RSR 3.1 PDF - Red Savina Review

Red Savina Review
spring 2015
Red Savina Review
The Online Literary Magazine in the Southwest
Vol 3 Issue 1
Spring 2015
ISSN 2169-3161
EDITOR in CHIEF
John M. Gist
MANAGING EDITOR
Wendy Gist
POETRY EDITOR
Richard Stansberger
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Matt Staley
ART DIRECTOR
Royce Grubic
Red Savina Review (RSR) is an independent, bi-annual e-zine publishing short films, creative
nonfiction, fiction and poetry in March and September. RSR is a nonprofit literary review
headquartered in southwestern New Mexico. For submission guidelines visit our website
redsavinareview.org/submit-2/.
Copyright © 2015. Red Savina Review contains copyrighted materials, including but not limited
to photographs, text and graphics. You may not use, publish, copy, download, upload, post to a
bulletin board or otherwise transmit, distribute, or modify any contents in any way. You may
download one copy of such contents on any single computer for your own personal, noncommercial use, provided you do not alter or remove any copyright, author attribution, or other
notices.
A Letter from the Editor
March, 2015
Dear Readers,
Red Savina Review (RSR) is three years old and growing stronger. The journal is almost
able to hold its own now, thanks to those who have donated their time and money in order to get
the little guy to stand up straight. Though still a bit wobbly, we have even taken a few baby
steps. And that’s where I want to start: THANKS TO ALL OF YOU who have contributed time
and money to this endeavor. It wouldn’t be possible without your help.
As with each issue, writing this letter allows me to reflect for a time on why, exactly, we
continue to publish RSR. Producing a literary journal is very time consuming (just ask Wendy
Gist, who has spent countless hours working on the journal for little more than a nod and a
“Thanks!”). Add to that the fact that there are no real perks (especially the monetary kind), and it
cuts into my own precious writing time, etc. It doesn’t take long to see that the cost benefit
analysis doesn’t balance out. We are taking a loss.
And then there is the world at large. Some days, when I can’t keep a lid on my cynical
self, it is ever so clear that we are now living in a post-literate culture where attention spans have
shrunk to short bursts and an annoying optimism punctuates Yeats’ vision in The Second
Coming:
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Why not join the happy nihilists? Throw in the towel and dive into the passionate muck
of Twitter-birthed social crises? Where social media rules opinion polls and corporate media
spins what news they can find into pre-packed ideologies, relativism reigns triumphant. So be it.
Why fight the inevitable? Nietzsche’s Last Men stand on the horizon of Manifest Destiny, the
goal of Western Civilization, the Hegelian juggernaut of World Spirit that will not be denied:
Lo! I show you the Last Man.
“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”—so asks the Last Man, and
blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His
species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.
“We have discovered happiness”—say the Last Men, and they blink.
They blink like George Bergeron in Vonnegut’s classic Harrison Bergeron: George,
because he is above average in intelligence, has had a mental handicap radio placed in his right
ear by government agents. The radio is tuned into a government transmitter that sends out a
sharp noise every twenty or so seconds to scramble the man’s thoughts. In the Bergeron world
everybody is equal: the beautiful sport masks so they cannot tempt and the athletic are required
to wear weights to hold them down. They are Nietzsche’s Last Men. On bad days, when my
inner-cynic springs forth like some Jack-in-the-Box in a cheap horror flick, I am a Last Man. We
all are. There’s no turning the tide now, so why bother?
In short, more often than not, I feel akin to Kafka’s character K. in the novel The Castle.
K. wanders through impenetrable alien bureaucracies that seem, on good days, to be a series of
Catch-22s leading to that ultimate paradox where faith and despair become one. It is here,
suddenly, I am able to breathe once more, the weight, at least for a moment, lifted: from the
irony springs a paradoxical hope:
I am reminded that the protagonist of Vonnegut’s story is none other than Harrison
Bergeron, a youth who rebels against conformity and, though sacrificing his life for a fleeting
taste of existential freedom, inspires, for a brief flash, the promise of human potential.
Nietzsche’s overarching protagonist is not Zarathustra but the free spirit, a nebulous being no
longer fully human, something more than human, an enlightened being not unlike a Zen Master
or a Taoist Immortal gone far beyond the constraints of human morality. We need not settle. Not
yet. Just the opposite: let the potential unfold!
Kafka never finished The Castle. And Yeats ended his poem with, “And what rough
beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” I don’t know for
certain what the beast will be. Like Kafka’s, our story hasn’t yet come to an end. Not yet. We’re
still telling it. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. But, as the rough beast continues its
approach, it is time to choose sides.
I’m throwing in with Harrison Bergeron and Zarathustra in the hopes of paving the way
for the free spirit. And that’s why I continue to publish the journal. As Zarathustra implores,
“Mankind is something to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” My answer, in
good faith: the Red Savina Review. One of the major emerging goals of the journal is to critique
the human condition, point out both its highs and lows. Most importantly, RSR continues
striving to engender the passion that defies the urge to mindless conformity and the
technologization of the human spirit.
There. That felt good. Now that you have weathered the rant, time to celebrate! Issue 3.1,
marking the third year of this little experiment, may be the best yet. The First Annual Albert
Camus Short Fiction Contest has been a big success. Thanks to all of you who entered. Without
you there would be no contest. A BIG thanks to Khanh Ha for volunteering to judge the contest.
It takes a lot of work and a lot of care to do a proper job and Mr. Ha has, as usual, gone above
and beyond in his efforts. There’s really nothing I can write to do Khanh Ha justice here. My
heartfelt thanks will have to suffice.
At RSR we maintain that the judge of a writing contest should have full autonomy. It
paid off this time around. The stories Khanh Ha chose, as you will see, serve to balance out the
stories I selected from the non-contest submissions. I would venture to say that we have struck a
balance between yin and yang. What more can the reader ask for? There’s something for
everybody! The editorial staff is calling 3.1 The Fiction Contest Issue.
