WINTER 2018

Lisa Compo currently attends Salisbury University studying creative writing and working for the SU Writing Center as a consultant. When she isn’t writing, you can find her performing on a stage, or cuddling with her cat, Noel.

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Who spoke, 
who listened, 
you could never be sure. 

Often you heard 
what you preferred not to; 
neighbors’ complaints, gossip, 
muffled voices of illicit love. 

If you lost connection, 
your static signaled. 
After a blizzard, 
if the line was silent for long 
Claude or Jimmy Joe drove up your steep driveway 
stenciling the new snow with tire chains. 

Most days in that house, 
the line quiet but not dead, 
you waited to be heard 
not just accounted for. 

Leisha Douglas is a professional psychotherapist and part-time yoga teacher, who is blessed to help others in their deeply intimate, personal explorations. She has worked in a private psychotherapy practice for over twenty-five years. From 2001 to 2010, she co-directed the Katonah Poetry Series with former Poet Laureate Billy Collins; she currently serves as poetry consultant to the series committee. Her poems and stories have appeared in The Alembic, Big Muddy, Corium Magazine, The Cortland Review, Crack the Spine, decomP, Forge, and The Minetta Review as well as others. 

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Ian T. Hall was born and reared in Raven, Kentucky. He is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Tennessee, where he serves as the assistant poetry editor for Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts. He has published poetry and fiction in Kentucky Monthly Magazine, The Louisville Review, Heartland Review, and Modern Mountain Magazine, among others. 

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Outdoors, the 
instructor scraped 
snow, exposing 
vole trails and one 
small gray-brown vole, 
a wee sleeket 
cow’rin tim’rous 
beastie like the 
one Burns’s plow 
unearthed. The 
instructor had 
barely given 
it a name when, 
swift as a guillotine, 
a red-tailed hawk 
swooped to snatch it, 
roosting in a tree 
to breakfast and 
ignoring us 
with Olympian 
indifference. 
We stood stock still, 
shocked and thrilled 
to see a bird 
of prey up close, 
vole guts dangling 
like spaghetti 
from its bill. 

Kathleen Naureckas is a retired journalist whose poems have appeared in Bluestem, Light, Measure and Willow Review, among others. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, “For the Duration,” in 2012. 

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Katherine Page is a writer and elementary school teacher living in Leadville, Colorado. She has had her work published in Bluestem, Open Minds Quarterly, and Macalester College’s Chanter Magazine. 

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I’ve stopped watching / the water crowd surf the panes / break loose / spit through cracks 
/ drench couch cushions and flannels and faces. 

The TV is on / my eyelids glued to my eyebrow bone / On the screen / video of kids silent 
by water / They have taken to floating stages / like life rafts / On the screen / 
commentators shout over whitewater / they get louder / sell ad space / wait / On the 
screen / everyone is waiting for the punchline / looking for the joke / they find / a headline 
instead / On the screen / everyone is laughing / they say / a parade has been scheduled bring 
your life vests. 

Cross-legged / leaning against the couch / hiding from the spit / I sit / My feet asleep / I 
don’t stand / I rock / ask for cups of water and meals served on coffee tables / My dog licks 
my face / I don’t turn my head / I don’t turn / can’t turn / while the sloshing against the 
windows becomes / not a background noise / but a / drowning. 

If breathing under water was possible / I would already be doing it. 

Mariah Perkins is currently an MFA candidate at Wichita State University as well as the co-editor-in-chief of mojo/Mikrokosmos. Her work can be found in Lunch Ticket, Fugue, Crack the Spine, and heard on WYCE’s Electric Poetry. This sample of work aims to discuss personal and collective anxieties.

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The beginning of Daniel Senser’s poetic career coincided with his initial descent into madness. He made a vow that he would write so that someone in need would find his poems and feel liberated by them, as so many poets did for him. The real challenge, however, was in liberating himself. Much has been accomplished in that regard, and he believes it shows in his poetry. 

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He had written of the rains, the creeping fog, a faint sun over scarred earth, frozen fields strewn 
with rusting heaps crisscrossed by endless strips of tar. 

Now he listens, day after day, to a bald head in a bare room that doesn’t change. 

Between these walls, this congregation of the maimed. 

They will not let him out or let him explore other wards. 

Caught between the two states, he would almost rather die than stay another moment in the elongated somewhere. 

Drab walls, stale air, bloated hours. Flies on standard-issue curtains. 

Michael Washburn is a Brooklyn-based writer and journalist and the author of the short story collections Scenes from the Catastrophe (2016) and The Uprooted and Other Stories (2018). 

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Gabriel Welsch writes fiction and poetry, and is the author of four collections of poems, the most recent of which is The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse (Steel Toe Books, 2013). His work appears recently in Moon City Review, Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, Crab Orchard Review, Chautauqua, Pembroke Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Mid-American Review. He lives in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, with his family, works as Vice President of Strategic Communications and Marketing at Juniata College, and is an occasional teacher at the Chautauqua Writer’s Center. 

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It’s not so dangerous, all this 
falling backwards off moving 
El Caminos on a dare, coming face 
-to-face with trains, sinking deep 
into a needle’s slumber. What 
doesn’t kill you, et al. 
Like promising love to anyone 
who touches you sincerely: 
say mercy bruises on the schoolyard 
or sex behind it, beneath a woods’ 
summer weight. Funny how all this 
violent searching for heaven brings 
both, in spades. & it’s funny 
perhaps in a different way 
how we spent years trying 
to down the sun with our fingers 
yet given a rifle can’t even point, 
let alone squeeze the trigger, when 
the wolf that dragged our dog away 
returns for more. There’s always more 
until there isn’t. More bourbon, trains 
arriving & departing. More shards 
of sunlight, less sharp every day. 
So much nakedness it almost hurts 
as much to look at ourselves 
as look away. 

John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. An eleven-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, The 46er Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Previous publishing credits include The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon. 

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Miller Lite: a middle-aged man with a face like a ham would do a skit with another guy just like that. 

There were mops of badly cut hair, bodies lumpy with too much beer and salt and age, half-folded up with too much brutal use on the playing field. 

Great taste but less filling was how everyone who had a TV knew it was the beer men wanted. 

My father didn’t always recognize the ex-jocks and inside-joke celebrities. Still, he laughed, quietly, at whatever skit was going then. 

He had known men like that. He had been an athlete. 

Some people will tell you it was the eighth-greatest advertising campaign in human history. 

And the greatest of all time when it came to keeping Joe Sixpack entertained and drinking. 

It did with cameos what no one had done with cameos before. 

Smokin’ Joe Frazier, one of the best boxers ever, showed up in those commercials, but so did Marv Throneberry, a professional baseball player who was known for striking out. 

They even had a living legend of a writer, Mickey Spillane, doing a recurring bit as my father watched and drank. 

The spots needed to be good when the Miller Brewing Company was selling something called “Gablinger’s Diet Beer,” from a Rheingold’s recipe they’d bought for cheap. 

My father set a can of Miller Lite and a glass of ice on the small red barrel that stood beside the easy chair in which he liked to drink and watch TV. 

The top of the barrel divided into half-moons, one of which was lower than the other, as if the wet cans, over the years, had warped the wood. 

He had the beer can on one side, the glass on the other. 

In topping things off he did not pour so carefully that the beer slid out smoothly and without foaming. He poured so roughly the beer foamed. 

Then he dipped his fingers into the foam and flicked it at the mouth of the glass, like a kid might do. A kind of play. And he briefly sucked at his fingers. 

The foam stuck to the ice cubes and made a white film that looked like flour. Having dried his fingers, he picked up a salt shaker and, with delicacy, salted the beer. 

Having fussed over the salt and the ice, he gave the impression the beer was something to mask, like a medicine that tasted bad. It didn’t seem to give him pleasure to drink it. It was more like an obligation. 

Even though he had eaten well already, he forked fried oysters out of a tin box, the lid curled back with a little key. He arranged thin slices of summer sausage on a plate. He popped olives into his mouth. 

With all of that, he seemed to be celebrating. 

Fifteen minutes later, he stepped into the laundry room at the back of the house. He opened the refrigerator and took out a can of beer. Now there was just the dim light from the fridge, which he hadn’t bothered to close. That way he could finish one and get another while hardly moving. 

The fridge was old and smelled of stagnant water. The little doors on its freezer wouldn’t close. They swung forward when the fridge was opened. My father was used to that, his hand rising to catch the doors before he could think to move it. Sometimes the light blinked out, so that, as he drank, he was standing there in the dark. 

