WINTER 2015

“Hey there, whoa!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s a better pace.  Whew.  You go by ‘Al’?  That your handle?”

“You must excuse me.”

“For what?  What’d you do?”

“I have no wish to be rude.”

“Well, that’s dandy.  Not like I’d notice anyhow.  So, look, Al. . . .  Can we slow down a bit more?”

“I do not know you, sir.”

“Thomas P. McClusky.  Now you do, and happy you will come to be that you made the acquaintance of Thomas P. McClusky.”

“I’m afraid I have no time to speak today.  Perhaps you could talk to my wife.  Back there.  Farringford.”

“Your wife?  She handle your business?  Anyhow, I’ve found it best not to involve third parties.  Complicates things.  Makes it problematic when it comes to exit strategies, I’ve found.  Not that I’m sure your wife isn’t a doozie – in all ways, business too.  I’ve seen ladies who are top notch at business, you know.  But I find it best, as I say, to go straight to the main man, keep it mano a mano.”

“I must be off.”

“Hold your horses.  Give me thirty seconds.  I can feel it in my bones that you’ll be happy you did.  I can tell just by looking at you, even with that Dracula coat and shawl thing on.”

“Dracula?”

“Ah, before your time – or after – but pay that no never mind.  Here’s my question to you:  are you interested in making money?”

“That’s impertinent, sir!”

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’”

“My servants will eject you, sir, by force.”

“Yeah, sure.  But back to money.  You got a swell layout here, but I know you could use a little extra – or a lot extra, if you take my meaning – just to spruce things up a bit, get some doo-dads for the little woman.  Am I right or am I right? ”

“No.”

“What about some well-earned rest?  I admit it doesn’t look like you’re doing all that much, putting in the hours wandering about this god-forsaken island.  But I know appearances can be misleading and that you are hoping for a nice cushy retirement, some gin rummy with Mrs. T and naps in the afternoon.”

“No.”

“Oh, wasn’t it you who wrote, “Let’s harken what the inner spirit sings, ‘There is no joy but calm!’ Why should I toil, who am the roof and crown of things.  Oh rest ye, brother mariners” – and so forth.  So, rest ye, Al Tennyson!”

“You got the meter wrong – and everything else.  In any case, the speakers are cowardly, lotos-eating mariners.”

“Drugged-up, huh?  You got anything like that around?  Guess not.  But don’t tell me you don’t, down deep in your singing inner spirit, long for the good life and for the money it’d take to land it for you.  Right?”

“I have no interest in lucre or the sloth you say it would buy.”

“You think that, but was it you that also wrote, ‘It little profits that an idle king’? Huh?”

“Yes, I wrote that.  “By this still hearth, among these barren crags.”

“Right.  Good stuff.  I know a song-writer might be able to do something with that.  But back to “little profits.” That’s the key, by damn, little profits, very little.  You want real money, Alf, I know you do.  Get yourself off these barren crags, for one thing.”

“You mystify me, and I must now leave.  Please remove your hand.”

“Just a friendly gesture, buddy – trying to keep you from making the mistake of your life.  But I can see you aren’t fully persuaded yet, leaning but not quite there.  So OK, here it is.  You’re poet laureate, am I right?  Can’t be too many of those around, and I’m told you have a pretty good following as it is, even before I work my potent magic – in The United States of America, I mean.”

“Are you sane?”

“Sane as a hat-stand, certified, Laureate o’ mine.  So, let me lay it out for you.  A speaking tour, but that’s just the beginning.”

————

“No answer, PL?  OK, I’ll walk along with you but not so fast.  Where’s the fire, huh?”

————

“OK, Al, The idea is to hit the ground running, minute you’re off the boat.  That’s the name of the game.”

“What game?”

“Now you got it, Al.  You’re thinking out of the box.  I knew it the minute I saw you, ‘There’s an unorthodox business opportunity ready to bloom,’ I said.”

“How did you get here?”

“You mean. . . ?  How did I get here on The White Island?”

“It’s the Isle of Wight.”

“Sure it is.  Or did you mean, ‘How did I come to be here at all?’  I’m wondering, Al, whether your question is directed at the physical or the metaphysical?”

“Pardon me?”

“Glad to.  Did you mean something airy-fairy or nuts and bolts?  Were you wondering  how we came to be at all, or how I, Thomas P. McClusky, got made by my Mommy and Pop, one mid-October evening, counting backwards by 9, you know.”

“No!  Indecency is anathema to me.”

“That’s just one more way we’re joined at the hip.  Anathema to me too, to the max.”

“Right, Al.  I take it your silence indicates that we’re on the same page, ready to put our heads together and hatch this plan that’ll get you right off the charts guaranteed.  No more nickel and dime stuff, depending on book sales – poetry too.  Penny ante.  Through with that, right?  With my help, you can jockey for a top position in real markets.  As you say in another of your poems,  “Every door is barr’d with gold, and opens but to golden keys.’  That hits the nail right on the noggin.

“I did not mean to endorse greed and acquisitiveness, man, just the opposite.”

“And I agree, Al, with you all the way, step-by-step, though we’re taking them at a pretty hefty pace and I wonder if we couldn’t maybe. . . .”

“You are free to go any time.”

“Wouldn’t think of abandoning you, nossiree.  One thing they say about Thomas P. McCluskey:  he’ll stick to you like glue, loyal as a dog or parrot or your wife, the ravishing Mrs. T.  You know what they say about friends and loyalty.  You know that one?  Friends are like bum cheeks – shit comes between them but they stick together.”

“Sir, I. . . .”

“You laughing there, Al?  Knew I could get through to you, establish some real rapport.  Didn’t think it’d be over shit, but you never know.  Keep your options open, right?”

“OK, Laureate, you mull that over.  Meanwhile, let me run this up the flagpole, Al, see if you or your people salute.  The speaking tour is the set-up, only the set-up.  First the East, the proven territories – Catskill resorts, Wheeling, Akron, Gatlinburg.  Then swing West to Saint Looie, Dodge City, Tombstone, Leadville – the real money towns.

“How’s it sound so far?  You think we’re leveraging our synergies?”

“I have a walking stick, sir.  One more minute of this and I’ll not answer for how I may be driven to use it on your person.”

“You’d hit me?  Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, I’ll tell you that much.  I can only say I meant you no offense at all, you or your missus or anybody else.  I’m an honest man with a very sick wife and little girl, out to do what I can in this world to bring harmless pleasure to some and no pain at all to the rest.  But why don’t you go ahead and beat me.  I mean, why not?”

“Oh, sir, I did not seriously intend assault.  It’s just that you are so importunate and have me so confused.  Please do not weep.  I will listen calmly to your schemes, I do assure you.”

“Now we’re cookin’ with gas.  As I say, Al, the tour’s only the hook.  What really counts are – you ready for this? – endorsements!  Huh?  Yeah?  Endorsements!”

“What?”

“You know, The Laureate’s Luncheon Meats, Tennyson’s Toothpaste, Alf’s Alcohol Rub – that sort of thing.  Sky’s the limit.”

“Oh my.”

“But here’s where my experience comes into play, my experience and, I will not hesitate to add, my originality.  Thomas P. McCluskey isn’t called the wealthiest man East of Dubuque for nothing.”

“Are you?”

“Yes indeed.  Am I what?”

“The wealthiest man east of Dubuque.”

“I’ll not lie to you, not too often, har har, but no, I am not.  What I said is true, though:  I am CALLED that.”

“And it doesn’t take a soothsayer to imagine who does the calling, right Thomas P. McCluskey?”

“You got me, sharpie.  We’re going to hit it off right down the line.  Say, you got a fine speaking voice, if a little rumbly.  Do you sing?”

“No.”

“Play guitar?”

“No.”

“Do impressions?”

“Never.”

“Well, I’m not apple-polisher, Alf, and I can see I got my work cut out for me, but I’m not one to give up.”

“Learn that art.”

“Learn what art?”

“The art of giving up.”

“I can see you’re one tough cookie, either that or playing hard to get.  I’ll tell you what, I see the little woman approaching across the fields there.  I take it that’s Mrs. T, right, as I’d be the last to imagine anything unfitting, something on the side for the Laureate, ya know, nudge-nudge.  I’ll lay out the whole scheme for her.”

“You come within twenty meters of her and I’ll throw you off the nearest crag.”

“Oh please, my friend, I meant nothing by it.”

“And that sniveling act won’t work again.”

“That silence you?  Are you mute, temporarily at least?  Tell me, then, just how much money do you suppose this might bring?  Give me two separate figures, one for the readings and the other for readings plus endorsements plus impersonations.  I do a fine Prince Albert.  But I draw the fucking line at guitars.”

James R. Kincaid is an English Professor masquerading as an author (or the other way around). He’s published two novels  (Lost and A History of the African-American People by Strom Thurmond — with Percival Everett). He is also the author of a couple dozen short stories, and ever so many nonfiction articles, reviews, and books, including long studies of Dickens, Trollope, and Tennyson, along with two books on  Victorian and modern eroticizing of children: Child-Loving and Erotic Innocence.  Kincaid has taught at Ohio State, Colorado, Berkeley, USC, and is now at Pitt.  Contact him through email at kincaid@usc.edu–or Jim Kincaid on Facebook.

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On a Sunday morning in July, nine-year-old Mark Slate watched his father from the back seat of their equally-old, light blue 1966 Ambassador. After letting in his wife, Mark’s father slid behind the wheel, turned over the engine and gave it the gas, driving the Slate family into their first vacation.

Mr. Slate motored along with his right arm slung over the back of the seat behind Mrs. Slate, tapping his hand to the rhythm of the swing songs and crooners on the radio. Even so, Mark didn’t ask any questions. He knew they were driving to Tucson because of something to do with his father’s job as the manager of the meat department for a supermarket. The plan was for Mr. Slate to work Monday through Wednesday and then for the family to continue their vacation until the following Sunday morning, when they would get back in the Ambassador and return to their home in Escondido, California.

All the windows were rolled down and music coursed out of the radio and up into the sprawling sky. Perhaps it was naïve optimism, or maybe it was just the plain-old human knack for denial, but a squall of possibility seemed to be tossing itself around inside the car. Although the wind prevented Mark from hearing what his parents said, he was happy to see them talking, and even smiling at each other.