I also want to extend my sincere gratitude to the writers, all of them who submitted. It is
you who fuel this venture. Whether submitting your work to RSR, agreeing to do interviews,
spreading the word or reading the journal, you are the heart blood. Thank you.
Finally, the staff knows full-well that this whole business would end without their efforts.
There is no way I could do this alone. I find it a little difficult to admit, as I have always fancied
myself a kind of lone wolf, but I have found a sense of community in RSR. Community is good.
There. I said it. And I thank you for that.
Enjoy Issue 3.1. Spread the word. Donate if you can!
-JMG
Contents
Creative Nonfiction
Gavin Van Horn
Knowing Maggie
Marlene Olin
August Is the Time to Say Goodbye
Robert Joe Stout
“Behold This Wonderful World!”
Krista Varela
Roots
Cady Vishniac
My Jog
Upon Waking
Poetry
“What Happened to Just Playing Music?”
Ace Boggess
[question asked by Andrea Fekete]
Darren C. Demaree
UNFINISHED MURDER BALLAD: BETWEEN
SUMS
UNFINISHED MURDER BALLAD: I COULD
NO MORE HEAL MYSELF
UNFINISHED MURDER BALLAD:
MEDICATIONS BY THE BED
UNFINISHED MURDER BALLAD: EACH
SIGH
Sandra Kolankiewicz
Emotional Morphogenesis
That Smote When You Did Not
Amy Krohn
Grass Fire
Grass Fire Reconsidered
Sarah Lilius
No Oasis for Victims
Bipolar for Couples
Monsters
Brandon Marlon
Manhunt
Gregg Orifici
Here and Now
Our Father
Zeitgeist Unplugged
Stan Sanvel Rubin
I definitely need to get out of here
METABOLISM
TENT
MAN WHO CRIES BLOOD
Fiction
Kerry Barner
The Shoe Shine Boys
Roy Bentley
The War of Northern Aggression
Julia Blake
How Light Escapes
Mark Connelly
Doing the Drill
James Hanna
Hunter’s Moon
Gregory Koop
Truth and Reconciliation
Michael McGuire
“¡..basura..! ¡..basura..!”©
Arthur Plotnik
Guest Interview
Jan Ramming
Dance Lessons
Jay Todd
Green
Kathryn Watterson
What Was I Saying?
Gavin Van Horn
KNOWING MAGGIE
I don’t know you, magpie. I know your corvid cousins. I discovered a valuable lesson some time
ago: follow the crows, that’s where the action is. (When for reasons of their own, they aren’t
following you.) I am guessing the same is true of you, Maggie. Can I call you that? No, you’re
right—too familiar, not yet.
I don’t know you, magpie. Our ranges don’t overlap. Me in the glacially steamrolled Midwest.
You in the folded mountain spines of the Great Basin. But here I am, a temporary visitor on the
backside of the Rockies. Here you are.
I do know this: Your Othello flash of black-and-white are too conspicuous, your chatter-wocks
too demanding, your plumed tail too extravagant for others not to know you. This provides
strange comfort, because I know that the gleam in your feathers must have birthed whole
mythologies, sacred story cycles, and trickster reversals that swelled human minds. Perhaps you
stole the full moon and tucked her under your wings to carry home, only to have her melt across
your breast as you brushed against a warm earth. Perhaps you cheated coyote out of his rabbit
bones and he leapt and snatched your fugitive tail in his shiny teeth, stretching those feathers like
taffy to profligate lengths. Perhaps you pressed your luck at taming fire and singed your feet
while carrying a flaming twig to hapless humans, and so your legs look as though they’ve been
dipped in spruce ink.
Beauty, mischief, and brains, too. Cognitive researchers say you are one of a handful of species
that can recognize their own mirror image. Chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants … magpies. You
also mourn fallen kin. Nodding, arranging needles and sticks, dignifying the body.
When I first heard of these vigils, the world gained a new measure of wonder. The line between
humans and other animals, two-leggeds and winged ones, became opaque. The ground shifted
and we stumbled from second-cousins to immediate family. A darker paradox seized me, though,
as I pondered our shared funeral wakes: is the trade-off for greater understanding the ability to
suffer? Is the comfort that we do not do so alone?
The cuts of self-awareness make the search for wholeness more painful, inevitable, and in the
end, impossible. If I could converse with magpies, I might try to warn you, even though it would
be futile. You cannot shift evolutionary trajectories and become a less sentient form of animal
being. Consciousness is a genie that cannot be returned to its bottle. Awareness that allows
empathy for others creates a certainty: suffering the loss of what is dear to us. That old story
about forbidden fruits, a snake, and the first couple relies upon this dramatic centerpiece. The
expansion of knowledge makes uninhabitable a blissful garden of simplicity. So we gather
together for comfort, hold the edge of the coffin, nod our goodbyes, and dignify the body.
There are those who would look at you, magpie, and see an ominous sign—a tombstone
preacher, perched on granite, complaining at the piñon; a trash picker; a seed thief. But all I see
is life: a self-aware yin-yang, streaked by cobalt, gliding up an anthracite mesa toward Gothic
Mountain. I watch you swoop between cars and strike a confident fencepost pose and I know that
between the two of us, you are the one who’s got a handle on this strange world. Carry on,
magpie. Go about your business. I hope we meet more frequently—enough so I can call you
Maggie.
Marlene Olin
AUGUST IS THE TIME TO SAY GOODBYE
The harder I tried to remember their faces, the more they blurred. Like a billboard of pixels, the
closer I neared, the more disparate their features became. Time does that. One moment merges
with the next until all you have are disconnected squares. A birthday. A funeral.
We were girls who played with boys. Kickball. Baseball. Every weekend our mothers dropped us
off in Davie to go riding. For five bucks Meryl and I galloped in scrubby pastures for an hour
and spent the rest of the day hanging around the barn. Day in day out our life was horses until
suddenly it wasn’t.
All at once the boys grew bigger and stronger. They smelled like sweat and old soup and instead
of looking at our faces they looked down at our breasts. We looked down too, hoping and not
hoping. We felt like lumps of kneaded dough left out on the counter. Any day now. Let it rise.