He turned the can upside down. He made his throat a funnel. He tilted his head back, too, so far he must have felt ready to tip over. It was done in an instant: the can emptied, and my father more full. 

He was workmanlike about this. He was like a machine that emptied cans. In two minutes he drank four or five beers. He didn’t just open his mouth. He opened his throat. And the beer dropped down, fast. 

Had he gotten enough? He didn’t wait to see how one beer or another would make him feel, even though he seemed to know what it would take. It may have been a matter of hitting a number he had in mind. 

+ 

At most of the family gatherings I remember, just about everyone was unapologetically drunk and out of control. 

My uncle drank one can of beer after another with my father in a corner of our living room. He knew more about the McDermotts in Ireland than anybody. We come from Boyle, he told us. That’s really the name. 

My aunt and my grandmother steadily drank cocktails and got into shouting matches. They said unkind things about how the other had styled her hair. 

My grandmother never used to drink, but after her husband, whom she had eloped with at the age of eighteen, had a heart attack and died at the department store where he sold clothes, she took it up, saying it was the only way to kill the pain of missing him. 

She also drank a lot before getting on an airplane. Manhattans were her favorite. She smelled, pleasantly, of booze and perfume. 

I remember a great-uncle slurring his words so much it was like a different language. What he was feeling as he talked was clear. What he was saying was not. His wife translated word by word, conferring sense. 

When the family drank, emotions ran high. The drunken feeling of belonging, of connectedness among brothers and cousins, was often so strong all the men burst into tears. Trying to explain it to the children, they cried even harder. 

My father liked to proclaim the exceptionalism of his Irish blood in ways that were entertaining and irrational and sometimes melodramatic. 

A great-grandfather had emigrated from County Roscommon. When he got to America he worked on railroads repairing track. It was a point of pride that one of his seven sons became a depot man in town. 

The depot man’s son, my paternal grandfather, was a binge drinker. Every three or four months he would leave home and disappear for a few days and drink as much as he could as quickly as he could and sleep on the floors of bars or in the open air. 

There was a bar in Zell, South Dakota, where he went to binge again and again. It was a few miles down Highway 212 from Redfield, where my father’s family lived. 

Once, on a hunting trip, not far from Zell, I couldn’t find my father anywhere. After searching the cattail sloughs, I walked back to the road and saw that his car was gone. Two hours later, after dark, I ran across him. He was very drunk and swimming backstroke in a motel pool with a dozen high-school football players from the Lower Brule Reservation. 

As he glided back and forth he had them all laughing about something. There were no other adults around. He had quit hunting and driven to a roadside bar, then back to our motel to go for a swim. He wouldn’t say which bar, or where his shotgun was. 

A few years later I drove to Zell to look around, but I couldn’t find the bar where my grandfather slept. There was nothing standing there but an abandoned Catholic school. 

Climbing up the bell tower, I didn’t think I would ever find out where he or his need had finally gone. 

As my father was happy to tell anyone who would listen, he came from all of that: he came from South Dakota, and from Irish. He came from drinking. 

+ 

It’s exciting to think of the drunk historian, and to consider his mind set free to roam through time. 

All around my father as he drank in the basement at home were artifacts of Native American culture. 

There was a headdress, a woman’s buffalo hide shirt, and a pair of beaded moccasins. There were utensils made of bone. There was a ceremonial vest with braided horsehair. 

There was even a tomahawk, the stone more than solid enough to split a man’s skull. 

My father sometimes picked the tomahawk up and swung it around as the Great Sioux War raged on in his imagination. 

There was also a broken carbine more than a century old. 

It was the kind of rifle a U.S. soldier might have used during the Indian Wars, a soldier who rode with the Seventh Cavalry, a soldier Custer led. 

When a commercial that wasn’t for Miller Lite came on, my father took the carbine down and pointed it at a mounted antelope head that hung on a far wall of the basement. 

The carbine would no longer fire and was as much a conversation piece as the antelope. Still, he must have felled that pronghorn a thousand times over. He would kill it and kill it again, raise that antique rifle to his cheek. 

Now Bloody Knife speaks with Custer before the Battle of the Little Bighorn. 

To himself he says: “I will not see the sun go down.” 

“Garryowen” plays as my father aims the carbine’s scored barrel at “Custer’s Last Fight,” which hangs above the TV. 

The print was produced by a beer company in the 1880s. It can still be found in saloons across America. My father’s version was three feet high with fine details of bloody scalps. Custer was firing at the enemy. In the next instant he would be overrun. 

This was what is known as “going down fighting.” 

The scene was perfect for drinkers to look at over a long night at the bar. The idea they could come back to was that “they would not take him alive.” 

Drinking made Custer’s plight more real to my father, too. The more he drank, the better he could imagine himself in those final moments. 

Bosses and children were coming at him. He did what he could to keep them all at bay, and he was inventive and relentless in his own defense. 

But just like that, the enemy broke through. 

+ 

As a watcher of television, my father was loyal for a time to The Rockford Files. James Garner had been Maverick, after all. 

He took in The Six Million Dollar Man and there was something called Carter Country about a squad of joshing cops in Plains, Georgia. 

In a different decade there was Miami Vice. There was Cheers. The shows came and went, but the drinking mostly stayed the same. 

Soon decades had passed with the TV, the tomahawk, the gun, and “Custer’s Last Fight” in the basement. 

One night, my father mixed a drink in the kitchen. Rather than walking down the stairs, he walked from the kitchen into the living room and put my sister’s Bruce Springsteen record on the stereo. 

He took a long pull from his glass, set it down, and began to dance and shadow-box to the E Street Band. 

A few minutes later he abruptly left the room, and when he came back he wore what was, for him, a slightly unusual set of clothes. 

With the jeans and white t-shirt, and his black hair slicked back with water, he looked like Brando did in A Streetcar Named Desire. 

He wouldn’t say why he had stayed upstairs. But it was all so different now. None of the TVs were on anywhere in the house. 

This happened in the spring, during those first warm days after the cold March winds had faded. 

This happened in 1986. He was fifty-two then. I was sixteen. 

That night, as he danced, my father flexed his biceps. In the break between “Glory Days” and “Dancing in the Dark” he curled a barbell to his shoulder. Drunk and wired, he looked younger and stronger than he had in years. 

Now his cowboy boots cut that living room rug. He was giddy in a menacing way. He seemed powerful, and capable of doing things, even violence. 

The dancing went on for a few evenings, no more. 

After that he took a leave of absence from work. He would not explain why. Once he’d returned to the job, he was given permission to stay home while writing a lengthy report. He seemed busy, and we didn’t see much of him. 

At some point the Miller Lite went away. He brought home cardboard boxes holding bottles of vodka instead. 

One afternoon I walked into the house after school and saw a still hand resting on the carpet beyond the doorway that opened into the living room where my father had danced. 

Stepping into the room, I saw that he had passed out on the floor. It was a little after two o’clock. I was calm watching him: a man lying on the floor in the middle of the afternoon, not moving. 

+ 

What are you going to do, my father asked, when the heart says to go? I had no answer. I wondered, though, what my mother and I were going to do. I wondered where we were going to live and how we were going to get money. 

He had woken up that morning and had vodka rather than breakfast. He had not bothered to ice the drink or to put it in a glass: he drank it warm from the bottle to save time. His eyes were red and he needed a shower. 

He was following his love, he said. Most people just follow their fear. He said he couldn’t do that anymore. He laughed and raised his hands, as if he was as surprised as I was. 

Then he went out to start the car. He did not seem to possess a map of any kind. 

Is this the way a father should set off in search of something he has to have? Or do other ways of doing that exist? Are they better? 

As he drove off, he kept one hand on the steering wheel and one hand on a bottle of vodka. It sat on the seat beside him like someone he was leaving with to make a new life. 

My father had a last stand, too. 

Jim McDermott lives with his family in Virginia. He is the author of a creative nonfiction book and is a recipient of the Bevel Summers Prize from Shenandoah. 

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The Buffalo River about a mile from Lake Erie is a lonely place. Its banks are lined for miles with abandoned piers and empty cement blocks, sheer high walls along the water. The river runs through the City of Buffalo, N.Y., but I would not have known I was near a city had I landed on that shoreline with no map and no one to explain the place to me. Had I wandered there alone I could not have guessed why there had ever been such cliffs of concrete or what they had once been used for, only that I had gotten myself lost somehow among giants and dinosaurs. 

