WINTER 2013

It had been some days since the doctor had given Josephine leave to rise from her hospital bed, but she had largely chosen not to do so.  Two weeks had passed since the evening her husband, Joe, had put her through the living room window.  Two weeks abed was not quite enough.  Josephine had come to believe she would know when it was enough because, in the hospital, everything had its proper time.  Sister Frances came with food and pills at seven and noon and seven again.  Father Emmett walked the halls with his duffel bag of hosts and wine and anointing oil between two and three in the afternoon.  Dr. Larkin probed and injected and dressed wounds an hour or two before sunset.  And Josephine’s mother, Irma, came to visit at four each day, save Sunday, after her lunchtime shift at the diner.

In the days after the accident (so-called by the nurses), Josephine had been ashamed to ask after her husband.  But a week went by with no mention of him, then ten days, twelve.  This sudden erasure of his life seemed to erase a part of her own, an effect she found not wholly unpleasant.  And something had happened to her eyes.  Nothing looked the same.   Here was the common world—the chipping nightstand, the telephone, the stuffed armchair that never regained its form once sat upon.  But the light was wrong.   The sun through the window was too weak in the mornings, then strong before dark.  The ivy creeper nosing around the window frame cast a shadow-vine that writhed on the bleached linoleum.  Shadow-leaves bucked in the gusts that beat time against the rackety screen Sister Frances brought to keep out the flies and wasps.  No matter how she blinked or rubbed her eyes, whether her sleep was whole or fitful, the light was distorted in this new world.

On her third Saturday at St. Mary’s, Josephine received her mother as she had each of the previous thirteen days.  She lay back against the pillows in a fresh cotton dressing gown with her eyes lightly closed.  She could always smell her mother coming.  Irma smelt of burnt coffee and stale rolls, the same smell she had come home smelling each evening of the six unholy days of the week when Josephine was a child.  The day was hot and pulled other layers from Irma’s skin.  Brine from reaching bare-handed into the pickle barrel.  Sweat beading up under hamburger grease and talcum powder. Since childhood, Josephine had liked to frighten her mother who had an odd tendency to hover over any prone body she believed to be sleeping or dead.    When the house-smells (parlor dust, wood mold, iron) were close in her nostrils, Josephine forced her eyelids open.

“Jesus and Christ!”  Irma leaped back and stumbled against the armchair behind her.

Josephine smiled with the right side of her mouth.  The muscles required for the other half-smile remained yet unusable.   When Joe lifted her body to push it towards the window, she had turned to the left, so that side had got the worst of it.  The flinch to the left wasn’t an instinct.  There had been time to choose which side. Looking up, Josephine focused her eyes on Irma’s nose, which occupied the center of her face like a small freckled mushroom sprouting from a boulder.

“Knock off that grin!  You look like a half-wit.  Where’s the doctor gone off to?  He see you today?”  For the past two weeks, Irma had been the fervent companion of Dr. Larkin, the ward’s afternoon attending physician.

Irma pulled her lips together and chewed them between her teeth.  Below her, in bed, her daughter looked smaller than she had as a girl.  The swelling brought by marriage and children was replaced with twitching slimness, as if Josephine’s bones had been re-strung with kitchen twine.  The first days after, Irma had made the arrangements.  They would all leave: she and Josephine and the boys.  There were cousins in Warnsburg, way down in the hills, where Joe, if he followed, would meet the end of a rifle.  In the first days, yes, that was the arrangement.

“Everything lovely at work today?” asked Josephine with a grimacing brightness, pulling her lips up her right cheek until the stitching in her face began to ache.  “Have a seat, won’t you, Ma?”  Josephine gestured with her good hand to the easy chair slouched near the bed.  Her fingers were thick, surprising above the bird-bones of her wrist.  She had bitten her nails to the quick all her life.  Here, someone had filed and buffed them.  But what then of the other hand, tucked beneath the sheet?  Irma pinned her eyes to the wall above the bed.  She would not see the left hand; she would not seek it out.

“It’s not teatime at the Savoy in here.”

Josephine dropped her hand from the air, but left the smile fixed in place. “Any broken eggs in the omelets today?”

It was their oldest joke.  Irma grinned and took her eyes for a spin around the thorned head of Jesus, perpetually crucified over the headboard.

“Dr. Larkin says you need to get up.  Get moving.”  Irma dropped the mass of flesh where her chin should have been for emphasis.  “He says to me ‘Irma, time is going on and your daughter with it.’  He says it’s going on, whether you like it or not.”   She said this in a way she believed to be cheerful, though she had no ear for that sentiment.

“He spent the morning next door with the Spiegel girl, him and Father Emmett.”   Josephine pulled a pout.  A half-pout, as it were.  Elsie Spiegel was a Bavarian doll, dimpled and curled within an inch of her life.  Her leg was crushed the previous Sunday when, jumping for the running board on the streetcar, she missed her footing.  Josephine tried to picture Elsie lying in the street, blood pressed out of her compact veins like oil from the meat of an olive.  But she could only summon up a chipped porcelain doll, limp and expressionless on the pavement.  Josephine’s eyes fixed themselves in a high corner of the room, behind her mother’s right ear.  A torn web, long-void of its spider, floated there beyond the reach of Sister Frances’s dusting spear.  Though the sun was full in the room, the web cast no shadow at all.

“We’ll see about that.  I’ll be having a word with Elsie’s father, be sure.”  Irma huffed a breath over her daughter’s face and levered her body upright.   Josephine watched the threads of web-silk pull loose from each other by small degrees.

“Her father owns a plastics mill.  He’s making her a custom leg.  Wouldn’t she have the luck?  She’s leaving soon.  We’ll be usual again, Dr. Larkin and I.”

Irma was standing now with her back to the window. The thought came to her unbidden, unwanted: Josephine could give a person the urge to slap her.  Arrangements had been made.  They could leave tonight.  It was simple enough, as most things were.  She thought of pleading with her daughter but, never having made a plea, couldn’t fathom how to begin.

Outside, cars sloshed in the trafficway cut some years back through the hillside where St. Mary’s kept broad watch over the City of Kansas below.  The windowpane was filled in the middle with the rustling tops of sycamores that grew in the cemetery on the trafficway’s opposite side.  Backed by the sun, Irma was a dark blotch against the bright day behind her.  Josephine listened for the bump and skip of car radios below, drivers waiting for the traffic light to turn.

Irma stood taller and picked at her blouse.  There was nothing for it then, nothing more to say. She turned and dropped her pocketbook by the chair before settling herself heavily into it.   Her eyes sunk level with her daughter’s body.  In profile, Josephine looked almost unharmed.

“I’ve a bit of news from the old neighborhood.”  The old neighborhood was Irma’s term for the small set of streets where she’d lived since birth.  It irked Josephine to hear it called this, as if it were an ancient enclave somewhere.  In truth, their houses were ten blocks distant.

“I’d prefer the National Geographic.”

“Now, this is bound to get you riled a little.  It’s got me shook, and that’s some doing.”  Irma dragged the chair nearer to Josephine’s head.

“Father Emmett, he’s been to Africa.  He told me about the women, stark naked, no tops or brassieres. And Sister Frances, she was in Mexico, so she can speak Spanish.”  With her mother seated, Josephine shifted her eyes to the ceiling and moved them lazily over the matte hills of plaster.

“Alright, here goes.  You know the Macon house on Mercier Street?  With the cat smell?  Been there since before the Pilgrims?”  Irma felt suddenly troubled by the warmth.  The sun should have been relenting this time of day.   The drops on her brow had broken free and begun to course around her little nose.  She took a moment to wipe her face with her handkerchief.  “Last night…Josie, it burned clean to the ground.  Mrs. Macon didn’t make it out.  It smelled awful, all that cat hair burning.”

The Macon place was known to Josephine from her from her earliest life.   The house was pistachio-green clapboard with a brick façade painted a matching green.  It was small, too small for the lot, with scrubby grass twenty feet in all directions.  A thick border of red geraniums planted around the foundation gave it a Christmas look in the summertime. The Macon house was of unending fascination to children, some of whom believed Santa Claus lived there summers.  Though it had probably once contained children of its own, the only occupants during Josephine’s lifetime were old Mrs. Macon and her calico cats.  They prowled the grounds day and night, innocently massacring the geraniums and crabgrass: death by mass urination.

Now Irma’s eyes had little specks of light in them, as if she were seeing the fire before her.  Josephine’s own father had been killed in a fire just before she was born.  The subject of fire still held a strange power for Irma.   Josephine tensed the muscles over which she had control, causing a flood of pain down her left side.  When she did this, her body felt a part of her distorted vision, the left side an outsized shadow, the right, its natural state.    Irma’s agitation rose with her voice.

“I went over there straight away when I smelt it, but wasn’t anything I could do.  The windows were busted from the heat and the cats were running all directions.  Remember when we used to go by there when you were a little girl?  Remember you used to hold your nose?  You always wanted to go by there, even with it smelling so bad. “

Josephine turned to see her mother, a stack of pale lumps piled into a shirtwaist dress.  It was true; the house had fascinated and repulsed her.  It flaunted its terrible existence in the street, forcing itself on one’s eyes (the colors), up one’s nose (the smell), into one’s ears (the mewling).  Absurdly, at the center of this pressing horror was only Mrs. Macon, a woman so unremarkable that Josephine could not recall her face.   Relieved of her news, Irma leaned back and blotted her neck.  Josephine opened the right side of her mouth.

“I was thinking of cats, too, just the other day.  Father Emmett saw a tiger in Africa.  He said it moved like it was shrugging its shoulders all the time.  Like it didn’t care in the least about eating you.”

Irma started forward to reproach her daughter, but then closed her eyes against it all.  The white walls, the heat, the pitifully small Christ assigned to this room.   A car blew its horn lazily in the street.  Then the room was silent for a long time until Irma stood up to begin her search for Dr. Larkin.

On her third Sunday at St. Mary’s, Josephine awoke with a feeling of lightness.  Below the room’s open window, a car radio played a song about love.  A young song.  Young people in their cars were going out for drives across the river.  The countryside, of course, lay in all directions.   But they were driving to the green hills beyond the river, where the Missouri made bluffs when it cut west off the headlong plunge of the Mississippi.  When they were courting, Joe and Josephine had driven these hills.  They were carsick hills, coming one after the other, rapid and shallow.  When they reached a crest, Joe would gun the engine.  Josephine would reach under the white leather seat to hold on.  The car would float for one second, no more.  She was so light then.  They would plow back down into the next trough.   They bruised their legs and broke the shocks.   In the evenings, they came back dirty from road grit.  They ate hot biscuits and had an hour alone, in Irma’s parlor behind the lace drapes.  Joe brushed his hands all over her dress.  She traced her fingers over scars from street fights.

At three o’clock, Josephine woke again and felt a stirring under her breastbone. It was swelling in her, as if something had lodged in her chest, a little bubble poking against her clavicle.  When Dr. Larkin arrived for his rounds, he took five short strides to her bedside.  A tall man would have taken three.

“Mrs. F, how are we today?” asked Dr. Larkin through a red beard.  His eyes did not meet hers, but swept as a searchlight over her broken left half.  Then he was at her side, deft fingers on her cheek.

“I couldn’t say how you are Dr. Larkin,” mumbled Josephine through her half-wit grimace. “So I suppose I couldn’t say how we are.”  Dr. Larkin looked up from the dressing he was peeling off her face.

“Sharp, very sharp.  Your mother is a sharp woman too.”  Dr. Larkin leaned back to his work.

“Yes,” continued Josephine, “but what type?  Would you say my mother is tack-sharp?  Or perhaps knife-sharp?  Or, in your case, a scalpel? ” She often spoke sweetly to the doctor, letting his manful concern spread over her like a balm.   But the new stirring thing had her, as Irma would say, a bit riled.  “Have you any wine or cordials around, Doctor?  I’d like us to make a toast.  To sharp women.”

Dr. Larkin laughed and pressed his fingers down to secure a fresh sheet of gauze. Josephine’s left face felt new and tight as it healed.  The appearance was ugly, but the healing was not without its pleasure.

“You’re quite a sport, Mrs. F.  You’re a very funny woman.  I didn’t know you took after your mother so much.”  The doctor lifted her shoulder from the bed.  She winced behind her teeth then swallowed it.

“Dr. Larkin, let’s just say we go our separate ways, my mother and I, on most accounts.”  It felt grand to say this to the doctor, to vie for his attention as Elsie must do.

