – and hustles off. After a brief pause he steps forward. The ticket clerk is wearing a mouse-gray sweater and oversized glasses. A long yellow cigarette hangs from the corner of her mouth.

“Help you,” she grunts.

“Yes, well, I’d like a ticket.”

“This is the place.”

She waits. It looks as if she’s on the verge of speaking – an accomplishment in its own right due to the cigarette dangling there, angled toward the counter, impossibly acute, defying gravity, really, just dangling there as it would in a photograph – she waits but doesn’t say anything for a few moments.

Then: “Well where to, then.”

“I’m not really sure.”

“You aint really sure.”

“Somewhere south, maybe.”

“We got Rochester, we got Albert Lea…”

“No I mean south. Like, Texas south.”

“Texas? Abilene, Dallas, Houston…”

“Not literally Texas.”

The ticket clerk looks up at something on the wall above the window, sucks on the cigarette, blows a sheet of smoke down toward her lap. She folds her hands and looks at him through the window like a lawyer might a prisoner. Then she rolls back from the counter, fishes around in a drawer or cabinet, then returns and slides a brochure through the transaction tray.

“Here’s the fare schedule,” she coughs, “let me know when you get it figgered out.”

“Does this have the prices on it?”

“It does.”

“Okay, thank you.”

“Map’s over there.”

“Yes, thank you.”

He borrows a pencil-nub from her and compares the schedule to the map. Really gives it a thorough analysis. Not such a bad habit. Most destinations fall distinctly into one of four categories: too expensive (popular group, that one), too far (Miami by bus?), too infrequent (now, it has to be now), or not far enough (what’s the point, kiddo?). He makes a little game of it, separating cities into these four groupings. A being too expensive, and so on. Boston is an A. Des Moines, a D. El Paso, A but also a little B. So AB then. Flagstaff, C.

Halfway through the schedule he realizes he doesn’t have a metric for the good destinations, the possibilities. The whole point of the exercise. So he erases the initial judgments, starts again. A little star for the finalists. He likes the little stars, four neat intersecting vectors that really do draw attention to the viable cities. He gets maybe a little star-happy as a result. But that’s okay: he can get as star-happy as he wants. No equations to guide him, no integral limits to bound him, no distinct solution waiting for him.

A bus enters the station, airbrakes wheezing, and emits a cloud of exhaust.

He can’t help himself from totaling the results in a little table at the bottom of the schedule. It’s pointless, of course, really he only cares about the little stars, but he does it anyways, just a quick count. The As dominate. But there’s no way he’s going to apply percentages to each of the columns, no siree. Besides the ABs complicate matters, so it’s not like there’s a clean distribution anyhow. Precision and accuracy are two different things.

So, the little stars. After some contemplation he decides it really needs to be now. No waiting. The station smells like…exhaust, of course, but something else too, something metallic. Rusted steel, maybe. Not a pleasant smell. It has to be soon.

At the ticket counter the clerk is flipping through a newspaper. The classifieds, from the looks of it.

“So, zero zero is midnight, right?”

She takes a long drag from the latest cigarette and mashes the filter out in a tin ashtray. “Zero zero is midnight, yeah.”

“So this one here, this leaves at twelve ten? Tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, this one then.” He points to the schedule.

“Coach?”

“Yes.”

He finds an empty cluster of chairs – green, plastic, cold – near the terminal. The garage is mostly deserted. A coach idles at the far end of the building. A few rows over, a scrawny man in rags snoozes happily. A prim old lady in a pillbox hat diligently watches the clock above her head. A janitor in a denim jumpsuit hums while dragging a mop across a concrete island.

There’s a magazine in his suitcase, but he doesn’t feel like getting it. The suitcase is full – complete, is the word he’d come up with. The suitcase is complete. He doesn’t want to disturb those neatly packed rows, the order contained within that plastic shell. Anyone else would have just jammed everything in there all haphazard, overcome by the urgency and exhilaration of the moment. Not him, no siree. He’d packed with conviction. Calmly, scientifically (well why not? you wouldn’t believe how much stuff he’d fit in that suitcase!). No need to rush. Slow made it real….

A loud clack of shoes echoes across the terminal. He turns, expecting to see the young woman with the tan coat. But no, coming up the sidewalk is a man clad in an acorn-brown suit and polished wingtips. He has an overcoat draped over his wrist and a salt-and-pepper beard and a dark complexion and a long curving face. Looks like a washed-up jazz musician or pool shark, someone who tries too hard to look like someone he isn’t, or someone he used to be. The stranger walks past the chairs and leans up against a block wall near the exit.

Popular Mechanics is the magazine. He’s already read most of it anyhow.

After a few minutes the stranger comes and sits in the opposite bench. He has a peculiar odor about him, like stale oranges (strange thing is, he’s smelled that same smell before, that exact smell, only he can’t remember where). The stranger takes a moment to size him up and then smiles. Sits there smiling, in fact, for what feels like five minutes. There’s a tooth missing from that smile, too, a lower incisor, which is pretty much impossible to ignore.

“Hey man,” the stranger finally says, “I know you probably don’t like being disturbed, and all.”

“Oh.”

“But don’t worry.”

“Worry?”

“Hey your secret’s safe with me, all right?”

“Secret?”

The stranger leans back and lets out a throaty laugh. “It’s cool, it’s cool. I got you.”

There’s no way out of this conversation short of up and leaving. Which, all things considered….

“Look sir I don’t – ”

“You don’t want to be disturbed, I hear you.”

“No, I mean, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Okay man, sure. Sure.” The stranger winks, makes a zipping motion across his lips. He’s quiet for a while, tapping his legs, coughing, looking around out of either curiosity or paranoia. Then he says, in a near-whisper, “I know, though.”

“Know what?”

“You. I know you.”

“Sir, no offense, but – ”

“You that guy, what’s-his-name. From the movies.”

“Who?”

“You know, that – hell, man, you! You’re you, that guy. The comedies.”

“No, I think – ”

“Hey your secret’s safe with me, all right? No one here to tell anyhow.”

“Sir but I’m…” He stops for some reason, stops right there and thinks about it. And you know what? He’s not that, not anymore, he’s not an engineering student any more than he is a pianist or tinkerer or programmer. Heck why not a movie star? No labels. It’s become rote, that grand exposition, that pompous speech borrowed from somewhere, some place in his imagination, well actually I’m majoring in electrical engineering, actually, and yes of course it’s difficult but you know not that difficult…And how proud it made his mother, his grandparents, all those aunts, and best of all how it infuriated his brother. Labels. Unthinking. Mouth opening as though coin-operated or remote-controlled, those nice-sounding words, keep ‘em comin’ kiddo!

“Just let’s keep it between you and me, okay?”

The stranger smiles like it’s the happiest day of his life. “I knew it! Man, I knew it!”

“And no pictures.” Says it with some authority, even.

A serious look comes across the stranger’s face. “I don’t even own a camera.”

Labels are like units. Half the Exam was units. Ridiculous conversions. Pounds per cubic foot to Newtons per cubic centimeter, frivolous stuff like that. Time-consuming calculations. Units.

“Thank you,” he says, falling back into a relaxed pose, knees crossed, hands folded. He wishes he had a pair of sunglasses.

“How come you’re here, anyhow?”

“Minneapolis?”

“I’d’a figured you for a limo man, myself.”

“Oh. Yes well, actually…”

The stranger leans in close.

“I’m researching a role.”

The stranger snaps back, looks around again. Then he steps across the aisle and sits, leaving one seat between them, eyes white and wide.

“What kind of role?”

“A hobo. You know. Or more like a drifter. Bus station type. No offense.”

“In Minneapolis?”

“His friend lives here. Girlfriend. My character’s girlfriend. Actually,” and he hasn’t had this much fun in years, “actually it’s not his girlfriend. It’s this girl he left, or that left him, a long time ago, which led to his – ”

“She lives in Minneapolis?”

“She’s…a student. Yes.”

“This a comedy?”

“Oh, sure. I mean – yes and no. I don’t like labels. Hate labels.”

“I see.”

He feels a little bad for the stranger. Poor guy is so enthralled with the scuttlebutt, you know his own life is anything but interesting.

“Hey though, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

The stranger leans in again. “I always wondered, you know, with the movies…”

“Yes?”

“Because you bank, right?”

“You mean, at an actual…?”

“You aint living in the poor house, exactly.”

“Oh well, yes we – I do all right.”

“So all this cash, right?”

“Yes?”

By now he’s downright excited for the question, what’s this stranger going to ask? Something sordid, maybe, Hollywood decadence, girls and alcohol, the depravity. You’ve got one question for a celebrity: quick, what do you ask?

“But like pro athletes, man, they got salaries, they got contracts.”

“Sure.”

“But actors, they do a bunch of different movies, some actors do a lot and some don’t.”

“Yes…”

“And so you get paid every time, every movie…”

The suspense is killing him, get to the point already! He’s a little jittery, truth be told, let’s just hope this guy doesn’t get creepy here…

“That’s right.”

“Well what I always wondered was…”

“…Yes?”

“Well what I always wondered was, do they pay you all at once, or do they give you like paychecks every Friday? Like any other job?”

Oh. “Uh…”

“Hey, but you don’t have to say if you don’t want.”

“No I – well they, most of the time, at least, they – you get – I like to, at least, I like to have them…split it up, sort of…”

The stranger looks satisfied, relieved almost. He draws back, crosses his arms. “Smart,” tapping his skull, “I knew you was smart. See if it was me, and they give me all that bank right away, I’d blow it. I would.”

“You think so?”

“Cars, man.”

“Cars?”

“Cars. I got a weakness for cars. You were probably thinking women, right?”

“Oh, I…”

“Booze, cards, that whole scene?”

“Not at all.”

“Normal vices. Everyone’s got a vice. Me, I like my cars. Old school. I’d blow through them checks like nothin’.”

“I can see how…”

“Splitting them up. Smart.”

He waits for the stranger to follow up, ask another question maybe, but no, the man is quiet for a long while. So that’s that, then.

He limps off to the bathroom. Checks the time: not much longer now.

He keeps coming back to the Exam. All those hours of study, days and weeks and you lose track. The formulas you forgot you knew, theorems, proofs, integrate and evaluate between a and b…Heck when you think about it you spend four plus years preparing for the Exam, courses, assignments, other exams that at the time seemed terribly significant… You put in all that effort and the Exam comes and you spend half your time on units, fractional conversions, middle school stuff. Feel your way through a problem, trial and error, you search for the proper equation, the correct series of derivatives, maybe even figure the thing out and you get to the end and they want the answer in some esoteric unit. A slap in the face. You fry your brain pretty quick going through those elementary mechanics – shut off the mind, get out the calculator and punch in numbers. Hope you don’t make a clerical error, either, best pay attention to that handwriting kiddo.

Back at his seat the stranger gives a nod. “You got a bum leg there?”

“Oh, well, my character, he’s an amputee.”

“Oh yeah! Yeah, what’s that called again?”

“The limp?”

“Method, is that it?”

“Method?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, yes. Method. Yes.”

“Looks good too. Real.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re good, man, serious. I seen a lot of movies, but you got a special talent. Serious.”

Five minutes til departure now. It’s been fun. Plus the stranger looks happy, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt. Victimless crime (not a crime, but). Win-win. It’s been fun.

They’re quiet for a while, the two of them, nothing to do but check the time, yawn, rummage in pockets for nothing in particular. He can hear the clocks, dozens of clocks microseconds out of sync. And once you’ve got a ticking clock in your head, boy, it’s not going away any time soon.

He has an idea. Gives him chills actually, this idea. He knows he probably shouldn’t, poor guy’s put up with enough already, plus how much longer can he maintain this front, really. On the other hand he hasn’t had this much fun in years.