Thinking it might be safe, Mark leaned forward against the front seat. “Are we going to Vegas, too?”

“No, we are not going to Las Vegas,” said his mother. She turned to Mr. Slate. “Lou, I don’t want you filling his head with your silly, get-rich-quick schemes.”

“It’s not a scheme, Lil.”

Mrs. Slate shifted to the far end of the seat. “You know I could brush up on my bookkeeping skills and get a part-time job for extra money. I could work when Mark’s at school.”

“No wife of mine is going to work.”

“But I was working when you met me.”

“Yeah, working on trapping a husband.”

Mrs. Slate lit a cigarette. The smoke curled for a brief moment before the wind sucked it away. “Maybe you’re just afraid I’ll meet someone who doesn’t stuff sausages for a living.”

Mark saw that he should have kept his mouth shut about Vegas. He slumped back onto the seat behind his father and leaned his head on the door with his eyes closed. The wind filled his ears and mind as they propelled forward to their vacation destination

Early on Monday morning, Mr. Slate left for work with a slam of the door. After Mrs. Slate finished putting on her face and getting dressed, she and Mark headed to a five and dime store, where Mark hounded her until she gave in and bought him a raft to use in the motel’s pool. He wanted a scuba mask and snorkel too, but she told him that his father had only given her five dollars in spending money and she needed nail polish and a magazine to read.

After lunch, Mark floated on his raft, while his mother relaxed in her bikini, smoking cigarettes, reading her new fashion magazine and staring up into the fronds of the palm trees. The songs flowing out of the transistor radio and the growing pile of cigarette butts in the ashtray next to Mrs. Slate marked the afternoon’s dissolution. Every so often, Mark asked his mother to join him in the water or to play gin rummy, but she always shook her head no and finally told him to leave her in peace already, that she had to finish her nails and she wondered why she wasted good money on that raft if he wasn’t going to use it.

Late in the day, Mark lay on his back with his head hanging over the edge of the pool. He had just realized that he had forgotten to feed his two goldfish before leaving for Tucson and was wondering if he would find them floating on top of the water, as had happened last winter when he and his mother had suddenly stayed with Aunt Betty for a week.

“Lil, what’s the problem? Where’s my gin and tonic?”

Keeping low, Mark rolled onto his stomach. With his head on his forearms, he watched his parents sideways through squinted eyes.

Mrs. Slate turned a few pages of her magazine. “How time flies when you’re having so much fun on vacation.” She rose and slipped into her robe and sandals.

Mr. Slate tossed his stained and wilted butcher’s apron toward his wife, but she stepped back and let the apron fall to the ground. “I need it clean for tomorrow.” Mrs. Slate picked it up with the tips of her thumb and index finger and held it away from her body as she headed toward the room.

Mark wasn’t sure if his father noticed him. He watched him drop into a lounge chair and rub the back of his neck for a while.

“Sit up, kid.”

Mark sat up.

“And look at me when I’m talking to you.”

Mark looked up at his father.

“Tell me what you did today.”

“I was in the pool. Mom bought me a raft.”

“Did you have fun?”

“I guess.”

“You better have fun. This is your vacation.”

Mrs. Slate returned, handed her husband his drink and sat down with her own.

“Mark told me you were out spending money today.”

“Lou, please, I bought him a raft. He has to have something to do all day besides pester me.”

“Did you buy anything else?”

“A bottle of nail polish.”

“What for? You have a date?”

“Yeah, didn’t I tell you? With the man in the room next door.”

Mr. Slate lit a cigarette. As he exhaled, he tilted his head back and pointed his cigarette at Mrs. Slate. “You’re a real card, Lil. But someday the joke’ll be on you. You know that, don’t you?”

Tuesday frittered itself away much the same as Monday. After dinner, Mrs. Slate asked her husband for money so she could buy tonic water and limes at the corner store down the street. He wanted her to take Mark, but she said he had been in her hair all day long. Mr. Slate pointed out that he had been at work all day, but relented as long as she was back in half an hour. When Mrs. Slate opened the door to leave, he looked at his watch and announced the time. She didn’t wait to hear her return deadline.

Mr. Slate picked up his cigarettes, but the pack was empty. He crumpled it into a ball and tossed it toward Mark, hitting him on the shoulder. “Kid, go get me a pack of cigarettes.”

He gave his son some change and Mark sprinted down to the vending machine in the motel lobby. He had a moment of panic that he had pulled the wrong knob and would have to explain to his father, but the familiar maroon pack fell into the trough. He scooped it up, dashed back to the room and handed the cigarettes to his father.

Mr. Slate slapped the pack against the side of his hand so that a few cigarettes peeked from the opening. He pulled out one and again slapped the pack, forcing the remaining cigarettes back into their places. “Bring me those matches, kid.”

As he fetched the matches, Mark looked at his father’s book on the bed. It was open to a page with a black and white photograph of a man’s hand holding five playing cards.

Mr. Slate thumped on the book. “This is the bible on gambling. Like I told you last week, when we go to Vegas, I’ll show you how to make the big money.” He lit his cigarette and dropped the match into an ashtray. “But from now on, let’s keep our plans about Vegas between you and me. Your mother doesn’t know how to think like a man.”

Mark was relieved that his father let him off the hook. It made him want to prove that he wasn’t a mama’s boy. “Mom said that she should’ve gotten a dog instead of getting married.”

Mr. Slate looked up from his book. “She said that to you?”

Mark kept his eyes focused on the one-eyed jack of hearts in the photograph.

“No, I just heard her say it.”

“To who?”

“Aunt Betty.”

“Is that so? And what did Aunt Betty say?”

“She said not a dog, but a cat. Mom should have gotten a cat.”

Mr. Slate stood up and paced back and forth a few times before stopping in front of Mark. “You tell me. Would you rather be on vacation or wiping up dog shit?”

Mark thought about how he had begged his mother for a cocker spaniel, but instead ended up with goldfish.  “Vacation,” he said.

“Now you’re beginning to catch on.”

Mr. Slate began to pace again. “Take it from me, kid. Women don’t know what they’re talking about, so it’s no use paying any attention to them. You work like a dog, but they’re never happy.” He stopped pacing and looked at Mark. “If you’re not careful, you’ll be the one wearing the apron, but you won’t be stuffing any salami.”

Although Mark had some ideas, he wasn’t exactly sure what his father meant. He didn’t want to look dumb, so he didn’t say anything. His father turned back to his book and the conversation was over.

On Wednesday, Mrs. Slate and Mark took their places at the pool. Mark was sick of the pool and asked his mother when they were going to do something different. She said maybe tomorrow and added that they would see what his father said when he got back.

The potential for something different lingered like cigarette smoke in the air. Such was the power of anticipation that, at the end of the day, Mrs. Slate had Mark drag a lounge chair across the patio and next to hers, so she and Mr. Slate could sit next to each other when he returned. She also told Mark to watch the parking lot. When his father pulled in, he was to run back and tell her so she could have his gin and tonic waiting.

The vacation gods must have had a moment of temporary tenderness or insanity. When Mr. Slate arrived, Mrs. Slate handed him his drink and invited him to sit by patting on the lounge chair next to her. She raised her glass and toasted their vacation.

Mr. Slate funneled off most of his drink in one go and lit a cigarette. For a few moments no one said anything and pop music and cigarette smoke mingled peaceably in the air.

“Lil, you know I can’t stand this noise. Put on some music.”

“Mark, please find something that your father likes.”

Mark turned the radio dial until he found a station playing big band music, which is what his father played on Saturdays while working in the basement at his freelance job, hand painting signs of the weekly specials to be hung in grocery store windows.

A swing tune came on and Mrs. Slate clapper her hands and sprang up. “Oh, the lindy.  Remember this one?” She tried to pull her husband to his feet, but he jerked his arm away.

Mrs. Slate turned to her son. “Mark, come dance with me.”

“But I don’t know how to dance.”

“It’s easy. I’ll show you.”

Mark didn’t move.

“Kid, get up. Your mother wants to dance.”

Mrs. Slate showed him the steps and Mark bumbled through the song. He was embarrassed that his father saw him tripping and stepping on his mother’s feet and wondered why she had to ruin things. After it was over, his mother smiled and curtsied to him.

“The man is supposed to bow,” said Mr. Slate. He stood up. “Like this.” He bent forward at the waist and straightened, making a flourish with his arm in his wife’s direction.

“Go ahead, kid. Don’t just stand there. Bow.”

Mark bowed to his mother with a minimal flourish and sat down as a foxtrot began to play.

“Lou, they played this at our wedding.” Mrs. Slate tugged on her husband’s arm. “Please, just one dance with your wife. It’s been almost nine years.”

“I already told you, Lil. I don’t want to dance.” Mr. Slate swatted his arm to disentangle from her grip, but the heel of Mrs. Slate’s sandal caught on a crack in the cement. She twisted and fell onto her hands and knees, in a dog position.

Mark and his father watched as she sat back on her haunches, brushed away the pebbles embedded in the skin of her palm and stood up. “My mother was right. I never should have married you.”

Mr. Slate took a long drink. “Yeah, maybe you should have gotten a dog, instead.” He paused. “Or even a cat.”

Mrs. Slate stared at her husband without saying anything. Then she turned to her son. “Well, there’s no doubt that you’re your father’s son,” she said.

Mark didn’t fully understand what his mother had said, not even whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to be his “father’s son.” Because she wasn’t smiling, he decided that his mother thought it was a bad thing. But he didn’t have to respond, because she was already heading back to the room.

“Kid, turn off the radio.”

Mark switched it off and waited for further instructions.

“Don’t worry about your mother and her games. That’s just how women are. They’re never happy with what you give them. They always want more. And when it’s too late, you learn that all along, the deck was stacked against you.”

“Then what do you do?”

“Good question.” Mr. Slate took a drag off his cigarette. “If you’re smart, you’ll have a few tricks of your own up your sleeve. But sometimes, the best strategy is to cut your losses and get out of the game.”

The smoke from Mr. Slate’s cigarette rose and leveled off evenly, as if being pressed down by a superhuman force.

“A man has to be in control. And that means having a plan.” Mr. Slate took another drag off his cigarette and exhaled. “Are you with me, kid?”

Mark nodded. “I need a plan.”

Mr. Slate threw his head back and barked out a laugh. “You’re learning,” he said. Then he shook the ice cubes at the bottom of the glass and with a twist of his forearm, flung them like dice across the cement between himself and his son.