“Well, Mrs. F,” said the doctor, an instrument of some kind audibly clutched between his own teeth, “They say the truth will set you free.  So, just keep that in mind.”

“What?”  Josephine braced the muscles of her right face and made her voice rude.  “What are you saying?”

“It’s just a saying that helps people I talk to.  I was saying to Elsie yesterday that when God closes a door, he opens a window.  And she said to me, ‘That might be true, Doctor.  Though if God forgets the window screen, you’ll soon be infested.’ She’s a sharp one, too.”

Dr. Larkin walked around to the bottom of the bed and squatted to test her reflexes.  When he tapped the bottom of her right foot, Josephine did an unexpected thing.  She pulled her leg up at the knee and sent it out for a not-gentle kick to the side of Dr. Larkin’s neck.  It had been a decision; there had been time to decide.  Enough time to draw her knee back and position her heel so it would fall against the flesh of his neck.  His red beard twitched as his head flicked back towards the open door.  He made almost no sound as he hit the floor, just a scuffle of shoe leather and gabardine.

On Sunday evening, after dinner and pills, the riled feeling within Josephine began to push in a flush across her chest and face.   Outside her body, the world had gone quiet and dark.  The window’s creeping ivy outlined an unbroken blackness.    The tires of the cars going home to Sunday supper were only a slight hum now in the gash of the trafficway.  The overhead lamp cast an intolerably equal light, neither bright nor dim, somehow worse than the sickening quality of the sun.  Sundays had a tucked-in quality at the end of them; Irma would be putting the boys to bed now.  For the first time since her admittance, she felt terribly alone.  Her pulse came faster, filling the capillaries near the skin.

The hallway was half-dark when Josephine slid her foot over the threshold of the room.  In the warmth of the night, the nurses had shut the lights to make it seem cooler on the ward.   At the end of the corridor was a desk with a nurse and a little way beyond, the chapel. Her steps fell unevenly, the pads of her feet much softer than the third-limb rap of her cane.

When Josephine pulled open the door to the chapel, the room was near full.  She walked to the front pew slowly, letting them see her in all her cut-and-bruise glory.  She had a sudden desire to be seen.   The chapel air was thick and she shrugged through it like a heavy drape.  She sat on the right where Mary’s pink toe peeked out from the blue folds of her robes to press upon the serpent’s slithering head.  Across the aisle, under Saint Joseph’s staff, Elsie Spiegel was saying her prayers. Her bowed head was just over the space where her leg should be.   Her robe and nightgown covered the stump, but there it was, outlined by a sudden cliff-drop of satin at the thigh.  The absence of her leg made her beauty more dollish.   It was difficult not to look at her.  The girl was younger than Josephine had thought.  Perhaps the ward made them all look older.  She should have been out riding in a car, coming back from the hills on her Sunday drive.   Josephine closed her eyes and began to pray.

Irma had largely passed over Mrs. Macon in her description of the tragic fire.  Most people passed over Mrs. Macon, who did nothing to fight her own eclipsement with her garish house and its feline stench.    In trying to call up the poor woman, Josephine could see only oxford shoes and socks with elastics stretched to the limit.   Settling into prayer, the Macon house burned before Josephine’s eyes as it must have before Irma’s.  Blue-orange fire curled in quiet, neat lines over the green paint of the house before spreading out to roar.  The cats flowed out, not one by one, but as dense as the streams of flame bursting from the screens of the front porch.  Ridges of fear edged into the lingering pains in Josephine’s jaw and shoulder.  As the house burned, two streetcar tracks grew away from it, bright as fire themselves. A trolley bell clanged loudly, mixing with the fire sirens.  The hot windows failed to burst, but cracked instead with the dull, grinding-glass sound of a body going through them.  The prayer was loud now, viciously loud, and Josephine began to shake hard in the pew.  It had been a mistake to leave her bed, to leave the shadow-light of her room, to pray now as she hadn’t for weeks.  She breathed hard through the right side of her face, sweat thickening on her lip.  Then the prayer was quieter, quieting down, and she walked barefoot under a bright sun over the charred bricks of the Macon house.  Around it, the border of geraniums remained unharmed.  Mrs. Macon was lying in the middle of the bricks, a little charcoaled.  Josephine knelt and lifted the old woman’s head into her lap.  She stroked at the cat’s fur that covered the woman’s head, soft and rippling under her palms.

On Monday morning, the telephone rang.  Josephine was again abed, Sister Frances having found her half-asleep in the chapel the night before.   She read a dime store romance the nurse had smuggled in, though dime store romances were discouraged.  When the bell began its ringing, Josephine started.  It had done this only three times since she arrived.  Twice had been Irma, calling from the diner when she wanted to laze in the phone booth and talk.  Once it had been her boys, both struck suddenly quiet by the novelty of speaking to their mother through the handset.  They had cried while Irma shouted at them from the background to say something nice to her.

The phone was on its eighth ring when Josephine answered.  She reached over with her good hand to grasp it, then pulled the receiver from the cradle.  She hadn’t counted on its weight.

“Hello?” said Josephine.  It was odd to hear her voice on the telephone. It came out breathy and hard in the way of meeting a stranger.

The other end was still.  Then, the voice came, rough as crust on bread.

“Is this Josephine Fatovic?”  it asked.

“Yes?” answered Josephine, forearm aching from her grip on the receiver.  She loosed her fingers and relaxed her shoulder.  It was a woman.

“Oh, well.  It’s Mrs. Macon.  From over on Mercier Street.”

Josephine frowned and was quiet a moment.  The paperback tented on her lap waved its pages in a sudden breeze from the window.  The heat had broken in the night.  The breeze was cooler now and sent gooseflesh popping down the right side of her body.

“Of course….Mrs. Macon.  I mean, I heard the terrible news.  About your house.”

“Oh, well, my cats are the only terrible thing really.”

Josephine paused to stare at her knees under the covers, then darted her eyes about the room to sooth the queer feeling in her stomach.  But the sun came in weak as water and nothing looked the same from day-to-day.  The web in the corner was gone, demolished. The stuffed chair was mustard yellow today when yesterday it had been the color of wheat.  Sister Frances passed by the door, solid as an iceberg in her white habit.

“Mrs. Macon?  Where are you calling from?  It’s just…my mother said you passed.  In the fire.”

“Oh, sure, Irma tells a tale, don’t she?  But I guess you’d know….”

Irma was known to tell tales, it was true.   Josephine slouched back into the pillow.  In her mother’s mind, one of life’s great pleasures was to be informed someone was dead and then to learn the opposite.  It was a strange sort of gift, but a gift nonetheless. When Josephine’s father was burned in the fire, this very thing had happened.  They told me he was three hours gone, Irma would say.  He’d run down the street clean ablaze.  But there he was.  Plenty alive in the hospital . Leaned his head down on my belly and talked right to you.  Remember what he said?   Josephine did not remember.  He had only lived another ten days.

“But there was a fire, wasn’t there?” Josephine’s chin dropped down to her chest.

“Sure was.  Big one in the kitchen.  Started when I was frying chicken.  Maylene jumped right up on the stove and dove for the leg while it was still in the pan.  Landed flat on the handle and flipped the whole darn thing over right into the flame.  Caught herself afire, too.  It was a dreadful thing to see! ”

Mrs. Macon sobbed a few big tears into her end.  They were the fat tears of a grief that could be soothed with a few shushes.   Josephine remained silent on the line.  As she pictured Maylene in the act of chicken-thieving, she could not help but feel a little satisfaction at the cat’s fate.

“Well, I called anyhow to say your husband has just been wonderful.  I didn’t know where to go or what to do after the house burned, so I went with Irma.  There she was, in front of my house, when I came out with the firemen.  But she was all full in her house with you feeling poorly in the hospital and her looking after your boys.  She went right down next day though and got your Joe to take me.  She said he needed somebody anyway, to look after him and cook.  Said you might be gone a good long while.”

A breeze gusted and knocked the romance to the floor.  Josephine took a breath, then another.  Mrs. Macon held the line and squawked.  Sunlight dumped itself suddenly on the squares of linoleum in front of the window.  The room seemed to spin six inches, then stop.  The last things she remembered before the hospital: the grinding-glass sound of the window breaking, then the blue-painted floorboards of her own front porch. Her face was half-turned up to the ceiling.  Underneath her body, a spreading warmth.  It was dark already.  The porch light was bright so that Joe’s face, when he bent over her, was hard to see except for the sweat that caught the light.  When he reached down to lift her head into his lap, she saw that she could die, if she chose.  But he brushed his thick fingers along her arms and waist.  Then along her ribs and neck.  The way he had in Irma’s parlor, with the door closed, with the lamp dimmed.   She had fallen into the blackness of injured sleep still huddled in the crook of his arm.

With her good hand, Josephine cast back the sheets and pushed herself up to sitting before snatching the telephone back to her ear.

“Mrs. Macon?”

“Yes…?”

“Don’t you go bringing those stinking cats in my house.  If there’s a mess of cat piss to clean next week, I’ll be the one giving you hell.”

Josephine slammed the receiver in its cradle.  She made her way across the linoleum to stand at the window, in the square of light.   Morning traffic flowed in the street below, toward downtown, the river and the hills beyond.  In the graveyard, worn headstones squatted like a flock of pinioned birds.  Josephine knocked Sister Frances’s window screen to the floor.   Both hands on the sill, she leaned far out.   Somewhere on that road, that rude moat of life, her mother was riding the streetcar to work this morning.  Humming a tune, pleased with herself.  Josephine leaned farther out.  The left side of her lip pulled open with her right and the sun came into her mouth.  It rested on her teeth while her screams passed over it, that diffident and changeable light.

Kate Lister Campbell lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. Originally from Kansas City, MO, she holds a degree in history from the University of Chicago and a Masters of Public Administration from NYU. When not writing, she works with nonprofit and government entities to design job training and placement programs for people with barriers to employment.

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Not physical, my new camp-mate says, evaluating my muteness. Emotional. You haven’t spoken in six months. No infections, paralysis or palsies. “Selective Mutism,” right?

“Correct,” I would say if I spoke. But I don’t. Speak.

Do you talk in your sleep? my camp-mate asks. It’s dark in our room, and my camp-mate’s voice filters down from above, muffled by the mattress of an upper bunk bed. I have never seen my camp-mate, who somehow is only in his bunk after “lights out.”

“I don’t know if I talk in my sleep. How would anyone know that?” I would say if I could.

I’ll listen and tell you, my camp-mate says. I’ll tell you what you say.

My roommate wasn’t here when I arrived at Camp Nag’s Head. I discover his voice again each night, as if his words are pieces of a broken mirror on the floor beside my bed. At night I also hear crickets through the high, screened window, and the roar and whoosh of cars and trucks traveling up and down Route 158. As the outside sounds peak and fall away, they remind me that I’m rooted here at camp.  On the other side of the highway, the ocean, hidden by summer rentals, rolls out to infinity. I might hear an occasional surge. There are dunes south of Camp Nag’s Head. Their silence dwarfs my own muteness—I’ve lain among them, my ear against the sand, listening. I imagine that on clear nights a visitor can hear the hiss of starlight striking the dunes like sleet.

*******

“It’s a miracle, a camp like this for Austin right in Nag’s Head,” my big brother Jesse said to my sister-in-law Briggie. His eyes flitted from the pamphlet to his wife, to the therapist who’d handed him the literature, then back to the pamphlet, and finally to me. “You loved it when you and I drove down there with Greta. Remember our big adventure, Austin? The week at the Nag’s Head beach house? Remember it was freezing?” I didn’t answer, and Jesse read from the pamphlet: “‘Selective mutism. Grief management.’ They list both.” He continued reading: “‘The camp provides a 45 day residential program designed to strengthen the things attendees do well; work on things that are more of a challenge; encourage attendees to have fun and make friends.’”

*******

Language abandoned me—or I abandoned it—all of a sudden one day, when my mother’s dementia reached a crisis point. Even though Jesse’s got twenty years on me, Mom had been confusing me with my brother-from-another-father for months. Then she blanked out the fact that I ever existed. She saw me only as pre-teen Jesse. Austin who? When she saw us next to each other, Mom looked from huge Jesse to under-sized me and somehow registered that the same son co-existed at different ages.

The breaking point came as Jesse and I stood together in our kitchen, watching Mom in her un-tethered robe pour a dozen freshly beaten eggs from a mixing bowl into the dishwasher.  If she’d been capable, she’d have seen us as separate products of her pair of marriages: Jesse was her boy from the man I called Uncle Jim; I was her offspring from the “love of her life,” Robert. But, slowly but surely, I’d been squeezed out of the picture.