He eases into it: “Well I’m on the next one…”

“Let’s see,” the stranger checks a gaudy wristwatch, “another hour.”

“Where to?”

“Home sweet home. Joliet, Illinois. And you?”

“I – well if you don’t mind I’d rather not – ”

The stranger puts up a hand. “Say no more, say no more.”

He lets that simmer for a minute or two, then: “Hey,” full-on smiling now, “would you like an autograph?”

The stranger raises his eyebrows. “Hey man, but I don’t want to disturb you…”

“It’s nothing. Really.”

“You sign enough autographs as it is, I bet.”

“Come on. My pleasure.”

The stranger rubs his nose. “Well hey if you don’t mind…” The stranger digs in the pockets of his overcoat, finds a little scrap of paper. Drycleaning ticket. “Guess this’ll have to do, all right?”

He still has the pencil-nub loaned from the ticket clerk. “All right.”

The stranger intervenes quick: “If it aint too much to ask, can you make it out to Annie?”

“Annie.” Not sure why, but the introduction of a name sort of puts a damper on things.

“My youngest. Big fan.”

He tries to imagine Annie. He can’t picture this man as a father, much less father to a young girl. Seems like the type of man who has plenty of women but no wife, or maybe an ex from a passionate, instinctive youth, but no family. Certainly no young kids, given his apparent age.

“Annie.”

He raises the pencil-nub. It feels weightless in his hand. And when’s the last time he handled a pencil without an eraser? Somehow he’s nervous. The pencil hovers there for a moment. And just as he’s about to lower graphite to paper he realizes he has no idea whose name he’s supposed to write.

Ryan Ries lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with his wife, daughter, two cats, a hamster, and a fish.  He is currently shopping a novel and revising another.  His favorite color is blue.

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Prema was glad she had not told Emmett about the email the woman had sent. He would have dissuaded her from inviting the woman home.

Prema had shown Emmett two other emails over the past few months. They had not been like the ones she got almost daily, with subject lines that said Dear trusty friend, Greeting and God bless, Your Miss Irina Pubutu, Attentions please, Please I long your urgent respond. One email she had shown Emmett had been about an orphanage in Bangladesh and the other had been from a Pakistani man with terminal lung cancer. I understand you want to do some charitable work, but don’t get duped, Emmett had said, as if he had some special knowledge she did not have. He said the emails were scams, and likely not even from the Indian subcontinent.

Prema stepped out onto the porch, hugging her shoulders against the cold, and scanned the white length of Breakneck Road. The air had the familiar, faintly tinny taste Prema associated with winter in Wyoming. The snow that had started early that morning was still falling. In the distance, Prema could see the light white dust that had blown onto the crimson rose-printed banner that her neigbbor, Mrs. Grant, had hung outside her front door.  Every holiday was celebrated to its fullest in Cathaway, perhaps because there was not much else to do so far from any other sizeable town. January had not yet ended. The tinsel streamers, stars and nylon banners printed with the words ‘Welcome 2012,’ had only recently been put away, but Valentine’s Day preparations had already begun.

Valentine’s Day was when the porch renovation was scheduled to begin. Emmett had already contacted a contractor who would install thick glass and heating vents. The porch would become an inside space that could capture the cheerful sunlight Cathaway offered as consolation to the few residents who disliked the cold. Emmett said it would be a place Prema could sit even in deep winter, even though Prema doubted the possibility. She had not discussed the idea of putting off the renovation with him. She had wanted to meet the woman first, to verify her credibility, before broaching the matter with Emmett.

A dirty cream Chevy with ship-like lines crawled up the road and skidded to a stop in the driveway. Prema watched as a woman crunched over the snow to the porch steps. She looked as if she were a decade or so older than Prema, perhaps sixty-five.

“Hello, my dear,” the woman said. That had also been the subject line of the first email she had sent Prema.

Prema had decided to risk inviting the woman because she had not sent a mass-email. The email had been from a Sri Lankan to a compatriot. Now Prema felt she had been right. This woman was too prim and matronly to be a con artist.

“Janice Perera,” the woman said. She removed a glove and held out her hand. It was a plain-looking hand; although the nails were trimmed and clean, they did not look manicured. A gray coat was hanging over the woman’s slightly lopsided shoulders. “You must be Prema Mendis.”

“A long drive from Flanders,” Prema said, as she opened the front door. The smell of the pie Emmett had baked that morning still scented the house.

“Five hours,” the woman said, slipping her coat off her shoulders.

Prema shut out the cold and led the woman to the kitchen, reminding herself to be cautious; the woman was a stranger, however innocuous she seemed. She started the tea kettle.  “So you said Colombo, Mrs. Perera?”

“Call me Janice,” the woman said, taking a seat at the counter. The tip of her nose was bulbous, which gave her face a slightly coarse appearance. The only makeup she had on was lipstick in a sober shade of brown. “Yes. And you?”

The earnestness in her face reminded Prema of a teacher she’d had in school in Colombo, a long time ago. The teacher’s name had been Miss Geraldine, and she had taught Grade Seven English. People had thought her eccentric, although maybe that had only been because she had ridden to school on a bicycle, wearing stout covered shoes that could have belonged to a man. In class, Miss Geraldine had been gentle, more likely than the other teachers to excuse girls for talking too loudly. Prema could imagine her saying, “Hello, my dear,” in her soft voice. In fact, now that she had thought of it, she was sure she could remember Miss Geraldine saying those words when she had gone up to the teacher’s desk one day.

Prema nodded. “Same here. I’ve been in Wyoming for eleven years, and for much longer in the U.S. But I’m sure you can still hear my accent, no?” She could hear her Sinhalese accent get heavier as she spoke. After three decades in the U.S., she had no problem speaking the American way, so she was surprised at the easy way she slipped into her old language patterns. It was good to let go.

“Ah, yes,” Janice said.

Friendly eyes, Prema thought, noticing the wrinkles that radiated towards the woman’s temples.

“You, of course, can’t tell,” Prema said, as she put out Emmett’s apple pie. “Not even a small accent. You speak Sinhala? Perera. That name could be Sinhalese or Tamil or Burgher …?” She said this although she was sure Janice was a Burgher. Janice did not look much different from anyone else in Cathaway, with her light brown eyes. There was a faint brownish tint in her skin, but Flanders, like Cathaway, was situated several thousand feet above sea level, so it would be difficult to avoid a tan.

“I used to speak a little Sinhala, but that was a long time ago,” Janice said. “I was ten when I came here. That is why I have no accent. I’m Burgher.” Then she added, “I am descended from the Dutch, you see.”

Prema paused in the act of reaching for the tea tin at the peculiar way Janice said this, as if Prema had never met a Burgher. Could Janice be so accustomed to meeting people who knew nothing about Sri Lanka that describing herself in this fashion had become second nature? It was possible, Prema thought. Flanders was twice the size of Cathaway, which had only five thousand three hundred people, but it was no doubt as insular a place.

“You still have family in Colombo?”

“No,” Janice said. “The few I have are mostly in England and Australia.”

“Yes, in Australia, I know there are big Sri Lankan communities,” Prema said, pouring water into the teapot. “That is where my sisters live now, in Sydney. They have plenty of people around from home.” She wondered whether to ask about the kinds of people Janice knew in Flanders. Janice’s email had mentioned that she had no children, so she could not have been part of a Parent Teacher Association. For years, that had been Prema’s main social outlet in Cathaway, outside work. But now the children were grown, and she had no reason to be on a PTA. Was this woman the type of person to join book clubs and township boards?  Did she hold dinner parties?  It would depend on her husband’s disposition, Prema thought.

The first time she had met Emmett, in the dimly-lit stacks in the Texas State University library, where he had been an assistant librarian, he had struck her as exuberant; later, she thought that had been because of his bushy eyebrows and the resonance of his voice. By the time she married him at the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe eighteen months later, she had come to understand that he was a quiet man. She had got used to his shyness and did not mind it, although his reluctance to attend social events had already begun, by then, to narrow their circle of friends. Over the years, his reluctance had increased. His books and his skiing were what mattered to him. He was happy in Cathaway.

The woman started to rummage in her handbag, her head bent and her gray hair concealing her face. She extracted a picture from the bag and handed it to Prema. It was a photograph of a large white-walled house that lay partly in the shade of a tree with spreading branches. “The house I grew up in, in Colombo. It’s not in my family now, but I had the picture.”

Although the colors on the picture were faded, the design on the upstairs balcony railing, the size of the wood-framed windows, the shape of the roof and its terracotta tiles were strikingly familiar. They reminded Prema of houses she had passed every day as a schoolgirl. The scarlet flowers clumped on the tree branches and strewn on the ground marked the tree as a flamboyant like the one that had flourished outside the house in which Prema had grown up.

“I remember houses exactly like this,” Prema said. But there might be similar houses anywhere in the world, she thought. Then she wondered if she was being too suspicious. “Funny how I remember houses, when so many other things, I don’t remember,” she said, placing cream and sugar on the counter. “You remember so much more when you have someone to talk to about things.”

Janice nodded at that, stirring her tea. She took a piece of pie and set it on the plate Prema had put on the counter.

“The thing is,” Prema said. “I never cared for talking about Sri Lanka with people outside the family unless they were from home. Easier to fit in that way, no? Especially here in Wyoming. But now my children are grown and gone. And Emmett—my husband—is always either working or going up there.” She pointed at the mountain slopes spread out to the east. Emmett said the Wyoming landscapes were sublime. Sometimes Prema could see what he meant when she looked at the land stretching undisturbed to the horizon. But these days, she mostly saw how blank and white it was, and how thirsty the scrubby vegetation looked when the snow finally melted. She would have liked more trees, even if they blocked her view of the mountains. What wouldn’t she do to have a few bougainvilleas around?   “Skiing, hiking. That’s what Emmett cares about nowadays. When he’s at home, a book keeps him happy if he’s not baking a pie. Not that I’m lonely.” She waved her hand at Mrs. Grant’s house in the distance, visible through the long living room window. “I’ve been here so long. I suppose I know a lot of people. But lately, I’ve been wishing I knew some people from home.”

Janice’s eyebrows had come together in sympathy. Prema could see that she understood. How easy it was to talk to her, she thought. “I used to know so many back in Houston, where Emmett and I met,” Prema said. “Well, not so many, I suppose. Maybe twenty, thirty. But we got together for dinners and lunches. Birthdays, graduations, public holidays. Any excuse to wear a sari. Can you imagine wearing a sari here? I haven’t seen a single resident from the subcontinent in all the time I’ve lived here. There, someone was always coming by for a chat, with fish buns or patties or milk toffee. I haven’t had any of those for a long time. What’s the point of making things only for yourself? Emmett is not so keen on them.” Her mouth watered, remembering the fish buns. She sighed. “Don’t you miss those things?”

“Oh, yes,” Janice said, looking at the photograph that lay on the counter between them.

“Maybe it’s age,” Prema said. “You know they say people get closer to their nature as they get older. These days, I find myself thinking a lot more about my school days back home.”

“I know the feeling. You can’t wait to go back and settle down,” Janice said.

That took Prema aback. “Oh, no, no, no. I can’t do that,” she said. “My children are in this country, grown and settling down. Emmett would not be happy there even if he found a job. Where would he ski? And I have been here too long myself to give up the conveniences. You know the last time I went back, ten years ago, how hard it was to find a shop nearby that had some printer paper?” She looked hard at Janice, who was stirring her tea again. “You want to go back and settle, even after so many years?”

Janice clutched her handbag to her chest. “No, no. That is not what I meant. Well, in some ways, I want to, even though it is impossible. Certainly I miss Sri Lanka,” she said. “There is no one in Flanders who would understand about where I grew up.”