But I was lost on purpose in a place called “Silo City,” where every so often as I stood on that shore with my dog Colby, a boat would pass up the river and its passengers would swivel their heads to see the magnificent ruins of Buffalo’s grain shipping industry, the wrecked shells of towers and old machinery, the steel drawbridges that still opened and closed every so often to let a train pass, like the jaws of ancient sea beasts that now and then wake to feed. Once, ships the length of football fields motored up the river. The ships carried grain, millions of tons of it, all the grain the Midwest and much of Canada could muster; they unloaded their haul into grain elevators, long blocks of concrete tubes, and then trains took the grain still farther away, and all of this churned and hummed with massive industry along the waterfront for ages. None of it happens anymore. 

Now the silos stand like Shelley’s Ozymandias, trunkless legs of stone in the desert rising nine stories above so much useless stuff. Ducks and geese wade through the murk. Sometimes deer wander by, but hardly any people; on thousands of acres along the water in Buffalo, all that humans once built was abandoned a generation ago, so there is no longer a reason for anyone to be there. 

Oh my god, I loved Buffalo. Right at first sight, I loved it as if it had been built in heaven just for me. 

Colby and I arrived in Buffalo on our mission to visit as many places as we could that no one else seemed to ever want to go. I felt, I suppose, that I had something to learn that only those unwanted places could teach me. This was my strange, midlife obsession, and when I found myself at last with some time off from my teaching job, I indulged this need to visit difficult places, crossing thousands of miles my friends back in New York City knew mostly as “that stuff out there” and proudly avoided. That attitude is a kind of denial—a blind eye that I’d been guilty of too. If, for example, I knew anything about Buffalo before I went it was only that it was godforsaken, a place that people had been fleeing for decades. Passing it on the New York Thruway bound for other places—fancy places like Cleveland and Albany—I might have looked out toward Buffalo and seen the long, flat rows of tiny houses in its suburban foothills, all those faceless domiciles beneath a daunting web of power lines, the rings of six-lane highways that choked and choked Buffalo even decades after it had died, and like any normal healthy person with most of my life still ahead of me, I might have said in those moments, “huh,” and turned my focus back to the map, and wondered how much longer I’d be driving. 

But then there I was, a woman of a certain age, not as willing as I’d once been to push blindly along without stopping to question, and when I did stop I discovered, to my surprise, a deep affinity for old, forgotten Buffalo. Among other things, it was a distant, isolated city, essentially a loner, not unlike a woman of a certain age out wandering with a trailer and a dog. Liberated from the oppression of more fashionable places, it is really very cool, a hip little outpost that no one seems to expect to like, but then they do. Buffalo developed a bad case of low self-esteem as the 20th century wound down and was, by the time I met it, truly devastated; its decline had been swift and thorough. But who was I to judge? My physical decline had only recently begun but my self-esteem had run ahead and hit the skids; in midlife I’d found a bog of disappointment. At 49 I couldn’t even claim the status of a crestfallen Buffalo but felt more like Newburg, N.Y., a once-bustling city that never quite achieved greatness and was now past its prime. Even that may be arrogant. Whatever aspirations I once had, whatever small accomplishments I could claim, at that moment in my life I had come to see myself on the grand map of humanity as a humble, wishful Paducah—a place, plain and simple; sweet home to some, feisty when pushed, but fundamentally awkward, and arguably dispensable. Yes. Perhaps my soul was stranded in Paducah. 

This is the truth of a midlife crisis, which in hindsight I can see is what brought me to Buffalo: it is like looking at a map and not knowing, really, where you are on it. You were going somewhere but gradually you’d realized that you’d become lost—and what’s more, no one was expecting you to show up anyhow. You grasp your futility and yet are still young and strong enough to wrestle with it, and thus, to suffer. 

But then, wow: look at Buffalo. It was no pathetic little whip of a cold, worthless city. It had once obviously mattered very much. It was the terminus of the Erie Canal. The Gateway to the West. They called it America’s Paris. And for all that, look what happened. Good god, Buffalo had actually, certifiably achieved greatness and it was a total mess anyhow. There was something profoundly comforting in that to me, a certain relief in the inevitability of failure. Loving Buffalo, I began to think that, maybe, I could forgive myself for everything. 

There’s a half-day kayak tour up the Buffalo River that includes a hike, for which paddlers pull their kayaks up onto a peer in Silo City–an especially complex and grim-looking peninsula of ruins in the larger collection of them along the river. The paddlers wander at their own pace through this large lot of empty concrete grain elevators, eating their lunch of baloney and cheese or chicken salad or what have you on the grimy shores of a river that looks very much like a sewer in that spot, running inky and flat through high walls of steel and cement. 

I read about the kayak tour as I was planning my drive into the middle of the country; I saw the baffling pictures and jumped. I made my kayaking reservation months in advance fearing that somehow, hordes of the morbidly curious would awaken and swarm to this adventure, and all the spots would sell out. But when the day of the paddle was at last near, I realized I had a bigger problem. Colby and I were going to spend three months living in a tiny trailer, roaming the country in search of hard truth, and as it happens there is no place in Buffalo to camp in a trailer, actually. Urban places in general—and especially the really desperate places, which appealed to me most—are not, it seems, generally very big on camping. Some cities do have RV parks, but oddly enough those places are often linked to news stories of meth lab busts, or described online as chock full of vicious dogs and sex offenders, all of which fascinates me on one level, but in no way inspires me to park and try to sleep. 

So I booked a night in a cheap motel near the city and began a desperate hunt for an insider’s guide to urban camping. Eventually I called BFLO Harbor Kayak, and discussed my camping options with Jason, the owner, who was at a loss, really, until eventually he said, “I don’t know how adventurous you are,” which was my cue to draw a deep breath and wait for the best possible weird-in-a-good-way suggestion to follow. A long sigh came from Colby, who’d been hiding on the floor between our motel room beds since we’d arrived. “But if you want,” Jason said, “you could camp at Silo City.” 

+ 

Not everyone agrees on the proper use of the expression Silo City. Some believe it’s an apt nickname for Buffalo as a whole, but Buffalo’s official nickname is the City of Light, since the power of nearby Niagara Falls gave Buffalo the first electric street lamps, and also because Buffalo in its day was, after all, an American Paris. The name “Silo City” is a trademarked term lately given to the entire region of mostly abandoned grain elevators in the city’s First Ward. But it is also used, apparently with disregard to the trademark, to refer to the specific 6-acre property purchased in 2006 by Rick Smith, the third-generation chief executive of a family-owned metal fabrication company with headquarters next to the silo “campus” he now owns. 

To be clear: the big concrete cylinders sticking up all along the river are grain silos, but the silos stand clustered in blocks with rusted, rolling grain loading machinery attached to them, and these clusters are actually grain “elevators.” A woman who had spent her life in the orbit of New York City would have little reason to know this and I didn’t, but I learned. Groups of 20 or more cylinders—the silos—stand two deep in rows like a case of concrete “tall boy” lager cans, eight or nine stories high, all along the river in a mesmerizing abandoned industrial zone that is also described as “Elevator Alley.” 

Rick Smith’s property, which contains about a half dozen grain elevators and related structures, is only one of the many sites in Buffalo where these abandoned works stand, but it is special among them. It is, for one thing, home to the oldest solid concrete grain silo on the planet, and in fact, the slip-form process of concrete silo construction was invented there; concrete silos around the world have Buffalo to thank. It is a distinction that might matter to approximately 17 living humans, including me, and mean nothing to most of the other six billion or so, unless you are moved to consider that there, among the weeds and rubble of Silo City, is hard proof of how fast glory fades, and how a truly transformative idea can, in short time, cease to matter whatsoever. 

Smith had wanted to build an ethanol manufacturing plant on his site, fed by corn shipped in from the Midwest. That’s why he bought it, but that didn’t work out. And now there they still are, these vacant looming concrete things that a bomb wouldn’t take down, not easily, and on this particular six-acre tract, they all belong to one guy who wonders what in the world can be done with them. 

The gate to Smith’s property is watched over by a man called Swannie Jim, whom Smith—himself a character, sporting a bushy mustache and an ever-present cowboy hat—calls “a modern day Thoreau, living in his Walden,” though Thoreau could never have been so leathery nor quite so committed to austerity as Jim. Swannie Jim lives on the site in a cozy, cluttered shack heated by a stove in which he burns logs and broken pallets. There is enough electricity to keep the lights on and the beer cold and not a whole lot else seems to matter. Jim in his day had been project engineer at a number of large industrial sites; he had come to Buffalo to more or less retire, and then got involved in Silo City and the ethanol project, which failed. 