Perhaps the difference was always there but now there was a drifting, a small but seismic shift
between Meryl and me. I went out with a boy with an older brother. The brother drove. No one
wore seat belts in the ’60’s, and hip-to-hip ankle-to-ankle shoulder-to-shoulder, the boy and I sat
petrified and electrified in the back seat. The Rolling Stones were on the radio, the bass
thumping, the boy’s brother pounding the steering wheel with his hands. It was like riding a
horse, scary and thrilling at the same time.
My world split. I dove right in, entering a universe of miniskirts and white lipstick and sleeping
all night with my hair wrapped in juice cans to make it straight. High school swallowed me. I
was invited to parties. Guys had taken notice. I was popular if you graded on a curve.
Meanwhile Meryl became a cowgirl. By eleventh grade she had finally gotten a horse of her own
and spent every afternoon flying through fields with the wind in her hair. She lived three houses
down but we now we only spoke in the evenings. I was busy, so busy, moving fast while Meryl
stood still.
One day in August Meryl’s father knocked on my door. Meryl’s father never knocked on my
door.
“There’s been an accident,” he said. He looked sunken, like someone had taken a hose and
sucked out all the air. “A riding accident,” he said. “She tried a jump. She should never have
tried a jump.”
Sixteen-year-olds aren’t supposed to die. My family walked like ghosts, their fingers skimming
the walls for ballast. My sister stayed in the tub for two days. Mom thwacked the floors with her
mop.
I found my father sitting on his bed. He was holding a coin. There was a note, a note I had never
seen before. Dear Mr. K., this is for you, don’t take any wooden nickels, your friend Meryl. That
was how she was, leaving little gifts, notes.
I rummaged through my drawers for keepsakes, presents Meryl had given me over the years. A
clipping from the funny pages. A bracelet. A book. But more than anything else, I wanted to say
goodbye. Her death was like a door slammed in my face. Wait a minute! I wanted to
shout. We’re not finished yet! There were a million things I was sorry for and a million things I
would always regret.
Something inside me changed that day. The world fell off its axis. Surprises startled me and good
news made me superstitious. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for catastrophe to
strike. And when I became a wife, my anxiety doubled down. There were two of us to worry
about. Then three. The larger my family grew, the heavier my load. Then one day, all my fears
came true.
While my son’s birth had been routine, everything went wrong when my daughter was
born. And I soon learned that if there’s one problem, other problems follow.
When Sarah looked at the ceiling and blinked, they called it absent seizures. When she couldn’t
figure out how to connect to people, they called it high functioning autism. Her best friends
were her dogs, her gerbil, her guinea pig. And when she grew older, there was nothing she
wanted more in life than to learn how to ride a horse.
Sarah loved her lessons. I stood in the shadows, nibbling on my blouse buttons, watching. She
had no control over an animal that could kill her with a kick. She was scared to pull the reins It’s
hurts Mom, I’m sure the bit hurts. If she wanted the horse to turn, she’d lean over and shout in its
ear, Would you mind making a left?
Of course she fell off. Even then she’d mumble an apology to the horse, dust off her helmet, and
get right back on. Meanwhile my sixteen-year-old self, superimposed on a middle-aged woman’s
body, watched. Concrete lodged in my throat. When I blinked, I saw fireflies.
Sometimes the hardest thing you do as a parent is sit on your hands and do nothing. To ignore
the what ifs and pretend that the future is laid out before you like a map. The trick, you convince
yourself, is simply to follow the directions. To let that voice on the computer become the voice
in your head. Disembodied. Devoid of feeling. Disconnected. We go through the motions, walktalk-eat-dress, as if life were a buffet of endless options.
Our friends Susie and Rick didn’t see Sarah’s awkwardness. They saw just saw a kid who loved
horses as much as they did. If Rick and Susie weren’t riding, they loved to watch others ride.
They’d sit with us in the bleachers and cheer Sarah on as if she were in the last leg of the
Kentucky Derby. Their daughter Brianne, five years younger than Sarah, was a rider, too. By the
time Sarah was in college, Brianne was bringing home trophies by the week. There was a huge
photo of her hanging in her father’s office. She and her horse posed mid-air over a four foot
fence on the precipice of winning another competition.
One night Susie and I sipped coffee at the kitchen table and talked.
“Brianne hasn’t ridden all summer,” said Susie. “She’s pulled a muscle in her leg.” Susie was a
nurse with a background in holistic medicine. She plied her kids with vitamins and healthy
foods.
“I’m having her take warm baths. Applying arnica salves. It seems to be helping.”
Six weeks later we got the phone call. An MRI showed a tumor the size of an orange. It was a
rare type of bone cancer that strikes children. Within days Brianne was flown to MD Anderson
in Texas. A year’s worth of surgeries, chemo, and every type of torture followed.
Nothing helped.
When masses reappeared on the x-rays, Susie and Rick took their daughter home. They had
purchased a fifteen acre ranch in Boca Raton and turned it into Brianne’s fantasy world. A stable
full of horses, a pool table, a game room, a pond stocked with fish. We were invited to see
Brianne and get the full tour. Again it was summer.
“Make sure to bring Sarah,” Susie told me. “She’ll love the ponies.”
I wasn’t sure I was up to the visit, let alone my daughter. One of Sarah’s toughest challenges is
dealing with emotions. For years we worked with flashcards that had pictures of people’s faces.
“Which person looks happy?” I would ask. “Who looks sad or angry?”
Animals were easy. A dog’s upright tail tells you it’s fine. A horse forwards its ears and snickers
when it’s mad. But there wasn’t a rulebook for dealing with death. I hadn’t a script for final
goodbyes.
Nothing prepared us for that Sunday afternoon. Brianne must have weighed seventy pounds.
The stubble on her head was beginning to grow back but her complexion was pale and grayish.
There were black circles under her eyes like the kind you see in old photos of Holocaust victims.
A wounded bird, all skin and bones. She limped when she came to greet us.