“Jesse,” she said, looking from my brother to me, “tell Jesse to clean your room. You don’t listen to me.”

“You mean Austin?” Jesse asked fuzzily. “You mean I should tell Austin to clean his room?” Mom put the dirty mixing bowl in the pantry. Her robe hung open, exposing sagging, blue-veined breasts. She regarded the two of us warily.

“I don’t know what you’re calling your invisible friend these days, Jesse,” she said, “but you’re not funny.” I struggled to keep my gaze from dropping beneath Mom’s waist and squinted to avoid looking at her breasts. But I found no comfort in the cold eyes that refused to take me into account.

I remember thinking a trapdoor had opened beneath me, and then nothing. It was the last time I saw my mother. I woke up in a hospital bed. I don’t talk now. I follow simple directions, but I don’t converse—no winks, nods, notepads, or sustained eye contact.  Language is easy for some, like Briggie. She’s Swiss and speaks five of them. My sister-in-law is the world famous veterinary expert you might have seen on Youtube. She sings yodel-lullabies to mother pandas to get them to accept their babies. She was invited once to be on Letterman, but turned them down. Greta, my three-year-old niece, picks up words as naturally as a tadpole grows legs. I have no more appetite for language than I do for breathing underwater.

*******

A few very old Dr. Seuss books have come with me to Camp Nag’s Head. These books are family treasures. They’re over fifty years’ old and smell like memory. They first belonged to Jesse’s dad, mom’s first husband, the man I called Uncle Jim. My own father spent nearly a year dying in the hospital, and Uncle Jim helped care for me while Mom tended to Dad. It’s Uncle Jim’s voice I hear in Dr. Seuss’s rhymes and rhythms.

It’s possible I’m too old for Dr. Seuss. I read these books to Greta, although now I can’t recall the sound of my own voice. I’m at the age when boys’ voices change. If I should suddenly start speaking, I might sound like a stranger to myself.

Uncle Jim moved into our guest room after my father died. Mom needed his help. She’d already grown forgetful—Dad’s illness had been hard on her. Uncle Jim did things like pick me up from school, until the day he didn’t show up because he’d had a heart attack.  While I waited for him, watching yellow buses drive off with my classmates, he was dying in our driveway.

Uncle Jim’s death pushed Mom closer to the edge she eventually tumbled from. The therapist who suggested Camp Nag’s Head for me hinted that as Mom disappeared, she yanked me down with her—I’d been carrying the same losses she had, and then she added herself to my load. When she no longer recognized me, I collapsed. And woke up with nothing to say.

*******

Jesse, who’s been flying down to visit every weekend, sits beside me in the library of Camp Nag’s Head. He opens Dr. Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra, sticks his large face in the middle of it, inhales deeply, and reads aloud.  I blink across the room through the glass door overlooking the courtyard garden. Sparrows hop into and out of a thorn bush. Jesse reads about the fantastical letters invented to spell the names of the creatures the book pictures: the letter QUAN is for Quandary, an animal that lives alone on a shelf at the bottom of the ocean, perpetually worrying: “is his top-side his bottom? Or bottom side top?” And THNAD is for Thnadners, “and oh, are they sad, oh/ The big one, you see, has the smaller one’s shadow.”

Someone sticking his head in the library might mistake Jesse for my father. Counting Uncle Jim, that would make three dads for me, which is funny because I really don’t have any. And I’m not sure if I’m supposed to try to remember or forget my mother. My actual father, Robert, is the dad I remember least.  I see him in a hospital bed, connected to tubes and machines. He’s a picture on the mantle holding a baby I’m told is me. He’s the empty chair at the dining room table we toast on holidays. He is the reason we open our Christmas presents on Christmas Eve instead of waiting for Christmas morning, like Jesse said he did when Mom was married to Uncle Jim. I’ve inherited my own dad’s pale blue eyes, his wispy blond hair, his lack of size. He never read Dr. Seuss to me. When I try to call up his voice, I hear him telling me, “Time for bed.”

*******

I know some Dr. Seuss that’s for little kids, my camp-mate says as we lie in our dark room. “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish . . .” It sounds like he’s counting down lost parents. Since every camper here at Camp Nag’s Head has a disorder, I suspect my camp-mate’s might be that he is unseeable.

Camp Nag’s Head T-shirts display the camp name in a logo: a butterfly with a round face and hopeful expression. I think the logo is confusing—it should be the head of a horse. During group activities, I notice that the other children keep a hand on their shirts just below the logo, as if their problems are printed there and they’re trying to hide them. I see nothing under my logo, but I pick up the camp habit of holding my hand over my heart.

Every camper has a companion-therapist, which is one of the special features advertised in the camp pamphlet. My therapeutic companion, Terry, is a thin man or woman with short hair and a flat chest. S/he wears baggy shorts and has untanned, hairless legs. When s/he speaks, s/he seems to be trying either to make a naturally deep voice higher or a naturally high voice deeper. Her/his face is as gleaming and featureless as the face of a figure on a sports trophy.

I spend hours in the library flipping through my Dr. Seuss books. Terry sits across from me, thumbing through old issues of Psychology Today. S/he peeks at me from time to time to see what I’m up to. This afternoon there’s a AAA guidebook on the table between us. It’s for the states of Virginia and North Carolina. It’s newer than the guidebook Jesse and I used two years ago when we drove down to Nag’s Head with Greta, who was only six months old. Briggie was in San Diego, trying unsuccessfully to save a rejected newborn panda. I wonder if the information has been changed in this new edition of the guidebook.  Maybe this camp has been added to the list of Nag’s Head attractions. If I had speech, I’d share with my camp-mate what I learned about the origin of the town’s name: how land pirates marched ponies with lanterns hung from their heads along the beach at night, knowing that ship captains would mistake the lights for safely harbored boats and wreck their vessels on dangerous reefs. Then the land pirates would plunder the wrecks and murder the survivors.

If I open the AAA guidebook, what would Terry think?

*******

Does Jesse visit Mom as often as he visits me? Does she still know who he is? For the few hours he spends here, he must waste dozens in the air. Kitty Hawk, site of the Wright brothers’ first flight, is only a few miles up the highway from Camp Nag’s Head. On our vacation two years ago, we didn’t go to Kitty Hawk—the weather was too foul.

You must have flown over millions of people on your way down here, my camp-mate says. Including the President of the United States.

And we must have passed many of the same millions that February two years ago when we drove down—though some of the first millions must have died, and some of the second millions hadn’t been born.

Somebody back then, maybe only one person, must have noticed your car and had a thought about it. And this time somebody must have looked up and watched your jet disappear into a cloud.

If the same bystander witnessed both, that would be narrowing something down, wouldn’t it?

*******

When does Jesse have time to see Briggie and Greta?  He and I stroll over the grounds or sit in the library, sometimes with Terry, who knows Jesse is my brother, not my father.  Other children pass by like bubbles with their own guests or therapist-companions.

“I hear you might visit the dunes,” Jesse says. His face looks tired from smiling. By coincidence I turn to the page in On Beyond Zebra showing the letter JOGG, which is needed to spell Jogg-oons, “who doodle around in the far desert dunes/ Just doodle around, crooning very sad tunes . . .”

I flip to the next page without reacting. I want Jesse not to worry about me. He talks as if I respond to him. He tells me Briggie and Greta miss me. It’s possible, he says, that they will fly down for a visit next Sunday instead of him, unless there’s a major animal emergency somewhere in the world that Briggie must attend to. I blink in my brother’s direction, then lower my gaze to the bowl of miraculous fish I imagine that I’m holding instead of a book.

“Mom says hello,” Jesse murmurs. His eyes dip to the camp logo on my shirt when he tells this lie. Mom is a memory hole.  When it’s time for Jesse to leave, he hugs me good-bye in arms as thick as a bear’s, and I feel myself disappear in them.

*******

Is it a miracle that this camp is in the same Nag’s Head that Jesse, baby Greta, and I vacationed at two years ago when the Carolina shore was suffering through a record-breaking cold spell? We’d only been in our rented beach house a day when a sleet storm knocked out the electricity, and the week’s supply of Briggie’s breast milk we’d brought for Greta was in danger of spoiling. A fire blazed in the hearth as I propped Greta on the sill of the picture window. We watched Jesse lug a cooler to a dilapidated shed where he hoped the mother’s milk would stay cold. Beyond the shed the black ocean spread to the horizon under gray clouds. Greta squirmed when she saw her father.

“Da-da!” she enunciated clearly. “Da-da!”

Baby’s first word, something unexpected. But I shouldn’t have heard it—it belonged to her parents, not to me. I was thrilled for a second, but I knew I had to keep the achievement a secret. Greta would speak again—there’d be no stopping her; it was the natural order of things.

“Right,” I whispered, “That’s your daddy.”

“Da-da!” Greta shrieked again as Jesse disappeared into the shed.  Months later, six hundred miles to the north, “Mama” became the baby’s first official word.

*******

Here are Briggie and Greta, led to my room by Terry, who says s/he’ll meet us in the library and leaves us alone. A white bandage winds around Briggie’s forearm. Greta holds her mother’s hand and, leaning into her hip, looks up at her face. The three-year-old places a finger on the bandage.

“Boo-boo,” Greta purrs, then “Nurse.”

“Yes,” Briggie says to her daughter, then “May I?” to me as she sits on my bed. Without answering, I sidle toward the window. My camp-mate, of course, is absent. My sister-in-law lifts her pink T-shirt and unfastens her nursing bra just as Greta steps up to take her mother’s nipple. While my niece nurses standing, I think of calves I have seen reaching for their mother’s teat in barns at county fairs. Briggie’s smiling eyes are the color Jesse calls Lake Geneva blue. He said they reflected the Alpine sky, and he could see snowy mountains in them.

“She’s more unsettled and tired than hungry,” Briggie says over her child’s head. “Our flight left before dawn.” I picture the jet that brought them south soaring from one of Briggie’s blue eyes to the other, then focus on my visitors’ pairs of matching sneakers—pink with white and purple trim. “Your brother wishes he could be here,” Briggie says. “He’s spending time with your Mama this weekend.”  Greta’s hair is a nest of dirty blond curls, darker where they’re sweat-pasted to the nape of her neck. I hear her slurping.  Briggie’s short hair is lighter and straighter—her bangs end an inch above her eyebrows. With a breathy gulp Greta pulls back from her mother, who arches her back as she snaps her bra shut and tugs down her shirt.

*******

My visitors and I sit in the library with Terry. Greta fidgets on the bench beside me, peeking over my shoulder at the pages of On Beyond Zebra I flip through, front to back, back to front. The child’s hip bone, as hard as a baseball, presses into my thigh. She might smell of milk. I remember the stale-sweet odor from bottle-feeding her at the Nag’s Head beach house. I’m afraid a picture of Mom is going to pop out of my Dr. Seuss book, but I keep turning pages. Would I recognize her? “Mother” doesn’t start with a made-up letter like the rest of the creatures in this book.

When Terry asks Briggie about her bandaged arm, my sister-in-law answers,

“A mother panda surprised me as I offered her own baby to her. She lunged at me and bit me. There’s a lot of stitches. It’s surprising how quickly they can move, they seem so lethargic. When I sing to them, sometimes I relax and let down my guard.”

Terry seems to know about Briggie’s career. S/he asks why mother pandas reject their babies.

“Good question. My husband—Austin’s brother, you know, Jesse—thinks that the species is tired. Pandas have given up, he says. He calls it ‘specie-al suicide.’ Specie-al, not special. I think they’re grieving over something they’ve lost. They’re depressed.”

Terry says, “I read in Psychology Today that scientists studying grief use prairie voles instead of rats for their experiments. Voles form bonds, so they feel loss. Rats don’t bond.”

Briggie nods. “A rat will fight its own mother to the death over a scrap of cheese.”

Terry clears his/her throat. “Which do you think is worse, evolving into something that’s given up, or evolving into a rat that only cares about itself?”

Briggie is quiet for a few seconds. I flip through On Beyond Zebra. Greta swats at the fluttering pages. “But those don’t have to be the only choices, right?” Briggie asks.

*******

Briggie has signed me out for a day trip to Jockey State Park, and we’re trudging through the dunes. It’s hot and shade-less. The sky is a uniform milk-white—the dunes fail to rise against it with the majesty they reveal when the sky is blue, and the hike is less a pleasure than a chore. Greta has tired quickly, and Briggie carries her in her unbandaged arm. Mother and child wear blue baseball caps with little red socks on them for the Boston baseball team. Sun-block glistens on our arms, legs, and cheeks. I still feel the touch of Briggie’s hands from when she smoothed the lotion over me in the parking lot. My copy of On Beyond Zebra sticks to the arm I’ve tucked it under.