Now, each morning Jim rides his bicycle up Childs Street, the roughly paved road that goes nowhere except into and out of Smith’s collection of elevators, to unlock a chain-link gate across the road. He spends a few hours building pallets at Smith’s shop; he spends afternoons keeping track of the curiosity seekers who have stumbled upon the open gate on Childs Street and could not resist going past. Silo City, all but bereft of industry, seems to attract everything else. Smith’s property has been the site of poetry readings and music festivals; films have been shot and music recorded in the echoing silos; movies have been projected outside onto the sheer silo walls. In 2011 the site began hosting an annual extravaganza called “City of Night” that brings art installations and performances to Silo City; hundreds of visitors wander by candle and moonlight through a wasteland strewn with art installations. Buffalo hipsters once set up a mustache museum there; vendors hold a flea market on weekends. University of Buffalo architecture students built an enormous obelisk beehive on the grounds, but after a year the bees abandoned the hive, and now it stands along the road, tall and shiny and empty. 

Jason, the kayak guy, had asked Swannie Jim to watch for me and when I pulled up with my trailer, he and his pit bull Champ walked over and put their faces in my car window. Champ’s face was fawn-colored with almond eyes and a licorice nose. Jim’s was thin and rough like worn red leather, stubbled with white whiskers; his eyes, squint-thin through thick glasses, were creased in the corners in a way that suggested he had spent a fair amount of time looking into the sun. 

“You think it’s safe to camp here?” I asked through the car window, like a tourist at the gates of Yellowstone worried about bear. Most Silo City veterans would have been appalled by this question, but Jim was kind, and in my defense, it really was an abandoned industrial site, accurately described as a creepy, deserted brownfield at the edge of a poor and sometimes violent city. Pictures I posted later on the Internet drew speedy and satisfyingly worried responses. My favorite came from a friend back home who, upon seeing pictures of my trailer in a debris-strewn mud patch, dwarfed by the mysterious blocks of cement, wrote to say: “Remember, palm to the nose, knee to the groin. Palm to the nose, knee to the groin.” 

Swannie Jim, a man who drinks a lot and lives in a shack, assured me I’d be safe. “We don’t get a lot of trespassers,” he said. He grinned. His dog snapped at the end of her rope. Colby was whining to get out of the car, which could have meant grave danger was imminent or that he needed to pee. Odds were on pee. I told Jim I’d be staying. 

I parked the trailer next to the Marine A elevator, where the sun at a certain late angle turned the top third of the silos dark orange and left the rest in gray shadow. It felt like we were in the mountains. I made a ring of rocks around our campsite like a fence, bringing pioneer order to the wilderness. I set out my chairs and barbecue. 

In the morning, Colby and I sat by our trailer and watched young hairy guys with battered cars and tool boxes show up at Marine A to work on a big new Smith-backed initiative: transforming the Marine A silos into a rock climbing and yoga studio, grasping at the new fitness economy because the ethanol thing had fallen through. When it was finished, the climbing wall on the 190-foot Marine A tower would top a165-foot Reno climbing wall to become the world’s tallest manmade outdoor climbing surface. Anyhow, that was the dream. 

Jason, the guy who ran the kayak business out of Buffalo Harbor, was also involved in building the rock-climbing studio. He came by later to show me around. We entered Marine A through a cut at the base of one of the concrete tubes. An empty grain elevator is like a Medieval cathedral, unlit and unadorned. At eye-level, shafts of light pass through spaces where there had once been windows. The silos themselves are long, vertical tunnels to the sky, blocked about fifteen feet above the ground by massive steel hoppers—10-ton funnels with spouts that open and close. The hoppers once stopped grain from pouring down to the floor. Railway carts would pull up in the dark, open space beneath the hoppers; the steel spouts would open and let loose a flood of grain. Most of the steel hoppers had been removed from Marine A by the time I saw it; torches and tractors helped pull them out, so that when I looked up from the ground inside I could see the full, unfettered height of each empty silo, thin light piercing holes at their tops. Shouts and coughs and whistles echoed up into that dark vacant space, out into infinity. 

In the Port of Buffalo, grain was unloaded from ships by men with shovels right up until 2003 when the last hand-scooped load was emptied at the General Mills elevator, and after that machines took over. But the truth is, no grain has been delivered by any means for fifty years or more to Marine A, or to the nearby Perot Towers, or the Nesbitt or the H. and O., or the Great Northern, Concrete Central, or Cargill; none to March, or Sturgess, or Spencer Kellog, or any of the elevators on acre after abandoned acre, all the way up the river. 

People in south Buffalo know the names of these places the way Coloradans can name mountain peaks. They are part of the landscape. A hundred years ago when the concrete was poured, the silos were fixed into existence like the city itself. Now it seems likely the silos won’t ever come down; that part is still true. But the purpose they served, as it turned out, passed in a moment. And then, there is the rest of time. 

+ 

Colby and I ate dinner on a dock near the old Perot Malting Works, and we were walking back to the trailer for the night when we were spotted by Swannie Jim, who was standing outside his shack smoking a cigarette. He called me over and said, “You know, you haven’t been talking to the right people.” 

This worried me. Jason had seemed so nice. But Swannie Jim said if I really wanted to know about the silos, I’d better follow him. Colby and I entered the shack and there in the bad light, sitting around the stove on a collection of broken chairs, were Rick Smith and Bob the Builder, who works in restoration, and Kevin the Horse Thief, a retired state employee. Their connections to each other were various but had been made long ago in a bar. Someone handed me a beer and Bob leaned way back on the bad springs of his seat and said, “so you’ve come here to learn. What do you want to know?” 

I wasn’t sure how to put it. “What the hell happened to Buffalo?” I said. 

My inquiry was not so much ignorant as too broad; it was like asking “why was I born?” They could have told me themselves if I’d asked them 10, 20, 30 years ago that what rises will fall, in both the world and the flesh. North Dakota was at that moment exploding with gas and oil. Check back with North Dakota in 20 years, they assured me, and I’d find a new Silo City, I’d find Derrick City, I’d find decay. None of this was hard to grasp if properly explained. 

Kevin started the process of my enlightenment by tipping his head back and entering a kind of dream state. “The key to all this is the War of 1812,” he told the room. 

Turned out that I had arrived in Silo City 200 years to the day after the start of the Battle of Lake Erie, a turning point in the War of 1812; this apparently linked me inextricably, if unimportantly, to my new favorite place. I had been called there, somehow. The battle’s bicentennial explained the presence in Buffalo Harbor of a fleet of “tall ships,” which had sailed in from a pre-industrial dream. 

The reason why the Battle of Lake Erie mattered so much was because the lake was a gateway. Controlling Lake Erie meant controlling the West, all that land across the continent that in 1812 was still unsettled. Sailing the Great Lakes out to what we now call Ohio and Michigan and Wisconsin was the easiest way to get there. If the British controlled Lake Erie, they would not only have had a strategic site from which to attack their former colonies; after the war, they would hold the key to the whole damn continent. Lose the lake, and America would be cut off from its destiny. Keep the lake, and soon, Buffalo would become the second-largest port in North America—all ours. 

“We really had to realize how important it was to control the water,” Kevin said. “That’s what the Battle of Lake Erie showed us.” 

Kevin sat with his legs crossed and his head tipped thoughtfully. Jim leaped from his stool and made for the fridge. He passed out beer to Kevin and to Bob the Builder, who waved his empty bottle in the air, then leaned in to tell me something privately. His girlfriend, he said, was 20 years younger than him and they sometimes had troubles. Apparently one trouble was that she didn’t appreciate his need to drop by Swannie Jim’s shack to drink beer and take stock every day. Bob fell back in his seat and we gave each other a sympathetic nod; clearly he’d sniffed out the true motive in my road trip—I was running from my fear of turning 50. Fine. But I knew something he apparently didn’t, which was that whatever good a young woman might do him, an older one would more likely approve of his visits to the silos, just like my longtime partner knew a road trip with Colby was a wiser stress reliever than, say, sleeping with my students. She had practically pushed me out the door. I raised my empty bottle and Jim tossed me a full one. Colby began making rounds of the room, trying to hump all the men’s legs and, failing that, licking their knees incessantly. 

Meanwhile, Kevin’s lesson on the War of 1812 had progressed to an intellectual climax. He tipped way back as if watching his lecture on a PowerPoint projected on the ceiling, and Bob swiveled in his chair and checked his watch. Rick Smith presided silently beneath his cowboy hat, wiping drops of beer off his mustache. 

Kevin said: It was only four years after the Battle of Lake Erie was won against the Brits that work was started on the Erie Canal. The country figured out what the water meant to our defense and well-being and then, boom. Erie Canal. Everyone until then had said couldn’t be built—too expensive, too difficult, a pipe dream. Suddenly it got the government backing it needed, because a canal would get men and material up to the lakes fast. Just like Eisenhower’s highways 130 years later: a defense plan that, once established, would be mainly used to move freight and vacationing families. 