“Hey, Sarah. I’m so glad you’re here.”
She grabbed Sarah by the hand.
“I have so much to show you.”
The two girls fed apples to the horses and then drove a small cart pulled by two miniature
ponies. They weren’t much bigger than large dogs.
“Do you believe that horse is wearing a hat?” said Sarah. She was grinning ear-to-ear, her eyes
lit with a Disneyworld glaze. When Brianne was too tired to ride anymore, she showed Sarah
how to brush the ponies. Sarah usually spoke in a monotone voice and seldom registered
excitement. But while all the other guests had fake smiles pasted on their faces, she was clearly
having fun.
After an hour’s tour, we decided to order in food and have an early dinner. Brianne, I noticed,
had disappeared. Sarah was busy wolfing down barbeque and had no idea where Brianne
disappeared to.
“It was time for her pain meds,” Susie told me. “She doesn’t have too much strength left. But she
wants you to see her before you leave.”
We found Brianne lying in her bed in a fetal position with three blankets covering her frail body.
The curtains were drawn and one small lamp was turned on. Even the light hurt her.
I stood at the doorway with Sarah and my husband, not knowing what to say or do. Drained and
empty, there was not one ounce of strength or courage left. I scrambled for a few words,
knowing that nothing would be adequate. “We loved the tour, sweetie.”
With tremendous effort, Brianne turned to us and held out her arm. “Thanks so much for coming
to see me. How ‘bout a hug, Sar?”
There was Brianne’s hand waiting, dangling in the air, her fingers quivering with exertion. This
is what they call grace, I thought. Never mind the unspeakable pain Brianne was enduring. She
was thinking of Sarah, loving Sarah, transcending the demands of a body that failed her.
I nudged Sarah forward and watched them embrace. At first there was space and air and
awkwardness. But their arms found each other and Brianne leaned her head on Sarah’s shoulder.
“It’s okay, Sar. It’s gonna be okay.”
It had been decades since Meryl’s father walked up to my front door. And now, years later,
another child was dying. But this time, what had remained unspoken was spoken. What little
comfort could be offered was laid at our feet like a gift. Grief, I realized, was not just the absence
of someone you love. It’s layered with both our knowledge of the past and our fears for the
future.
When it was time to leave, we plugged our address into the GPS and headed home on the
interstate. Continue straight ahead, said the voice on the computer. My husband white knuckled
the steering wheel while tears streamed down my face. From the backseat Sarah finally spoke.
“Brianne’s going to be all right. Isn’t she, Mom? She’s going to be all right?”
In front of me cars began to turn on their headlights. Soon the horizon was dotted like a
pointillistic painting, the sun a red-purple bruise in the sky. On my right billboards and
lampposts zoomed by. It was hard to tell if we were moving forward or if the whole world was in
retreat.
Stay the present course, said the computer. We drove until the trees and the signs blurred
together. I stared and let the darkness blanket me. Finally the GPS recalibrated its bearings, and
as the car clunked over concrete seams, the robotic voice spoke to us once more.
But don’t forget to yield.
Robert Joe Stout
“BEHOLD THIS WONDERFUL WORLD!”
Mexico is the Middle Ages with a cosmetically redesigned face. The power structure is an
oligarchy, not a monarchy or vice-regency, but it operates in the same inept Feudal fashion as its
pre-Renaissance predecessors. Most important policy decisions are not made in Mexico City but
in Washington, D.C., Madrid and by the World Bank (and by the capos of competing drug
corporations). Transnational businesses plow through the legal system as well as the
environment, flinging restrictions aside and enriching those who pave the way for unrestricted
profit taking.
Those in Mexico who devise the rules (called “laws”) also are the referees who monitor them.
The laws enhance the elite and castigate those who don’t belong—i.e. 98 to 99 percent of the
population. Non-eliters are allowed to complain but not to organize groups of complainers.
When groups of complainers grow too large they are forcibly repressed (this repression is labeled
“public security”).
Roman emperors provided Coliseum spectators with gladiator fights and Christian-eating lions;
Mexico’s elite fills television with dawn to midnight game shows, football (soccer) games
and telenovela soap operas. A president of Mexico who also was a one-time president of CocaCola de Mexico made “tell-people-how-good-your-product-is-often-enough-and-they’ll-believeit” the guiding principle of his six-year administration.
It worked—but not because the 98 to 99 percent believed it. It worked because 98 or 99 percent
of the 98 or 99 percent have low paying jobs, medical bills, children, migrant husbands,
collapsing roofs, Church holidays and empty gas tanks. Television gives them something besides
broken drains, double commutes, rotting tomatoes, cancelled credit cards and snatched purses,
even if what television gives them is fluff and falsehoods. By increasing poverty among the non-
elite, those wielding power force those afflicted to spend more time and energy eking out a
living, thus increasing conformity and eliminating ability to forge change.
Like the government the Catholic Church (which itself is a government) is divided between
possessors of power and wealth—the elite—and a massive non-elite (that includes priests), the
struggling but employed middle and working class and millions of
disenfranchised campesinos and indigenas. A United Nations report described living conditions
in parts of rural Mexico as squalid as those of Equatorial Africa. Despite these reports, verified
and presented to the governing elite, the Church hierarchy focused pastoral and political efforts
on criminalizing abortion.
Similar to Medieval kingdoms, dukedoms and baronies, the ruling elite and their hangers-on
have barricaded themselves in walled fortresses protected by conscripted mercenaries who
augment their meager wages by raiding the non-elite. Caught between these mercenaries and
those of competing invader bands (journalistically called “drug cartels”) the 98 to 99 percent—
like Middle Ages serfs—find themselves systematically victimized, their lands taken, their crops
robbed and their women raped.
The invader bands, a twenty-first-century version of the barbarian invaders that swept through
Medieval Europe, emerged from disenfranchised have-nots who were kept from participating in
the world created by the elite. They created their own world, one with different values and
different rules but one that provided money, power and various diversions. As their world (or
worlds—a savage interplay of competing drug corporations, kidnapper bands, caciques,
paramilitary enforcers and turf warriors) increased in size and potency, the elite surreptitiously
joined forces with them.