“I can’t believe we forgot a water bottle,” Briggie chuffs. “We won’t be able to stay out here very long. Let’s climb that big dune so we can say we did it, and then we’ll go to the beach across the highway. We’re going to see the ocean soon, Greta!”

We plod to the top of the highest plateau, and Briggie starts to point past a series of receding dunes toward the first water she sees—but the blue expanse has an opposite shore, and she’s puzzled. What she’s looking at is the bay between the Outer Banks and Roanoke Island. The AAA guidebook says the settlement on Roanoke Island disappeared without a trace hundreds of years ago. Briggie pivots 180 degrees and shields her eyes from the late morning sun. When we shift direction, we see how close we are to Route 158. Beyond the dunes rise power lines and the rooftops of condos.  But here and there at the horizon are slate gray slivers bounded by nothing but the milky sky.

“There’s the ocean!” Briggie shouts. She hoists her daughter high in the air. “See the ocean?” Greta glances at the rooftops and wires, then back at the plainly visible water we all saw first. “Sure,” Briggie shrugs, “why not?” She grunts as she lowers Greta to the sand. The child totters for a second, then takes a few steps toward the edge of the plateau. The slope of the dune is too gradual to be dangerous. I see small groups of hikers scattered across the acres the dunes cover. From the color of their shirts, some of the hikers are from my camp. No one is close enough to recognize.

Back when I had speech, and Greta’s single word was a secret, I read On Beyond Zebra to my niece while we cuddled in the beach house waiting for power to be restored. If I could tell my camp-mate the story of how Nag’s Head got its name, I might change the lamp-toting ponies into zebras.

“Austin,” Briggie says, “You’ve got a month left of camp. When it’s over, you’re going to come live with us in Boston. We’re going to move your Mom to a place near there. It will make things easier for everybody.” Greta has stretched out at her mother’s feet, resting her head on the compacted sand as if she hears the dunes’ heartbeat. I scan the horizon over Route 158, but I’ve lost the bits of ocean. I raise my book to block the view.

“Beyond Zebra,” Briggie reads from the cover. “But what’s before Zebra? That’s something to think about, too, isn’t it?” She scoops up Greta, who giggles and goes limp across her mother’s arms. It looks like Briggie is offering her as a sacrifice. Or has plucked her from the ocean.

Before Zebra. I want to picture my mother, but I don’t dare—what if she appears naked, and with pointed teeth? Briggie adjusts her daughter into a comfortable carrying position and starts down the dune. I watch the muscles of my sister-in-law’s thighs knot with each step. Jesse told me Briggie had once been a ski jumper for the Swiss national junior team: “She fell, and took up dance instead.” Now Briggie saves baby pandas. As I march behind my sister-in-law, I hear her yodeling softly to Greta. The notes rise and fall from chest-deep to falsetto and back. These are muted, desert yodels, nothing like those bellowed from mountain top to mountain top in the Alps. I feel the soft notes in my own chest and throat, and it’s all I can do to keep my lips pressed shut.

But I stumble and release a single sound: “Flunn.”

Dr. Seuss writes that you need the letter Flunn to spell Flunnel—a creature so shy “he only comes out of his hole, I’m afraid,/ When the right kind of softish nice music is played.”

“Excuse me?” Briggie asks calmly, pausing and looking back up the dune at me. I’m shaking my head like I’ve got water trapped in my ear.

“Alright. Okay,” Briggie nods. Without another word she continues downhill, goose-stepping, letting gravity do the work. Greta gazes at me over her mother’s shoulder, her eyes as blue as Briggie’s, as blue as the sky has to be for the dunes to look their most impressive.

“Aus-tin,” the child pronounces. The syllables float toward me like pink rose petals.

Greta, I think, apparently loud enough to cause Briggie to turn her head and add her grin to her daughter’s.

Gregory Wolos lives in upstate New York on the bank of the Mohawk River. His short fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in JMWW, Yemassee, The Baltimore Review, Versal, The Roanoke Review, The Los Angeles Review, PANK, A cappella Zoo, Superstition Review, and many other journals and anthologies. His stories have earned two Pushcart Prize nominations, and his latest collection was named a finalist for the 2012 Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award. For lists of his publications and commendations, visit www.gregorywolos.com.

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I have a job telemarketing for a carpet cleaning service. I sit in a bullpen of low cubicles, reading a script about our patented dry foam technique. It’s guaranteed, the other telemarketers joke: this foam is so dry, you’ll shit yourself. They smoke and make fun of customers on their breaks. The high school dropouts try to get me to buy them cigarettes so they can join in, but I don’t.

People are nicer to telemarketers than you’d think. Sometimes they complain about their privacy, my having barged into it. I suspect the word they’re looking for is aloneness, and because I feel bad, because it seems their only shot at release, I let them rant until they’re ready to hang up.

This one woman, though. She said we should all go to jail for bothering people at dinnertime. I told her I killed someone with my sister’s car and that was a lot worse. I didn’t qualify that it was actually Eva because you can’t get into that sort of thing on a sales call. Wanda gives me a hard time for saying things like that, but she doesn’t know what it’s like.

…

I visit Wanda on Sundays, the only day I’m not at the call center. It’s a relief, not having to read that script, even though it would mean inflicting a Sabbath Day nuisance on the housewives of Wake County. The gamma ray burst of horning in. They wouldn’t talk to me about Jesus if I called, though. It is a documented fact that the foulest mouths in the area are in Cary, where well-to-do young mothers will call you a cunt for interrupting their kid’s birthday party.

My coworkers track all that verbal abuse on a dry erase board in the call room. You get one point for crook, two for bitch, three if there are genitals in the cuss. Anything sick or original, like snatchmaggot humpweasel, gets ten. If you piss enough people off, or you piss a few people off bad enough, you win lunch at Chili’s. Wanda likes hearing who’s in the lead, the best insults of the week and such. She says I should participate, give things like that a chance. She thinks I’m down on myself.

“You a professor of temporal motherfuckin’ physics, Sherry. Don’t you forget it,” she says. She’s talking about the woman on the phone, who I told everything to, who’s threatened to get me fired.

She looks run down and queasy under the yellow fluorescent lights. When I was on her side of the glass, I thought visitors always had a look of contentment, as if they didn’t have problems, other than someone in here they had to visit. They came in all tan, wearing white shorts and baseball caps like they were headed to picnics after. It seemed cruel. My parents always looked like they’d gotten lost on the way to church.

“I am a physicist, Wanda,” I say. “I am not, for the moment, teaching anything.”

“That’s a load,” she says.

If my ex-husband, the thermodynamicist, were here, he’d say she was making a lot of sense. He always accused me of exaggerating, seeing plots where none existed. Why would the chair be out to get you, Sherilyn? Where’s the logic in that? The difference is he thought I was making things up, but Wanda can see I’m right. I imagine them in a room together, how that would go. Him, with those Buddy Holly glasses you want to knock off his face, fretting about the rug she’s flicked cigarette ash on. Had he mentioned it was handwoven by a Tibetan artisan? Her, knowing it came from Costco.

“It’s time to quit feeling sorry for yourself, baby,” she says, leaning across the table. She scratches her scalp through her Richard Simmons hairdo, which the bad yellow light is making into a halo. “Fuck fate, you know what I mean?”

I have wisdom on my side now, she means, I can avoid certain patterns. Not get in cars with Eva. She must know that’s not true, where she is. Prison is a temporal loop like everything else.

…

When we were kids, my parents were always cramming me and Eva together, hoping we’d learn to get along. They crammed us into the same bedroom and clogging troupe. On prom night, the night we could have died, they crammed us into Kyle McManus’s Trans Am. I guess you could say they only had themselves to blame. We tried to get out of it, being an embarrassment to each other, but the parental drive to have children who like each other is strong, so we lined up with our dates in front of the fireplace. I frowned and Eva looked out of it and Mother said, “Smile, for crying out loud,” as Dad took the picture.

On the way to the dance, Kyle kept putting Eva’s hand on the steering wheel while he lit up cigarettes, for the show of it. He’d take a couple of drags and throw it out the window, a waste of a perfectly good smoke. As they smoked and drove, they discussed a party they wanted to go to after the dance, someone’s parents rumored to be in the Caribbean. An improbability, but Kyle was certain there’d be beer. For a moment it was like Craig Snelgrove and I were watching one of those safety films from Driver’s Ed, the in-love joyriders driving fast in the rain, crossing medians, overcorrecting like it was going out of style.

“Kip and Muffin are about to learn a hard lesson…about responsibility behind the wheel,” Craig said, importantly. He smiled at me and patted the rectangle in his coat pocket, offering me another nip of peppermint schnapps. I took it, hoping he didn’t read this as a sign of movement in my thinking. There was another question hanging between us, whether I would live with him in the fall when we started at the state university.

I was running this experiment where I slept with him, just to see what happened. There was a lot of lying on my back afterwards, waiting for feelings to come, making careful logs of whether they did or not in my diary. Craig figured this meant things were official. He was trying to be accommodating and fun in the meantime. I laughed at the thing about responsibility, forgetting my plan to gut him.

Eva turned around in her seat. I could see her mind turning over and over for a way to eject us from the car. “We should drop them at the 7-Eleven,” she said.

“Yeah,” Kyle said, settling it. “How’d you like that?”

“Compared to dying of a head injury, pretty well,” Craig said.

When the car went off the road, it punched a hole in the chopstick factory’s fence. Eva and I sat in the grass, watching the boys silently panic, unable to disentangle the grill of the car. I wanted to tell her out of meanness that our dresses, hers turquoise taffeta, mine silver, were the only way Kyle could tell us apart.

She skootched close to me, her face right in mine. Beam was on her breath. “You have to help me. You have to tell them it wasn’t my fault,” she said. She had Kyle’s tuxedo coat around her shoulders, trying to look martyred, knowing the sky was falling. I was pretty sure my wrist was broken. She had a gash under her mouth, a smear of blood in the shape of an isoceles triangle on her cheek from when she’d wiped her chin with the back of her hand.

A few days later, Eva came out of the bathroom dressed in black, with one of those home permanents that make your hair look like you stuck your finger in a socket. The house stunk with chemicals. The whole thing was a protest of our parents’ ban on Kyle McManus, and of his bomber jacket having appeared on Laura Moseley that day. Eva seemed to fragment after that. We blamed Kyle for the frizzy perm and the fingernails bitten to the quick and Phil Collins played so loudly Dad took her tape deck away.

Sitting at the kitchen table, I glued sticks of balsa wood together into a tower for my AP physics project. Because of the cast, I could only use the fingers of my right hand, so I couldn’t get the force distribution right. The tower would violate a number of building codes. I’d blame Eva for any carnage that occurred.

She came in on a cloud of hair stink and opened the refrigerator. “What a mess,” she said into its open mouth. She emptied the fridge slowly, grouping each piece of food together by category on the floor: dairy, fruit, condiments, beverages, Tupperwared side items, each inside a separate square of linoleum.

“What are you doing that for?” I asked.

“It’s for you,” she said, “for after I’m gone, so you won’t ever have to wonder where anything is.” She looked up at me from underneath that hair cloud, her chin looking infected with black train track stitches across it.

“You haven’t been using that gunk the doctor gave you to put on your cut,” I said. “Your face is going to rot off.”

She said she hoped I would look at all of this and understand what she’d been trying to do for me my whole life. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the schnapps flask, laying it in the middle of the food. When I saw Craig getting into his father’s truck, I’d noticed that the rectangle in his coat pocket was gone. I thought he’d thrown the flask over the fence.

She circled the mess on the floor, like it wasn’t arranged quite how she wanted it. After a while, she threw up her hands in a surrender motion and walked out. I heard her on the phone a minute later, talking about her life being over, about Laura Moseley. I believe this was about the time the sane and insane branches of Eva’s personality finally had the guts to fork off each other. It has been a slow process, in action our whole lives. Sometimes I think she knew that after the accident things seemed to be speeding up.

A few years later, Eva dropped out of college to marry Donald Tucker. His father was our family’s dentist, and he was going into the business, too. I told him the story of the accident during the Christmas holidays, when she brought him home to show off her ring. I stopped at the part where the car hit the fence. In those days Donald was a sanguine orthodontistry student with a full head of hair, who used words that were older than him, like flabbergasted. He shook his head. Kids. So rash and unflossed.