It was because no one in Cathaway knew anything about Sri Lanka that Prema had recently asked Emmett, who managed the local public library, to acquire two books on Sri Lanka: a travel book and a history book.

“That’s what I am saying,” Prema said. “Emmett understands more than anyone else here, but not the same, no? He’s not Sri Lankan.”

Janice looked up, her fingers twisting the strap of her handbag. “He’s from here?” She looked around the room, and her eyes settled on a family picture in which Emmett stood, smiling and freckle-faced, between Prema and their three grown children.

“Yes,” Prema said. “Mendis is my maiden name. Of course, Emmett has visited Sri Lanka with me and the children several times. But the thing is, he doesn’t have the same connection. It’s the little things you miss, no?  Tastes of things. Things people say. Smells. You know, no?”

“I am fortunate to have my husband,” Janice said. “Of course, there are no other Sri Lankans in Flanders. That is why we tried to find people in other towns. The next best thing to family.”

“How is he doing, your husband?” Prema said.

“As well as can be expected,” Janice said. She wiped the edge of her eye with a tissue she had produced. “He is worried, of course, because of the urgency of the situation. As I said, we have to find the money within the next two days. Otherwise it will be too late.”

“How did he get it in both eyes?” Prema said. “Unusual, no?” She knew something about retinal detachment because one of her co-workers had suffered from the condition a couple of years ago.

“Not so unusual for a man of his age, according to the doctor,” Janice said. “Even if we can save one eye….” She blew her nose softly. “I don’t know how we would manage if he goes blind.”

“I didn’t understand from your emails why he could not get help from his family. They are still in Sri Lanka you said?”

“To find money so quickly… they are not so well off, but yes, they are in Kandy. The house he grew up in wasn’t far from the Temple of the Tooth, where Lord Buddha’s tooth relic is kept.”

Prema stared at Janice. It was such a strange thing to say. Did she really think that Prema might not know about the Temple of the Tooth?

Janice’s fingers were clenched around the straps of her handbag. Her neck, above her lint-specked blue sweater, was rigid. She was nervous, Prema realized. It struck her that Emmett might have been right. She ran her mind back over the conversation she had just had. But had it really been a conversation?  The woman had not said much. Had she been so eager to find someone from home that she had been gullible?  Had the woman just shown up here after reading a book or a webpage on Sri Lanka?

“Tell me. Where did you live in Colombo exactly?” she said, keeping her eyes on the woman, who was fingering the string of small black beads looped around her throat.

“Colombo 7,” the woman said. Then she added, “The area called Cinnamon Gardens,” in a way that sounded again as if she were reciting from a history book or maybe a travelogue.

The woman had not touched her pie, Prema noticed. She put her own fork down. Here she had been rattling on, when the woman was probably not even from Sri Lanka. “What do you remember the most about Colombo?” she said, trying to keep her voice from sounding strident.

The woman stared down at her cup, which was standing in a small pool of tea that had spilled onto the saucer. “As you said, so many little things. These are things that are hard to put into words.”

Prema waited for her to say more. Minutes must have passed in silence. The woman only looked into her tea.

“Surely, you remember something,” Prema said.

The woman cleared her throat. “There were cannons on Galle Face green,” she said.

Prema remembered the old cannons clearly, left over from the days of the Dutch colonists, pointing out to sea. But those cannons had been pictured in the travel book that Emmett had ordered for the library. Out of all the things the woman could have remembered, why would she only mention something that was probably in every tourist book on Sri Lanka?

“I don’t think I can help you,” Prema said. She cleared the counter of the pie and the teapot. She took the woman’s half-full cup from the counter and placed it in the sink, not caring about her rudeness.

“Suddenly, this…” the woman said.

Prema did not look at her face. She gestured towards the door. “It’s getting late. I want to get some work done before my husband gets home from skiing.”

The woman got to her feet, holding her handbag to her chest. She followed Prema to the door. “You don’t believe me,” she said. “You are pushing me out because I can’t remember all the details of my childhood?”

Prema said nothing. She opened the door, letting in a blast of cold air.

The woman paused on the porch.  “I can remember plenty of little things,” she said. “I remember the Cargills, in Fort. My parents bought two boxes of apples there one Christmas. There were six small apples to a box. It was the first time I ate apples.” She pulled her coat tighter around her shoulders. “But is my telling you that going to convince you that I am from Sri Lanka?  Sometimes I myself am not sure where I am from. There or here.”

How well Prema remembered the Cargills store at Christmastime. How the bustle and noise of the street stopped suddenly when the store’s heavy doors closed. How chilly it had been in the air conditioned interior. How shiny the tins of English butter biscuits and the red cellophane-wrapped hampers of goodies had looked. She remembered apples there too, from when she had been very young, perhaps five or six. The apples had been small and pale pink, and so exotic that she had been afraid to touch them for fear of spoiling them. Now apples sat heaped in the fruit basket on the kitchen counter, a staple of her weekly grocery purchases. Their smell filled her house.

Prema joined the woman on the porch. The wind had risen, and eddies of snow were moving across the porch steps. “Look, I know what you mean,” she said.

The woman opened her handbag, sheltering it from the wind, and took out a sheaf of folded papers. “Here, if you want to see,” she said.  “The report from the clinic. You can call the clinic if you want to verify his condition. I have given them permission.”

Prema took the papers, but she did not look at them. She looked at the woman’s shoulders hunched against the cold, and at her face, on which she saw the kind of fear and sadness she might see in anyone who needed help, whether they were from Colombo or Cathaway.

“Maybe you should wait until Emmett gets home.” She hesitated, unsure whether to wait outside with Janice or to invite her in again. But it would be too cold outside to wait. “Come in and sit,” she said. “When Emmett comes home, I will talk to him and see if we can spare some money for a loan. We had been planning a renovation project, but we might be able to postpone that for a little.”

She looked around at the porch, and at the familiar white expanse of the mountains ahead. Putting off the renovation would not be difficult. She was not sure she wanted it done anyway. Even glassed in and heated, the porch would always be between the inside and outside, she thought, never fully one or the other.

Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer’s fiction has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and is published or forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Quiddity, The Summerset Review, The Notre Dame Review, Stand, Kaleidoscope, and Literary Mama. She won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2004. She works as a psychology professor at Felician College in New Jersey. Website: www.ruvaneevilhauer.com.

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When Ms. Denise starts scribbling on the chalkboard, Rodney Claremont turns behind him and pulls on Tully’s tie. Ms. Denise’s hand connects lines to the locations of monuments they will be visiting on the school trip, a weird reverberation comes off the board with her mouth so close to it, and Rowdy Rodney, as his dad tells his son to tell his friends to call him, pulls so hard on Tully’s school tie that his nose almost bounces off his desk. The knot is an atom ball of fabric, pulled tight against Tully’s Adam’s apple, too small for him to unfurl, so he pulls away while Rodney pulls forward. The kids around them are smiling and laughing behind their hands. Tully pulls back so hard that he feels the tug threatening to pull through his skin and spine, decapitate him it will, and his head will go rolling down the aisles and girls will kick at it and scream at his dead eyes to get away. The veins in Rodney’s forearms rise to the surface. He has a blonde flat top like his father, and he smiles at Tully struggling. He waits until Tully’s pulling with the most force he can muster before he lets go of the tie, and the momentum snaps Tully’s head back. His shoulder blades hit the seat rest with a thud and the two front legs of his chair actually rise and then slam back down on the tile. Kids in the front row flinch. The whole sixth grade turns back to see. Even Ms. Denise. Her long red hair swivels around her shoulders and she’s about to yell at whoever is causing the ruckus when she sees Tully looking down at his desk. His face is red and his hands work feverishly on the minuscule knot. In front of him sits Rodney, whose hands are folded as he looks at Ms. Denise, the only student staring back at her. “Alright everyone,” she says. “Settle down. Rodney, you’re taking the empty seat behind Janet.”

“But I didn’t even do—”

“Now, Rodney.”

She side steps to her desk for a stack of graded history exams, looking at Tully the whole time, who can’t get his tie to loosen and keeps shaking his head, muttering quietly to himself.

“Rose,” she says, “Can you help pass these out?”

Rose, one of the girls sitting in the front row, takes the papers, reads the name on the top page and hands them out, walking between the rows, a static noise of hushed conversation now prevalent in the room. She gives Rodney back his test that’s riddled with red ink on the top page. Ms. Denise begins talking about the Washington Monument. Rose stands in front of Tully’s desk with her hand extended, but Tully doesn’t look up. Blood collects under the surface of his face. “Here you go,” she says, waiting for him to take the paper. The words come out like she’s talking to a rabbit she just found in her backyard, afraid the slightest noise will make it run away. Some kind of recognition would help, but she never gets it from him, so she slides the paper on his desk, and he moves his arm away like the paper can hurt him. Ms. Denise calls on Lisa Fitzgerald to start reading and the class settles down. When Rose is down the next row, Tully reaches for his test. His fingers grip the paper where Rose’s hand touched it, and his face tickles before going numb. The number 68 is circled in the header. Under that, in red ink, Ms. Denise has written, You can do better.

Rowdy Rodney and the other boys in the fourth grade have a nickname for Tully. They call him Shit Brow, because above his left eye, in the center of his thinned eyebrow, is a birthmark the size of another eye, slightly raised and dark like a sun spot, made even more noticeable because of Tully’s rigor mortis skin complexion.

In the lunchroom, Tully eats at the table nearest to the entrance. That way he stays within line of sight of the teacher’s table. He shares the space with a group of classmates that pretend he isn’t there. He sets down his brown paper bag, choosing to sit as far from them as he can, out of courtesy to their privacy. They’re not mean to him, and are kind enough to call him their friend if Ms. Denise walks by and asks if everything is okay, but otherwise he’s the cardboard background to their lunchroom stage.

He scratches at the side of his head because his granddad cut too close with the clippers again. The same old infantry buzz cut, when other kids in his class have faux hawks and graphics etched along the sides. He brings a cold lunch to school while everyone else buys food from the cafeteria. He peels the shrink-wrap off his tuna sandwich when he sees Rose get in line with her friends. Her family lives on the same block as him. Theirs is the only house with a driveway. Saint Jerome Elementary makes their students wear the same uniform, but for some reason, in Tully’s eyes, the plaid skirt just looks better on Rose. He keeps his head low to the sandwich, almost bowing to it, while straining to see from the top of his eyes so it doesn’t look like he’s watching the popular girls waiting to fill their trays.

Girls do something to his brain that make his jaw clamp shut. And if it’s his turn to help Ms. Denise hand out the graded homework, his hands turn into dog tongues and he struggles to keep from shaking when giving the papers back to a girl. It feels wrong just to look at Rose as long as he does, to look at any girl for that matter, which is why he hides it. This close to the sandwich, Tully thinks about hot lunch and Rose and her home with the driveway, and that somehow they’re all related but he’s not sure how. He just knows they’re the things he doesn’t have, that are not his to begin with.

Something catches his eye at the far end of the cafeteria. Rodney is standing at the far table, waving at Tully. When he has his attention, Rodney sticks a Reese’s peanut butter cup above his left eye and lets his mouth hang open a little. The kids watching laugh.

After the school day is over, Tully takes his ragged book bag off a hook from the back wall, where everyone hangs their things. The class is full of laughter and conversations about who’s doing what and where they can go to hang out. Tully lingers at his hook before pulling his coat off, stares at the chrome and waits for someone to ask what his plans are, if he wants to go do something, which he could, because he never does anything. But the wall thins out as other hanging book bags disappear, and kids put on their coats as they exit. He reaches for his jacket and rests it across his arm, right as Rodney walks behind him and slaps his hand across Tully’s back. It makes a hollow sound, like Tully is empty inside.