On Thursday morning, Mrs. Slate shook Mark awake and told him that his father said they were leaving. When Mark asked where they were going, she said to ask his father.

Back in the Ambassador, Mr. Slate sat with his left arm leaning on the driver’s door and his right hand holding the steering wheel at the twelve o’clock position. He kept his eyes on the road and his foot pressed on the gas pedal. Hot winds eddied between him and his wife, who had her elbow propped on the passenger’s door and her head in her hand. She wore sunglasses and a kerchief over her hair and seemed to be searching amidst the flotsam and jetsam on the shoulder of the road for something she had lost on the way to Tucson.

Mark lay on the back seat with the top of his head pressed against the door, one foot on the seat and the other on the floor. He alternated between staring at the unchanging blue sky and watching the ever-changing shapes on the backs of his eyelids. He imagined his father pulling into their driveway, cutting the engine and each of them shooting out of a separate door of the Ambassador. The Slate family vacation wouldn’t be over soon enough.

Mark’s boredom fed his hunger, but he knew there was no point in asking about lunch. They wouldn’t eat until his father said so. When the sun was at its most unbearable, Mr. Slate said so by pulling into a truck stop, where they ordered sandwiches and set to eating in silence. Afterwards, Mr. Slate leaned back on his side of the booth, smoking a cigarette and staring into space. Mrs. Slate sat on her side doing the same and Mark sprawled next to her, picking at a corner of drink-splattered wallpaper that curled away from the wall.

After Mr. Slate sucked one last drag off his cigarette, he jammed it into the ashtray and slid out of the booth. Mrs. Slate asked where he was going and he told her he needed something in the car. She asked him what, but he turned away without answering. Mrs. Slate held up the check and called out that she didn’t have enough money to pay, but Mr. Slate waved his arm and said he’d take care of it when he got back.

Mark wanted to go with his father, but his mother told him to sit still. When she reached for her cigarette resting in the ashtray, he clamped both his hands around her wrist so that she couldn’t bring it to her lips.

“Mark, let go.” Mrs. Slate pushed at him with her arm as if to fling her son off her, but he held on. “You’re hurting me.”

Mark released his mother’s arm and thrust it away, then fell back into his corner. “Why do I have to stay here with you? I want to go with Dad.” He began to twist his foot back and forth, thudding it against the wall.

“Stop it, Mark,” said his mother.

Mr. Slate returned and spread out a roadmap on the table.

“Knock it off, kid.”

“So, you’re lost,” said Mrs. Slate.

“No, Lil, I’m not lost.”

“Then why are you looking at the map?”

Without looking up, Mr. Slate said, “There’s been a change of plans.” He moved his finger across the map and tapped on a city in Nevada. “We’re going to Las Vegas.”

“You’ve got to be kidding, Lou. We don’t have that kind of money.”

“That’s why we’re going.”

Mrs. Slate tapped the ash off her cigarette, lifted it to her lips and took a deep drag. “No. I refuse to be part of your ridiculous scheme,” she said, exhaling smoke and words together.

Mr. Slate refolded the map without a single mistake before he stood up and said, “I already told you, it’s not a scheme, Lil.” Then he walked away.

Mark leaned into his mother. “Where’s Dad going? Is he going to Vegas?”

Mrs. Slate didn’t respond and Mark pulled on her arm. “Mom, I want to go with Dad.”

“Sit still, Mark. Your father’s not going anywhere. He’s just bluffing. He hasn’t even paid the check yet.” As she picked up the check and held it out as proof, Mrs. Slate looked over her shoulder to the windows, which faced the parking lot. Mark also looked, just in time to see his father approaching the Ambassador.

He jumped up and pointed. “Dad’s going. He’s going to Vegas.” Mark and his mother scuttled outside, into the heat and diesel fumes.

The parking spot was empty, except for a mound of cigarette butts where someone had dumped the contents of their ashtray. Mark looked at his mother. Mrs. Slate put her hand to her forehead and scanned the parking lot for the Ambassador. She looked as if she were saluting.

“I want to go with Dad, to Vegas.”

Mrs. Slate lit a cigarette and looked down at her son. She exhaled out of one side of her mouth, away from him, but didn’t say anything. Mark watched as the smoke streamed purposefully, before it abruptly, even viciously, turned back on itself, as if it had nowhere to go.

Mary Moycik is a former attorney.  In her next life, she hopes to be a dancer and in the one after that, a veterinarian.  Whatever she is, she hopes to make people laugh.  She has published in J Journal, Bacopa Literary Review, and Counterexample Poetics.

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So it’s not like we kidnapped her exactly.

It was the pitch of night, and we finished a joint, then got ourselves organized. Paddles, life vests. Then we canoed to the far end of Lake Travis, almost.

My shoulders ache, we said.

My hands are blistered, we said.

My arms are dead, we said.

We leaned into the night to smoke a bowl, wondering why we’d been so gung-ho to volunteer for this little mission. Waves lapped at the fiberglass hull.  Lightning strobed in the distance. We clung to the gunwales, hoping we still remembered how to swim.

We needed a new boat, and lucky for us, we found one tied to the first dock we investigated. It sparkled and shimmered in our flashlight glow. No one was using it. There was plenty of room. The Evinrude purred when we hit the ignition, and we gunned it across the lake, then down the swollen Colorado. The night felt soft against our stubbled faces.

We went all the way into the city, past Loop 360 and MoPac and Lamar. We followed the river till we hit (almost literally) the First Street bridge, then we motored on down into SoCo. The streets were like canals. We took it slow, slaloming through jetsam and flotsam. Not just tree branches and old tires, but acoustic guitars by the dozens, an accordion, a complete drum kit. The thick air smelled dank and murky. Frogs croaked, cicadas droned.

It took a while to find Jerry’s place, though we’d been there a thousand times. Things looked different in the dark, in a flood. The house was up a little hill, so we landed the boat and hoofed it. The door was locked. We rang the bell, but Luisa didn’t answer. Still, we knew she was home because her tears were streaming beneath the door. If this went on, the city would be completely underwater by morning. So we did what had to be done, then took her down to the boat.

We didn’t waste any time getting back. Of course, it wasn’t easy to keep Luisa, or ourselves, in the boat, the way she lurched and lunged, despite all the rope. We were lousy with knots. When she started biting, we gagged her with a bandana, then cut the engine long enough to light a spliff. But the current was strong, so we only got in a toke or two before we had to fire the Evinrude up again. Somehow we made it back without anyone drowning.

Even if maybe we wouldn’t come off like heroes, we had to do something. The storms had raged for the better part of a week, with thunder and lightning and torrential rain, high winds and flash-floods and tornadoes. And on our week off! Now the rain had stopped, but the floodwaters weren’t receding. Just the opposite: they were still rising!

Maybe we’re hallucinating, we said.

Not unless this ganja’s laced, we said.

Then what’s going on? we said.

We mulled on it over bong hits. We puzzled as we munched Zingers and drank spiked coffee. We picked Jerry’s brain, but that got us nowhere, since he sat in the corner, flipping playing cards at the trash can. A steady herb diet seemed to bring him clarity: his eyes brightened and his face relaxed. Still, the mumbled responses he offered were mostly incoherent. He was hung up on his lady, while we were stuck on the weather. We pondered and brooded, stuffing Ding Dongs into our maws. Then, in the middle of the night, after smoking a giant spliff of Mexican Haze, it hit us.

It’s a false dichotomy, we said.

Floods and tears, we said.

We have to get them back together, we said.

Three of us volunteered. We wanted what was best for everyone. Plus, we hadn’t been canoeing since we were kids.

Jerry and Luisa weren’t exactly ecstatic to see each other. We hadn’t expected that. It caught us off-guard. Luisa was subdued for a while, probably because, when the gag didn’t calm her down, one of us shucked his t-shirt and tied it over her head as a blindfold. She freaked out at first, growling and clawing at our faces, but it was for her own good. And look: it worked! At least, until we took it off. Of course, the light was dim, so her eyes had to adjust. Lightning knocked the power out, then the generator ran out of gas, so we were down to candles. But soon as she spotted Jerry, all hell broke loose.

Dirty, cheating bastard! she yelled.

Then she went after him. We weren’t entirely sure how she freed her hands, which had been bound with ropes. Maybe we should’ve used duck tape. Luckily, we didn’t wait around to find out what she had in mind for Jerry. We subdued her with packing tape we found above the refrigerator, stuffing a sock in her mouth to keep her from shrieking threats and obscenities.

Jerry corralled us hastily in the kitchen. One of us stood watch over Luisa from the doorway, just in case.

What the hell is she doing here? he asked.

Surprised? we said.

Grateful? we said.

Impressed? we said.

Lemme get this straight, Jerry said, rubbing his eyes in the yellow candle-flame flicker. You kidnapped my wife?

That wasn’t what had happened at all, not exactly, and we told him so. We reminded him about his so-called infidelity and Luisa’s heartbreak and the floods that were inundating the city. We explained about the tears running like a river from beneath his front door. As we passed around a fat spliff, we suggested that he might’ve misjudged our character.

We’ve got moxie, we said.

Guts, we said.

Gusto, we said.

We took long tokes, exchanging half-smiles.

Jerry rubbed his temples and frowned. What you are, he said, is a bunch of fucking idiots.

We were hanging out in the living room, sprawling on old sofas and easy chairs, taking bong hits and munching Twinkies. Maybe we weren’t soaked to the skin anymore, but dampness clung to us like a bad memory. Our keys rattled on carabiners clipped to the belt loops of our cut-off jeans. We adjusted our cycling caps and pawed at our wet raglan-sleeved t-shirts. Our tattoos rippled in the bad lighting. Someone pulled off his retro running shoes and wrung out his socks on the warped wood floors.

We were loopy and laughing, ribbing the new guy, when Jerry tromped through the door. He sported a torn poncho and carried a fishing pole. He looked like a hobo on hard times.

Aren’t you supposed to be in Hawaii? we wondered.

He nodded, trudging across the room and plopping down onto a sagging love seat. Maui, he said.

We held our breath, and not just because we’d taken another huge bong hit. The Ho Ho’s, we noticed, were already running low.

Then what are you doing here? we asked.