“I bet that guy’s kicking himself for ever letting her go,” he said.

…

Our mother says we fought in the womb, like Jacob and Esau.

“Fighting over what?” I’ll say, not quite remembering the story. Something about goat stew.

“Who got the better spot. Who got to come out first. Whatever babies fight over,” she’ll say.

Twenty years after Kyle McManus’s car went through that fence, the cut on Eva’s chin was a white half moon scar. Her eyes were dinner plates. It had rained that day, so my wrist hurt. I thought, I wonder what happened to Craig Snelgrove? Did he ever find anyone else? Is he out in California, working at the volcano observatory, naming craters after me? I thought how funny he was compared to my husband, how he asked what I felt about things. I’d logged this in my diary, too.

Eva whiteknuckled the steering wheel, both feet on the brake. “I mixed them up. I mixed up the pedals,” she said.

“You did not,” I said.

The Piggly Wiggly checkout woman sat up on the pavement, waving the receipt for our mother’s birthday cake. A hummingbird cake, store bought because I don’t cook and Eva wasn’t supposed to use the stove. When we got out of the car, I told everyone that the woman ran out in front of us, I’d panicked and mixed the pedals up.

“My fault, my fault,” the woman apologized, as blood squirted into her brain. That night, she passed out in her driveway. Corn muffins flew out of a restaurant to-go box and went rolling around her like little UFOs. Her husband crouched beside her and whimpered, Oh, Lord, Kathleen, while a neighbor, who was certified in resuscitation, tried to revive her. For the moment, though, she was just waving that receipt. “We aren’t supposed to let people leave without their receipts. In case there’s a problem.” A man who resembled a young Michael Dukakis helped her up.

Eva stood beside me, patting her hairdo, looking at the scene like she’d just wandered into it. “I told you we should of got ice cream to go with the cake,” she said, too low for anyone but me to hear. She was going through a stage where she only whispered. “If we’d of got ice cream, this never would of happened.”

“Be quiet, Eva,” I said. I took the receipt from the checkout woman and told her to take care. As I headed toward the driver’s side of the car, I heard her ask if anybody had an aspirin, but no one did.

A year or so ago, I looked Craig Snelgrove up on one of the computers in the correctional facility’s Media and Technology Center. It was fancy for a jail library, with a circulation desk like starship bridge, an honest-to-God card catalog, all kinds of outdated books and periodicals to help the cons reverse their course in life. According to the internet, Craig was teaching earth science at a high school in Rochester, New York. His faculty picture on the school website showed him about sixty pounds heavier than he was when I knew him. He was smiling flatly, like the flash had gone off too soon, like things weren’t going okay at home and the photographer had coaxed him into marginal joviality. I preferred the volcano scenario. It was worth thinking about after Eva hit the breaks.

The thermodynamicist lectured me for getting in the car with Eva. It was December. He’d spent the morning inside my mother’s Christmas village, a rife urban sprawl of little ceramic buildings all over the house: general stores, churches, ice cream parlors set up on gold-flecked blankets of artificial snow. He didn’t understand the logic of that either.

“Where was the sense in that? The woman could have been killed,” he said. “What’s your takeaway from all this?”

“I should have learned to bake?”

When he didn’t laugh, I told him about Eva parking behind me in the driveway, how I’d offered to move the car for her but she insisted. He said I was making that up to lessen my feeling of culpability. We argued about that for a few minutes, and then I cut him a big slice of hummingbird cake to make him stop talking.

…

We’re still married, in the legal sense. A woman I know named Silvie, who writes grants for the university’s School of Natural Sciences, says that he has moved to Durham, where he lives in a loft with one of his graduate students. Silvie is my friend, so she doesn’t tell me the girl’s name, just that his application to fund a new heat exchanger was turned down.

It’s winter. I imagine the girl, longish chocolate-colored hair, capped with a crocheted beret. She has on those stretchy pants the twentysomethings wear now but is not quite slim enough for them. Her legs look meaty and soft beneath her pea coat. She wears no makeup because he prefers women that way. She needs some, though. Her face is a blank no-face, with eyes and a mouth that don’t stand out, the kind of face you forget instantly. She’s drinking out of a paper coffee cup. I imagine something silly in the cup, like a pumpkin latte, though for all I know she’s taking it black.

She’s just come out of one of the tobacco lofts downtown. He’s upstairs, gathering papers and books for a morning lecture, running late because they’ve taken the time to make love. He is good at sex. This is why she looks content and dreamy, sipping her drink. She knows nothing about me, the wife with the record. I decide her name is Karen or Andrea, something weak but not ditzy, so I can’t roll my eyes when he tells it to me.
When I call, she answers the phone. She sounds annoyed and congested, as if the call has woken her up, but my asking to speak to him dries her head fluids up.

“Who is this?” she asks.

“Sherry Cole,” I say, deciding just this moment to start using my maiden name again.

There are some passing-the-phone sounds, squeaks and bumps and a rubber cordstretching noise. She whispers “Who is that?” and he asks her in his normal voice to give him a moment. I wonder if this exchange will bring the age difference between them into relief, if this relationship can survive the news of me.

“Sherilyn.”  I dislike being called Sherilyn, and he knows this. He told me once that Sherry is an aperitif, not a name. “We have some things to discuss,” I say. “Indeed,” he says.

The last time I saw him, he was sitting on a courtroom bench, looking disappointed. Not in the justice system, in me. He doesn’t believe in sacrificing oneself for others, in lying down on the tracks unnecessarily. He believes that equal and opposite reactions to fool choices are the natural order of the universe. What did you think you were saving her from?

“I hope you’re well,” he says. It seems like a cheap shot.

“I can come and go as I please, I guess.”

“You can or you guess you can?”

“Don’t split verbal hairs,” I say. “It’s an ugly quality.”

“I just wish you’d speak plainly. You’re always leaving these gray areas when you talk. It creates uncertainty for a listener.”

“That assumes you ever listen to people.”

I hear him swallow and then his breathing tapers off, and I fancy that he has turned to look toward the door, toward her. It’s another swallow before he speaks again. “Look, Sherilyn, I don’t have a lot of time here,” he says. “We’re going to this orchard, see.”

“Which orchard?”

“Some orchard or other, what difference does it make? Kelsey enjoys that sort of thing.”

“That’s idiotic,” I say, meaning the orchard, but also the girl’s name.

“That is neither here nor there,” he says.

“You hate that kind of thing. You say it’s like paying someone to perform migrant labor for them.”

“I’ve never said anything like that, Sherilyn. It’s racist. Just stop.”

“Okay, fine.”

He wasn’t a bad husband. He didn’t cheat. He organized our finances on a special computer program, which enabled a savings plan and bills paid before they were due. About a year into our marriage, when we talked about children, I said I didn’t think I wanted any, and he said, Whatever you prefer. It’s your body. I was disappointed that he hadn’t fought for offspring with me but had to concede that this made him a decent man.

The weekend of the accident, we spent the three-hour drive to my parents’ house talking about the separation, how it should go into effect after the holidays were over. He did small annoying things the whole trip. He drifted onto the rumble strip as he talked about my research assistant, let the sunflower seeds he was eating fall onto the seat. He insisted on keeping the radio on smooth jazz, even though it meant changing stations each time we drove out of range. I let him because I felt bad.

We agreed on the terms of the separation. He said that he wasn’t stupid, that he didn’t deserve any of this. I said he was right, he didn’t, but that didn’t change where we were.

“I just hope that all of this has taught you something about how the world works, about your role in it,” he says. I can hear the girl’s voice in the background, saying something about lateness, I think.

“Are we still talking about the orchard?”

“Sherilyn, be serious, for Christ’s sake. You didn’t even stand up for yourself. Not once.”

I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that Eva would not have survived any of the things that might have happened to her after she hit the brakes outside the Piggly Wiggly, when I was wondering about Craig Snelgrove’s marital status. Since Kyle McManus, I’d known that if anything truly bad ever happened she would collapse inward and explode, and we’d all be annihilated.

…

On the day of my manumission, Wanda helped me put my things into the vanilla pudding box the guard brought from the kitchen. As we packed, I reminded her what she said to me my first night. You look like you just shit a moon rock. You some kind of scientist? She didn’t like me, and told me so. I reminded her of this, too.

“I still don’t like you,” she said, wrapping the picture frame in one of my shirts.

The photo was of some of my undergraduates, from our trip to the particle accelerator right before I switched places with Eva. The kids went nuts, all those infinitesimal futures being created and fizzling out in front of us. Baby universes, the tour guide said. I searched for a metaphor, some kind of landscape to put it in for them—seizing opportunity, not being daunted by failure—but the moment passed when some of the girls became so moved that they cried and held onto each other. Girls these days always cry in groups.

As I snapped the photo, I thought, I should have the guide take one with me in it, but we were behind schedule. Our bus was about to leave without us. I settled for the shot with a Sherilyn-shaped void in the center.

Wanda lay the frame on top of the other things in the box. It was her way of saying goodbye. She wouldn’t let me put my arms around her because we could do that when she got out.

…

A few weeks before I got into the taxi with the pudding box, Donald sent me a letter, offering me a room with them on Nag’s Head. I know he feels guilty, but I also know he wants some help with Eva. My mother said I should have taken them up on it. Nag’s Head is nice all year, the least they could do.

I never answered his letter. Around that time, I was also getting a lot of letters from Eva, at least three a week. She said she had acquired a special kind of vision that let her see into the core of people. Donald was keeping a log of her movements in his head where she couldn’t read it, with the help of a cleaning woman who was reporting on her and missing her appendix.

On Easter Sunday, I tell Wanda I can’t see her, and Donald drives his yellow Jaguar all the way from the Outer Banks to the Bojangles on MLK. He sits down with his plastic tray and a paper sleeve of French fries that he doesn’t eat. I have a chicken biscuit that I don’t eat.

Every time I see Donald, he looks more like an orthodontist. His hair is thinning in half lives, the hair of someone who is good with needles and gas. I wonder if people with bad teeth see him in line at the bank and feel sudden, unexplained courage to improve their smiles.

He hands me an envelope with a check in it, a lot of money. I wasn’t expecting it, but I take it. He understands what I have done for them. This is not the last time it will come up. Six years from now, we’ll be at my mother’s funeral and he’ll say something about what the poor woman went through and Eva will look out of it, her white scalp visible because she has started pulling her hair out. Trichotillomania, the doctor will call it, on top of everything else. My new husband, the high school orchestra teacher who I met on one of my calls—we just got to talking, that living room/dining room special an unexpected segue into the cost of things these days, into life and the Republican party and the falling salaries of teachers in the public school system—he will nod like he understands but be thinking about Vivaldi.

“She’s been digging holes on the beach,” Donald says. “Deep ones. A kid named Austin fell in one of them and almost broke his neck. The mother’s threatening to take us to the cleaners. That’s all I need, it’s all I need.”

“What is she digging holes for?”

“Everything,” he says. “She said eventually everything there is is going to rush into one of them and collapse down to a single point and none of this will exist anymore.” He waves his hand in front of him, as if to indicate that this Bojangles would not escape the pull. “I told her that isn’t going to happen, but you know how she is.”

“It is going to happen, just at the end of time. And not on the beach,” I say.

Donald looks at me the way he looks at Eva. I tell him about the call center and Wanda and Craig Snelgrove and how since the moment our egg split, which the thermodynamicist always called The Big Bang, Eva and I have been moving away from each other at something close to the speed of light. When my students asked me how everything began, this was always what I thought about.

Emily Koon is a writer from North Carolina. She has previously published work in Fiddleblack, Juked, Meridian, Camera Obscura and other places. Emily can be found blogging nervously at thebookdress.com.