To do so the elite had to appear as though it was not doing so; consequently, it formed criminal
bands of its own (called “federal police,” “the Army,” “the Marines”). These bands fight the
invader bands with weapons supplied by the ruling elite of their neighbor to the north—the
United States—and the invader bands fight each other and the elite’s criminal bands (also with
weapons supplied by the ruling elite of the neighbor to the north). By 2012 over 100,000 of the
98 or 99 percenters had lost their lives and over 20,000 had disappeared with no end to the
warfare nor the elite’s acquisition of wealth in sight.
Making the “War on Drugs” a holy crusade—good against evil—and propagandizing nonexistent achievements, enabled the ruling elite to shield from the 98 to 99 percent’s awareness
that the products involved—cocaine, marijuana and designer drugs—are the country’s primary
source of income. Undeclared income that is, sliding from bank to bank, investment house to
investment house, politician to entrepreneur to stock trader. The little that trickles down to the 98
or 99 percent is sucked back up by taxes and escalating prices for basic commodities.
Even after the nineteenth century war of independence from Spain and the twentieth century
revolution against dictator Porfirio Díaz, Mexico continued to be a country of royalty, Church
and serfs. Both those administering the divine right of the state and those administering the
divine right of the Church cloaked themselves in invulnerability. Political, economic and social
life originated with the elite and was delegated by them. Justice? Petition the divine right of the
state. Food? Beg the divine right of the state. Happiness? Heed the divine right of the state. If
these fail pray for a miracle from the divine right of the Church.
To minimize protests—or at least organized groups of protesters—the elite had to convince the
98 or 99 percent that (1) there is no real reason to protest and (2) it is useless to protest. They
achieved this through a complicated interchange of faces and irresponsibilities called “elections.”
Like perennially losing baseball teams that every year or two replace the has-beens and neverbes on their rosters with different has-beens and never-bes, Mexico’s tightly controlled electoral
system shuffles members of the elite and their hangers on among available offices. At the end of
each of their terms governors become senators, senators become cabinet ministers, cabinet
ministers become Congresspersons, Congresspersons become governors, ambassadors and party
heads. And like fans that boo or applaud, criticize, Twitter and get into bar fights, the voters are
not participants but outsiders—spectators—ignored by the ruling elite’s redistribution of political
plums.
Separation between the elite and the 98 or 99 percent is validated by procedures and regulations
assembled in more or less comprehensible fashion (i.e. arranged alphabetically and/or
numerically with appropriate $, % and similar symbols). These regulations and procedures
include agendas, bonuses, expensive accounts, administrative assistants and invitations to
cocktail parties, dinners and exclusive entertainment. Occasionally those administering them
require contact with the 98 or 99 percent—contact that usually can be dismissed after an
interview, teleprompt or promise. Frequently these contacts begin or end with the phrase
“according to the law”—a reference to the alphabetical/numerical assortment the elite have
compiled.
The keepers/interpreters of procedures and regulations comprise a “sub-elite” who remora the
elite. As legislators and bureaucrats they define their world as “apegado a la ley,” a definition
that is rhetorical, not emotional, although a riotous conglomeration of shouts, threats,
recriminations and bribes may have gone into the forming of its various sections, subsections,
appendices, etc., not to mention lengthy delays and countless detours through procedures
required by other sub-elite-originated laws and regulations.
Almost without exception the $ symbol and/or phrases associated with it appears. Although those
composing the sub-elite generate no $$$, they are very suspicious of those who do;
consequently, they fill the sections, subsections, appendices, etc., with
alphabetically/numerically arranged conditions and restrictions rooted in the distrust that they
feel towards the 98 or 99 percent and towards each other.
Membership in their world is limited “according to the law” by the election process during which
the 98 or 99 percenters vote for one of two or three candidates that the elite and their hangers-on
have allowed to compete. These candidates have free reign to promise, promote, suborn and lie
as long as they adhere to the sections and subsections regulating procedure (procedure is
extremely important to the sub-elite since content is missing).
Often the winners of these competitions are those who spend the most $$$; consequently, they
become indebted to those who provided the $$$ for them to spend (i.e. the elite who script their
performances). Seldom do these scripts admit the entrance of any 98 or 99 percenters except as
generalities loftily eulogized as the “pueblo,” “the citizenry,” “the voters.”
Although well enough rewarded financially, the sub-elite lack the security of the elite;
consequently they find it necessary to safeguard their ascension by creating a sub-sub-elite to
curry political favors, disguise financial transactions and misinform the media and the 98 to 99
percenters with fanciful propaganda. Those in the sub-sub-elite who are most successful in
performing these services eventually wedge themselves into the sub-elite; those less successful
slide away to seek real work or to develop ways to remora those who do.
As in all Medieval kingdoms displays of wealth accompany displays of power. They effectively
proclaim to the 98 or 99 percenters “behold this wonderful world we give you to admire!” The
financing of these displays (like the financing of the elections and the expenses of the elite, subelite and sub-sub-elites) is “privileged,” protected from public scrutiny by sections, subsections
and appendices to the laws (i.e. “not something for you mere serfs to concern yourselves about”).
Aware that the 98 to 99 percent feel trapped by the need to eke out a living, victimized by
constant shortages and under constant threat from invader bands, the elite and their minions
divert them with circus spectacles, troubadours and witch burnings (i.e. soccer games, rock
concerts and the War on Drugs). The performers—court jesters—achieve a limited
independence, public notoriety and sometimes relative wealth, but they entertain according to
limits that the elite prescribe.
These jongleurs, jesters and circus performers understand that people who laugh are less likely to
revolt than people who have nothing to laugh at. They also understand, consciously or
unconsciously programmed by the Medieval chain of command, that having someone beneath
them to mock, degrade, abuse and ridicule gives one a (false) sense of superiority. Feeling
superior to certain others or groups of others perpetuates a downward chain where everyone
except those on the very bottom, being of little or no use to the elite, have someone to beat up
and blame (this top-to-bottom process effectively segments the 98 to 99 percenters and prevents
them from uniting to overthrow the elite).