It took Jerry a long time to answer. The herb and patchouli mingled with the mildewed rugs. Someone mixed up chocolate milkshakes in a blender that dated from long before any of us were born. We began to crave big, greasy cheeseburgers.

Laying low, was all Jerry would say for a while.

We let it ride. It was really none of our business. After all, it was Jerry’s cabin, so he could come and go as he pleased and expect not to be hassled, never mind he was letting us use it for the week while he and Luisa celebrated their anniversary in Maui. Plus, Jerry was our boss at The Betterday Café, where we made espressos and brought enlightenment to the seething hordes. There was plenty of room at the cabin for one more. Plenty of ganja, too, and if it happened to run out, Jerry would have more. He always did. Anyway, when he was ready to talk, we’d be there to listen.

He didn’t say peep until after the fresh-baked space cakes.

Remember that cute blonde I had in last week? he asked.

Singer-songwriter chick? we said.

Katrina? we said.

Christina? we said.

Something like that. So Luisa was driving by right when I was walking the girl out the door. She can be like that sometimes.

Hot-blooded? we said.

Jealous? we said.

Possessive? we said.

Jerry’s cackle drowned out the scratchy Stevie Ray Vaughn record spinning on the vintage hand-cranked turntable. All of the above, he said. Y’all know what that girl was like, flirty and everything, and I’m not saying I minded it exactly. But it’s not like she wasn’t carrying a guitar case, right?

So what happened? we asked.

That’s just it, he said. I can’t say exactly. Soon as I stepped through the door, Luisa jumped down my throat, calling me a liar and a cheater and a bunch of other things in Spanish, just screaming and yelling and flailing at me with all kinds of sloppy slaps and punches. Took me a minute, but I caught the gist and explained about our new acoustic corner and so on, but Luisa wouldn’t have it. Said she knew I was two-timing her and she’d make me pay for it.

What does that mean? we said.

Pay how? we said.

What could she do? we said.

Jerry swallowed a chuckle, then smoked a bowl, listening to SRV wail. When the pipe was empty and the song was over, he said, Luisa’s from a tight-knit family. Old school Tejano, if you catch my drift.

We wrestled with the idea for a moment.

We don’t get it, we admitted.

He puckered in disgust. Her brothers, he said. That’s why I came out here. They’re probably looking for me as we speak. A score to settle. That’s how it works in her family.

None of us had considered that angle. We packed Jerry a bowl and brought him Kettle chips, anything to take his mind off the situation.

Thunder boomed, lightning cracked, the rain fell in torrents.

Floodwaters roared like the inside of a seashell, but we were on what Jerry called a bluff, high above the lake, so no worries. We cranked the tunes to drown out the clamor. We smoked another bowl. Some of us stuffed cupcakes into our faces and danced. The roaring swelled over our music. We peered out the windows to survey the situation, but it was the middle of the night, so we couldn’t see much. Still, the murky funk of lake water was unmistakable. From the deck this morning, wobbly and reeling, we gazed down at it fifty feet below us. But overnight the lake had become a river, and now the river was flowing right outside the door.

This could get interesting.

A booming like thunder. Luisa screamed and huddled closer to Jerry on the couch in an emergency flashlight glow. (When she’d finally calmed down, we un-taped her from the chair and threw the slobbery gag out the window.) Another boom, but where was the lightning? Not a flash or streak or bolt. The cabin shook and shimmied from foundation to cedar shingles, bedrock gone Magic Fingers. Windows rattled and cupboards clattered. We all held our breath. That worked out well: most of us had just taken a big bong hit.

Then we noticed the floor went spongy. We felt dizzy and unmoored, but it wasn’t the Columbian Gold. A bobbing sensation. A slow spinning. A feeling of downstream movement.

What’s happening? shouted Jerry.

Dude! we said.

Awesome! we said.

Righteous! we said.

¡Hijos de puta! yelled Luisa.

Look out the window and tell me what you see, said Jerry.

He pitched one of us his flashlight. It traced an incandescent arc across the black room, landing with a clunk at our feet. It went dark. We heard batteries rolling up and down the room. Maybe the floors sloped? Every direction?

Luisa rattled off again. The only word we caught was estupido.

When we’d chased down the batteries, we snapped the light on. Brought out our stash and Zigzags and rolled a fatty. We sparked it, then passed it to Luisa, who needed it more than any of us. She scrunched her nose up and waved it away. As it made the circle, we were tempted to aim the light up under our chins and tell ghost stories, only we couldn’t remember any. Anyway, we were having trouble keeping our feet. When we finally got to the window and waved the light around outside, we understood why.

Woah! we said.

What is it? said Jerry.

Luisa muttered under her breath.

Know what they say, we said.

Go with the flow, we said.

And flow with the go, we said.

We chuckled and high-fived and passed the joint around.

But Jerry’d had enough. He stormed over to the window. Gimme that, he said, grabbing the flashlight. He shined it around, then said: Holy shit!

Because his cabin was now afloat.

Alone in the dark, Luisa sobbed and sobbed.

By the time we got to the lake, it was pouring. Just our luck. Jerry not only gave us the week off, but the keys to his cabin on Lake Travis, and what happened? A veritable deluge. We’d never seen it rain so hard. We sat in the car, glum-faced, passing around a skunky joint, watching the rain come down in sheets. Lightning strobed. Thunder pealed. The car shook. We huddled together, taking perfunctory puffs and straining to hear the radio through the deafening roar.

Half an hour later, the rain finally slacked off a little. It was still coming down, but at least the house was almost visible, and we could make out the flagstone path to the front door. We hustled our backpacks and grocery bags inside. It couldn’t have taken ten seconds. We still got soaked.

We were baristas by day, poets, artists, and musicians by night, and we needed a break from the whole scene. We kept strange schedules and late hours. It took most of us three double-espressos and a pack of cigarettes to wake up, a six-pack and a nickel bag to come down. In the back of our minds, we suspected it wasn’t sustainable. That’s why we jumped at Jerry’s offer. We had big plans: relaxing, skinny-dipping, lazing in the sun. We might even give fishing a shot, if we could find the fishing poles and remember not to drink too much.

We hadn’t counted on the rain. Like everyone else, we’d heard the forecast, only nobody believed it. There’d been a drought longer than most people could remember—since before we moved to the ATX, possibly before we went to college. Then, almost as soon as Jerry passed us the keys to the cabin, thunderheads began building off to the west. By the time we’d made a grocery run and piled into our cars, the sun disappeared behind a canopy of gray. The temperature dropped ten degrees. The air felt thick. We could smell ozone.

Tut-tut, we said. Looks like rain.

So there we were, in the pitch of night, sloshing around in the middle of Lake Travis. Or maybe we’d already been washed down the Colorado? There was no way of knowing. Nothing we could really do anyway. Instead, we took bong hits and ate Sno Balls. We listened to more SRV on the turntable: The Sky Is Crying, Couldn’t Stand the Weather, Texas Flood. The house creaked and moaned. The steady flow of herb gave us peace of mind.

Didn’t know you had a houseboat, we said.

The SS Betterday, we said.

Jerry’s arc, we said.

We half-expected Luisa to go off the deep end again. But when we glimpsed her face in the wandering flashlight glow, she seemed peaceful, for her. She snuggled in close to Jerry, and they both acted as if she’d never threatened castration with a dull carving knife. They said very little. We made stupid jokes or commented on the marijuana, the particular variety, the quality of high. We lit more candles so we wouldn’t waste the flashlight batteries.

The elephant in the room disappeared in a dense ganja fog.

The cabin bounced, shimmied, and swirled in the dark floodwaters. We paid no attention, rolling a monster spliff. Seriously, biggest one we’d ever seen, had to use old newsprint for rolling papers. We stuffed in most of our stash. We could always score some more from Jerry next time we got paid. One of us lit it, took a toke, then passed it on. The sweet aroma permeated the room almost immediately.

It wasn’t long before Luisa said, Can I try some?

We sent the herbal cigarette her direction, biting down our grins. We watched and giggled and waited, the candle flames casting distorted shadows on the wood-planked walls. But she didn’t break into a spasm of hacking like we expected. Instead, she took a long drag and, smiling big as Christmas, passed the joint to Jerry. We should’ve known. With Jerry for a hub, she had to have lots of practice.

When the THC hit, she said, Sorry for all the nasty things I said.

We nodded and grinned and chuckled under our breath.

Sorry for wanting to claw your eyes out, she said.

No problem, we wanted to say, but we were all busy with our humongous spliff, or else stuffing our mouths with Donettes.

Sorry for thinking you were screwing that little rubia slut, she said.

Even high as we were, we knew that wasn’t meant for us.

Jerry hugged her close. I’d never step out on you, baby, he said.

I don’t know why I get like that, said Luisa.

No worries, we said.

It’s all good, we said.

We do crazy shit all the time, we said.

By now, the joint made it back around to Luisa, and she took another impressive toke. When she finally exhaled, she said, Thank you for bringing me to Jerry. I hated you so much before I understood. She passed the spliff to Jerry. You went to all that trouble just for me. Gracias, amigos.

That wasn’t the whole story, of course, but we let it go.

No big deal, we said.

Any time, we said.

Happy to help, we said.

I feel terrible, said Luisa through a bout of sobbing.

Then the waterworks came back on. We couldn’t be sure what triggered the tears, though it was possible the cannabis was to blame, at least in part. There was nothing for it now. At first, they came at a trickle, and we hoped that would be the end of it. No such luck. Jerry tried to console her, holding her close, petting her long black mane, whispering in her ear. Yet before long, Luisa was bawling her eyes out. It made a serious racket, drowning out some of our favorite tunes, but the real trouble was the tears. Pretty soon, the floors were drenched. Not five minutes later, the tears were ankle-deep. Even as we floated downriver, the cabin was flooding from the inside out!

Jerry? we said.

Bossman? we said.

We’ve got a serious problem, we said.

When Jerry realized what was happening, he took command. Get buckets! he yelled. Bowls, blenders, whatever you can find!

We bailed and bailed, scooping up Luisa’s tears and pitching them into the sinks and toilets, out the open windows. All the while, Luisa was still crying her eyes out, which didn’t make our job any easier. In fact, we couldn’t keep up.  We bailed until our backs ached and shoulders screamed, until our arms burned and hands cramped. Everything stank of lake funk, mildew, and sadness.