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I don’t believe the dead concern themselves with those of us who are living. It is impossible to imagine they think about the way I hold my hands on this steering wheel while I am driving. And surely they couldn’t care less that I am on this flat stretch of highway, driving north toward Van Buren County and the tiny town where I grew into adulthood. The dead are partly dreaming and partly alive, my mother likes to think, though she also believes that three crows in the same tree portend bad fortune, that a muddy creek bed drying then cracking in summer means that someone will have a miscarriage. I lost my own child—a boy—in my sixth month of pregnancy, and surely there was a dry creek bed somewhere in the world, many of them, in fact, enough to wither a host of children in the womb. I am not alone in my grief, in other words. Probably I sound bitter, and I know I am, but my husband thinks that my sorrow is carrying me north from Arkadelphia—the name for this place where we are living—to visit my mother. My husband believes I am seeking comfort, but my mother and I will sit on her back porch and drink the sweet tea she learned to make as a girl in Mississippi, where she also learned that tragedies come in threes and you should spread the cut hair from your children outside the doors and windows of your house to ward off evil spirits. It’s been six weeks since Walter Michael Davis died, and in that time I have felt only the power of his absence. My mother phoned to say she hears my son in the sounds of the wind in tall grass, in the beautiful names of the birds and wild flowers she loves. My mother claims that, when my father died, he flew off with the Cooper’s Hawk we sometimes saw chasing birds in our back yard, that we heard calling from the woods. My mother said she could sense his presence in that call, and I envied her for that. So what do I plan to say when I arrive? We will sit on her back porch within sight of her birdfeeders, in sight of the creek that will be dried and cracked in the August drought, and I will ask her what it is she thinks I have done to deserve this. Did I walk into the shadow of a dark bird flying overhead? Did I allow an owl to perch on our roof while my husband and I were sleeping? I will tell her how much I resent the dead for the power they hold, resent her for imagining she is speaking to my dead son, for believing he exists half in this world and half in some other, as though his ghost is pressing forward toward my breast to feed.

Doug Ramspeck is the author of five poetry collections. The most recent book, Original Bodies, was selected for the Michael Waters Poetry Prize and is forthcoming by Southern Indiana Review Press. Two earlier books also received awards: Mechanical Fireflies (Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize), and Black Tupelo Country (John Clardi Prize, University of Missouri-Kansas City). Individual poems have appeared in journals that include Kenyon Review, State, Southern Review, Georgia Review, AGNI, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He teaches creative writing and directs the Writing Center at The Ohio State University at Lima.

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It is said that when Elena Leranjo died, the smell of lilacs lingered in her bedroom for days, emanating from her corpse before tumbling softly out the window to smother the streets of Sao Brunois for years after. The scent permeated the brick and mortar buildings in both directions: up the hill towards the rickety old church, where she was later buried, and down the hill towards the bay where fishermen and dock workers alike began to weave rumors into mythologies, mythologies into truths that were carried out to distant currents and passed onto others. Whether real or imagined, men who had never seen a lilac before claimed to smell an army of its blossoms while their boats drifted slowly into port.

 The saccharine odor soon came to symbolize the town, a place where the sun seemed to shine too brightly, the food too rich for outsiders to finish, the wine too sweet to get drunk on, the people too friendly to ever be completely trusted. The smell baked itself within the breads and pies, mingled with chimney smoke in the evening and spread yellow across the starry skies. It was a constant reminder of the impermanence of life and the permanence only found in death…

*          *          *

As a boy, I was told there was supposedly nothing special about Elena Leranjo; she was born like any other child and was treated as such. An unfailingly polite girl, she smiled at everyone when not transfixed by the slow-moving clouds above. On any given day, one could pass her home and find her helping her mother with chores or picking flowers from the lawn. She held imaginary conversations with imaginary things, believed her dolls to be living, breathing things. She was, like the other young girls, being groomed to take over the duties of keeping our village running while the men were out at sea.

No one knew what caused her to suddenly slump over in death while playing with the other children. No one saw anything out of the ordinary; she simply stopped running and fell face-first into the dirt, the hem of her dress flapping in the ocean breeze. The village doctor, and another that had arrived on a monthly supply ship, examined her, found nothing wrong, shook their heads, bewildered. The funeral procession up to the church was a small one; her parents, her older brother, an uncle from a distant village, her dog, a three-legged mutt that whimpered the entire way. So they say.

Now? Others in the village have her name stuck to their lips, as if she were the beginning of a curse that had turned our part of the world into something sickly and gangrenous, something to be chopped off and thrown away without a second thought. I don’t believe in curses and I don’t believe our current problems began with the mysterious death of a girl nearly half a century ago.

But this wasn’t the only rumor, oh no. With every ship that arrived, news of the world came with it. Some in the form of print on paper and the rest from the slippery tongues of men in easy lies and half-truths that made it hard to sift for reality. We saw a change come over our scenery, odd bits of detritus washed up on shore. Over the years, talk of Elena changed into whispers of a floating sanctuary, an island that moved on the ocean’s whim, full of tall buildings crammed tightly together and built deep down into its earth. The sailors who claimed to have seen it called it a castle on the horizon. I called it all nonsense until the sailors stopped coming to port.

One day, our wharf was a loud and bustling market place filled with foreigners and local tradesmen, harlots and wine sellers. The next, only the sound of seagulls could be heard flying through the nearly empty harbor. We pressed on, believing these changes to be momentary, but then pieces of vessels, thousands upon thousands of smoking and disintegrating slats of heavy oak, began washing up onto the beach. The tides brought with them questions about the missing sailors. They also, in their own strange way, brought answers.

For weeks they had washed up on the shores of our little ocean-side hamlet, looking like long and sun-bleached dominoes of the dead scattered across the sand. Femurs, tibias, ulnas, radii. Skulls both whole and caved in, lengths of spine still intact like tiny ladders. The smell of dead marrow and rot overpowered the sea spray and salt blowing in from the west. We could no longer fish for even their skeletal remains arrived picked clean by whatever had turned our water brackish and unclean.

The surface took on a marbled sheen; blood mixed into tidal pools and turned the water the color of fresh bruise. The waves, once high and mighty and full of power, lapped slow against the coastline, lazy and sluggish as if burdened by the phenomena too. Sunlight fell upon the surface and seemed to disappear or die within the thick fluid. Oars melted when sunk below the surface, came up smoking and missing ends. Some great unknown thing had poisoned our ocean, had turned it dangerous.

For the first week, packs of wild dogs had appeared in the mornings and disappeared by afternoon, carrying in their mouths the largest bones they could carry. Soon, they began coming at all hours of the day, snapping and snarling at anyone on the beach, as if worried their new treasure trove would be stolen away from them. And then one day, they too simply disappeared. Some villagers believed the dogs had finally filled their hidey-holes full with the chew toys. And while I couldn’t say why at the time, I felt it was something else, something more sinister. Their sudden disappearance was bad omen that trembled deep within my insides and kept me awake at night. And I am not a man of superstition.

The meadows beyond the outskirts of the village began to die. The grass withered to brown and then finally to ashy black. Our landscape looked like a shriveled organ, diseased and unusable. The wither spread closer and closer to our homes, large and spacious homes made of mudded stucco, bamboo and palm fronds tethered together with think vine lacing. Large windows cut out of the communal areas that opened up to views of the ocean, stairwells that spiraled up around the entire home. The more ornately crafted a home, the more respected the man who built it. I should say that my own home, built by my grandfather and later added onto by my father and me, began practically enough before I added several balconies and trellises for creeping seaweed vines and wild blossoms. It was a fine home to be in and one I had no intention of leaving.

But as the black crept closer, we had to choose: stay and possibly wither black ourselves or find a way to leave to make a home elsewhere. Elena Leranjo’s name became an unspoken whisper on our lips again. Had her death so long ago brought us this quick and silent decay? Was our little coastal hamlet in some way cursed? I dismissed the ideas as quickly as it appeared.

I was the first to start collecting the bones, worried that the supply washing up on shore would dissipate and thin out. We could no longer trek out to the forests beyond the black for fear, real or not, of instant death in the meadows. Some believed it would creep up from the ground, slither between toes and find its way into our veins, soaking arteries and strangling us from the inside out the way the sea had done to our boats; we heard them fracture and crack loudly one morning. They fell apart and dissolved within the water before our eyes. Steam rose up off the black water’s surface around the disintegrating vessels. What happened to the sailors now became clearer, but no less understood. The poisonous water was crushing in on us from all sides. It was only a matter of time now.

And yet, I noticed the washed-up bones remained strong and intact, floating in from every direction. They seemed to stand up to the strange nature of the ocean while the wood could not. I did not fall prey to wasting time questioning the strange nature of this phenomenon and instead began planning our escape. To where, I did not know, but the black would soon overcome us if we didn’t act. The choice between staying and being swallowed up by the unknown or floating out into a greater unknown was a losing one, but I’ve always thought it better to be actively moving in a direction, even if it’s the wrong one. Sitting around and waiting to die seemed like giving up. It seemed cowardly and I could imagine my grandfather’s face scowling down at me for even allowing the idea into my head.

And while I did not believe the rumors of a floating city that moved with the tides, we made a boat of bones and set ourselves adrift, hoping to find the water still blue somewhere. Hoping to find the rest of our sailor brethren safe and out of harm’s way.

By the end of the first day, we had acclimated ourselves to the idea that we were floating on the remnants of people we may have once known, may have once broken bread with on a slow and drunken evening. I realized the idea hadn’t occurred to me while putting the boat together, but necessity seemed more important than dwelling on revulsion or sentimentality at the time. The setting sun had gone all aflame, bathed the ocean in bloody light on the horizon. Behind us, we could make out the scraggly black outline of our island home. I wondered if I would ever see her coastline again. Or if I would ever want to after the ruin had its ways.

“How many of them made it, papa?” Giulia asked. “How many of them got off the island?”

I shook my head, unable or unwilling to speculate. I had hoped all but knew this wasn’t the truth. My cautious optimism was one of the few reasons her mother, Adara, had married me in the first place. I didn’t wear the constant scowl of someone staring into the sun like other men on the island. There is a spark in you that has yet to catch flame, she told me once. I always liked that particular memory and it was one I thought of often as we sailed to wherever.

“Here,” I said, cutting a slice of papaya. “Eat. We will need our strength in the morning and there’s not much to keep us.”

She took the fruit from my fingers and bit into it gingerly, still afraid the blackness had left the island and somehow traveled with our supplies. She looked up at me, juice running down her chin, and I smiled back while holding the fleshy insides of the fruit up for her to see. “No black,” she muttered.

“No. No black.”

I knew the waves farther out would get choppy, so I had fortified the sides of the boat with multiple layers of bones. I had tethered it all together with lengths of tendon and ligaments that also washed up on our shores, looking like fleshy kelp strewn across the white sands. Why these did not disintegrate like the rest of the body parts, I could not say, but I was thankful for it. Our sea-faring transport looked more like a small ship than a raft, what with its closed-in roof and high sides.

There were four oars made of pelvic bones and femurs, a sail-less mast of sixteen incomplete vertebrae tied together and reaching up to the gods that created them, a rudder made of whale fins (a fortuitous surprise as they were the only ones that washed ashore), the transom and forward pulpits made of a small army of ribcages.

We had space to sleep without fear of being splashed on, but I worried whether we would survive our first storm. Did the rain also have the same kind of melting effect on the human body as the ocean? I couldn’t be sure and didn’t want to take the chance, so a tiny, windowless, cabin was built in the middle of the deck, large enough to fit us both. Giulia slept peaceful and curled up in my arms.

It took her hours to fall asleep and I…well, I lay awake most nights, body tensed and taut, ready to fight whatever wave tried to overtake us, ready to lift her high above my head if the ocean found its way into our walled-off cabin. I hoped that the gentle rocking of the boat would lull me to sleep, that the motion would cocoon me into slumber, but it only served to heighten my nervousness. They were small waves, but how much damage would they do if they spilled over into our ship? Would we melt away in slow screams? This was the thought that kept me from falling hard into dreams. Death did not scare me, but I was terrified of a painful death. I was terrified of having my skin sloughed off by some great unknown with only my bones to wash up on a shore where I remained unknown. No one to mourn my passing, no one to sing a hymn in my memory. I know not why, but it feels important that I be remembered long after my body decays. I’ve done nothing to earn this remembrance, it is simply an idea that vibrates deep within me.

We had been out to sea for several days, had gotten into a routine. Guilia would fix breakfast in the morning before waking me. She would take the first shift of ridding the deck of water that had washed over the railing while I struggled to wake up. Today, however, there was something in her voice that shook me to my core. Something inhuman, cold.

“Papa! The sun!” Giulia shouted from the deck of the boat. I untangled myself from the blanket and left the dark of the cabin to squint out into the daylight.

“Come away from the railing, child. You’re far too close,” I said, hobbling across the awkward deck, my body protesting the aches and soreness of an awkward sleep. She didn’t move, but simply pointed out to the sunrise. A haze of yellowish green sat atop the ocean like a layer of foam. It turned the birthing sunlight a sickly color, made the day look nauseous and foul. Not quite the color of sky before a storm, but something else.

“It’s Elena Leranjo,” she said, sleepily, as if in a daze.

“How do you know that name, Giulia? Where have you heard it before?”

She shrugged, never taking her eyes off the horizon. “But can’t you smell it?”