Rodney’s friends flank either side of them. “Shit brow,” he says, “you need a ride?”

Tully can feel something break inside him and begin to drip, but the drops never hit anything. “No thanks,” he says. “I’m just walking.”

The hand on his back climbs up his shoulder, and they begin walking into the hallway, towards the stairway. They’re enveloped with the rest of the student body leaving the school. Rodney massages the skin and bone in his palm, and Tully turns away so Rodney doesn’t see that the pain is registering in him.

“Shit Brow, you’re tense. You need to take it easy. I’ll ask my mom to take you home.”

The flow of conversations surges around them. Plans, hanging out. Tully squirms in Rodney’s grip. “No, don’t ask. I’m fine.”

“But it’s raining outside. You’ll catch a cold.” They reach the ground floor landing, and everyone’s standing by the main doors, waiting for their rides. Rose is talking with her friends.

“Wait a sec,” Rodney says in a voice louder than it needs to be, “doesn’t Rose live by you?”

The leak inside Tully turns from drips to a steady flow, spilling into a bottomless pit. “Please,” he says, looking at his shoes. “Don’t…”

“Hey Rose!”

The principal cuts through the crowd, making her way outside. Tully tries to break free but Rodney’s fingers are too strong. When the coast is clear, he calls out again.

“Rose!”

She stops talking to her friends and looks for who’s calling, along with everyone else. They see Tully and Rodney and shut up because something good is going to happen.

“Rose,” he says, “can you give Shit Brow a ride home? It’s really pouring outside. His potato head might sprout.”

Everyone starts laughing. Rose smiles and shakes her head. “Quit it, Rodney.”

“What? Give him a ride home. He lives right by you.”

Tully waits before making eye contact with her, and he can see the awkwardness of the situation seeping into her face as she turns to the door and back at them, slightly bouncing in place. The wheels are turning in her head. “Well, I can ask my mom…”

Rodney slaps Tully on the back again. “There you go. You don’t have to be so scared all the time. I told you she’d say yes.”

“But…” Tully says, “I—I said…” Rose is looking at him. She’s not smiling anymore. She’s as nervous as he is, and Tully can’t talk because of what’s filling inside him. It fills his lungs and he can’t breathe. It rims along the bottom of his eyelids. Blood rushes to his face. Why does his body react like this? It makes him look like he’s crying when he’s not. A white sports truck pulls up, framed in the school doors, and Rose looks to Tully and nods at her ride, as if he doesn’t know what her car looks like, like he can’t pick it out of a parking lot full of cars, because that’s the car that passes him everyday after school on his way home. The hallway walls contract with kids watching them. He keeps his head down and hurries to the door like he has a stick up his ass. Rodney’s voice bounces off the walls behind them. “You forgot to thank me.”

When he reaches the doors, Tully breaks off to the right and sprints down the block. He never looks back. He doesn’t turn over his shoulder when a girl’s voice calls out for him, never sees that Rose is standing with the passenger door open for him. The trees bristle along the sidewalk, sprinkling down beads of ice water that splash on the back of his neck and hands. He turns off the main street and takes the alleys and people’s gangways to get home. There’s a man a few yards ahead of him wearing a housecoat and boots. He throws away some garbage and asks Tully, “What’s that you’re saying?” It’s only then that Tully realizes he’s talking, and the last thing he remembers coming out of his mouth is, “…always picking on me.” A car backing out of its garage almost hits him. The red brake lights are like eyes when the truck jerks in place. Tully puts his hand on the fender. “Jesus, kid,” the driver says. “I didn’t see you. Watch where you’re going.”

He keeps walking without acknowledging the man. It starts to come down hard.

***

The Buick idles half a block down from Saint Jerome. Steam rises from the two cups in the center console, one of them coffee, the other hot chocolate. Tully looks at the green numbers on the radio display. The old man sitting in the driver’s seat grabs his cup and blows on it before bringing it to his lips.

“Nervous?”

“I guess.”

“There’s nothing to be nervous about,” his grandfather says. “If your teacher didn’t think you were up for it, she wouldn’t have picked you. How many boys in your class, you’re the one she picks.”

Tully has his own theory on why Ms. Denise picked him as the boy representative from their class for a wreath laying ceremony in Washington D.C. He knows she thinks it’ll give him confidence, and if he took such an honor that other teachers, even the principal, kept gushing over, that he could apply this newfound self-respect to the rest of his life. “We’re you ever scared of flying?” he asks his granddad.

He sips his coffee and looks out the windshield, at the neighborhood still mottled in pockets of darkness before the sun fully rises. “Hell, at the beginning, sure, everyone is. But you get used to it. After a while, it feels like one long bus ride.”

He looks in the rearview mirror and sees the school bus turning the corner that will take them to the airport. He pulls a pack of chewing gum from his flannel breast pocket. “This is for the plane, on takeoff.”

“Thanks, grandpa.”

“Alright then. Your friends are lining up already. Go on.”

He can’t even look at his granddad. He knows if he looks him in the eyes, the glow from the dashboard will be marbled in his eyes and it will look like he’s fighting the urge to cry, even though he’s not, so he opens the car door and slips out while saying he’ll call him from the hotel.

On the plane, he sits next to Jesse Litmus, who has the window seat but doesn’t look out of it, who plays on his iPad with his headphones plugged in. Their class takes up a bulk of the cabin, everyone sitting next to their friends, Tully only sitting next to Jesse because Jesse’s best friend Peter is at home sick with chicken pox, which threw Ms. Denise’s room charting into a mess after she already figured it out. The popular boys who are also the good boys in the class, sit in the center rows behind the good, popular girls, talking between the seats, tossing unopened bags of peanuts at each other. Tully leans on his arm rest to look at everyone. He sees the popular bad kids like Fabian Dreary and Tom Wilkes talking to the popular bad girls like Stacey Tech, who tells everyone she’s not a virgin anymore and relights cigarette stubs she finds in public ashtrays. Tully chews on a wad of gum. The tip of his nose is pink and wet because Jesse’s overhead fan blows on him and it’s cold.

“Hey, Shit Brow, let me get a piece of gum.”

Rodney slips into the aisle seat next to him. The corners of his lips are red with chip dust. Tully does as he’s told. Rodney takes the piece and then eyes Tully’s face carefully. He squints at him, leaning in closer to Tully’s face, and Tully freezes not to make any sudden movement.

“What… what is…” Rodney points to Tully’s face. “Tulls, I think you’ve got some cum on your cheek.”

“Really?” Tully fears it’s the white stuff that accumulates at the corners of his mouth when he’s really thirsty, so he pulls on his shirtsleeve and wipes his lips dry. “Thanks,” he says.

Rodney rolls his eyes. “Fuck me. You. Are. Clueless.”

“Huh?”

“You’ll just take it, no matter what I say.”

“What?’

“English, Tulls.” Rodney says. “Why do you think everyone picks on you?”

“I—people don’t—“

“It’s so easy. You don’t defend yourself. Girls won’t like you if you can’t stand up for yourself. Like, where’s your self-respect?” Rodney’s eyes switch over to Jesse, who’s watching a movie on his iPad. His lips morph into a smile. “I’ll never bother you ever again if you muff Jesse right now.”

“What?”

“Right now, right now, muff him, hit him right on the chin. No more titty twisters. No more Shit Brow. Come on—now!—he called you a fag to Rose. I heard him.”

Tully pears over his shoulder at Jesse, who pretends like he can’t hear them, even though the panel of the iPad begins fogging up around his hands, and he slowly scoots in his knees off the floor so his feet rest on the seat cushion, knees tucked against his chest.

“Crack him one,” Rodney says.

“I don’t want to,” Tully says.

Rodney leans in and speaks very carefully. “I’m saying you’ll never have to deal with me ever again if you hit him. You can stop getting picked on. Right this very moment.”

Tully thinks about all the bad things that can happen to him if he hits Jesse in the face or if he doesn’t, or if his fist barely registers any pain to Jesse’s face and him and Rodney both start laughing at his weakness, or if the plane nosedives into the farmland below and he’s the only one who dies. But Ms. Denise walks through the aisle before he has a chance to decide.

“Rodney,” she says, “this isn’t your seat. Move.”

“In a minute. I gotta see something first.”

“Now, Rodney.”

He sucks his tongue against the roof of his mouth and gets up.

They travel through Washington D.C. in one big group corralled by Ms. Denise and three parents who volunteered as chaperones. The popular boys hang out with Colton’s dad who’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and everyone asks him what the tattoos on his arms mean. The girls in the class follow the two moms who tell everyone how they’re training for the marathon, so their fanny packs are filled with energy bars and electrolyte strips they put on their tongue as they visit Ford Theatre, where Abe Lincoln was assassinated. They visit the National Archives, and everyone crowds around the glass display of the Constitution. The first day wraps up with a visit to the McDonalds next to their hotel. Ms. Denise assigns Tully to room with Dave Forest and Cody Reynolds. They’ve never been mean to him, but when curfew rolls around, Dave and Cody grab their blankets and pillows and ball them under their arms.

“We’re just gonna go hang out in Mike’s room for a while,” Dave says.

“Yeah,” Cody says. “We’ll be back.”

The hotel hallway rumbles with footsteps running back and forth, pockets of giggling. If you put your ear against the wall, you can hear the room over, who’s Deanne and Rachel and Nisa according to the phone list Ms. Denise handed them. Tully gropes the wallpaper absentmindedly with his pink ear pressed against the wall, listening to the pockets of silence that are broken with explosions of laughter and someone yelling No, no, no, and some other girl laughing and saying Yes, yes, yes. If the phone list is right, then the rooms surrounding Tully’s are full of girls, and he decides he’s turning on the shower any time he has to use the bathroom, just in case they can hear him too. He wanders into the bathroom and hears more muffled conversation, and he doesn’t need to run for the list to know it’s Rose behind that wall, because the tiny blonde hairs on his arms are raising and pulling towards the sound of her voice.

He turns on the shower and undresses. His pale skin is matted with birthmarks, like he needed that many reminders to know he had been born at one time, that it always wasn’t like this. The showerhead is like stepping in front of an open fire hydrant, it’s so strong compared to the one at home. After a while the jets massage his skull, and it relaxes the knots he carries around his temples from constantly worrying about some fucking thing blindsiding him out of nowhere, a frozen lunch, a roll of toilet paper—Rodney’s favorite—pen caps, erasers. With a powerful enough showerhead, steam collecting against the glass partition, Tully’s mind drifts.

He knows Rose will never like him. It isn’t even something he pines over—he just knows, sees the logistics perfectly, that a girl like her doesn’t call herself a girlfriend to potato headed boy like him. Still, he thinks about her a lot. Not kissing her or anything like that. He’s not sure why he thinks about her, or what they would do together. None of it makes any sense. He knows it’s important to make sense. He can see it in his grades, in the notes Ms. Denise writes on his History and English homework. Review your work. Write in pencil first. Organize your thoughts. The getting picked on might be easier to deal with if he were smart, so he could have something to fall back on. Sometimes he feels like he gets it, when a textbook is cracked open on his bed, and the words on the page start to bloom something in his head, he reaches for a pencil to answer a question on the take home sheet, but somewhere between his eyes and his fingers the thoughts get brittle and fall apart. All he’s left with are the dried pieces of thoughts that don’t make sense when strung together. How does everyone else change thoughts into words? Feelings into words? Sometimes it feels like he’s one giant finger rubbing against the earth, all sensation and no way to interpret it.

The phone in his room is ringing. At first Tully freezes in the shower until it rings again, then he throws the shower door open while the water still runs. He swings a towel around his bony hips, treading wet footsteps behind him. Drips of water sprinkle the phone dock.

“Hello?”