The Church participates in this Wonderful World of the elite with jongleurs, entertainers and
magicians of its own. They regale the 98 to 99 percent with an illusory future where all of them
can be wealthy, happy, without problems and without pain—but only if they conform. To rebel is
not to conform. To be different is not to conform. Those lowest on the conformance pyramid—
atheists, homosexuals, women who have abortions—deserve their punishments and enable those
along the top-to-bottom process to feel virtuous by oppressing them.
“Conform and we will take care of you.” The Medieval government and the Medieval Church
benignly disguise the murderous wars against invader hordes, the unremitting depletion of
natural resources—oil, gold, lumber, corn—and offer festivals, television, and sports
extravaganzas to keep the 98 to 99 percenters poverty strapped, disorganized and deceived. “Fail
to conform and you’ll be punished,” with shortages, inflation, excommunication, clubs, is the
other side of the coin. To pray for change—a miracle—is honorable and inoffensive. To try to
create even minor changes is a crime—and a sin.
The elite have yet to line their castle walls with the spiked grimaces of beheaded protesters…
That could be next.
Krista Varela
ROOTS
The Sonoran Desert, although one of the wettest deserts in the world, has an incredibly harsh
climate. The heat in the summer easily exceeds a hundred degrees most days; in the winter,
nighttime temperatures drop below freezing. Despite these extremes, many plants have adapted
to thrive in this capricious environment. It’s the only part of the world where saguaro cacti grow
in the wild—those amazing spined plants that can shoot straight up at heights of over forty feet.
With an underground system as complex as the desert itself, the saguaro cactus has three
different kinds of roots. A single taproot plunges a few feet into the ground, staking claim to its
space; there are also two sets of radial roots, one thick and one thin. These radial roots go only a
few inches deep, spreading horizontally instead of vertically, with the thinner set growing as long
as the cactus is tall.
***
I was born in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. For eighteen years, my own roots stretched
across Pima County, grew underneath the Santa Catalina Mountains, and dug into the ground in
eastern Tucson.
Heat precedes the sun. The asphalt burns during the day, radiating heat underneath my feet. A
rattlesnake lies in wait under the shade of a mesquite tree, conserving energy for his hunt later
on. A quail scurries across the road to join her babies in a bush in my front yard.
Then the sun begins to set, with oranges and pinks streaking across the sky; the mountains trap in
the heat so that even when the sun is gone, the warmth still lingers. Once night falls, the desert
comes alive. The rattlesnake comes out of hiding to begin looking for food. Coyote travel
through alleyways, yipping and howling so close they sound like they could be in the backyard.
Packs of javelina, the desert’s wild pig, scavenge garbage cans unbeknownst to the rest of the
neighbors sleeping soundly in their beds.
These are the details I remember. These are the parts of the desert that live in me.
***
In the desert, water feels like a gift.
The one time of year the Sonoran Desert is guaranteed to get rain is during monsoon season, a
period that is considered a minor season along with spring and fall. From July until September,
we wait as the humidity rises in the air until late afternoon. Dark, gray clouds quickly roll in,
charging the sky like wild horses on stampede. Thick and swollen, they burst, tearing through the
Southwest. Lightning shoots across the sky, illuminating the vast expanse of the Old Pueblo.
Thunder follows, ricocheting off the Catalina Mountains to the north and Rincons to the east.
Heavy rains last an hour, maybe more, and then, as though it were all just a dream, the clouds are
gone. The air afterward has such a lightness to it, that cathartic feeling one has after a good cry,
as though the sky is relieved of its burden.
Animals and plants alike are thankful for the water. The special hairs on the roots of a saguaro
can help the cactus collect up to 200 gallons during a single rainfall. An adult saguaro can weigh
upwards of six tons with all that water weight. Supported by a skeletal system of woody ribs, the
plant breathes in water like we breathe in oxygen, its ribcage expanding slowly as its roots drink
from the ground, filling its veins with life.
Even though the rains are necessary for the survival of life, something so powerful can be
dangerous. Washes and alleyways will flood, the ground unable to soak up all the water
inundating the earth. Thinking they are masters over nature, people will try to drive through
these rains, only to be stranded while the rushing water rises to carry them away.
In the beginning of 1990, my mother was going to leave my father, but then she learned she was
pregnant. A New Year’s surprise. She decided to marry my father in early February at the
courthouse. The last thing she remembers of her wedding day is the taste of alcohol on my
father’s breath.
That year was one of the wettest monsoon seasons on record, but it didn’t rain at all the week
that I was born. Despite heavy rains early in the summer, the monsoons seem to have tapered off
by that afternoon in late August when my mother finally went into labor almost two weeks late.
My brother would be born just over four years later after a devastating drought. The cycles of the
desert are swift and severe.
I wonder how my mother, a newlywed, felt looking out of her hospital window, holding me in
her arms, seeing sunshine. Was she thinking most of the storms had passed?
***
The house where I grew up didn’t have any saguaro cactus, but our neighbors had one in their
yard. It was only a few feet tall, but saguaros are slow-growing plants; it was probably already
between thirty and forty years old.
The rest of our neighborhood looked slightly out of place. The old couple that lived across the
street from us had two palm trees in their yard. Our house had pine trees: two out front and one
in the backyard. No matter what time of year, pine needles fell and covered the ground. My
mother would spend hours on the weekends raking up the needles, filling endless trash bags
trying to keep the yard neat and clean. But there was no stopping them.
The house also had flowerbeds: one in the walkway leading up to the front door, and some in the
backyard lining the concrete wall around our property. Another one of my mother’s ongoing
projects for the house was to keep these flowerbeds filled with plants. I don’t remember what
kinds of flowers she would get, but I loved their vibrant colors, the blues and yellows, the
oranges and purples. I would gently finger their silky petals before she planted them, aware of
how delicate they were. Each time, I would be hopeful they would last more than a season, more
than a few weeks. But the flowers always needed more than my mother could give: more time,
more water, more nutrients. They would shrivel and die, and my mother would put on her
gardening gloves and rip their fragile roots from the soil.