After what felt like a lifetime of bailing, maybe twenty minutes or half an hour, we realized we’d made a big mistake. We were waste-deep in tears. Luisa would be the death of us. But what could we do? So we bailed a little and smoked a little. We bailed a little more and told each other jokes. We bailed some more and shared the last of the cupcakes. Anything to keep our minds off the one thing everyone was thinking about.

But we lucked out. Big time. At some point during the night, after we’d all but given up on bailing, Luisa stopped crying. The sobs petered out. The tears stopped flowing. Maybe Jerry managed to distract her, or maybe she fell asleep. Who knew? None of us really cared. The floodwaters were no longer on the rise, inside or out, so now we could rest easy. We bailed tears until they no longer sloshed around the cabin floor. Then we rolled the day’s last joint. But we were so exhausted, we passed out before we could even light it.

We woke up just as light began trickling into the cloudless blue. We felt dopey and unrested. We couldn’t have slept more than a couple hours. Despite the power outage, the Lone Stars in the fridge were still cool, and we each guzzled one, then sipped a second. We wandered into the living room, where we found Jerry and Luisa snuggled up together on the sofa, sound asleep. We grinned and high-fived and made a muted fuss over a job well done.

It worked, we said.

What genius! we said.

And she didn’t even kill us first, we said.

The cabin bobbed and swiveled in the water like a fishing cork, but we no longer felt that unsettling downstream thrust. We stumbled to the window and gazed at the miracle of clear skies. As the house slowly rotated, we got our bearings.

Downtown, we said.

Bat Bridge, we said.

SoCo, we said.

We rubbed the sleep from our eyes. Someone lit a joint, but we didn’t smoke it. Instead, we flipped it into the lake and laughed and ate the last of the Honey Bees. Mockingbirds twittered and cawed from the eaves. The sun shimmered into view, casting the world in pink, salmon, and tangerine.

But the moment couldn’t last. It would all be over before we knew it. In fact, we could already hear the womp-thwack of the news choppers headed our way. So we grinned at each other, then stripped down to our skivvies and dove out the windows. The water was tepid and tasted of salt, but we didn’t mind. We yelled Marco! and Polo! as we treaded water and swam circles around the cabin. We climbed up to the roof and executed swan dives and front flips and cannonballs, careful to avoid floating debris as we plunged back into the lake. A raccoon dancing on the keys of a baby grand. A pit bull paddleboarding on a Stratocaster. A tubing longhair picking dirty blues on a Dobro. Maybe we looked like total nutjobs, splashing and playing in the very floodwaters that nearly did us in. Maybe we were. But the sun was finally out, and our vacation wasn’t over yet. Plus, for the first time any of us could remember, we were glad to be alive. We were going to make the most of it.

J. T. Townley has published in Collier’s, Harvard Review, Hayden’s Ferry
Review, Prairie Schooner, The Threepenny Review, and other magazines and journals.  He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of
British Columbia and an MPhil in English from Oxford University, and
he teaches at the University of Virginia.  To learn more, visit jttownley.com.

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*These two pieces are excerpted from Postcards from Here, a memoir in vignette form which will be released by Vine Leaves Press in February 2016.

Marriage

My wife catches porcupines with the trash can and the lid the way you or I catch spiders with a glass and a piece of paper. Porcupines are bad neighbors. They let themselves into the garden, and take one bite out of every tomato, every squash, every cucumber. They climb up our ornamental trees and rip off the branches, leaving ugly holes near the top. We can’t decide if they’re brazen or just stupid, they way they ransack the place in daylight, with us standing right there. They know enough to run, though, when Kara bounds toward them with the trash can. I watched her one morning chase a fat porcupine clear across the grassy expanse of our lawn. It waddled as fast as it could, and Kara (wearing pajamas still) had to toss the bulbous, plastic trash barrel ahead of her to capture it. Her aim was good. The barrel landed on the fleeing animal just cleanly enough to halt its escape. I do not support porcupine relocation. I worry too much about babies being left behind or porcupine homesickness, but I have learned to stay out of this. From the porch, coffee in my hand, I watched her wrestle the trash can lid beneath the soft feet of the porcupine, then she rolled the whole package over, sliding the creature to the bottom. She stood next to the barrel, breathing hard, and asked me if I would get some rope from the garage. I hate that she loads them up and drives them down the road. Hate that they are scared and confused and lost — I project too much. I regard her there, in flannel pajamas and a T-shirt. Then I put down my cup, go to the garage, and get the rope.

Marriage Two

He was a super model. A presidential candidate. A porn star. He stood in the field in front of our house, basking in his own light. The spectacle stopped me, quite literally, in my tracks. I had not seen this before, and it took several seconds for my brain to understand the information coming in over the retinal wire. He was as grand as he could make himself — feathers puffed out, almost standing on end, and tail opened like a fan.  Not only standing, but slowly turning himself in place, to show every angle, every facet. He looked like he had walked right off the front of a Thanksgiving card from Hallmark, so perfect was his tom turkeyness. He wanted her to see. She was nearby, pecking at the grass, striding slowly away from him,  wholly uninterested. Undaunted, he began to slowly move forward, as if he walked a thin catwalk, nodding to his fans. Aloof but aware. She was too busy to even glance at him, and that’s when I noticed a slight motion near her long, still tail feathers. Then more. Then the motion took the shape of four gray puffballs that followed her in a perfect line. Babies. He had, clearly, impressed her at one time and now just wanted some of the romance back. She pecked and grazed, keeping one eye on the babies, training no eyes on him. She was done with him, maybe just wanted him to stop showing off and help keep track of the puffballs. He serenaded her with a burst of sound like gurgling water, shaking his wattle. Nothing. She turned away. The puffballs collected by her scaly, yellow feet. She was busy. The tom stopped his pivoting, lowered his feathers, and shrank. He transformed from the rock star to the guy who delivers our mail, the guy with the good job and the steady paycheck.

Penny Guisinger is the author of the book Postcards from Here, which will be released by Vine Leaves Press in February 2016. Her essay “Coming Out” was named a notable in 2015 Best American Essays. Other work has appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Rumpus, Guernica, the Brevity blog, Solstice Literary Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, multiple anthologies, and other places. She is an Assistant Editor at Brevity, the founding organizer of Iota: The Conference of Short Prose, and a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.

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As if sixth grade weren’t awkward enough, there were dances in the gym. Girls’ arms hung limp around boys’ necks, whose hands, in turn, grazed waists. Both rested limbs as if the slightest pressure would snap heads or break hip bones. But not so for Tracy Mead and the fervor with which she grabbed Rich Fasano, after I asked him to dance and he turned me down. Appearing out of nowhere, she threw her arms around Rich’s neck. Rich Fasano of fourth period art class. Rich Fasano with the brown, feathered hair, green eyes, and the father who regularly broke his sons’ bones.

Nothing made sense to me that night. Not the three-four waltz my father had taught me before I left for the dance. Not the poofy, pink dress my mother had bought for me to wear. Because when I got to the gym, couples were just hanging on each other, swaying in the dark. No one was waltzing. And most of the girls, like Tracy Mead, were wearing tight jeans, halter-tops, and sequined belts. Her halter-top was cobalt blue, setting off her blond hair and fair complexion. The sequins on her belt were gold.

And her arms were around Rich’s neck in the split second after he rejected me. Tracy Mead’s tan, slender arms were wrapped tightly around Rich Fasano’s neck.

I’ve often thought of that dance in the years since sixth grade. And I’m not sure I’ve learned the lesson hiding between the pink tulle layers of the night. It took me hours to work up the courage to ask Rich to dance, and he said no. No because his father was waiting for him in the parking lot, a father who was often responsible for the casts Rich wore: an arm, a wrist, a collarbone. He had to leave. And then Tracy Mead swooped in and simply threw her arms around his neck. Without asking. And she starting dancing. And he danced, too. To the song that should have been my dance with him. When that song was over, I tried to do what she had done. I ran up to him and threw my arms around his neck. He shrugged me off and yelled, “I told you I have to go,” and then left the gymnasium.

Is this story merely a lesson in dealing with rejection? That would make it any sixth grader’s story and also, on the scale of my life’s rejections, an easily forgettable moment. The scene seems to me to be more complex, more sinister. Because looking back on that night, I’ve often asked myself how I could be more like Tracy Mead. How I could have made my attempted neck grab work like hers did. How I could have been more successful in forcing a man to do what I wanted. And I think those are deeply troubling, selfish questions to ask.

***

The first time I ever had to reflect on how I’d bullied a grown man was after I broke off a two-year engagement. Frank hadn’t seemed all that interested in getting married again. (His first wife left him because he didn’t want kids). But we had started living together, and this was a problem for my extremely Catholic parents. I was young, in my early-twenties, and had not yet learned what I would by my early-forties about setting proper boundaries with my folks. Feeling pressure from them, I pressured him.

And when I say pressure, I mean full-court offense. I was a straight-“A” scholarship student who finished a triple major in college before winning a Fulbright Fellowship. When I set my mind on a goal, I did anything within the bounds of the law to achieve it. I left wedding magazines open on the tables around our apartment. I turned up the television when jewelry store commercials came on. I worked into conversation the engagement stories of every married couple we knew: how one guy had dropped the ring into the bottom of a glass of champagne, how another guy had proposed on a starry night while on a hotel room balcony overlooking a river valley. I was relentless.

Dutifully, on my birthday, he presented me with a tiny box and put an engagement ring on my finger. I should have felt ecstatic. I’d gotten exactly what I wanted, what I had worked to make happen. Instead, I felt empty. The smile on his face was the kind of smile you make when you are relieved of some duty, some burden. It was not the kind of smile you make if you’d just gotten something you deeply desired. An important distinction in desire started emerging in my thinking: what I wanted was not for him to do what I wanted. What I wanted was for him to want to do it. For him to want me the way I wanted him.

After the engagement, as I watched our relationship fall apart, I remembered the times I’d pressured him—my Tracy Mead moments, when I’d thrown my arms around his neck and forced him to dance with me. While pressuring a guy into proposing marriage isn’t illegal, it’s ethically questionable. Even though Americans laugh at this scenario in popular culture, as if it is a woman’s prerogative to be a little “crazy” when trying to land a husband, as if it is part of what defines her as “feminine,” I decided that I would never again force a guy into a relationship with me because I would never know whether or not he really wanted to be there.