Muffled talking, then a soft voice comes on the line. “Uh, Cody?”

“No.”

“Oh my god, Dave, yes! Shut up for a sec. It’s Cassy. Is Cody there?”

The room list next to the phone is damp with water dripping off Tully’s chin. This room still lists Dave, Cody, and Peter—not Tully, who was originally assigned a room with Tom Sandoval and closer to Ms. Denise’s room. The air conditioning kicks in, Tully going cold while half naked, the drops traversing the knots of his spine feeling like ice. Tully looks around the empty room to make sure he’s alone.

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” shushed laughter, “Okay, ask him—shut up, I’m telling him—ask him if he likes Rose.” He can hear Rose in the background, talking at a high pitch he’s not used to hearing from her. He stares at the empty bed across from him.

“Okay.” He waits a beat. “Okay, yeah.”

“Yeah he does?”

“Yeah. He does.”

Her voice is slightly faint when she relays the news, like Rose is standing off over her shoulder. “Then why didn’t he sit next to her on the plane?”

“Uh, because.”

“Because why?”

“Because… he was scared.”

“Whatever! Scared of what?”

“Uh, hold on.” The phone barely registers as something in his hand, his fingers have gone cold and numb, the air conditioning kissing his calves and the knots of his exposed spine, which is just enough of a sensory distraction that he’s just going with whatever is happening on the phone.

“He was scared she didn’t like him,” Tully says.

“Nuh-uh.”

“He—he didn’t want to… He just didn’t know.”

“That’s dumb.”

When the sound of her voices trails off, Tully knows she’s talking to Rose. But when the silence stretches long enough for Tully to look down and see his towel damp and curled around his ankles, a new voice comes on the line and changes his DNA by entering through his ear, all calm and collected, asking him about tomorrow, if maybe, Cody and him wanted to hang out with them when they visit the Arlington Cemetery.

“You there?” Rose says, while Tully tries to remember how to use his tongue again.

“Yeah.”

“So yeah, then?”

“What? I mean, yeah, sure.”

“Cool.” They both say nothing. “Later then.”

“Huh?”

“I said, ‘Later’.”

“Oh yeah, okay.”

The line goes dead, and Tully trembles.

White crosses are regimentally aligned and run along the rolling green downs in succinct rows. Herds of students and faculty trek through the hills, too silent for this many people in an open setting. The trees don’t even rustle. Rose walks next to Dave, and when Ms. Denise isn’t looking, when the chaperones stop and give out a thousand yard stare over the crosses that seem to go on forever, Rose fits her hand inside Dave’s, and Tully, at the edge of the group, close to Ms. Denise for protection, he brings his fingertips to his bottom lip, willing Rose to look back at him, even though making eye contact with her feels like it could turn him into marbles that would scatter in all directions.

He’s wearing the form fitting beige slacks that cling to his legs, a blue collared shirt and a blue clip-on tie. The shirt and the tie are two different shades of blue. When they enter the Washington memorial cemetery, and climb the stone steps that lead to a glass door where ribbed pillars outline the Memorial Display Room, and behind those glass doors is a uniformed man standing perfectly still, dressed in white pants and white gloves that make you squint from their vibrancy—when he speaks, his words have a way of not disrupting the silence of the grounds. All emphasis and tone is translated in the way his eyes are slit when he greets the children, how the knots in his jaw are permanently flexed. He introduces himself as the Relief Commander for The Tomb of The Unknown Soldier. He swivels to face Ms. Denise and asks if the students handling today’s wreath will please step forward. She turns to her class, and Tully’s fingertips are in his mouth. The class parts to leave only Tully and Rose standing in the middle. The guard takes a step toward them. He informs Tully and Rose that they will wait for him at the top of those doors over there, pointing to the other glass doors behind him, while the rest of the class stands in the galley. They are to stand shoulder to shoulder, and he will ascend the steps without pausing and then lead them to a designated position in front of the tomb.

The Relief Commander leads the class outside. They descend the steps where other groups and tourists have assembled as they watch the changing of the guard. Tully and Rose stand alone at the top of the steps. Not even the wind disrupts their clothing. Cameras flash without the shutter sound snipping through the crowd, and Tully can’t help feeling like he wants to scream. He can feel the magnetism of Rose on his right side. Some unmistakable pull, that if he relented to it, would hurl him against Rose or through her, be absorbed by her. He looks down and sees his tie rising and falling on his chest.

“Nervous?”

Rose is talking to him.

“What?”

“Are you nervous?” she says.

He tries to think of something to say while he still has her eyes fixed on him, but the Relief Commander is already ascending the steps, and Rose quickly turns back. The Commander tells them to follow his lead, he will clue them in on movements before official commands are given. They are to touch every step. The Relief Commander turns and begins walking towards the tomb, and Tully and Rose follow as a guard is marching from the left of the landing. When the Relief Commander halts, he whispers to Rose and Tully to step forward. When they do, the tomb guard holding the wreath before them extends it and they lay their glistening palms on the white tulips and forget-me-nots. The tomb guard lets go. Rose and Tully are holding it alone. He leads them to the wreath stand before the tomb, and Tully reads the description carved on the stone, HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY AN AMERICAN SOLDIER KNOWN BUT TO GOD.

Gus Moreno lives in Chicago. He writes for a music website called On The 7th Day Of Hip Hop and writes fiction when his bulldog isn’t pressing his nose into his knee to play.

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At the end of a school day, I went to an empty classroom to talk to a teacher who’d summoned me. At first, her tone was light. “I want you to be honest,” she said. “I don’t want you to equivocate.

“I won’t prevaricate,” I said.

“I’m concerned about your sister,” she went on.

My sister, who was younger than I, was in a class with the same teacher.

“She seems precocious, but not about her studies.”

I didn’t reply.

“Most students her age think oral sex means kissing,” the teacher said, “but your sister knows more. Is something happening at home?”

“No,” I said, but I was prevaricating.

The teacher switched the subject. “Are you going to the Freshman Frolic?” she asked. She was referring to the annual dance for ninth-graders.

“I’m not,” I said.

“There’s a girl who wants to go with you.”

“I’m not going to change my mind,” I said.

“You never change your mind,” the teacher said.

*

I changed my mind. I asked the girl, and she said yes. But when I told my father about my plan, he didn’t seem to like my decision. He didn’t offer to give me and my date a ride to the dance. I had to arrange for other transportation.

On the big night, I rode with a classmate and his father. I was wearing a tan leisure suit and carrying a corsage. When I met my date, I noted her height. She was always tall, but on this occasion she was taller than ever. She was wearing a long gown that might have concealed elevating shoes. I gave her the flower bunch and she pinned it onto her chest.

I sat out most of the dances, but I went onto the floor for one. I put my arm around my partner’s waist and held her hand with my free hand. When I stepped forward and back, from side to side, she followed me. When I looked up, I was looking at her chin.

“I like don’t being tall,” she said.

“No problem,” I said. “I just need a stepladder.”

Later, she and I posed for a photograph. The idea was for me to stand behind her and put my arms around her waist. We turned sideways to face the camera.

When we arrived at her house after the dance, she said, “Good night.” She got out of the father’s car by herself and walked to her door. I didn’t accompany her.

I didn’t realize how rude I’d been until we dropped off my classmate’s date. The boy got out of the car and walked his date to her door. That, I saw, was the polite thing to do.

*

Later, my teacher came to our house. No one knew why she was there. When I came into the kitchen, I saw her sitting at the eating table. My mother, wearing an apron, was leaning against a counter. I looked into the sink—it held a freshly caught trout. I pointed to the fish, but the teacher didn’t respond.

“Are our children doing well in school?” my mother asked.

“They have some ability,” the teacher said. She was referring to me and my sister and brother.

“They have it easier than I did,” my mother said. “When Japan attacked China, I had to ride in the back of a truck to get to school.

Shortly, the teacher left.

My father came into the room. “I know why she was here,” he said. “She was spying on me!”

“She was just visiting,” my mother said.

“Visiting!” my father said. “She was gathering information for the authorities. We’re living in a police state. I’m going to that school, and I’m going there armed.”

“You’re making an earthly hell,” my mother said. “That’s what the Buddhists say. You have to rise to no-self.”

“I don’t need your Eastern advice,” my father said. “Sidhartha was a sissy.”

My father went on a rant. “I’m an artist,” he shouted. “That’s what I do. But I can’t do what I do because of you!”

While he yelled, my mother, my siblings and I remained silent. When he paused, my mother said, “He’s sick inside.”

“Are you listening to me?” he shouted.

“Sick inside,” my mother said to me and my siblings.

“I’m going to the bar,” my father said, “and I’m going to drink until my money is gone.”

*

I got my Freshman Frolic photo along with everyone else who’d attended the dance. The picture was an eight-by-ten glossy print. My date looked nice, draped in her gown. I was standing behind her, in a sort of piggy-back position.

A student asked me how I liked my photo. When I didn’t reply, the boy held a loose fist under my chin and said, “Speak into the microphone.”

I leaned toward the offered hand, then stopped when other students started to laugh.

Suddenly, I realized the fist wasn’t holding a microphone. It was holding an imaginary penis, and “speaking into the microphone” would be speaking into the penis, or worse than speaking. I didn’t want to get any closer to the fist.

*

I was assigned to give a speech for my health class. To complete the task, I found an entry in an encyclopedia volume at home and rewrote what I read. I made very few changes.

In school, I explained what I’d learned about human needs. “Beyond the physical things,” I said, “there has to be some stimulation.”

A student interrupted me. “What do you mean by stimulation?”

I started to mumble. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Can you speak up?” the teacher said. “What we need is a microphone. You need to speak into the microphone!”

*

My sister talked to me later. “That teacher came because I talked to people in the school office,” she said.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I told them about our father.”

“What about him?”

“He was abusing me.”

“What did they say?”

“They thought I was lying, but they sent the teacher.”

*

At home, my father told me and siblings to stay in our rooms. “You know the saying ‘Children should be seen and not heard,’ ” he said. “Well, you should not be seen or heard.”

In my bedroom, I sat by myself. There was nothing for me to do. I had books, but I couldn’t focus on reading. All I could think about was not being able to leave my room.

I picked up a reel-to-reel tape recorder I’d received as a birthday present. I plugged in the microphone and held it in my fist. I brought my lips close to the pickup and started talking. “I’m speaking,” I said. “I’m saying something. Here’s what it is.”

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of the novels Haywire, Tetched, and Roughhouse. Both Tetched and Roughhouse were finalists for an Asian American Literary Award. He teaches literature at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and fiction writing at the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA in Manhattan. He received a fellowship in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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I can see it: the bleach blond piano nestled in the corner of our living room opposite the blue brocade love seat that opened into a bed. I say bleach blond because my father stripped the piano’s black finish (too dark, my mother decided, too heavy-looking) and refinished it in a varnished yellow-brown. My father was handy. He converted footboards into nightstands and built kitchen cabinets with drop-leaf tables.

No one ever asked me if I wanted to play the piano. I was sent at age seven to the after-school group lessons of Miss Vosk. She spoke with an accent and wore her dark hair in a bun atop her head.

My favorite piece was called “Mazurka.” I later learned that this was simply a term for a Polish folk dance, but to me there was only one Mazurka, the one I played. It was lively and had a gypsy quality that evoked lands of my ancestors. (We were not gypsies, but descendents of Eastern Europeans. Close enough.) I was not adept at memorization but I managed to memorize this piece. My parents were not as enamored of the Mazurka as I was, or maybe I just played it too many times.

“How about a nice waltz?” my mother would suggest, or if she was not in a patient mood, “I can’t take that noise!” said with her hands over her ears.