To this, everyone tossed back a good slug of beer. A major city in that spot where the canal meets the lakes was inevitable. It doesn’t matter if that city gets an average of 93.6 inches of snow in the winter. It doesn’t matter if touching Canada seems, to people living cozily below, like floating off the tether into space. The water made Buffalo utterly essential. Greatness was destiny. 

+ 

On the viewing platform at the top of Buffalo City Hall—a 32-story art deco beauty—I saw how Lake Erie runs off to the edge of the world, and I looked out across the ruins of old warehouses and factories, and I saw from the air the houses that have lost more than half their occupants in a handful of decades, the decades in which I had come of age to see the country apparently declining. At the start of the 1960s, when I was born, the United States had seemed untouchable, on the crest of a great wave of prosperity that Buffalo still figured into. So much can change in 50 years. 

The legendary architect Frederick Law Olmstead was Buffalo’s planner, and in the 1860s when the city was one of the country’s 10 largest, Olmstead sought to exceed the elegance of Paris in the Second Empire, to outshine the renovations Haussmann was just then wrapping up for Napoleon. Buffalo was an American prodigy, rising to its glory almost the moment it was born, like a four-year-old chess master, or like my 7-year-old self, so adept at using the alphabet that my first-grade teacher tagged me for greatness. When you are 7 and your teacher says you’ll be great, you believe her. You look up with wide eyes and a jelly-stained mouth and you really believe you are on a path to immortality. Not asthma and credit card debt and jobs you aren’t always proud of. Greatness. Buffalo: two American presidents came from that city, and another, William McKinley, was murdered there. Presidents get killed in Washington D.C., Dallas, and Buffalo. That’s it. These are cities that command respect. The Buffalo I saw from the sky was cluttered with empty factories and 23,000 vacant homes, it was suffering and yet it was still lovely, it was still ready to rise up and do great things. I understood this place as I understood Colby, who was 14, and who for much of the previous year could not make it across the lobby of our apartment building without peeing on the floor, and then he’d look up at me like he didn’t understand what had happened and god I loved him, and I would want to cry. That’s what I saw in Buffalo, which is to say, I saw its humiliation, and it felt so unfair.         

I’d left Colby at a pet shop for a bath while I toured the city, partly because he needed to bathe but mostly because it was safer for an old guy; he couldn’t follow me everywhere. When I picked him up in the afternoon, he trotted out in a dinosaur bandana and a big, toothy grin. He looked so handsome. I mentioned to the groomer that it seemed like it might be getting cold out, to which the groomer, a slim girl with white spikey hair, laughed nervously and said, “well yeah…” like my observation was both dumb and somehow upsetting. Later, in a shop in the city’s cool Elmwood neighborhood, I told an insanely chipper clerk at a coffee shop, “It’s cold out. Guess it’s true what they say about Buffalo.” 

The young woman looked up from what she was doing behind the counter and dropped her smile, eyed me seriously. She shook her head slowly and said, “you have no idea how cold it is here. It is a cold place. You should thank God every day that you don’t live in Buffalo. Every single day. As soon as I can, I’m leaving.” 

+ 

On Sunday in the silos, I watched football on a twelve-inch TV inside Swannie Jim’s shack. That Sunday, the Bills won a heartbreaker in the final second and after that, we all ate wings and pizza by a fire outside Jim’s shack. In Marine A, a woman named Jax Deluca was playing her ukulele and singing songs that a crew was recording. 

I went into Marine A to hear Jax sing, and when she finished, I wandered with Kevin back out into the night. Swannie Jim had turned his light out. Kevin, at maybe 60, was built soft and comfortable; he was a pleasant man and he had a nice way of talking long. One night we had tried together to find the right image, some vivid way to explain what had happened to Buffalo. Prosperity was a force without end; it only moves. It’s like weather. It drifts away. They say the St. Lawrence Seaway is what killed the city, because after 1960 when it opened no one needed the port anymore, but still there was Buffalo, a city with its face still turned to the sky, waiting for the rain to come again. 

But still, that night the Bills won and the music echoed in Marine A like magic, and lifted by this, when we wandered back to the shack but found the party over, Kevin dared to ask if I might like to close the night with one more drink, somewhere out there, beyond the gates of Silo City. I know well this desire to make the good feeling last a little longer; joy brings a weightlessness, like the world has struck a perfect balance and should never be allowed to fall again. For a deluded moment I imagined necking with Kevin back in my trailer, feeling so much love for the lost things, everywhere, feeling still so excited and fresh and uncomplicated myself. But then I floated up and saw us standing there, looking at the stars, two pale, graying stumps of humanity stuck in the brownfields, nursing an all-day beer buzz. 

“I guess I better not,” I said, and Kevin smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” And I went back to my place beneath the silos, stone walls empty as church bells. In the morning, like prosperity, I’d pack up the trailer and push on. 

Lori Soderlind is author of Chasing Montana, a memoir. Her essay “66 Signs That the Former Student Who Invited You to Dinner Is Trying to Seduce You” is included in the Norton Anthology of Creative Nonfiction; it first appeared in PMS journal and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has reviewed for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, and has published essays in Mead and the Higgs Weldon journals. As a longtime journalist, her work has appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines, including the Times and The Boston Globe, Montana Magazine, and others. She holds her MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia University. She teaches in the MFA programs of Columbia University and Western Connecticut State University and is a journalism professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. 

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William Auten is the author of the novel Pepper’s Ghost (2016, Black Rose Writing), a 2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award finalist for contemporary fiction. Recent work has appeared in BULL, Crab Orchard Review, Gravel, Permafrost, and 
Slush Pile Magazine. 

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Forty-nine means your skin is like pea gravel. When you’re middle-aged, you start to turn to stone—punctured, implausibly, by whiskers, like crabgrass poking up through sidewalk grass. We all love a lush green lawn, but a single rough blade, insisting on its right to be where we know it doesn’t belong, is an outrage. I used to pluck each whisker. I’d grab at it with the tweezers, again and again, somehow just missing—pulling away while the whisker still stood—but I kept at it until I got those suckers; I’d hold them to the light and there they’d be. It wasn’t long before they grew too numerous for plucking to be practical, and I’d reach for the razor instead, my chin raised at the mirror like a man’s. 

I’d like to be soft again, somehow. 

My son left me two years ago. It was just him and me then, but in the span of a night it was just me, and it was him, separate. He wasn’t yet out of high school. To this day, I don’t know where he lives, or if it’s even indoors. I don’t know what or if he eats. I picture him in the last outfit I saw him in—jeans and an orange pocket tee. He took no other. Sometimes I think maybe he’s dead in it. 

I rub my hand along my now-smooth chin. When I was a child, my father would rub his chin against my cheek, hard. How I’d yell—Too rough! Too rough!—even though I kind of liked it. My mom would make him quit. I don’t much like having a beard of my own, but I wouldn’t mind feeling texture against me once more. 

Today of all days, I didn’t need to pluck. I lift the panther head over mine and peer out through the screen of the eyes. It instantly feels steamy and it smells like old breath—the combined exhales of a decade of dancing, jumping, running school mascots. 

I bought my fursuit in a charity auction at Patterson High. I’m not sure where the furries get them, but I think a lot of them sew. In the pictures, they all look rather similar—flared and stuffed haunches, cartoon eyes. My panther legs go straight up and down, like trousers, and my head is like a globe, not molded and defined. I turn one way, convinced I’ll fit right in, then turn the other and nearly give right up. 

My love for Jason was prickly, minus the actual abrasive love scritch. There wasn’t a lot of scritching—the furries’ word for a gentle and affectionate scratch on the back. He never had a dad, if you don’t count whiskered me. He didn’t even have grandparents—my dad long dead, my mom disapproving. She’d suggested an abortion. Maybe she sees a homeless runaway grandson as being like that. If she didn’t want Jason, I didn’t want her—and though Jason’s gone, that still holds. 

Now that I’m ready, I don’t know the best way to get to the civic center for the event I’ve been waiting on: FurNature Con, billed as the Midwest’s second-largest furry convention. I could take the bus or train, but would I wear my fursuit or take it in a bag? It’s big. I can fold the bodysuit up and store it in the mask, but the head is huge and heavy, like a prize pumpkin. It’s a lot to carry into rush hour. For now I take it off and hold it at my side. 