 ***

And then along came Justin. A four-year relationship whose painful intricacies I have only begun to sift through. Justin and I weren’t exactly lovers (not in person), but we weren’t simply friends, either. I met him when he and his wife were undergoing marriage counseling after she’d had an affair. It was clear that the marriage was already over—Justin was looking up ex-girlfriends from his past and vacationing by himself. Still, I hadn’t planned to fall in love with him. But the kind of connection we shared was rare. Our communication quickly turned into an emotional affair through emails, text messages, and phone calls. While we never did anything physically, we talked about and imagined sexual situations between us. At one point, discussing oral sex, he wrote to me and said, “Just put both hands on my head and guide me. Arch your back a little.”

It’s incredibly painful to remember times like these when he was so forthcoming, so present. Back when I mattered to him. Back when he was grateful for my attentions, which he credited with patching up his “shattered identity” and for undoing much of the hurt caused by his wife’s infidelity. But ultimately, he was still married. As new suitors came into my life and I tried to do what was right—pursue the available men—he chose to recommit to his marriage and we tried to settle into a friendship.

For the last couple years, and through some major life crises, he was my best friend. We talked via email or text message almost daily, and about once every two weeks on the phone. And while he told me that I was the person he talked to most often in his life, I never saw him in person, despite numerous requests on my part. And that began to take its toll. It felt like constant rejection. He got together with all of his other friends except me, even more often once his wife moved out of the house and they began moving toward divorce. Why was he afraid to see me? When I asked him about it, he said that he thought my desire to get together in person was “unusual.” This accusation made me angry. Who doesn’t get together with a best friend? He would have never said that to any of his other friends, his guy buddies or the colleagues he got together with. He had already refused so many of my invitations to get together, that when he told me he went out for a drink with a woman who invited him—that he was starting to date again already—I lost it. He had overlooked me so many times, that I couldn’t handle him giving his in-person time to someone brand new to his life. That’s when I went Tracy Mead on him, throwing my arms around his neck and trying to force a dance. I wrote him and told him that if he didn’t try dating me, that if he couldn’t at least take me out on one date, that we couldn’t be friends anymore. My self-esteem couldn’t handle him offering his in-person time to someone new when he’d never offered it to me.

My Tracy Mead moment did not go over well. He wrote me back and asked me to consider how I would feel if our genders were reversed. Would I approve if it were a guy trying to force a woman to date him by using emotional blackmail? And then I thought back to the night of the sixth grade dance, of Tracy Mead’s actions. What if the gender roles had been reversed then? What if Rich had run up after Tracy said she had to leave, grabbed her roughly around the waist, and forced her to dance?

Justin turned down my request, saying that he didn’t have feelings for me and he wasn’t going to lead me on. I told him that things had become so bad in our friendship, with his constant rejections in the form of refusing to see me, that I couldn’t stand by and watch as he said yes to invitations from strangers. We broke off contact for a few months. During that time, all I could think about was how things had been so good in the beginning when we were romantic, and how painful our friendship had become for me. After a few months of therapy, I contacted him and let him know that I thought we didn’t work well as friends. I renewed my request for him to take me on a date, saying that we never really got to explore the potential between us.

Even communicating with him about this feels like a Tracy Mead move. He wants me to just go away. And yet I send him pages and pages of solid arguments to consider, with specifics supporting my points, hounding him. It is taking him weeks to write back. In the meanwhile, he keeps sending me little notes about how he’s processing everything and isn’t ignoring me. He promises a response soon. Knowing him as I do, how emotionally twisted up he is inside, how he resents me now, especially when I call him out on his inconsistencies, I know the answer is going to be no. And that’s going to be the final straw for me, the inevitable end of any interaction with him.

In the meanwhile, I marvel at his selfishness and mine. He no longer cares about me or my life. We are incapable even of having a civil conversation (and yet he is friends with the woman who cheated on him). So why is he sending me little notes to make sure I know he isn’t ignoring my question? Because he doesn’t want to be seen as the bad guy here. It’s a completely selfish move. As are my requests that he give in and date me. We are both Tracy Mead-style wringing each other’s necks.

***

On the night of January 11, 2013, just a few weeks after Justin’s wife moved out, I met a professional guide for night ice fishing in the Berkshires. Just the week before, I had paid him to take me out for my first time on the ice. We had such a good time that he invited me back for what was supposed to be a large fishing party with a bunch of his friends on the night of the new moon, during which we attached glow sticks to the tip-ups to simulate moonlight and entice the fish to feed. Since this professional guide was offering his services for free, I asked if I could bring a couple of 6-packs of his favorite beer. Founder’s Backwoods Bastard, he told me. This particular beer had a 10.2% ABV, which I was unaware of at the time. The guide told me not to bring any food, that he would take care of it as his parents owned a grocery store.

Ultimately, the “large party” of people he said were coming never showed, and the food he promised was also slow in materializing, so that by the time he put a few ribs on the grill, I was a handful of beers into the evening. The rest of the story is easy to imagine—too much alcohol, no food, alone in the woods with a guy I’d only just met the week before. When I went in to the ice shanty to lie down for a few minutes, I was fully clothed. When I woke up, I wasn’t, and I was lying in a puddle of my own puke. He had taken my clothes off and was having sex with me. I asked him to stop, and he said no.

When I told Justin about it the next week, I couldn’t bear to tell him the truth of what had actually happened—and it’s still hard for me to say it even after years of therapy—so I told him that I got drunk and fucked this married ice fishing guide, as if I’d had some agency in what happened. Meanwhile, I couldn’t comfortably wear clothing for a week because of the bite marks and bruises he’d left before going back home to his wife and two young girls. Justin told me that he forgave me, and that I needed to forgive myself.

Two and a half years later, I would tell Justin that he had to take me on a date or I wouldn’t speak to him anymore, and he would ask me what such an ultimatum would look like if the gender roles were reversed, if it was a guy trying to “force” a woman to date him by threating to end the friendship. When he said that, all I could think about were the numerous times that guys had indeed been successful in forcing me to do things I hadn’t wanted to or that I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Even one of Justin’s friends from college, Doug, got it in his head that he wanted to date me. He was so persistent in pursuing me that, despite my better judgment, I tried it for a few months before breaking it off. He wasn’t a bad guy; we just weren’t well suited to each other, and I knew that from the start. At the time, I thought it was big-hearted of me to give the poor guy a chance, but it sounds more troubling to me now. What I’ve witnessed is that it’s okay for guys to pressure me in so many more ways than I have available to me to exercise force over them. We can giggle about the time I pressured Frank into giving me a cheap engagement ring, but I’ve given up months, years of my life acquiescing to guys because they have aggressively pursued me. And after waking up to someone having sex with me in an ice shanty, I can tell you that nonconsensual situations—whether physical or emotional—do terrible damage to someone’s psyche.

The Sex & The City phenomenon produced some uncomfortable moments for feminism. It advanced the notion that women should be having sex “like men,” casual sex without any feelings attached to the act or to the other person involved. This approach may be retaliation for all the times a woman has felt used after a sexual encounter—women can take back a kind of power by “getting even” and now tossing guys aside and making them feel used—but maybe it’s not a good idea for anyone to be having this kind of sex. Maybe it’s not a good idea for either gender to make the other feel used.

And this is the problem with the Tracy Mead move that I admired for so many years: it does not take a man seriously when he says no. As this generation advances our understanding of rape culture, we have to admit that any “strong-arming” in a relationship represents non-consent, even when it’s done by the woman.

***

I think back to when times were good with Justin, when they were just beginning. And I remember that really hot exchange we’d had about oral sex. “Guide my head with your hands,” he’d written me. I imagine palming his temples gently, bringing his willing head close. That’s the kind of mutual consent that will always be missing from the Tracy Mead move.

But for now, I’ve got my arms latched firmly around his unwilling neck, forcing him to dance. It’s probably the last time I ever attempt such an aggressive move. His final letter is going to come any day now, telling me what I already know. But I don’t know what happens when the song ends.

Lynn Marie Houston is an award-winning poet, an essayist, and an educator. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Squalorly, Word Riot, Full Grown People, and other journals and anthologies. Her first collection of poems, The Clever Dream of Man, was published by Aldrich Press in 2015.  She is currently pursuing an MFA at Southern Connecticut State University.

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My father and I touch down at Reno-Tahoe International Airport in the cool desert night after a sunny layover in Los Angeles. It is February 2011, and the balmy western temperatures are a welcome change from Minneapolis, where we started the day, leaving behind the second-snowiest winter on record in Minnesota.

“Did you see the city on the descent?” he asks me after we land.

“No,” I say.

There’s not much in Nevada; most people know it as the apostrophe-shaped wedge between Utah and California, a geo-cultural buffer zone between the Mormons to the east and everything but Mormons to the west. Some go there to get married, and some go there to get divorced, and Reno, for a time, and for the right crowd, must have been swell—in the Depression years, a handful of casinos blossomed to life, as if the fever dreams of a job-starved country simply manifested an inexplicable torrent of cool, refreshing commerce, seeding the desert flush in cash-laden Arcadian gardens of red, blue, and gold—on every corner a casino, in every casino a man, every man thumbing the penny, dime, or dollar where all his future wishes lay.

Today, Reno seems an awkward, avuncular go-between of two opposing families; shimmering Lake Tahoe is about forty miles southwest of the city, while the bright lights and wild nights of Las Vegas are hundreds miles more to the southeast. We had both been to Vegas before. In Vegas, many gamblers move with purpose, and often with style, dressing up to hit the floor. Women flit about in little-black-dress flocks of perfume and heels, throwing their hair and striding with drinks. Guys strut in dark slacks or jeans, polos or long-sleeves, cutting each other up about the bar, the girls, the booze, everything. In Vegas, there’s a whole unwritten code for How to Gamble Well with Friends, and you can see it around every felted table, hear it as others pass by.