I practiced every evening after supper, unless Aunt Sylvia was with us. She slept on the loveseat fold-out bed. Some evenings she asked me to give a little recital for her, and some evenings she was tired and turned in early, and I didn’t get to practice at all. My father had installed an accordion door of plywood across the entrance to the living room so she could have privacy.

Aunt Sylvia was not my Aunt. She was my mother’s cousin and lived alone in a large apartment in Nanuet, New York, an hour’s ride from our apartment in the Bronx. Every few months she called my mother and invited herself to stay with us for a week. She was bleach blond, like my piano. I could tell because by the end of her visits there was a narrow dark patch where she parted her hair on the left side of her head. She always arrived reeking of her patchouli perfume that made me sneeze, and wearing a low-cut blouse from which the tops of her breasts protruded. When she bent down to kiss me, her dangling diamond earring would graze my cheek.

“She’s lonely,” my mother explained to my father. “It’s just a short time she’s here. We should take pity on her.”

“I don’t think she wants our pity,” my father said. “And I don’t think you feel sorry for her. It’s her money.”

I stood in my bedroom doorway, listening, holding my breath.

“Her money!” my mother exclaimed. “There isn’t a prayer on earth she would leave it to us.”

“You must have a prayer, otherwise you wouldn’t put up with her,” my father pointed out. “She’s a nuisance while she’s here.”

My father didn’t like Aunt Sylvia, but he never said she couldn’t come to visit.  Until now.

“Absolutely not,” he told my mother. “You’re in no condition to cater to a guest.”

My mother was nearly eight months pregnant and she was past thirty, which in the 1950’s was well past optimal child-bearing age. After I grew up I wondered whether they had been trying for another baby for a long time or whether it was birth control failure, but I never asked. In any case, my mother was large, and tired.

“I can’t tell her no,” my mother insisted. “We’ll just have to deal with her.”

My father went to pick her up at the Port Authority bus station, and he  looked exhausted when they got to our apartment.

“My God, Adele, you’re huge!” Aunt Sylvia exclaimed upon seeing my mother. “It must be a boy! Or maybe two boys!” She laughed.

My mother smiled weakly. Aunt Sylvia had never been married, so how could she know about pregnancy? Anyway, these were the days before ultrasound and my mother could have been carrying a baby Godzilla for all she knew.

“How lucky you have Caren to help you,” Aunt Sylvia continued.

I forced a smile onto my face. So far there had been no mention of my helping with the baby. I knew nothing of changing diapers, warming bottles, and walking back and forth in the middle of the night with a wailing infant balanced on my shoulder.

Then Aunt Sylvia scrutinized my face.

“Something about you is different,” she said. “Oh—you’re wearing glasses!” She turned to my mother. “Isn’t Caren young to be wearing glasses? You don’t wear them!” she said almost accusingly. “What’s wrong with her eyes?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” my mother said patiently. “She’s a bit nearsighted, that’s all. A lot of children are.”

Aunt Sylvia contemplated my face.

“When you’re a bit older you’ll get contact lenses,” she decided. “After all, ‘boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,’” she quoted. Then she laughed again.

“Caren’s only ten,” my mother said.

“Never too soon to think about the future,” Aunt Sylvia insisted.

“Let’s get you settled in,” my mother told her. She turned to my father. “Tom, put Sylvia’s bags in the living room, would you?”

My father pulled open the sliding door, which had been closed just before Sylvia’s arrival, and brought her bags inside.

“Oh, Caren, there’s your piano!” she exclaimed, peering in. “You’ll have to play for me after supper.”

This was no surprise, as I always played for her. I had picked out three pieces and practiced them: Beethoven’s “Fur Elise,” a short bouncy number called “The Merry Farmer,” and the Mazurka. Hour after hour I had worked at them, although for all I knew, Aunt Sylvia was tone deaf. But I was ready for my recital.

After supper, my parents cleared away the dishes while I cleaned and polished my glasses. I hadn’t been thrilled to wear them. But one day at school, I had discovered that in a certain light and at a certain angle, I could see in the glasses’ lens a reflection of what was behind me. I fidgeted in my seat, this way and that, fascinated by my discovery. Maybe I could be a private eye some day. But at the moment all I needed to see was my sheet music. I dried the glasses and walked past the kitchen en route to my performance. My mother stood in the kitchen doorway.

“I think I’ll lie down for a bit,” she said. “You go ahead and play, Caren.”

“We’ll close the sliding door so we don’t disturb you,” Aunt Sylvia said. “You’ll keep me company, won’t you, Tom?”

My father shrugged and followed her to the living room. She settled herself on the love seat opposite the piano and motioned to my father to sit down next to her.

I sat on the piano bench and opened my music book.

“ ‘Fur Elise’ by Ludwig van Beethoven,” I announced.

I began to play. My arpeggios were smooth, my pedal work superb. When I finished the Beethoven, Aunt Sylvia applauded, joined, after a moment, by my father. I moved on to ‘The Merry Farmer.’ It was a great relief to get through the first two pieces. And finally I was ready to play the Mazurka.  I had memorized it, and I always played it three rounds. My fingers moved swiftly over the keys. I moved my head slightly, and I saw a reflection in my glasses. What I saw was a view of my father’s and Aunt Sylvia’s knees. And Aunt Sylvia’s hand was firmly clamped over the inside of my father’s knee.

My fingers stumbled on the keys but I kept playing. I made several mistakes and started over. Once, twice, three times I played the Mazurka. I closed my eyes and kept playing, because I was afraid to stop.  Suddenly the sliding door zipped open and my mother looked into the room.

“Caren, why are you…”  she began, and then she saw Aunt Sylvia and my father. Aunt Sylvia took her hand from my father’s knee and he quickly stood up. For a moment nobody moved. Then my mother pulled the door closed and I could hear her footsteps treading down the hall.

My father opened the door, and ran after her.

“Adele!” I heard him call out. Their bedroom door slammed shut.

“Caren, why don’t you run through the Beethoven again,” Aunt Sylvia suggested smoothly. “It’s so lovely, and you play it so well.”

Late that night, my father woke me up to tell me he was taking my mother to the hospital.

“Aunt Sylvia will be here to take care of you,” he said.

She turned out to be much more motherly than I expected. She made me scrambled eggs for breakfast, and she had a sandwich ready for me to take to school for my lunch. When I came home in the afternoon she had milk and cookies waiting. Supper was macaroni and cheese, my favorite.

In the evening, while I was at the piano practicing, my father came home.

“Your mother’s okay,” he said. “And you have a sister.” He smiled.

While I was in bed, still awake, I overheard my father and Aunt Sylvia speaking.

“You have to leave before Adele comes home,” he said. “I’ll call a taxi to get you to the train.”

“But you’ll need help!” she insisted. “I can take care of Caren! I can—“

“You have to go.” My father was emphatic. “I’ve arranged for someone to come in and help Adele.”

Four days later, Aunt Sylvia left in the morning after I went to school. When I came home, my mother was in bed, a private nurse in attendance. My sister had to stay in the hospital for several weeks. My mother was too weak to go to see her, but my father went every day after work. Finally, they brought her home and put her in a crib in a corner of their room.

For the next few years, when I practiced the piano I closed the sliding living room door to keep the noise down. After my sister was two years old and moved into my room, I sometimes stayed up late doing homework and slept on the loveseat pull-out bed. At first it felt strange, but gradually I got used to it. Aunt Sylvia never came to stay with us again, but the sliding door my father had made for her still came in handy.

On my sixteenth birthday, I began to wear contact lenses.

“You look like Aunt Sylvia,” my mother observed.

I studied myself in the mirror, and I, too, could see the resemblance. My mother never mentioned it again.

*

Because my sister was born prematurely, there was great concern over her development. Although I knew my mother’s early labor was by no means my fault, my mere presence at the scene that precipitated Mimi’s arrival caused me no small amount of guilt. As a result, I gave my sister more attention than I might otherwise have done. I read her bedtime stories, played dolls, and stayed with her so my parents could go out to the movies.

When she was very young, she would see me play the piano and try to climb onto the piano bench beside me.

“Pino, pino!” she said.

“No, no,” I would say gently, looking at her small sticky fingers.

But my mother sometimes sat her on the bench and let her bang on the keys.

“Don’t do that!” I protested. “It wears out the hammers!”

“She’s just a baby,” my mother shrugged me off. “Let her play a bit!”

By then I was twelve and had completed five years of piano study. I took private lessons with Mr. Capelli, who had a music studio in our neighborhood. My pieces were much more advanced; I was learning to play Peer Gynt’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King.’ I didn’t argue with my mother about Mimi’s banging on the keys. Instead I bit my lip and left the room. A few years later, when my sister was six, my mother encouraged her to play seriously.

“Why don’t you teach her?” she suggested to me.

“But she’s so young!” I protested.

“Only a year younger than when you started,” she pointed out. “And think of Mozart—he was just a child when he started composing!”

I had no idea of how to teach anyone to play the piano but I sat down next to Mimi on the piano bench and explained how to read the notes. Then I taught her the Major scales. Sometimes my mother stood at the entrance to the living room and watched us.

“My two pianists,” she would say, smiling.

Soon my parents decided to send Mimi for lessons, and I took her with me to Mr. Capelli’s studio. First she sat in his foyer while I had my lesson. Then I waited for her. It was a good arrangement except for one thing: I had to share the blond piano. We both needed to practice, but I, being more advanced, needed more time.

“Mimi should play first, because she goes to bed earlier,” my mother decided. “Then Caren can have it after supper.”

The piano had been solely mine for so many years that I didn’t think of it as family property. I sat at the kitchen table doing schoolwork while my sister played.

I spent more and more nights sleeping on the love seat. It reminded me of Aunt Sylvia. Sometimes I thought I could smell her patchouli perfume rising from the upholstery and my nose itched. I wondered if she ever thought about us, about me.

One day, as my sister and I were leaving our piano lessons, Mr. Capelli gave me a sealed envelope to give my mother. When we got home she opened it and read the note inside.

“Mr. Capelli wants to see me,” she said, but she didn’t say why.

Later that week, over supper, she told us.

“He thinks Mimi should study in Manhattan,” she explained. “He feels she has…”  she frowned, as if trying to recall his exact words, “professional potential. He recommended someone and next week I’ll go to speak to them.”

Her words, and Mr. Capelli’s, fell on me like a blow. Why hadn’t he recommended a better teacher for me? How could Mimi, just seven years old, play better than I did? I listened to her when she practiced. What I heard sounded like the easier pieces I played at her age. But soon, every Thursday afternoon, my mother took my sister into Manhattan to her special teacher. The lessons must have been very expensive, but my parents never mentioned the money.

*

I assumed I would continue my music studies at college, and in the beginning, I did. My college had “piano practice” rooms, cubicles with old pianos. I signed up for several hours each week but I was never happy with the pianos, although I tried all of them. After so many years with my blond piano, I couldn’t get used to a different tone. And somewhere deep in my mind maybe I resented my sister’s supposed musical superiority and knew if I kept playing I would always be second best. Meanwhile, I began to study French. The language had a music of its own. Soon I was spending more time on French and less time on piano practice.

Whenever I came home for weekends and vacations I would sit at my blond piano and play for hours while my sister was at school. Mimi still went to her special lessons. After supper, she practiced for three hours before she started her school homework.

And she did play well. I sat and listened to her while she went through her repertoire. Some pieces I myself had studied. One piece was missing: the Mazurka I had played as a child. I didn’t mention it. I wanted to keep it for myself. One day while the family was out, I sat at the piano and played it over and over. I played it from memory but if I looked at the keyboard my fingers stumbled, so I played it with my eyes closed. The melody took me back to my childhood, before my sister arrived, before life became complicated.

When I came home for winter break during my Junior year, a change in the living room caught my eye as soon as I walked in the door. The blond piano was gone! In its place stood a new mahogany upright.