“I’ll be home late,” I tell my roommate, Belinda. She’s gaming—a buff male avatar gazes around a battered wall with a huge unlikely weapon in his arms. All the gunfire I hear suggests that this is a critical moment, but it doesn’t keep her from staring. 

“FurNature,” I say. I shrug, like it’s an everyday thing. It’s clear from looking at her that Belinda doesn’t know what I’m talking about—thinks I’m saying “furniture,” like couches and chairs. 

“Great,” she says. “Have a great time.” It’s a very Belinda sentiment, and once again she has risen to the level of her purpose. Skinny Belinda is nonetheless like an old, fat dog in my no-pet apartment building. Curiosity makes her look up, but she doesn’t’ ask questions, and nothing could make her pursue. 

I’ve decided to wear my fursuit and grab a ride service. I text the driver that I’m easy to spot, and I stand outside in my black pelt—tap my foot like any late commuter as I wait. 

+ 

The last day I saw Jason, he wore a tail. It was a long, narrow thing, tufted at the end, and gold, like a lion’s, maybe, or a giraffe’s. Jason had always been tall, and kids called him that, and other things, too. Giraffe. Skyscraper. Too-Tall, Totem Pole, Stilts. 

It wasn’t like the tails I see in pictures from furry cons. Those are almost always fat and fluffy. My panther tail is like Jason’s was—long and ropy, slim. Runs in the family, I think. I grab it and give it a flick, less like a furry than like Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion, wringing his tail in his hands like a handkerchief. I refuse to think of tail as apology, though. That nerve-filled extension of the spine is made to tingle and sense, like an antenna connected to your backside. And didn’t I need to be sharp? 

Jason loved animals, and he was always drawing them—the arc of their whiskers, the tufted ears, the angular back limbs. He was good, and he should have been—it’s all he ever wanted to do. Once in an argument I took his journal and threw it in the sinkwater. It was still floating there, bloated, in the morning when I got home from work. 

I’ll bet it’s easy being a sweet mom if your kid eats his vegetables, or if he reads more than he games, or if he changes his clothes more than once a week. I was never sweet, and I never had much time. Most days I greeted him with did-you-do-your-homework. Most nights he went to bed without a kiss. 

It’s easy to second-guess, after. Some nights I tell myself I did the best I could, and then I can go to sleep. 

+ 

My ride pulls up, a black sedan, and I step into it—sleekly, I think—before the car pulls silently away. 

“I’m heading to the civic center,” I tell the driver through my mouth slit. 

“Yeah,” she says, and her voice suggests she’s carried a steady stream of housedogs and jungle cats today. 

But when I get there, most convention-goers—at least seven out of ten—are in street clothes. A lot of the others, more than half of them, wear ears and tails. As I suspected, the fursuits I see are different than mine—sleek and customized, at both more and less animalistic. 

The convention hall has a great foyer just inside the doors, and people are clustered in groups to talk. A man in street clothes wields a red laser, and a group of fully costumed cat furries chase it back and forth as I watch. They jump and bat with their paws, and they race each other to the left and the right to touch the uncatchable light. 

The registration line has the usual belt-and-stanchion system with about twenty feet between switchbacks. That means the people in line talk have occasion to talk to the person beside them, and that person changes every time the line moves, until the series of lefts and rights brings the same alignment into play. It’s a friendly group, and no one seems to mind the wait too much. 

I’m temporarily beside the lithe, elegant Mona Lisa of furries—a gorgeous lavender sloth with hooded eyes and long, expressive nails—when she turns my way and says hello. 

“I’m digging your suit,” the sloth tells me in gruff cigarette tones. “It’s refreshingly old school.” 

I’m surprised to hear an older man’s voice coming from the elegant sloth. 

“I was admiring yours,” I say back. To my ears, I sound convincingly feline. “You’re way on the other end of the spectrum.” 

Elegant Sloth laughs. “Oh, I used to come when everyone looked like a high school mascot,” they say. “We used to meet out at the Ramada Inn by the airport—maybe thirty of us in the early going. Those were the days.” 

For a few minutes, Elegant Sloth regales me with memories of a conference so small it had no consecutive sessions—just a big room with a series of panels, one after the other. These days, a lot of people skip the panels entirely, and I can tell this displeases Elegant Sloth, who favors a more refined time. I try to imagine it that way—all those furry legs, one propped on the other to make a knee-desk, and a pencil gripped within a paw, scratch-scratching down some notes. 

Elegant Sloth moves ahead. We’re close to the booth, so I don’t know if we’ll talk again. It was a fairly normal conversation, I reflect, and I held my own in it. No real judgment, or at least everything I judged, I judged as positive. 

But there’s the matter of the outfit. I knew it wasn’t one of the better ones, but I’d hoped I wouldn’t be immediately pinned as a mascot. I guess I figured when I pulled off the massive football jersey with the Jefferson High initials on it, I might look like any other anthropomorphized beast. But there are costumes—mascot, Halloween, what have you—and there are fursuits, and they are not the same. 

Something happens to a person in a fursuit. I don’t know how to describe it. They move differently—they stalk or pace or spring; they jump or wiggle. They don’t pace like a person in fur. Rather, they seem animated by something more primal. Even if the colors are fanciful and the facial expressions look straight of out anime, I sense a realness to the furries—the fursonas, I should say. 

I wonder if that’s what Jason was going for in his long, brush-tipped tail. Did he feel like himself, or was he more giraffe? When I snatched at it, only to find it was belted firmly at his waist, did he feel like an animal cornered? I didn’t mean to pull him down, and I still don’t know why there were tears. Maybe I hurt him. It was unintentional. 

When I attend the annual conference of nurse managers—the Nurse Management Conference, it’s called, set for Nashville this year—I guess we get into a groove, checking the name tag and then scanning up to the face above it. We’re all on social media and the message boards, and more people know me as Felicity Stanos than as a round-faced woman with eyes like overwashed denim and brown hair going gray. 

Like a lot of women my age, my profile picture shows me from an angle. In shadow. Five years ago. 

Instead of checking nametags of furries, I scan the room and take in each new person from the bottom, starting with the tail. There are no giraffes in sight. My eyes move from one unmasked face to another. Everyone seems so young, so full of energy. Talking and laughing in the small, roving packs has the atrium sounding like … well, a zoo, actually. 

At the registration booth, I pick up my badge and my tote bag, and I pose for a snapshot—everyone does; I figure it’s a security thing. I smile inside my Jaguar head, and that makes me blush in there a bit, too. It’s hot, and my trapped breath smells stale to me. I consider removing it, but I decide against it. I haven’t seen a single face I know, but it’s better not to be recognized. 

Word is passed from group to group: Area bars aren’t furry-friendly. If we want a beer, we’re better off at the bar at the attached hotel. Hotel bars don’t see fur; they see two-by-three plastic cards. These can be proffered by hand or paw; it all spends the same. 

A first-timer—a Dachshund, I think—is ticked. She wants to mount a protest—to show the proprietors of the Lucky 7 and Doug’s Place and all the rest that we’re all the same under our skin. Her friend, unsuited, tries to calm her. It’s often this way, the friend explains. People don’t welcome what they don’t understand. 

And there’s Jason, sprawled on his front in my kitchen, his tail still gripped in my hands. I can’t make that picture go away. 

+ 

The morning after I knocked down my son, I’d just come off working night shift at the women’s hospital. It had been a tough night, much of the staff gone with flu, and I’d spent much of the shift in triage, helping with admissions, comforting a miscarriage best I could. Maybe this just wasn’t your time, I said, to be a mother. 

It must not have been mine, either. Jason’s bed was empty. I couldn’t even be sure he’d slept there. Not much was missing—his sketchpads were stacked on his desk, his pencils sharp in their can—and I don’t know how I knew, but I did: He was never coming home. 

I looked around for the tail. It wasn’t there. 

+ 

And now I look some more through the black screen of my Jaguar eyes. All of these kids could be Jason, but none of them are. 

The opening address is about to begin, and everyone starts to file toward the ballroom, equipped today with hundreds of chairs to accommodate what we’re hearing is a massive crowd—the biggest FurNature on record. 

Someone scratches my back, and I turn my whole head to see through my eye screen who it is. I can’t tell, though. The crowd is on the move, and people flow past on each side. I wonder if it was someone I know—but that’s silly. What I see as we’re massing into place is that hands everywhere are stroking, scratching, and petting the backs and arms of others. I think it’s nice. 

I’ll admit it. I came here expecting things to be a crazy—an entire convention center of dogs in heat, fursuited strangers mounting each other in the hallways. That’s what people presume, right? But I didn’t see any of that. Maybe people nuzzle a bit more. Maybe they sneak a sniff. 