I wrapped my hands around her chest and held her against my legs, sniffing the air. I smelled the static of coming thunder. I smelled the brine of ocean and the sweetness of deep ocean fish. I smelled other, unnamable scents that came on the breeze and then, as a landmass came slowly into view, I could smell the faintest hint of lilac. I inhaled over and over, hoping I had deluded myself into believing the fragrance was there, but it permeated, soaked through until it was the only thing I could smell. Giulia smiled up at me, but I could not return the sentiment.

The morning was long. We continued to drift, almost purposefully, towards the landmass as it seemed to grow larger on the horizon. We could make out its shape, see its colors. It had no trees, sparse vegetation jutting out from its rocky edges, but was like a large building set out to sea. Tall, brick walls lined its beaches and stretched their arm-like parapets up to the heavens. No birds circled it overhead; none sat perched along the wall’s edges. No movement could be seen from the deck of our boat. I wondered what lay beyond the gates of this floating city, this marvel the fishermen used to speak of so often. As I’ve said, I’m not a man of superstition and blamed this vision on hunger, a possible mirage.

By high noon, we were close enough to swim to its shores, but knew better. We took our lunch on the deck, me slicing up fruit for the both of us as she tore bits of bread into pieces. We stared at the edifice, now blocking the horizon, the sun beating down on its browning façade from behind us, illuminating the cracks and the grouting. It was quite beautiful once one got up close to it.

By mid-afternoon, I realized I’d been wrong about there being no vegetation. What I’d believed to be cracks in the surface of the walls were actually lengths of leaf-less vines snaking upwards to the ramparts above. It was as if a great castle had come under the ruin of the world, succumbed completely and totally to nature. Its walls, easily hundreds of feet tall, were choked by the slithering vines, covered in them.

Beyond, the horizon remained soaked with yellowish-green fog, though it had been hidden by the castle before us. I could still smell lilac if I thought about it, but found myself too engrossed by the enormity of the island structure.

It was wondrous majesty and Giulia and I were completely spellbound. That there were stories of this place on the lips of sailors no longer surprised me. I could see how one might believe it to be a paradise, some kind of holistic kind of retreat from the world. For the briefest of moments, I thought I saw a man standing on the tallest ramparts, his clothes flapping in the wind, staring down at us until we drifted ashore. Then the sun flashed and blinded me. The man was gone when I looked again.

Our little boat washed ashore, slid up along wet ground until it stopped. I jumped off the vessel gingerly, careful to stay out of the wake of the lapping waves, and carried Giulia on my shoulders. Once we were safely out of distance, I put her down and let her walk on her own. I was too old now; I would not be able to carry her like that for much longer.

“Welcome!” a voice called out from above. We both looked up in surprise, eyes wide and mouths open, to see an elderly man standing on the outskirts of the craggy beach. He wore sun-faded khaki pants and a billowing dress shirt. In his right hand, a walking staff as tall as he was. He held his left hand out to us, as if to offer his meager strength to us both.

“Hello,” Giulia stammered. “Is this your home?”

The old man smiled and looked back over his shoulder at the huge edifice behind him. “I’m more like the caretaker,” he replied. “No one owns this particular island, and one day, I’ll be replaced by someone who will take care of it the way I have for so many years. You both look famished. Please, come eat and drink.”

Giulia and I looked at each other. I could see the hint of a smile playing at the corners of her mouth as I reached out for her hand. We walked up the beach to our host and I realized we had become part of the island’s mythology, woven into the tapestry of its legend, though we would never know to what degree.

The sand slipped and slid beneath my feet as I stared up the face of the wall, saw the bright blue of the sky for what it was: illuminating and clear, piercing and calm. We clamored up the rocky shelf and stood next to our host, who smelled like clouds, like sunshine on hung clothing. “What is this place?” I asked through short, panting breaths.

He put his free hand on my shoulder and looked me right in the eye. I believed I could see the constellations in the gleam of his retina, the North Star imprinted upon his brow, the passing of time whispering through his bushy eyebrows. “We call this place O Anjo, my friend.” He smiled and walked towards an opening in the stone wall, never motioning for us to follow, just assuming we would.

And then, I understood, but all too late.

Elena Leranjo had been a myth, a girl you one had ever known. A dream perpetuated by those in love with ideas they could never wrap their arms around.  A superstitious man’s way of explaining a grandfather’s death to his child or a mother’s way to explain the passing of a pet.

O Anjo meant “the angel.”

Elena and O Anjo sounded similar. Over the years, one had come from the other. I rolled the phrases over and over inside my head, moved my lips silently and felt the syllables dance across my tongue.

The island O Anjo.

Elena O Anjo.

Elena Leranjo,

There was no Elena; the island was O Anjo; the island was the angel; the island was death. It was so clear now that we were here, now that we heard the phrase fall like silk from the stranger’s mouth.

And yet we continued to walk, hand in hand, following our smiling host who explained in the kindest terms that this was how he received everyone that arrived and that some day, perhaps, we too would welcome strangers into the fold. His voice was that of softened fabric, of light thunderstorms in the evening, of waves gently rolling and crashing into the open arms of landmass. And we continued to walk while, outside, the yellowish-green fog slowly surrounded the island as it floated on into other currents…

*          *          *

It is said that when the village of Sao Brunois died, the smell of bones and rotted flesh smothered the crumbled, vacant streets for years after. The scent permeated what was left of the ornate homes, made them unlivable by those that found them later. Fishermen and pirates alike began to weave rumors into mythologies, mythologies into truths that were carried out to distant currents and passed onto others. Whether real or imagined, these sea-faring men claimed to have seen the lone survivor of this village, floating out on the ocean with his daughter on a boat they made of bones.

Adam “Bucho” Rodenberger is a 34 year old writer from Kansas City living in San Francisco. He holds dual Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy & Creative Writing and completed his MFA in Writing at the University of San Francisco in 2011. As of July 2013, he has been published in Number One Magazine, Alors, Et Tois?, Agua Magazine, The Red Pulp Underground, Offbeatpulp, Up The Staircase, The Gloom Cupboard, BrainBox Magazine, Cause & Effect Magazine, the Santa Clara Review, Aphelion, Glint Literary Journal, and Phoebe. He blogs at http://triphoprisy.blogspot.com.

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To dance or sleep in Buenos Aires—

either one, he said, is better than sex,

and I believed because of his expertise

in the game of backgammon. Sat between decks

of cards, he once beat a man who knew Castro.

He told me so beneath a black umbrella’s yawn

one wet October night. I believed him because he knows

the luxuries of bus tickets and backseats, Don

Juan and Madame Bovary, worn, withdrawn

from libraries. I believed when he told how he’d worn

his grandfather’s wedding band on his own

hand, told the others her name was Lolita, swore

he found her on the streets of Buenos Aires, new

and wide-eyed then, and even she’d believed him too.

Ashley Strosnider holds an MFA from the University of South Carolina, where she was a James Dickey Fellow and editor at Yemassee. She currently lives in Charleston, SC, where she works as a copyeditor and advocate for the Oxford comma. She writes reviews for The Review Review and Publishers Weekly, and her work appears or is forthcoming in decomP, Word Riot, DOGZPLOT, Unsplendid, dislocate, Fifth Wednesday, and Paper Darts.

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Scarab, hall,

ancient swamps.

A girl with dark eyes

raises her child

in the trees, second growth,

giving shade.

The railroad has passed,

the Wabash line, the post office

and store of Oaktown,

history she doesn’t know.

The box and lumber mill

have passed, crates for eggs

made from black gum

and cottonwood, steam on bolts

of wood for a day or a half,

then spun to a knife

for veneer, the waste

used to fire the boilers, also

history unknown.

The tupelo swamp

presents a frieze.  The gods

of Thebes walk in the hypostyle hall,

cypress in the wetlands

of the Cache, world

of the glacial Ohio.

A girl with dark eyes

raises her child

in second growth, emerald

and already old.

Angie Macri’s recent work appears in 32 Poems and Alaska Quarterly Review.  An Arkansas Arts Council fellow, she lives in Hot Springs and teaches in Little Rock.  She was born and raised in southern Illinois.

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Whenever she ate she talked about food,

all the unforgettable meals of her past,

with her mouth full. And he’d listen

as the food in her mouth grew smaller

and smaller, and more insignificant with each

description of some towering feast

or peerless confection of her youth. Squinting

with pleasure at all those distant pleasures,

she’d shake her lovely head as if to say: Pity,

you can’t quite see them from here. And he’d look

down at his plate, then across at her lovely head

and yearn for her eyes, which were elsewhere;

for her lips and teeth and tongue, which were

elsewhere too. And take her hands, like crumbs.

Paul Hostovsky is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Naming Names (2013, Main Street Rag). His poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net awards, the Muriel Craft Bailey Award from the Comstock Review, and numerous poetry chapbook contests. He has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. To read more of his work, visit him at www.paulhostovsky.com.

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I head first

for the scraped-clean section

where see-through houses

are being born, so like

the collapsing remnants seen

in sunset farther west,

skeletons perched on the hilltop

against a whitened heaven.

Red Sold signs mark still-vacant lots.

Morning silence sings benediction

while the steeple of the Methodist Church

holds up the sky to the east.

But then,  it is not silent, not really:

the under-thrum from the highways,

the drone of overhead passings,

the short twerps of birds.

They sing no soaring love songs

or callings out, just chirp chatter

of families around the morning table.

Ft. Worth is a distant blur and

the roofs of a recent nearby neighborhood

seem to be layered pyramids

of cast-aside dirt outside a mine or quarry.

Soon pickup trucks begin to stir

and manicured lawns wait

with word from the world sitting

there encased in dew-drenched,

plastic-covered newsprint.

Soon the bare land will be filled,

the sheared prairie gone.

But the street signs still whisper:

Scarlet Sage, Prairie Ridge,

Meadow Lark, Boxwood.

Carol Hamilton has upcoming and recent publications in Atlanta Review, New Laurel Review, Tribeca Poetry Review, Poet Lore, Green Hills Literary Lantern, U.S.1 Worksheet,  Willow Review, San Pedro River Review, The Penmen Review, Aurorean, Tar River Review, Colere, Presa, Nebo, Main Street Rag, Abbey, Hurricane Review, Illya’s Honey, Lilliput and others. She has published 16 books: children’s novels, legends and poetry, most recently, MASTER OF THEATER: PETER THE GREAT and LEXICOGRAPHY. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize.

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We imagine loneliness in the same way we imagine

death, and twice we are wrong. It is not the last flicker

going out, but the wrap of risen wind on charred wood

in the dark. Not the abandoned copper mine with

broken windows at dawn, but the boy taking a bronze

plumbing pipe to the river. Not the dog’s velvet belly,

burst open and spilling wet maggots on the train

tracks, but the tiny pliable femur bone of a mouse

found inside there. We say I feel so alone and we mean

we don’t know how to communicate. We say The dog

is dead and we mean we aren’t listening anymore.

In the growing light the boy carries his pipe to the river.

He packs it with stolen tobacco. He hides between boulders.

He has no filter, no friend meeting him. He lights it

and sucks and his own wind wraps what is inside there.

Anders Carlson-Wee was a professional rollerblader before he studied wilderness survival and started hopping freight trains to see the country. He has traveled through the forests of the South, the cornfields of the Midwest, the prairies of the West, and the blue-hued mountains of Alaska, eating food out of dumpsters and trashcans to avoid getting a job. Anders is an MFA candidate in poetry at Vanderbilt University, where he has received the graduate Topping Up Award. He is also the winner of a 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2012, New Delta Review, The Pinch, and Ninth Letter.

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I once loved a girl who tattooed four across

her back, which bared nervously but often

in the oceanic gloam of TV standby or cheap

candle’s night-light. I remember how, moist

and perspiring the cursive would shimmer,

inhale and flex and I would catch, behind her,

this artsy splendor–you are a child of the universe–

and I was flattered because this girl’s ribs

were lips spreading and teeth letting words

blow by which assured me the right to be

here. Here, as in thumbing over each line,

cupping her waist and tumbling broken-off,

clanking like a thrown down chain in a well.

Later I brushed my teeth while she washed

our waste and I saw her against the frost

of sliding glass. How she bent over and twisted

her skinny legs, scrubbing her thighs and breasts

and ass clean. I saw the tattoo again, pressing

against the glass for a moment, knowing it

would outlast me, follow her to dirt, and all

I could think about was how easily we fall

for bad poetry. No doubt the universe is

unfolding as it should. I looked away and spit

the blue-white foam, aiming it at the drain.