“Where’s my piano?” I wailed, staring in disbelief, tears forming in my eyes.

“Oh, Caren,” my mother said, helping me off with my coat. “That yellow piano was so old. And two of the keys were broken. Mr. Capelli came and looked at it, and told us it would be better to just buy a new one.”

“You didn’t even ask me!” I burst out. “That was my piano! You just got rid of it so Mimi could have a new one.” Tears streamed down my face. “Why didn’t I ever get special lessons?” The words popped out of my mouth.

For a moment my mother stared at me, dumbfounded.

“I’m sorry,” she finally spoke. “I didn’t know how you felt. When you left for college you stopped your music studies, so I assumed…”

I wiped my face with a tissue.

Mimi stood in the living room.

“You can try it, Caren,” she invited me, and she smiled encouragingly.

“Let’s have some tea first,” my mother said, ushering me into the kitchen. We sat at the table. She had made my favorite sugar cookies.

Later I sat down at the new piano and tentatively touched a few keys. I played a scale. Just like the pianos at school, the sound was totally different from my old instrument. Then I opened one of my sister’s books and stumbled through a few pieces. I wanted to play the Mazurka but I knew it wouldn’t sound the same.

“It’s nice,” I said, getting up.

I never touched it again. With the blond piano gone, my piano-playing days were over.

*

When I was thirty my sister gave her first professional recital. I flew in from Chicago, where I taught French at a private school. My sister had continued her music studies right through high school and now attended the Mannes College of Music in Manhattan. I hadn’t been home in several years. My parents came to see me in Chicago a few times, but I hadn’t seen Mimi.

“Why don’t you come to New York?” my mother suggested on one of her visits. “You should get together with your sister.”

“I can’t spare the time,” I always said.

I knew that the only real time I would spend with my sister would be listening to her practice. That was her life. Because of the difference in our ages, we had never become close, and I didn’t expect her to sacrifice her piano time for me. There was also the little thorn of jealousy I still felt, but didn’t want to admit to anyone.

Now my mother sat next to me in the auditorium. The house lights went off and the stage lights went on. I waited for my sister to appear.

The first thing that struck me when I saw Mimi was how closely she resembled our mother. We were now both adults and our features were fully formed. The resemblance reminded me of how I resembled Aunt Sylvia. I had her wide-set eyes, aquiline nose, and high cheekbones. Even with my mouse-brown hair, the similarity was striking. Well, I was related to her, so why shouldn’t I? My mother must have seen it too, and what a quirk of fate! I wondered if Aunt Sylvia was still alive, where she lived, whether she remembered us.

Mimi sat down at the piano and arranged her skirts on the bench. She wore a sea-green dress and dyed-to-match pumps, as if she were going to a prom. According to the program in my hand, she was going to play the Apassionata. The auditorium echoed with the sounds of rustling program pages and last-minute throat-clearing coughs. Then Mimi began to play.

As I listened, I closed my eyes. This was the child who pounded the keys of my blond piano. This was the musician I might have become, if I had wanted to, if I had worked hard enough. Or maybe not. Maybe the blond piano had simply been the vehicle that would move my sister into musical fame. She was only twenty but, according to my parents, her career was established. My sister received a standing ovation.

There was a party after the recital.

“Do you ever hear from Aunt Sylvia?” I asked my father when we were alone for a minute.

He shook his head.

“She wrote us a letter,” he said. “After your sister was born. She said how sorry she was, that what happened was entirely her fault and she hoped we’d forgive her. She called us from time to time. Your mother always spoke to her, but she made it clear that Sylvia was not welcome. In any case,” he added, “as soon as there were two children to take care of, it was out of the question. At some point she stopped calling.”

I nodded and we both sat in silence for a few moments.

“What happened,” my father finally said. “That was always a problem with Sylvia. I didn’t want her to visit, because I was always fending her off. And I tried to explain to your mother. But Sylvia was her cousin and she felt she couldn’t say no. And then there was the money. Whenever Sylvia came to visit, she always left us a good amount of cash supposedly to cover her expenses, but it was way more than we had to spend.” He paused. “Your mother called her about Mimi’s recital,” he added “but she said her health wasn’t good and she couldn’t come.”

I went back to Chicago. Three months later Mimi gave another recital. This time I was teaching and couldn’t get away. That afternoon I received a phone call from my father. My sister had collapsed in the middle of her performance, dead of an aneurysm.

*

I hardly knew anyone at Mimi’s funeral service. The place was packed with people from her music school. I had expected to see Aunt Sylvia there, but I couldn’t find her.

“Where’s Aunt Sylvia?” I asked my father.

“She’s ill,” he told me. “She sent a check to help with the burial expenses.”

That night at the apartment, I couldn’t bear to be in my old room so I slept on the loveseat foldout bed. The fabric was faded and worn. The mahogany piano sat silent, abandoned. Now I was glad the blond piano was gone. I felt it would have brought back the memories of the first twenty years of my life, and my sister’s childhood, and make me feel worse. There was some discussion of whether Mimi’s aneurysm could have been caused by her premature birth, but the subject was soon dropped.

A few months later, my parents moved from our old apartment to a place in the suburbs, and my mother learned to drive. The first time I visited them there, I noticed the apartment had no piano. And why should it, when there was no one to play? Yet I felt their home was lacking something, as if the piano was part of the family, part of our lives. I didn’t mention it. Instead I talked about my life in Chicago, my students, my involvement in the Foreign Language Association, of which I was Vice President.

*

When I turned forty, I saw some gray strands in my hair and I became a bleach blond. After the color job, I looked at myself in the mirror. I had to smile. I looked just like Aunt Sylvia as I remembered her. I put on some glittery earrings and a low-cut blouse. Suddenly I felt depressed. Would I end up like Aunt Sylvia, alone with no family? My sister was dead. I had never married and I had no children. A black mood settled over me.

A month later, a letter from a New York attorney arrived in the mail. The letter was about an inheritance and asked me to call to make an appointment. I waited until spring break, and flew to New York for the day. I didn’t tell my parents about my trip. When I arrived at the office of Drake and Hutchinson, I was ushered into an office with a thick carpet, a polished mahogany desk and leather chairs.

“Miss Krause,” Mr. Drake said, “I’m obliged to inform you that you are the sole heir of Sylvia Forster.”

Sylvia Forster?

“I don’t think I know who…” I began, and then I did know. It was Aunt Sylvia!

“It’s a large amount of money,” Mr. Drake continued. He mentioned an amount.

I stared at him in disbelief. My parents had spoken of Aunt Sylvia having money, but I doubted they knew the extent of her fortune.

“You’re a wealthy woman,” Mr. Drake said. “My secretary will have you sign some papers. And you’ll want a financial advisor, I expect.” He handed me a business card. “This man is very good.”

After I left the office, I walked to a nearby park and sat on a bench. I fingered a strand of my bleach blond hair and I wondered why Aunt Sylvia hadn’t left the money to my parents. Then I wondered what I would do with the money. For one thing, I would endow a music scholarship in my sister’s name.

I went back to Chicago and my French classes and the Foreign Language Association and didn’t immediately do anything with my new fortune except deposit it in my bank account.

The first thing I actually did with the money was buy myself a piano. I could have moved to a bigger apartment and purchased a Steinway grand. Instead, I picked out an upright that most resembled my old blond piano: a Yamaha with a teak finish. After it was installed and tuned, I bought a Beginners book, and one afternoon I sat at the piano to play. It had been nearly twenty years since I had last touched piano keys. To my surprise, I could still read the music, and I was able, haltingly, to play a few simple pieces.

Over the following months and years, I worked my way back to and beyond the level I had reached when I stopped playing. Going back to the piano made me feel like the happy and carefree child I was before my sister was born.

I never told my parents about going back to the piano. They weren’t eager to visit me in Chicago, and I felt it best to leave the subject alone. I found I could still play the Mazurka. I looked through every music book I could find but I was never able to identify the composer. So I think of it as “the Mazurka from Carpenter Avenue” after the name of the street we lived on. But I can play it only with my eyes closed.

Esta Fischer’s short fiction has been published in numerous print and e-zines including Colere, The Broome Review, The Four-Cornered Universe and The Write Room.

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My father’s quiet friends in prison, 1958-1962
Craiova, Gherla, Giurgiu—political prisons
Salcia, Periprava—forced labor camps for political detainees

 
I’m lumpy, lukewarm, and gray,
and you could use me for glue,
mortar, or clay.

 
Inside your cupped hands,
I breathe my steam,
soft as a prayer.

 
Dip your tin spoon
inside me.

 
Lift me
to your hungry lips.

 
You don’t have to like me.

Claudia Serea is a Romanian-born poet who immigrated to the U.S. in 1995. Her poems and translations have appeared in 5 a.m., Meridian, Harpur Palate, Word Riot, Blood Orange Review, Cutthroat, Green Mountains Review, and many others. She was nominated two times for the 2011 Pushcart Prize and for 2011 Best of the Net. She is the author of To Part Is to Die a Little (Červená Barva Press), Angels & Beasts (Phoenicia Publishing, Canada), and A Dirt Road Hangs from the Sky (8th House Publishing, Canada). She also published the chapbooks Eternity’s Orthography (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and With the Strike of a Match (White Knuckles Press, 2011). She co-edited and co-translated The Vanishing Point That Whistles, an Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (Talisman Publishing, 2011).

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I know better than to lean on the rail of the dock
but I lean anyway, belly-balanced, letting my nose and ponytail dangle

 
over murked reflections of themselves and my new necklace
that sways as it taps my chin. I reach

 
for the water-dark me, the one that eats crabs all the time,
crabs raw and scrabbly that cling to dock posts among the barnacles

 
and wait for chicken legs. The clasp slips on my bracelet,
brand new, too, and it flies up into my hand, my dark wet hand,

 
which grasps it. That girl down there slips my bracelet
into her pocket full of sediment. I lean deeper,

 
swipe at her hand and she dashes herself into pieces.
My fingers are dripping, stomach scraped. I am no longer she.

Emma Sovich lives in a graveyard in Tuscaloosa, AL where she dabbles in letterpress, gardening, cooking, and otherwise making messes. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama and editor of Black Warrior Review. Find her poems in or forthcoming from DIAGRAM, Weave, PANK, and Gargoyle. She rambles online at graveyardhouse.com.

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I lay down
life, crave

 
earth. Time’s
bell clangs

 
death, chimes
birth, folds me

 
in its grip.
Harrowed

 
in the grave
I twist, split-

 
ting the shell,
I leap from

 
the furrow,
an old god,

 
green
and knowing.

Sharron Singleton was a social worker with poor families and the mentally ill and was a community organizer around issues of civil rights and the anti-nuclear war movement before she started writing poetry. Her poems have appeared in Agni, Rattle, Sow’s Ear and Atlanta Review, among others. In 2009 she won the James River Writers Contest, she was named Poet of 2010 by the journal Passager, and in 2012 she won the MacGuffin Poet Hunt Contest. Her chapbook, A Thin Thread of Water, was published in 2010 by Finishing Line Press. She teaches poetry in her small Virginia town, is married with two children and five grandchildren, and is an avid gardener.

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Artists don’t sit inside all

day to write and type and suffer,

they play on their iphones and macs

with dull eyes editing music files,

remixing old sounds, taking

photographs that seem

somehow older even though they

don’t know why, they catch the movie

to marvel at the book (it’s YA fiction)

then the next day read it on the train

cover out and facing the crowd, and

they dance at night clubs to hip-hop and

techno in the nearest up-and-coming

neighborhood, their drunken image tagged on

facebook, exchanging that for actual fame,

and remain blissfully ignorant of the truth

because artists don’t think for themselves

or think at all anymore, hell,

they don’t even try, because

for the most part

when their head hits the pillow

around 5am

they’re plain fucking dead

and nobody gives a fuck.