The opening address is all about being true to oneself. It’s given by a very self-assured rabbit with an English accent. His name isn’t Peter, though. It’s Cuniculus. The guy says we can call him Cunny if we see him on the floor. Cunny, I think. Cunny Bunny. Kind of funny. He gives a good speech and everyone seems to like it. We all clap. 

I’m seated off to the side, and through all of the speakers, I scan the crowd, row by row, looking for a familiar face—looking for Jason, or even one of his friends I might recognize. Two years is a long time, and people change, but I know I’d recognize my own son, and no one else looks familiar. 

What am I doing here, I wonder. I feel suddenly certain that Jason didn’t come—that my shy son wouldn’t, though maybe he’d want to. But isn’t that the whole point—not to be shy for a weekend? You don’t need to have a father or be loved well by your mother to be tall and blue-tongued and beautiful, strange hands scritching your scapula. 

An organizer in a horse suit walks us through some of the fun in store for us. There’s a hoofer forum that’s new to FurNature—all of the horses and deer and unicorns and the like are having a whole morning of their own breakout session tomorrow, maybe as a precursor to their own event. 

A dance is planned tomorrow, strictly for fursuiters. Street clothes are fursona non grata, the horse jokes, and everyone groans. Tonight, there’s an exhibition basketball game at the arena next door. Apparently, a local group reached the city league championship tournament with all members dressed as kangaroos. The horse says they proved unexpectedly daunting to their opponents (and maybe a little creepy, I add to myself), and this gave them an advantage. They’re playing the G-League basketball team (that’s like the NBA’s minor league, the horse advises) in a charity game, all proceeds going to the Humane Society. 

Finally, the horse announces, there are door prizes, and everyone should check the wall outside to see if they got lucky. 

           + 

We start to file out—no basketball game for me tonight. My head is hot and I’m sure it’s tomato red. As I stand, patient in the bottleneck, a cat paw strokes my sleeve. I crane my neck to see, and a friendly calico is waving. I wave back. 

The slow walk out is hard. I have to pee, and the heat is more than I can take. I feel bad about it, like I’ve lost or given up, but I pull off the jaguar head. The ballroom air seems so crisp to me, and it’s cool on my forehead and neck. I’m someone who sweats a lot, but I’m wet at my hairline, and I feel a drop slide down the back of my neck. How I must look, I think. I’m glad no one knows me here. 

“Mrs. Stanos?” I hear someone say. 

“It’s Ms.,” I reply without thinking, but then I remember my manners. “But please, call me Felicity.” 

“What are you doing here?” the young man asks. He seems curious instead of unwelcoming. I notice he’s Jason’s age, maybe a senior or just graduated. 

“Oh, same as you, I guess,” I smile, lifting my jaguar head. 

“Is that … Jimmy?” the guy asks. 

“Is what … who?” 

“Jimmy the Jaguar. I went to Jefferson. That looks like Jimmy, our mascot,” the guy explains. 

I don’t know why I didn’t think that out of a whole convention of area furries, no one would recognize the Jefferson High mascot. Who knows mascots like a furry? All at once I feel deeply ashamed. 

“I’m not much good with a sewing machine,” I say, and ask, “Who are you?” 

“Kyle Johnson. I was at your house a few times. I know Jason.” 

I recognize Kyle, but it takes me a few seconds to register what he’s just said. He knows, not knew, my son. 

With both mitts, I grab Kyle by his freckled, furless arms and clamp down. 

“Where is he?” I growl, narrowing my eyes to slits. 

“Hey, let go,” Kyle says, wide-eyed as a cornered peccary. He pulls at his arm and starts to back away, then wheels around and runs away. 

I wasn’t going to hurt him. I wish I could find him and say so. I just want my cub. 

My eyes well up and I pull my round head into place. Shame tears pour from me. They’re distinctive—much hotter than the usual kind. One rolls over my lips. It’s full of salt. I let myself sob a little, since I know the sound will be lost in a thick, hot head inside a noisy room. 

The holdup is clear the minute I exit. A temporary wall has been erected, with eight-by-ten shots of the door prize winners the horse had mentioned. Most Catlike. Best Fantasy. Prettiest. There are about twenty categories, and everyone pauses to take them all in. An occasional squeal means someone has spotted themself. 

“Hey, Panther, you’re a winner,” someone says, tugging at what is clearly my Jaguar arm. 

I look, and there I am, my picture above my name. “Best Old-School.” I remember the Elegant Sloth—how I’d reminded him of the Ramada days. I’m to go to the info booth to claim my prize. 

I lean in. Beside my name, I see what appear to be two penciled punctuation marks, but they’re drawn stylized and loopy. It’s possible they suggest a question … but maybe they’re meant to be a heart. 

I spin around and look but no one’s watching. While I may be a brand-new predator, I know I’d sense him—know he’s gone. I’m invisible here in the shadows. 

I pull the tacks from the corners of my picture, carry it with me to the door. 

Karen Craigo is the author of two poetry collections, Passing Through Humansville (Sundress, 2018) and No More Milk (Sundress, 2016), and her fiction is included in Best Small Fictions 2018. She is a newspaper editor and teaches writing on the side in Springfield, Missouri. 

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On Day Two of Being Stranded without Edgar-Michael, I stopped moping around Montmartre, looked into my bank account, and decided four hundred more euros could fly me home. His home, which I would move out of before anyone knew what had happened. 

Now it’s Day Two of Working with François, and François again tells me that staring leads to money. You smile at the tourist’s eye, and after three seconds, the tourist believes that looking away would be rude. 

I learn fast, I tell him. And he says, “Yesterday, you lost us a lot of business.” But I say, “Watch me today.” I’m a prodigy at this. You stare as you ask for the tourist’s hand. Look at nothing else, even if a pigeon flies between you. Even if a pigeon were to land on your forehead and poop in your eyes, stare. If the tourist glances at the bell tower, you’ve lost them, so hold on. With your eyes, say, I know you and, We went to high school together. Make them think you want to reminisce about teenage shenanigans, the rolls of toilet paper you tossed across your math teacher’s roof. Do it right, and when you ask for the tourist’s hand, they will offer it to you. So capture it. Use their fingers to weave a friendship bracelet, quick as a pickpocket, then tie it around their wrist, and before they can protest, say, Dix euros. 

Or say, Ten euros if the tourist is American, because he won’t speak French beyond Parlez vous les toilettes? François says that I can capitalize on my Americanness—Americans will trust me. “But François,” I joke in French, “You are exotic, a Frenchman in front of a gorgeous church.” And he says, “I came here from Gabon, so I’m doubly exotic to the Americans.” 

“Americans don’t even know where Gabon is,” I say, and he says, “Exactly. And who would you want to give you a friendship bracelet? Someone interesting or someone familiar?” 

I’m not sure. 

These tourists don’t want a bracelet at all. But I won’t argue with François, who teaches me his trade and lets me crowd him and his friends on these steps. “For a three-day trial period,” he said yesterday. He felt sorry for me when I told him my partner—or fiancé, or whatever rich Edgar-Michael was—waited until Paris to give up on us. We’d planned this seven-country vacation all on his dime because without him I’m what my uncle would call broke as a window, and on our way to the Louvre we argued, so we sat outside the museum fighting all evening. We didn’t even enter to buy a postcard. And inside somewhere, the Mona Lisa stared straight ahead and secretly worried that we’d break up. We said the type of hurtful things that you say softly because they are true. I softly told Edgar-Michael I had recently realized he was an asshole though I had, in fact, discovered this years ago. That little lie was the first I’d told in a long time. And the next morning, he told me he was going on to Brussels without me, see ya, and enjoy paying for Paris on your own, pal. 

This is what I told François yesterday morning on my way down from the basilica. And he gently said, “Life plays tricks.” He patted me on the forehead like a grandmother who doesn’t exactly know how to comfort her sick grandson. “You can work with us, man.” 

This morning, François offers me red and pink string and says, “On second thought, I doubt your story was one hundred percent true.” 

I say, “Ninety percent. I’m sorry about the other ten.” Now he’ll wonder if I’m dishonest. If he should ax me. I’m a risk who flubbed up a bunch of sales on his first day. 

So, Day Two, and I’m trying to show François he bet on a winning horse named me. 

Up the ramp, this thirty-something with American sneakers smiles as if she’s taking a selfie though she isn’t. François watches me float that way. Let’s smile together, my eyes say to her. My teeth point outward crooked, and one of them is only a half-tooth, but years ago I figured how to make that look cute. 