***
The saguaro produces flowers. They grow near the top of the cactus, as well as at the ends of its
arms. Saguaros will not flower until they reach eight feet tall, when they are fully mature.
The blossom itself, the state flower of Arizona, has waxy-white pointed petals with a ring of
yellow in the middle. The flower opens sometime during the night between May and June, and
will only bloom for a short time. When the sun has set again the next day, the flower will be
gone.
***
My parents fought just in the early hours of the morning, when only the coyote and javelina
should have been awake. I could hear their arguments from my bedroom. I awoke to the sound
of doors slamming as the sun began to rise on my father’s empty promises to stop drinking.
The storm eroded a marriage for eleven years. In the summer of 2001, my father would leave our
house that no longer felt like a home. But until then, his voice rumbled through every room as
my mother’s pleas flooded the hallways.
The year my father moved out, Tucson would have the tenth driest monsoon season on record.
The flowers in the yard died. Meanwhile, the saguaro would carry on, storing its water in
preparation.
***
Arizona law prohibits the destruction of the saguaro in any way, and special permits must be
obtained to move or destroy any saguaro cactus when constructing highways and roadways.
Transplanting a saguaro can be a tricky business. The taller the cactus, the harder it is for the
saguaro to re-establish its roots. The younger the cactus, the greater the chances are for survival.
***
Now my father spends his summers away from the desert, away from the monsoons. He passes
his time out in the wilderness of Montana and Idaho, surrounded by forests and nothingness. He
wakes up by the sun, not an alarm clock.
My father spends his day cooking in a tent, on his feet for hours at a time. He caters to
firefighters, trying to serve those who serve our country. He cooks breakfast, eggs in bulk,
seasoned potatoes, and pounds of bacon. As soon as one meal’s over, it’s on to the next. It’s like
this for twelve hours a day, sometimes fifteen.
Though physically exhausting, this is what he looks forward to eight months out of the year, this
season where he can escape. When he’s out there, he no longer needs a beer at the end of the
day; his satisfaction in his job, in himself, is enough. How he must dread the sight of the saguaro
when he comes back, knowing it’s all he’ll see until the next fire season. If only there were a
way he could leave permanently, completely uproot and never look back.
***
I have not seen a saguaro cactus in months. I left Arizona six years ago, left to surround myself
with giant redwoods, with thick trunks that shoot up hundreds of feet in the air. I do not get my
fill of rain in the summer, but in the cold winter months, if I’m lucky, in a place where thunder
and lightning are rarities.
Instead of javelina and coyote, these days I see deer and cows roaming the rolling hills of the
East Bay. The Pacific Ocean is less than twenty miles away, the occasional sound of seagulls
overhead in my neighborhood indicating the water’s presence. There are days when I see a pale
sunset and miss the vibrant colors exclusive to the desert. But then I remember the desert is more
than just a sunset,that it is more than the plants and animals that live there. The saguaro is lucky
that it does not have memories.
***
The trees that used to be in front of my childhood home are now gone. The people who live there
remodeled the outside to look more like a desert home, a house that belongs. They repainted the
exterior a tan color, filled the yard with landscaping rock to match.
The pine trees have vanished, not even a stump or trace of roots remain. In their place, mesquite
trees and other desert plants populate the yard. My mother’s flowers are gone.
I think about those flowers, and I think, maybe it wasn’t their fault that they didn’t survive.
Maybe the desert just wasn’t where they belonged.
Cady Vishniac
MY JOG
What I’m trying to do is obliterate the self; I start at my front door. At first, I feel foolish because
the neighbors can see me decked out in my sports bra and tight pants, with my stupid earmuff
and my stupider ponytail swishing in the wind. I start sprinting, just so I can get down the block
and out of their sight, and so I get a stitch in my side as I round the corner by the gas station. I
slow to a trot. It’s been two minutes and my asthma is kicking in. (When I started, I couldn’t
even go for thirty seconds without developing shin splints.) I’ve always been keenly jealous of
people who can make their bodies do things for long, ecstatic stretches.
I’m mad at myself for the sprinting and the stitch, and my brain is picking away at this anger. I
feel myself bouncing up and down, the way that each landing on the pavement sends a jolt all the
way up my spinal column, my cold feet, the moisture that’s gathering on my skin, the wheezing.
I experience the sensation of all these things happening through and on me, but I’m not really in
my body yet.
It comes just as the stitch starts to leave, a seizing in my chest. I’ve made it past the gas station,
and the pizza place next door to the gas station, and the vacant lot next to the pizza place, which
cuts into a graveyard. I’m surrounded by tombstones, each of my feet sinking just a little bit into
springy humus as I work my speed back up, and then—with no warning—my ribcage constricts.
Someone else would topple over, but I make my body keep existing. I put one foot in front of the
other as fast as I can manage, and I hope I don’t run into anything. Step, I think, and the person
that was me ceases to be. Step step step step step.
When I do run into something—a tree—I stop. My nose is bleeding but not broken. I remind
myself that this is good for me. Someday soon, I’ll be able to go for five whole minutes. I sit on a
tombstone and let the wheezing take over. A man in a tracksuit stops to ask me if I need an
inhaler. I shake my head. I can tell he’s worried I’ll pass out, so I give him a thumbs up, which is
probably not convincing because I also gag onto the dirt at the same time. He leaves anyway. In
ten minutes, when my brain works again, I wipe the blood off my face with my earmuff. Then I
go buy a latte.
UPON WAKING
At some point during the night my earplugs slip out and fall onto the floor. The cats chew on
them. You’d think the chewing wouldn’t make so much noise, but the cats exhale loudly,
gurgling, as they eat the foam. Nate rolls over in his sleep, a rustle. Then he groans. He isn’t
awake, but I am, usually, by four or five.