Sticking the bristles under the faucet, I pulled

the lever hard, watching the deluge from above,

how the pink bits and dried bony paste loosen

and spiral away, my bubbly confused mess.

Jesse Mikhail Wesso, the profoundly amateur chess player and philosopher, musician, Trekkie, and burrito connoisseur. From the sixth largest city in Illinois, which happens to lie on its sixth largest river. Usually counting quarters for cat food or doing favors for coffee. Occasionally poetry. Voted most likely to say “Help, I’m alive. Help, I’m alive” at cocktail parties. Previously published in Fifth Wednesday Journal and Bluffs Literary Magazine.

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Not wanted – weed.

Bush, tree, leafed, blooming,

thistle, burr, petals falling,

pollen, samara, catkin dangling,

spider webs, and punky wooded

long fallen trees, shredded, picked over.

Woodpecker at my side, coreopsis at my feet,

and still the fallen may well weep,

but tulips, daffodils, forget-me-nots

have not yet been forgotten

nor have the grasses stopped.

Varied green and last night’s mist,

I have been there, too,

before the dully darkened grey sky and amber walk-throughs,

have been where there were no messages,

no after dinner discussions

disparaging lonelinesses of lost afternoons,

and the inconsequential,

the innocent rainfall,

the brooding ever watchful crows.

Connections I have mulled over,

the labyrinths I have constructed,

lavender, green and yesterday’s mist

subjugated by an anger

that no mandate contains.

An early morning legacy of confusion

enumerates the hours, tallying up conclusions,

stories that do not jibe,

and after finale, abrasions, soliloquys,

a catkin’s hurried passage,

a maladapted worrisome tirade.

And it isn’t only

that I am old and, as before but more imminently, dying,

nor do stardust or angels console.

Some trees, few bushes

and all that is behind the subterfuge of weeds,

and then there is the fog that’s always changing.

More so than with my own reply,

I’m never more at ease

than with the guttural sound of bullfrogs

from a cattail hidden shore

throbbing suspended over watery surfaces,

over quotidian disconnected wayward spaces.

Frank C. Praeger is a retired research biologist who has had poetry published in various journals in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia.

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He only saw his nephew once a year. They tried to

make it good. This time he took Will to the zoo.

Inside the gate, they made their first stop at the

monkey exhibit. A woman stood next to a plaque

that named the animals inside. He pointed to her.

He said, “Female. Caucasian.” A little further on he

pointed at a boy and called out, “Adolescent male!”

At the snack bar he gave a nod to the people in front

of them in line. He whispered, “Mating couple,

likely from the lower portion of the Korean

Peninsula.” When a woman bent over to tie her

shoe, he held his hand in front of Will. He said,

“Hold on. It looks like she is going to present

herself.” A docent heard this talk. She asked, “Do

you want me to call security?”

Chad Hanson serves as Chairman of the Department of Sociology & Social Work at Casper College in Casper, Wyoming. His poems have appeared in The Fourth River, Cold Mountain Review, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, and Amoskeag among others. A recent collection of his essays, Trout Streams of the Heart, is available from the Truman State University Press (2013).

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Sarah Evans is a former journalist who is newer to creative nonfiction. She lives in Oregon and is co-editor of the online magazine Salem Is (www.salemis.org). She is a graduate of the creative writing MFA program at Pacific University.

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Lynn Veach Sadler is a former college president Dr. Lynn Veach Sadler has published, in academics, 5+ books and 72 articles and has edited 22 books/proceedings and three national journals and published a newspaper column. In creative writing, she has published 9 poetry chapbooks (another forthcoming) and 4 full-length collections (another in press), over 100 short stories, 4 novels, a novella, and a short story collection and written 41 plays. As the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet 2013-2015, she mentors student and adult poets.

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I am standing behind the 1960 Chevy Biscayne in our driveway at home. The driveway is a horseshoe shape with entrance and exit off Route 83. At the top of the horseshoe one side of the Cape Cod style house faces east. A short distance from the north east corner of the house sits a one car garage, a backboard and basketball hoop bolted above the door.  The gravel drive makes it hard to dribble, but I’ve reasoned that the odd bounces sharpen my reflexes. When I play, the ball becomes coated with an orange dust that dulls its shine, its rubber hide pitted by the sharp edges of rocks. The Chevrolet is the new car my father bought with the two thousand dollars he received as an inheritance when my grandmother died. The money came from the savings Busia accumulated selling vegetables each year at a roadside stand from late summer and into fall. Sweet corn, tomatoes, onions, green beans, potatoes, cucumbers, peppers, zucchini and pumpkins, all grown on the eighteen acres of Illinois farmland she worked with her son, my uncle.

My father has never owned a new automobile. We always rode in used cars – four door sedans that looked as if he’d bought them from Chicago gangsters — dark automobiles with rounded fenders and worn cloth seats. The Biscayne is sky blue with a white top. It’s a big car, “a boat,” my mother called it when Dad pulled into the driveway the first time. The car barely fits in the garage and he’s hung a tennis ball on a string from the rafters so that when the ball touches the window at the driver’s eyelevel he knows to stop, that the front bumper will be just a couple of inches from the studs on the wall of the garage and there’ll be the same couple of inches of clearance in the back so the door can close.

Today, “the boat,” is in the driveway in front of the garage door right below the basketball hoop and net. The car is there, but I don’t want to go in and ask Dad to move it because he’s resting in the living room in his “after work” outfit of boxer shorts, V-neck T-shirt and white socks. He’s trying to cool off, lying back on his reclining chair, newspaper over his belly, snoring away.

For some reason I have to shoot baskets and I consider working my way around the front of the car but I know when the ball comes down from a shot it will eventually hit the car’s hood and there’ll be a kettle drum thump and that will wake my father and what will happen next will not sound pretty either. My father can yell as loud as thunder. His voice can shake the earth and his bite is as bad as his bark.

But the car is there — in the way. The new car is there in the driveway in front of the garage door, under the basketball hoop.

I go in the house and find my older brother lying on his bed in our attic bedroom. The window fan is on and the warm air blows his hair back from his face as he listens to a transistor radio playing rock ‘n roll. Elvis? Bobby Rydell? Fabian? I don’t know who is singing. They all sound the same to me. I’m a couple of years away from caring about music and learning the difference between teen idol voices, of having a favorite that I’ll listen to over and over.

It’s hot in the attic; the bit of wind that comes from the fan barely gives enough of a breeze to keep us dry. We sleep on top of the sheets in summer. The chirping of crickets, the June bugs tapping the screen and the moan of cars on Route 83 all get muted into a white noise by the hum of the fan’s blades.

But there’s still some hours left before dark and I want to work on my jump shot.

“You want to play basketball?” I ask Jim.

He’s bored and sits up, then shrugs his shoulders but says, “Okay.”

I go over to the window that faces the road, that looks down on the driveway and the green oasis in the middle of the horseshoe with the big pine tree and the circle of flowers my mother waters every evening.

“The car’s in front of the garage,” I say as if I’ve just noticed.

“See if Dad will move it.”

“He’s asleep in his chair.”

My brother clicks off the radio and stands up and peers out the window. “Shit,” he hisses. Then he shrugs. “We’ll have to push it back,” he says.

After he ties his gym shoes up I follow him downstairs. My mother is in the kitchen putting dishes away and she warns us not to stay out too late when the mosquitoes will be biting. We head out the kitchen door, into the backyard and out to the car.  Now the whole car moving business has become my brother’s idea. And already he has a plan. He opens the driver’s door and slides behind the steering wheel.  My brother is fourteen and I wonder where he’s learned to step onto the clutch and shift the stick on the column into neutral. It seems that Jim is always acquiring new and useful information from out of nowhere. Does that come from age? Is he keenly observant and able to transfer what he sees into action without instruction? Or is it something he’s picked up from his friends? Since he’s started high school he’s on a faster learning curve, one I understand as little as his moodiness, his frequent need to isolate, and the preference for rock ‘n roll over listening to Cub games on the radio.

Once he has the gear shift positioned where he wants it he gets out and we both stand at the front of the car, our backs to the garage. “Okay, on three,” he leans forward with his hands on the edge of the front hood. I do the same and on his count we push. The car tires crunch on the gravel but the big monster is anchored in a shallow depression and it only moves a bit and then settles back to its original position.

“It’s not level. We’ll get it rocking and then when I tell you, push hard,” he says.

He leans into the front and it wavers slightly. He pushes again rocking it back and forth. I position myself next to him and following his lead do the same. With each push we lean in harder. I get my feet against the garage door for more leverage and this time when we rock it backwards Jim grunts, “Now!” We both lean into it and the tires crunch the gravel and then the car rolls slowly, moving back, at first with the force of our bodies against the grill and then, as if it is a real boat, it’s launched and buoyant and caught in the current that takes it away from the dock.

“Shit. Shit,” Jim says and it takes me a moment to register that we are no longer pushing, that the gravel bottom does not hold the car. The Chevy moves on its own. We both race around to the back and try to grab onto the fins winged over the tail lights to stop it, but it’s too heavy and it rolls slow and steady dragging my brother on one side, me on the other, our canvas shoes grinding on the rocky bed.

The car moves straight back and not along the curve of the drive and out to the highway. But that’s only a slightly better fate because it’s cutting over the curved edge of the drive and into the lilac bushes that border the north end. The car runs into and half over the two thick bushes and then stops, the long leafy stalks bent and caught under the back bumper.

Jim surveys the damage and the anchored Biscayne. “Crap.”

We get behind it and try to work it forward. The back end is in the thick stalks of the bush and when we make our way into position mosquitoes appear from among the branches and leaves and we slap at our arms then try to push, slap again and push again. It’s no use.

“This is not good,” Jim says. He leans his back against the driver’s door and bends over to think. When it comes to telling Dad we’ve done something foolish neither of us has been blessed with brilliance. If lucky we get off with a muttered epitaph that questions our origins and reasoning powers, if unlucky we can end up first with a good lecture punctuated with obscenities and then a banishment until a punishment can be determined. Up until a few months ago it might have ended with a beating, us lying across one of the twin beds and our father scourging us with his leather belt. For some reason those have stopped. Perhaps he’s figured we’ve outgrown that kind of punishment, or that it really didn’t do any good. As experience has shown we have continued doing more foolish things. Or maybe he stopped using the strap because we hadn’t done anything to push him over the edge – like sending the car off the driveway and into the lilac bushes.

We walk around the boat as if there might be an answer on the other side. It doesn’t look so bad from the passenger side because of the turn of the driveway and how the lilac bushes are planted on the curve so that you have to be on the driver’s side to see how much of them have been crushed.  From the house it appears that the car’s backside merely hangs over the edge of the driveway and that the lilacs are snug on the back fin. But of course Dad wouldn’t slide into the car from the passenger’s side. He’d come around and there is no hiding the mess there.

“Well, we might as well get it over with,” Jim says and starts toward the back door.  I follow him, knowing we are in this one together and though he is the one who put the car in neutral, I am the one who really wanted it moved. A guilt and punishment shared is better than those suffered alone.

I follow my brother into the house and stand behind him in the living room where he stops next to the recliner where our father sleeps.  Head tilted back, mouth half open, eyes closed, the newspaper draped across his stomach, he snores softly, a wispy snort on the intake of breath. His white T-shirt holds a constellation of black dots where the welding sparks from the Harvester Plant found their way under the mask and into his overalls at work. From under the bottom edge of the paper the hem of his striped boxers stop at mid-thigh and from there his pale legs are bare down to the white crew socks at his ankles. My father is not a tall man, but he’s solid and strong and we are ever reminded that he once boxed while in the army. He has a lightning fast jab that’ll sting an arm or backside when used open-handed. Still a confession has to be made. For Dad to discover the problem later is to run a greater risk. It’s better to wake him and tell him now. It’s better not to appear as if we’re hiding anything. And it’s better to face immediate consequences, to get it over with.

I know all this, but it is my brother who acts on the knowledge. I curse our circumstance but admire his courage as he edges closer to the chair, as he quietly says, “Dad,” like a child seeking comfort during the thunder storm that has kept him awake.  At a time like this I wish I could make my own voice so small and perfect.

Larry Starzec’s essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in dozens of magazines including: Arkansas Review, Cottonwood Magazine, The Cream City Review, and Kansas Quarterly among others. His essay “In this Neighborhood, of this Earth,” was listed as a notable selection in Best American Essays, 2005. He holds an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College and teaches at the College of Lake County in Grayslake, IL.

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