She notices me as I walk, and I stare like I love her and am about to propose. I ask for her ring finger. She half-turns away and says, “Je suis désolé.” 

I say, “Did we go to high school together?” 

She doesn’t fall for that. She doesn’t have to. Yesterday no one fell for it, but twelve of them wanted to. Wanting to is enough, wanting to makes her return to me. 

“Where are you from?” she asks, and I say “The U.S.” though I went to high school in a French-speaking pocket of Ontario. 

“But which state?” 

“Yours.” 

She laughs, brushes her black hair back. I reach up for her hand. “Can I make you a present?” 

She lets me tie a red and pink knot around her finger. I stretch the strings and make left-right-left-right-left-right and slip what I’ve created off her finger and secure it around her wrist. 

“Since we’re old friends,” I declare. 

She says, “Thank you” as if she sincerely likes the bracelet, and I say, “Ten euros.” I try not to sound like I’m apologizing. 

“I didn’t know you wanted money for it,” she says and half-smiles, confused. She tries to yank the bracelet off, but François taught me how to tie them tight. 

I feel a bit sorry for her. She wears no expensive jewelry, and a crack runs up the frames of her eyeglasses. For all I know, she went into debt to come to Paris. 

“This place costs a lot,” I say. “For all of us.” I want her to understand that to save money I didn’t eat yesterday. But François said to sound forceful. We’re dealing in obligation. I drop my voice to a bass note and insist, “Ten euros.” 

“How about five?” she asks. 

“No.” 

She reaches into her purse for a ten. 

I say thank you, but we both know what has just happened. She pulls away from me and runs up the steps to the Sacré-Cœur Basilica her guidebook described. 

From the other ramp, François winks and his whole body becomes a thumbs-up. François likes to encourage people, which makes him good at his job. “We’re not ripping anyone off,” he told me yesterday. “We give them a souvenir and a story for ten little euros. Then we go to the grocery and buy vegetables.” 

I make a thumbs-up back to him, but with only my thumb. The rest of my body is too busy doing math, adding bracelets into plane tickets. 

François walks over to me to say “Nice job” and hand me a little skein of yellow string as if to say he can trust me with more colors now. 

The crowd picks up. So many people want in the Sacré-Cœur, even though, you have to admit, it doesn’t look especially interesting inside, not compared to all the stained-glass and art elsewhere in the city. It’s the outside that catches your eye: the white glow, the onion domes. Still, some people enter repeatedly. Yesterday, I recognized six individuals who went in at least three times during the day. In the next twenty minutes, I nab thirty more euros—ten from a teenage boy, ten from an old woman who speaks zero English or French, and ten from a guy who tells me I look familiar and believes I’m from Grand Island, Nebraska. 

François asks for his cut of the money, which I’ve promised him, and hands me blue string. He tells me my knots take too much time. “Try this way,” he says. I give him my pinkie. He loops and pulls tight. But I stop paying attention to technique when a man with a fancy camera and an out-of-date-but-attractive mustache glides up the ramp. 

“Doesn’t that man look rich?” François says. 

“His name is Edgar-Michael,” I tell François. 

The blue string still clings to my finger as I walk over to the man with the mustache. One of François’s friends calls, “Nice camera. Want a bracelet?” to him, but the man with the mustache ignores him. Because he sees me. 

After all this time, I say something a schmuck would say, which is, “Hello.” 

Why does he stick out his hand? I think he wants to shake or to hug. But then I grab on because hands remember what they’ve held. He yanks his arm back. Then changes his mind and waves his fingers beneath my jaw. 

He says, “Didn’t we go to high school together?” 

“You look familiar,” I say. I tie a blue and yellow knot around his finger. I ask, “How was Brussels? Did you see famous art? Catch infections from any strange men with nice jawlines?” 

He says, cool as a 1950s heartthrob, “I’ve never been there.” 

“You’ve been here in Paris this whole time?” 

He says, “I think we were in Mr. Gray’s math class. Tenth grade. Peoria Catholic High School.” 

Edgar-Michael once told a story about his niece. He gave her a hermit crab, but he didn’t realize hermit crabs needed a series of fresh, bigger shells to grow into. “They’re supposed to crawl into a new one and take on its shape,” he said. “But I didn’t know that, so I guess I made it suffocate. Or die of smallness.” 

He later confessed he had no niece. 

Either this man before me is Edgar-Michael—as François believes, which might buy me a fourth day of work for sympathy’s sake—or he is not Edgar-Michael. Both possibilities can’t be true at the same time. He doesn’t look anything like Edgar-Michael, but he has his mustache, and he sure lies like him. 

“That’s right,” I say. “Mr. Gray. Didn’t we toilet-paper his house?” 

“We wanted to, but he had a rooster in his front yard, remember? Right in the middle of suburbia, this giant rooster.” He laughs. 

“It scared us off.” 

“We dropped the toilet paper and ran to your car.” 

The bracelet is finished, but I don’t tie it yet. I let it hang from his finger. I say, “I wanted to kiss you in that car, but I was afraid.” 

“I think I loved you back then,” he says. We hear flapping behind him, but eyes like his dart for no pigeon. “But what could I say?” he whispers. “What if our parents found out about us?” His left hand grazes my thigh. 

“We could have run away,” I say. “I would have followed you across Illinois. Across seven countries.” I ease my hand into the thigh pocket of my jeans, clutch my wallet. His hands keep searching. 

“I wish I’d known,” he says. 

“But you did know. I told you for months. For years.” 

“With your eyes?” 

“And words.” We pause. I check out his biceps and hope he notices. 

I say, “Don’t pretend you had no idea how far I was ready to take us. I would have married you even before it was legal.” 

“But we fought too much.” He presses against me. 

“People fight in every relationship. Look at your parents.” 

“We had too many problems,” he says. 

“Everybody does. If I’m going to have problems with someone, I wanted to have them with you.” 

“I suppose it’s too late now,” he says, trying to feel my back pocket, which is empty. 

“I guess that’s a good thing. Or else I’d take you back.” 

I keep my right hand on my wallet—and this how good I’m getting—with one hand I slip the bracelet from his finger and tie a simple knot around his wrist. 

I say “Forty euros, please, Edgar-Michael,” because I am a fast learner, and I have won, and I can name this stranger whatever I want. 

“That’s a bit pricey,” he flirts. 

“Forty euros,” I repeat, my voice as bass as a basement. 

For once, he looks away. He undoes two buttons on his shirt—a pickpocket knows where to keep money—and unzips the money belt slung around his hairy chest. 

At the Louvre, I told Edgar-Michael I had only recently realized he was an asshole, but signs of his asshole-ness had popped up on our third date. In the car, he called me “sweet face” but shouted—shouted—at me to turn off the radio. Still, he knew fascinating facts, and on our fourth date, he remembered I liked books about the War of 1812. He gave me a book, so I forgot about the radio. 

None of us—me, the tourists—is dumb. It’s that wanting to makes us look at the wrong things. 

“Here’s two twenties.” The mustache man extends his palm like wants to hold hands, and I snatch the paper without touching skin. I shove it into my pocket before François can see how much I charged. 

Who wrote the rule that trusting someone means you get taken? Not me, pal, not me. I don’t make any rules. I just understand them now. 

The mustache man has started a lie, so he has to keep it going: he walks up the steps as if he came to see the Sacré-Cœur. 

Inside, he will look for a purse left open on a pew, or a euro bill poking out of an old man’s back pocket. The old man will look at the stone columns or the big mosaic, and he will not turn around. On its pedestal above, the statue of sad Jesus will not turn toward the thief either. Instead, he will keep pointing at his own stone chest, his Sacred Heart, and stare straight ahead at one lucky person as if he already knows their name. As if he remembers every town they’ve lived in, and every time they had to start over, and each lie they’ve hoped would turn true, eventually. He’s the only one in Paris who doesn’t need money—when he looks at someone as if they’re old friends, he means it. That’s why almost-atheists like me visit keep visiting this church. We sit on the left side, the eighth pew. In the line of sight. 

I watch the thief disappear into the crowd at the entrance. A pigeon dips toward my face, but I hold steady. 

François, all cheerful melody, comes over to get his cut and congratulates me with more string. Purple, black, gray, lime, tan, orange. Every color he has. 

Brad Aaron Modlin is the author of Everyone at This Party Has Two Names, which won the Cowles Poetry Prize and contains the poem “What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade.” He also wrote Surviving in Drought (stories), which won the Cupboard Press’s annual contest. He holds an MFA in poetry and a PhD in nonfiction. He is the Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at University of Nebraska, Kearney. He can be found at bradaaronmodlin.com. 

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