The gambling experience in Reno—in particular at the Sands Regency Hotel & Casino, where we are staying—is quite different. The average Reno gambler is alone, sucking away on a cigarette or rolling by in a Rascal, oxygen tank clutched like a talisman to their chests. Many are overweight, and their faces, after years or even decades of exposure to the desert sun and the miasma of dank casino funk, resemble unoiled baseball gloves, leathery and wrinkled, lined and tough as stale jerky. They wander the hotel and casino floor the same way cattle put out to pasture wander the ranch, and by 9:00 am, most don’t so much arrive as appear to never have left. The lobbies of the Reno hotels and casinos recall the earthy palette of 1970s’ leisure-suit chic, reflected poorly from tarnished bronze or gold columns and trimwork of many of the parlors and anterooms. Many of the gambling tables—so full and loud in Vegas—struggle to fill their seats. A permanent scrim of cigarette smoke lingers above everything, brushing the hunched shoulders of men and women alike with wispy, blue-cloud fingers.

The truth is I could be in any casino connected to any hotel, anywhere. The repeating geometric pattern of the carpet is eye-numbing, Kubrickian in its crimson, relentless mediocrity. I grab some $1 vanilla soft-serve from the CASINO CORNER MARKET, its all-caps stylized sign lit up in pink and purple neon, and walk in no particular direction, licking.

***

Many come to Reno—the poor man’s Vegas—to gamble. We are not in Reno to gamble. We are here to play cribbage.

Reno is the annual host of the world’s largest cribbage tournament, drawing over 1,200 players from all over the country. The majority of the tournament is conducted in one massive hall, where dozens of tables seat hundreds of cribbage players facing off against one another in row after row of navy-draped tables and brown metal folding chairs. Two or three other adjacent anterooms—normally bingo halls and dinner parlors, separated by impermanent sliding walls—round out the arenas of crib.

The field is composed of bluehairs, mostly, but there are a couple of young guys like me, twenty-somethings starting their careers when almost everyone else here has finished theirs. This dichotomy, sharp as the hairspray fumes from a passing pegger (that’s cribbage parlance for competitor), is evident to not just the person sitting across from the board and me, but to everyone in the room. Everywhere I go and everywhere I look this weekend, I am met with equal amounts of curiosity and scorn. Cribbage, as this no-trump conference hallway in Reno where we lay our cards suggests, is a game for old people. Whenever I lose a game—and with  twenty-two games in the main draw, there are plenty of opportunities to lose—my opponents admonish me as if the loss were preordained. And when I win, it’s because I’m lucky.

I take ten of twenty-two games during the round-robin blitz. It’s not good enough to advance to the best-of-three showdowns in the traditional bracket draws of the next rounds. It’s not even close.

***

Later,  Dad and I walk to a local store for crackers and fruit to bring back to our hotel room. As we wait for a stoplight to turn from red to green, and for its faceless LED figure to usher us across the street, I think of Virgil. Midway on our Reno journey…

Not even midway. It is the middle of the afternoon after a long morning of mostly losing to people I feel I should be beating, we’re out of the main tournament (there are several small satellite tournaments available for first-round losers), and we have two more full days left before our afternoon flight home. Didn’t we come out here with a purpose, after all? Isn’t this the Wiklund family game?

Dad didn’t fare any better than I did, and we are both quietly despondent. Outside the casino, the city is quiet, and though the air isn’t clean, it’s an improvement from the Sands, and I take slow lungfuls of it through my nose. My clothes reek, and the steady erosion of my senses from the casino and hotel coupled with the lower back pain from leaning over a cribbage board all day have sapped my energy away. As we pay for bananas, peanut butter, and crackers, we ask a clerk named Krissy or Kristy or Kelly or Kate which road to take west out of the city for a day trip through the mountains and into Tahoe. She champs a stick of gum and flicks inky, mascara’d eyes to the window. “I don’t know,” she says.

“You don’t know? Don’t you live here?”

“Yeah,” she says, twirling a lock of dyed blond hair extension around her fingers. “One of the roads,” she adds.

That night, we walk the streets. Looking around, I see the streets are mostly empty, the hotels and high-rises above them mostly vacant, the city mostly dark. A few plastic cups tumbleweed past. Nonetheless, we are diligent Midwest tourists, and we will have our picture beneath the Reno Arch, the famous marquee proclaiming Reno “The Biggest Little City in the World.”

We arrive outside Fitzgerald’s Casino and Hotel at the corner of Commercial Row and Virginia Street / Old US Highway 395, just a few blocks from the Sands. This is it—the epicenter of Reno proper, the Biggest Little City. Supported by a pair of reflective golden arches, the marquee looms over us, staking its claim, a twinkling simulacra of glitzy riches. The marquee is capped by a spiky, sparkling star, as if the world’s greatest party has just reached critical mass, exploding outward in scintillating, megaton payloads of prosperity.

Here, at least, is a little of the flashy, dazzling weekend dream I have imagined, or maybe desired, of Reno. It is the first vacation I can remember taking alone with my father, a tireless general contractor of over thirty years. The struggling economy and dismal housing market had forced my dad into early retirement, and early retirement was not something he had sketched in the grand blueprints of his life. In a flurry of scotch-induced post-Christmas cheer, we had decided we would do this thing, that we would book expensive tickets for a brief flight in February, and that we would come to Reno, together. My father enjoyed his time in Vegas, and though Vegas this is not, we thought it’d be a fun, oddball trip to take together, over the plains and into the desert, reconciling my burgeoning fear of flying with his golf-and-cabin-riddled restlessness, the result of simply having too much time on his hands before he had decided, like many retirees, precisely what to do with it. In the past, there had always been a nail to pull, a roof to raise, a door to open for someone else. Now those doors had closed, but in turn, the great burden of an unplanned afternoon—of many of them—had opened before him like an old window upon a humid summer’s day, smothering him with the prospect of muted, daytime television, spontaneous napping, and the great battered toolbox of mind and memory, and all the forgotten wonders and unrealized dreams inside. He’d never admit to being bored—he’s too proud and ambitious for that—but he’d been a business owner since George H. W. Bush was President, his own boss since before I was born, a conservative vote-the-line kind of man for as long as anyone could remember. But as my mother worked and my brother worked and I worked, the only ground remaining for him to break, for the first time in a long time, was his own. Read my lips, he seemed to be saying, I’m still figuring this whole retirement thing out.

We had come to Reno to play cribbage, yes, but 1,500 miles is a long way to go to lay the same cards and count the same points we had done all our lives with the rest of our family. For me, and for my father, I think we had not only come to Reno in pursuit of a recreational, laminate dream, one built with the lumber of the cribbage boards, and secured, hand by hand, fifty-two cards at a time. We had come to talk, I think—to speak of weight loss for him and of marriage for me—to speak as we had not spoken in a long time, to puzzle over the sketches of his retiree-blueprint days, and to figure out in which direction, if any, the vehicle of my life was really heading.

Neither of us knew that, though, as we stood under the Arch. Despite the casinos and hotels, the city is darker at night than I expected, and from beneath the blinking incandescence of the marquee, I narrow my eyes south, where the scarlet-domed entrance to Harrah’s shimmers, mirage-like, in this arid place. I can’t tell if the locals look like tourists or the tourists look like locals, but just about everybody stops by the Arch to gaze at the sign for a moment before moving on to or from the events of their late Reno night. From the other side of the Arch, looking north toward Palace Jewelry and Loan (Diamonds Gold Antiques Videos Watches Tools Guns Musical), the marquee reads, “The Bigge         y in the World,” as if the nameless promise of Reno is overheating, fizzling out. “Well, at least one side works,” Dad says.

He trots in front of the Arch, puts one foot in front of the other, and spreads his arms wide, the international vacationer’s symbol of Here I am, there I was, what now? I raise my phone, snap a photo of him, and he takes one of me. Outside the tournament, this was our only verbalized goal, as we’re not really interested in gambling, and there’s nothing else for us to do in Reno. It is t-shirt weather, cloudless, the stars amok above a desert that swallows everything else. Below, the city air feels slick and smeary.

We walk across the street toward a souvenir shop in the ground floor of a parking ramp, where a massive faded sign over the entrance of the shop reads RENO SOUVENIR STATION. The STATION is packed with almost anything the proprietors can cram into it: racks of Biggest Little City in the World pewter keychain arches; cases of desert rocks, bouncy balls, pens and pencils, magnets, toy cars, rubber snakes, and plastic dinosaurs; shelves of ceramic souvenir mugs (I STRUCK IT RICH IN RENO!); license plate covers; bulbous glass paperweights; other five-dollar knickknacks. A wall devoted to Betty Boop. A lingerie section, inexplicably. I wrap an arm around a fraying cardboard cutout of Marilyn Monroe, place a hand on one of her cardboard thighs—her crimson lips are scuffed and peeling, white, and someone has poked a hole through her mole. We leave with two t-shirts and a deck of cards.

Back inside our room, a pamphlet from the desk tells us that citizens of Reno are known as Renoites. Sharon Stone lives in Reno, and Dawn Wells—better known as Mary Anne, the blue-eyed, buxom bombshell from Gilligan’s Island—was born there. I grab some crackers and peanut butter and head to the window, munching. Our room on the 12th floor overlooks the western side of the city. I can’t see it, but from under the marquee, upon the streets where the refuse of the hotels and casinos drifts in the desert breeze, in that lonely, once-prosperous city of chance, above Carson City and Virginia City and Los Angeles and Tahoe and Vegas, its ersatz promise carried by the trade winds and beyond to the salted, blue shores of the Pacific, Hollywood must have seemed an impossible jackpot for people like Wells, fake as a cardboard celebrity, as illusory and false as the queen of hearts promised by the three-card-monte dealers on Virginia Street, an emerald city of Rat Pack wannabes and Cagney cagers. It’s amazing anyone gets out of Reno alive.   

From the glare of the window, my reflection towers over the desert. The mountains rise in the distance, their crooked silhouettes visible only from the waning light of the Reno/Sparks metropolitan area. I crunch another cracker and consider the tired landscape, consider my tired self. Exactly what, I ask myself, am I doing here?

***

On June 6, 2013, two years after our trip to Reno, my father suffered a massive heart attack from within the relative safety of our family cabin in Gordon, Wisconsin. The day had already taken on an unreal, ultra-bright patina for my family, because it was the same date, and my father the same age, when his dad had died of a heart attack in the early seventies. At sixty-two years old, it was D-Day once more, a day of invasion and ruin.

Later, at the hospital, the doctor explained in as simple terms as possible what was about to happen an hour or two before the surgery. He had already successfully conducted a quadruple bypass earlier that day. My brother cried. I remained stoic. “Glad you’re warmed up, Doc,” Dad said. And then we played cribbage.