Tom Pescatore grew up outside Philadelphia, he is an active member of the growing poetry/lit scene within the city and hopes to spread the word on Philadelphia’s new poets. He maintains a poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com. His work has been published in over literary magazines both nationally and internationally but he’d rather have them carved on the Walt Whitman bridge or on the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s old Skid Row.

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the way it rolls off your tongue, blue,

mysterious. It’s rather old fashioned tho

but when you run out of words for the

blues, doesn’t indigo give it a little

class? Then, I think of Millay with her

indigo buntings, curled on the same

velvet couches I have tho they’ve been

re-covered, not indigo but a chocolate

brown. One visitor stopping at Steepletop

in Edna’s last years mentioned how

shabby the sofas were. I think how

Vincent gave up her velvets, lovers, drugs

for the stillness. Except for the buntings.

But I digress. Indigo. I had to listen to

The Indigo girls, found I liked their name

better. I’d like to say I found the metaphor

to cinch this poem, to pull any reader

into Indigo ecstasy when I found some

E Mail about the film Indigo Children

but when I put the name on Google,

what I read lacked all iridescent blue,

that startling hypnotic glistening. Less

there than the marine’s startling icy eyes,

indigo jolting as sequins from deep under

ground as my real life pales

Lyn Lifshin has published over 130 books including 3 from Black Sparrow. Recent books: Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness and The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian. Recent books: Ballroom, All the Poets (Mostly) Who Have Touched me, Living and Dead. All True, Especially the Lies. Just out, Knife Edge & Absinthe: The Tango Poems. NYQ books will publish A Girl Goes into The Woods. Also just out For the Roses poems after Joni Mitchell. Her web site: http://www.lynlifshin.com.

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Thank you for the comment about my body being
. . .taut yet slender, was it? No one’s ever put it
quite that way before.

I might have kissed
back if I hadn’t seen it.

The cross stands
clear in my mind, the way it rose from the crowd, people
forced to go around, perhaps not hearing the black
man offering Jesus on little booklets.

He and I shook hands. He and I leaned in and I said Amen Brother.

Sarah Hulyk Maxwell is hoping to graduate in May from Louisiana State University with a shiny MFA degree in poetry. Her work can also be found in Ruminate, connotationpress.com: an online artifact, and OR: A Literary Tabloid.

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Emma Ramadan is currently studying literary translation at Brown University. Her work has previously appeared in Extract(s). She likes to make lists and linger in bookstores, and would be eternally happy with nothing but a cat and a cup of tea.

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El niño and la niña run hot and cold,

stirring the currents, flinging their black hair,

swinging on wind-driven whorls of eastern rains,

flooding Peruvian coastal plains and washing out

shore roads, making mud pies of pink adobe caves,

breeding mosquitoes, witching fevers, floating

small corpses down the sandy ravine. If people will squat

by the waterways, the dancing children say, they must perish

in the rains. Back to darkness, our lisping children say,

washing their robes in a slanting storm, blunting the stars,

laughing at the quavering mules sliding on the ruined hills,

the old ones counting their broken teeth, the wooden crosses

listing in the gale. Hail. These children carry tumbo

on their dripping heads, shaking the green pulp down.

Carol Alexander is a writer and editor. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Canary, The Commonline, Chiron Review, Eunoia Review, Mobius, Northwind Magazine, Numinous, Red Fez, Red River Review, OVS, Poetry Quarterly, Red Poppy Review, and Sugar Mule. New work is scheduled to appear Poetrybay, Poetica, Ilya’s Honey, and the Mad Hatter’s Review. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies Broken Circles, Joy Interrupted, The Storm is Coming, and Surrounded: Living with Islands.

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The crow is screaming
at an apparent Nothing

 
Fall air replete with skeletal trees,
incalculable blue

 
Autumn means never having to apologize for that
which is no longer here

 
The crow didn’t get the memo,
persists in his relentless conjurings

Nancy Carol Moody spent many years with the postal service, resisting the urge to read the backs of postcards. Now she lives at her desk, moving things around in search of other things. She loves scissors and the smell of tire stores and is only mildly amused when strangers want to touch her hair. She is the author of Photograph With Girls (Traprock Books), and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, The New York Quarterly, PANK, Salamander, and The Journal. Nancy can be found online at http://www.nancycarolmoody.com.

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Ibsen’s (1882) play pitted an idealistic hero (medical officer) against an entire community headed up by the doctor’s brother (Mayor) determined to defend its vested interests in the local baths regardless of its level of contamination. During a public debate the doctor calling for closure of the contaminated baths until sanitary conditions were attained was denounced as an enemy of the people. The debate focused on the issue of conscience and integrity versus opportunism.

**

Earthquakes and volcanoes are no strangers to Italy. On 31 March 2009 a group of seven people consisting of scientists, engineers, and a government official met in the town of L’Aquila to discuss and assess seismic tremors occurring there. Before the meeting the government official opined that ongoing tremors posed no danger and that the scientific community deemed conditions favorable because the tremors helped discharge energy. Six days later on 6 April a 6.3 earthquake struck L’Aquila killing 309 people.

Subsequently the seven were accused of having performed only a superficial analysis of seismic risk and providing false reassurances to the public ahead of the quake.

The prosecution alleged that the information provided by the experts led many people to stay indoors in the early hours of 2009. Further the prosecutor argued that the defense failed to distinguish between a natural disaster and the risk of such a disaster.

While the prosecutor acknowledged that it isn’t possible to predict earthquakes, he stated that its risk can be predicted. The first part of the prosecutor’s statement is universally held by geologists and seismologists and the second part is problematical.

The L’Aquila Judge handed down manslaughter sentences of six years to each of the seven experts involved in the pre-quake meeting. Clearly the judge’s sense of justice marked the L’Aquila Seven as enemies of the people. The response of the scientific community was immediate. A significant number of resignations from advisory committees were submitted temporarily leaving them in a state of flux. Thousands of scientists submitted petitions and letters protesting the judge’s decision. Of more than passing interest two unsolicited statements from earth scientists abroad accurately defined an emerging problem.

It’s incredible that scientists performing their job under the direction of a government agency have been convicted for criminal manslaughter. This verdict will not help those trying to improve risk communication between scientists and the public.

An even more emphatic statement affirmed: If the verdict stands it will have a chilling effect on earthquake science in Italy and throughout Europe. Who would now be willing to serve on an earthquake hazard evaluation panel when getting it wrong could mean a conviction? Who indeed?

A pair of earthquakes earlier (2012) in the north of Italy provide a case in point regarding the possibility of a third quake, leading a government agency to take emergency measures. When the quake failed to materialize, the mayor of a town threatened to sue the agency because the measures hampered local business. Shades of Ibsen.

Predicting earthquakes for L’Aquila is not a unique or isolated case. Earlier in  China 4 February 1975 a 7.5 earthquake occurred in Lianoning Province. Few deaths were reported. The Chinese claimed they’d accurately predicted the quake evacuating a million people from a designated epicenter. Though there has been some reassessment of the claim concerning fatalities, evacuating a million people is no mean feat. Daily commuter traffic in Los Angeles or New York would suggest what a challenge evacuation would be there.

One year later 1976 at least 240,000 died in the Tangshan China 7.6 earthquake which was not predicted. Who’s the enemy of the people here? The Chinese have also issued false alarms in a province near Hong Kong. People reportedly left their dwellings and presumably their jobs for over a month but no earthquake occurred.

On 20 March 1980 a series of minor tremors were recorded on Mt. St. Helen’s Washington. A week later ash and steam were extruded from the summit. From 18 May to the 20th seismic activity declined only to be abruptly accelerated by a volcanic eruption on 20 May 1980. Dozens of scientists were monitoring the situation when one reported:

“Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it.” These were the last words of the scientist.

Sixty people died from the eruption and associated mudflows. With all the attention on the developing volcanic activity, even with data obtained with the very best technology, scientists were unable to provide an unequivocal prediction. According to the L’Aquila verdict these scientists should be held accountable for not providing necessary information to mitigate any risk.

In northwestern United States there are a number of extant volcanoes that are most likely to erupt according to earth scientists. Encroachment on the slopes of these volcanoes continues apace with population growth. If Mt. Rainier in Washington experienced an eruption, how many fatalities would occur? There are state and federal agencies monitoring these volcanoes, but who would be the enemy of the people communicating costly false alarms versus actual eruptions? Some predictions are best or educated guesses. Can we realistically expect scientists to provide estimates or predictions of natural processes facing criminal indictments with false alarms or honest errors?

Perhaps a movie may summarize this portion of the account. In Dante’s Peak two experienced senior geologists disagree on the potential of a volcanic eruption in a small tourist town in Washington. One interprets the seismic records as a swarm of relatively harmless tremors, concluding that evacuation from the town would be unnecessary threatening the local economy. The other is just as firmly convinced the records indicate an imminent and violent eruption and that the town should be evacuated immediately. For plot and dramatic purposes the latter position prevailed. Ibsen’s enemy of the people rides again.

While predicting earthquake and volcanic eruptions may be more provincial, a broader and more generic net encompasses weather forecasts. Prompted by Hurricane Sandy an article on weather forecasting was presented in Science 9 November 2012. Based on billions of weather observations for thirty years the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is presently considered the most accurate of medium-range forecasts.

Although official forecasts from the National Hurricane Center (NHC) were better than ever, the European Model was 7 to 8 days ahead, and even at 5 days out the European Model had Sandy turning NW towards the New Jersey shore, its eventual landfall. Most other models showed the storm bearing N or NE moving harmlessly out to sea. Initially the NHC didn’t issue a hurricane warning to the northeast coast. If the NHC had excluded the European Model from consideration, they would’ve missed land fall and the level of intensity of Sandy. It is legitimate to ask how many more deaths attributable to Sandy (100) would’ve occurred, if the NHC had not included the European Model in their analyses. The L’Aquila judge might have sentenced the entire NHC staff for criminal negligence.

The same article briefly discussed forecasting tornadoes  New technology (Doppler Radar) has enabled forecasters to extend average tornado warning times from three minutes to thirteen minutes. While we should be grateful for the increased warning time for seeking shelter, thirteen minutes may be insufficient for many situations. Even with this increased warning time, the number of false alarms (tornadoes that never appeared) is between 75-80%. Seventy-five to eighty percent of super cells don’t make a tornado. There are special conditions between super cells that still elude forecasters. Meanwhile every false alarm erodes the credibility of the forecasts increasing vulnerability among the public.

If upon appeal the L’Aquila verdict and sentences are upheld, this would significantly reduce advisers and consultants participating and volunteering their expertise to country governmental agencies in particular Italy. Accordingly it would be difficult to assemble a group of external experts on a variety of topics and processes to aid governmental agencies for fear of conviction from a false alarm or honest error. Whether this would become an accepted legal practice in the United States is questionable.

Scientists have made mistakes, are making mistakes, and will make mistakes in the future with predictions of natural processes. While highly confident that a lead ball rolling off a table will drop to the floor due to gravity, scientists can only provide the probability of a certain magnitude for earthquakes on a time scale of 30 to 100 years; for weather forecasts 5 to 7 days; and tornadoes 3 – 15 minutes. The appeal process for the L’Aquila Seven will be of general interest for scientists the world over. Hopefully the men and women providing scientific expertise on a variety of topics (medicine, weather, earthquakes …) will not be branded as enemies of the people.

Don Maurer has written for scientific journals. Based on an ongoing court battle in Italy, his essay, “Enemy of the People: The L’Aquila Seven,” asks whether scientists should be held liable for predictions of natural disasters.

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