I’m not going to say it was Reno nor the Sands Regency Hotel and Casino that eventually saved my father’s life, when he would commit to losing weight immediately afterward despite the forthcoming infarction. To put it in Renoite terms, life is a gamble, sure, but the house always wins. We knew that then. We know it now. But if Reno and the Sands could make us forget that rule, if only for a second, then it was Reno and the Sands—with its shitty carpets, dumpy people, and apathetic effort to conceal it all—that threw that notion into stark relief, bright as the marquee, dark and cold as the midnight desert. In the handheld oxygen tanks of the mobile-no-more, the major-chord sirens of the casino’s one-armed robot army—a phalanx of soul-leaching dream machines, forever standing at attention in their ranks and files—and in the weary faces of the desert hungry, I experienced the first glimmers of a fatherless future. I saw the lines of his face in theirs, and they were the same. In the innocent way he ordered an ice cream cone at the CASINO CORNER MARKET, asking “One dollar?” when he already knew the price, I felt a surreal herald of a similar meaningless question when my brother and I would initial for his casket, for when the simple task of signing on a dotted line—when asking “Here?” about the same dotted lines we’ve been signing all our lives—would become an unthinkable directive, an unfathomable act, a final commitment to and admission of a terrible, terrible loss. This wormhole of Nevada, swooping through the East and West towers of the Sands, from the blue-sheeted tables to the vermilion, chainlinky, dizzying carpet, from the mute, silver elevators to the kaleidoscoping roulette carousels, through the bars on the floors of the casino and their watered-down drinks, through its tables of whimsy and chance, and even through the dealers, the servers, the Keystone casino cops, through the cribbage players—through the collected neon dreams of everyone under its roof—all served to reveal their black alien portents to me, a glimpse of the void on the other side of those ruddy, sawblade mountains, slicing the tarpaper sky and all the hammered stars above. Much later, visions of Reno robbed me of breath, and stole me from sleep, as its eroded buildings and neon signage tumbled to dust under the constant red-flame sun, that great glitzy star smashed to crystal pieces upon the scorched desert earth, and some siren, sinister blue-smoke wind carried clear across the plains and through my open window, stirring me awake.

After a sleepless night waiting for his blood pressure to stabilize, I browse the photos from that trip in the morning and do a little research. Though the Arch was erected in 1926 to promote the Transcontinental Highways Exposition of 1927, it wasn’t until 1929 that a man named G. A. Burns, of Sacramento, California, christened Reno “The Biggest Little City in the World.” Burns was awarded $100 for his efforts.

Looking back, the marquee was smaller than I expected. But so was almost everything at the Sands Regency Hotel and Casino, out there at the end of the western desert.

Jordan Wiklund is a writer and editor from St. Paul, Minnesota. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Brevity, Hobart, and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter @JordanWiklund, or at the St. Paul Curling Club most Sunday afternoons, working on his takeouts and draws.

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When I marry a woman, if Uncle James
doesn’t come to the wedding because his Bible says

it’s a sin, my father told me
he will sever the bond with his brother

like plucking the dead roots
from a bed of soil and moving on. I told him

I don’t want who I am to change
who they are, brothers born

from the same womb, seeds
of the same core, the boom after the war

into near-poverty. I told him
he shouldn’t shed his kin, unlace

his blood, when theirs was founded
first, miles before ours, their chronograph

already in tick. But I am his daughter, he said,
the intersection between him

and my mother, their permanence, engendered
of them and not with them. I recalled what I knew

of James and my father’s past, their childhood spun
from the same fabric, and now, jackknifed

into two conflicting roads. And me. Flanked between them,
the present and the former, between compassion

and contempt, our lineage, our name, between
where we are now and where we are going.

Rachel Kennedy is a New Hampshire native and recently moved back home from New York. She has studied at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and earned her M.F.A. in poetry from Adelphi University, where she also taught creative and composition writing. Some of Rachel’s earlier work can be seen in The Whistling Shade, The Fiddleback, and Bay Leaves, which is produced by the North Carolina Poetry Council.
Follow her on Twitter  @rachelkennedy88

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Sandra Meek is the author of five books of poems, An Ecology of Elsewhere (Persea Books, May 2016), Road Scatter (Persea Books, September 25, 2012), Biogeography, winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press, 2008), Burn (2005), and Nomadic Foundations (2002), as well as a chapbook, The Circumference of Arrival (2001). She is also the editor of an anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad (Ninebark 2007), which was awarded a 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Conjunctions, and The Iowa Review, among others. A recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the 2015 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has twice been awarded Georgia Author of the Year, in 2006 for Burn, and in 2003 for Nomadic Foundations, which also was awarded the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry. Meek served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Manyana, Botswana, 1989-1991. She is a co-founding editor of Ninebark Press, director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit, poetry editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College in Georgia, USA.

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Never was there a time when
the pantry doors did not bang
from sleepwalkers, human winds,

My earliest memory of home
was the urge for departure,

the creaking of a house easing
into middle age, subtle disarray,
damning evidence of mortality.

I traveled the country searching
for the center, the idea of home.

The myth of the cave captured
stick figures, fattened with time
on rectangles hanging on wire.

I began to burrow into a place
only after the birth of my kids.

We tell tales of those who flew
into mire, the sun, San Dimas:
those without bread float away.

The landscape carries memories,
sure, but lovers hold home within.

We clip our nails to convince
ourselves we no longer rend
and spear shadowy remains.

The last lesson of being home
is to let go of the need of place.

The box around us whispers
in the quiet hours of distance
within us, walls that hold us.

Martin Ott, a former U.S. Army interrogator,  is the author of six books of poetry and fiction, including the poetry book Underdays, Sandeen Prize Winner, University of Notre Dame Press and the short story collection Interrogations, Fomite Press. More at http://www.martinottwriter.com.

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Inside the window, paperwhites
lean jealously against the glass,
appraise the falling snow
for signs that it will not surpass
their raw ability to bring
glory to a winter hour.
But what do the narcissus know?
Saturated with delight
as the glass reflects their faces,
each ice crystal is a flower
to the viewer it displaces,
winter passionate as spring
fields of bloom on frozen lawn
harvest what they grow upon.

Robin Shectman Richstone has published poems in Poetry, Atlanta Review, Borderlands, Briar Cliff Review, New England Review, North American Review, and other magazines, mostly under her previous name of Robin Shectman. Her book-length collection, Under a Thin Roof, has been a finalist or semi-finalist in three manuscript competitions. She recently moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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The thing that makes a poem good, says poet Louise Glück, is that it is alive. Solarium, Jordan Zandi’s first collection of poems due out this February through Sarabande Books, is wonderfully alive; lively, even. The poems squirm, inflated with an enthusiastic buoyancy and brightness that makes them a pleasure to read. Their joy, like a dog’s joy, bounces along moment by crisp, exciting moment, where each joy is “as instant / as a stone that leaves the hand” (43). The first section of the collection whaps us with energy and genuine play. In his title poem, for example, Zandi savors both language – the way a word feels as it rolls off the tongue – and memory, in this case, the memory of the taste of a fruit infused with the essence of summer:

Remember summers, Jordan?
Eating quinces, spitting the seeds?
And how you never ate quinces again
when they laughed when you called them quinces?
And now there are no more quinces?
I do remember quinces (9).

The second section of the collection pauses for a moment, prodding at something more mellow than nostalgia, but no less heady: “Though the years have flaked from me / lichen still molds to stone” (18). Time is passing for me, Zandi seems to acknowledge, but I’m just one guy and the world keeps moving, so I’ll just enjoy it and be who I am.

Scattered throughout the collection are a series of poems titled: “On My Path Life,” “On My Painting Life,” “On My Pony Life,” and so on. In “On My Plane Life,” Zandi writes, or rather, reports, “I was in a plane—I felt the all-around bounce of it.” But it is the final line of this brief piece that I would like to draw attention to: “I thought of love and planes, and love on planes—then slept, coasting among white clouds, and mind was my atmosphere.” Mind as atmosphere. Yes, on one hand Zandi is the happy passenger in the cabin pressures and cross currents of his mind. A good example of this is his poem “A Lesson in Botany” that blends sounds and texture with a slippery poignancy, to become a lesson in language, a lesson in being alive and able-bodied: “Wind is a long thing, too thin to see. / Like precision or loneliness” (46). And earlier in the same piece, this gorgeous passage:

Of being a sea. Of things that move
but stay to the earth. To be young,
to be old. Which we express
like this: he has grown out
to encompass that post;
and he will grow into his (45).

Mind is Zandi’s atmosphere, yes, but so are the forests, islands and everything else that surrounds him!

For Zandi, poems sometimes seem to sally forth fully formed from his brain (“mind as atmosphere”), while other times his brain captures the visual and emotional texture/timbre of his surroundings (“the all-around bounce of it”). The work oscillates between a concrete realm with, among other things, “dead things gumming the sidewalk” (7) and a dreamlike space, evoking another time, olden, carnival-esque where Zandi rides his horse and peers into the pines. Either way, either world is crisp. Henri Cole who selected Zandi’s book for the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize, writes in the collection’s preface that Zandi seems to search for (and find!) “the great opium of simply being content with oneself – with a heart that receives and watches (if a heart watches), while resisting the systems that hurt us – and remaining awake to experience.”

Zandi’s poems aren’t precious nor are they spiritual but they play, and they play with the superior skill of one who fully embraces the present, and who happily honors all that is around him. This is not to say that Zandi’s poems do not contain regret, sorrow, places where “pain becomes the whole environment of the night,” or where a throat is “gorged on goneforever;” of course not (34, 27). But it is the way that Zandi is not crippled by these thoughts, that he can hold them up, describe them with the same ease and skill as he describes a “blade’s whetted petting” that makes his work so valuable, and so unique (20). He lives in the world that is ours, familiar, the only one we know; yet he discovers and discovers it.

Sophie Summertown Grimes holds an MFA in Poetry from Boston
University, and has spent an extensive amount of time living and traveling in China as an Oberlin Shansi Fellow and as a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow. She has published poems in The Literary Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and AGNI Online, among others. Author of the chapbook City Structures, published by Damask Press, Sophie was second runner-up for the 2011 New Letters Prize for Poetry and writes poetry reviews for Publishers Weekly. Twitter: @synopsissophie

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