My bleary noises, which are somehow not drowned out by the whirr of the fan or the buzz of the
space heater, include: the squeak of mattress springs as I sit up, the almost imperceptible click of
the buttons on my phone as I check the time and my emails, the thump I make on the floor
because, although Nate is trying to sleep, I am too exhausted to control all of my limbs, to walk
quietly on tip-toes. Nate grabs my pillow and puts it on top of his head to block out the sound.
Every time he does this I worry he will suffocate.
I go to the bathroom. The sound of water landing in the toilet—but I don’t flush because I’m
scared to wake up my Alina—and the sound of water landing in the sink as I wash my hands and
face. A series of soft clinks as I futz around with my makeup. The cats claw at my feet, mewling,
and I whisper, “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!” Also: “Ouch!”
Some dragging noises as I open dresser drawers. If I’m very lucky, Alina sleeps through all of
this, and I can get dressed—but getting dressed makes more thumping noises, because I haven’t
had coffee yet and I’m too clumsy to put on clothes without falling over a little.
She’s invariably wailing by the time I work both my feet through the ankle cuffs of my pants and
zip up my fly. I don’t mind; I don’t know why anybody would mind.
“Mawmee!” It’s the first word she says every morning, when she calls to me.
Ace Boggess
“What Happened to Just Playing Music?”
[question asked by Andrea Fekete]
I slept too long in the razor wire
where notes chimed like saw blades &
the moans welling from inside me
would eat away the lining of an ear.
I walked down the silent road,
through the silent fog &
the black & silent woods,
far from noisy afterglow
of a city we knew so long ago.
I left my guitar in the pawn shop.
I left my guitar on a bed of coals
as I hurried across, afraid
to slow-dance in the embers.
Were we not performers once?
Your hips swerved & trembled
to trilling rasps spent from your lips.
I shrieked like a seagull
calling to the sea. But,
music fades, & a song will end,
except in radio waves, I’ve heard,
which drift through space forever.
Darren C. Demaree
UNFINISHED MURDER BALLAD: BETWEEN SUMS
The language of mathematics really is too perfect to not be the root of damn near everything that
matters. Chop the peppers of a full treasure chest of minuses. Now, what does that mean? I
don’t know, but there appear to be bodies accumulating everywhere. Stoke the fires; this
severity never appears to be leaning away. It’s always sharpening itself with our best meat…
UNFINISHED MURDER BALLAD: I COULD NO MORE
HEAL MYSELF
One is less than the other. One can be made to be less. One can be zeroed…
UNFINISHED MURDER BALLAD: MEDICATIONS BY
THE BED
Frightful sleep and the answer to the whenever comes along, sensing the times and nerve to be
comprehensively, excellently savage, when we are shovels with serious things, we tend to bury
ourselves. When others hold the shovel, crush the tiny rocks into a water glass and allow them to
drown us the same way Woolf went, angry that it couldn’t happen faster, then those fuckers only
pushed us into the cavern we created. Sober, you may be awful, but awful people tend to live
forever…
UNFINISHED MURDER BALLAD: EACH SIGH
Chorus of the resigned, you had this coming…
Sandra Kolankiewicz
Emotional Morphogenesis
Some things don’t need to be repeated. Put
it on that long list of slips you’ll never
make again. Then heap faults high, seeded with
alfalfa or nasturtium, something that
feeds and gives pleasure to the eye of a
cow. Sprinkle the lot like grains of bone meal
around the tulips you plant before you
surrender them to the squirrels, glad to
let them go because, although no one tells,
beneath every flower, at the heart of
each germinating seed, in the essence
of the stirring root is a kernel of
shame. Imagine my surprise to see all
my sins germinating a garden of
foxglove, monk’s hood, turtle head, chamomile
of daisy centers now the source of my
medicinal peptides! One compound can
be another, mimicry so ancient,
having adapted so wisely, all parts
matching every little strip of our code.
That Smote When You Did Not
The moment you didn’t leave, I knew you
were gone inside that place you carry with
you like a medicine bag around your
neck, full of trinkets that might have helped you
once but are useless, forty years later.
Yes, running away when you were afraid
was wise. Not venturing out of your back
yard prudent when you had a mother with
a paddle she painted black and hung on
the wall, compliance over the dinner
table like a shrouded door letting the
neighborhood know death was there. In the tub
you cut your skin, safer than saying. Now
you’re caught in the eclipse of who you were
and are, what you might have done and what you
clearly fear you’ll never do, as if you
should have tried when you were young instead of
now, when you’re no longer fear the hand that
smote when you did not learn, kept you behind
a gate long broken and never repaired.
Amy Krohn
Grass Fire
I can set my anger aside
Like dishes at the sink
And I can calm a worry
By kneading it in the dough.
I can even push a burst of joy
Behind demure curtains.
But curiosity will leap unchecked
Burning bush to bush
And sweeping through the grasses
With hunger growing wild,
Catching every wind
To consume the next idea.
The cool-headed ones,
They try to stop it
By pointing out my place in life.
But they don’t see
The furnace isn’t useful
When the heat surrounds the house.
Grass Fire Reconsidered
When ideas leap instead of smolder
they miss things
Like my headstrong poem
about curiosity burning wild
My desire ran with Miss Dickinson
to sear a meaning through the lines
I forgot the thing called patience
which isn’t like a fire
More like a dry time,
sweeping floors, cooking meals, dusting
The humble things I do in service
for those who warm my heart.
Sarah Lilius
No Oasis for Victims
Left naked in the desert
with a song in my head.
A cactus the only way to pierce my heart.
Repression is the sand around my feet,
after awhile it stops burning.
Who knows where I’d be
if he hadn’t dropped me here
like a parcel for someone else.
I never thought I’d be his problem,
a catalyst of violence and voodoo dolls.
He holds a pin for every day
and on Saturday there’s extra.
Bits of hair, skin, drawn on eyes,
a serious doll, my mouth a straight line.
The stuffing comes out, he pushes it back.
On Sundays, when he goes to church
with his family in the air conditioning,
does he think of my naked body burning,
my dry mouth, the hurt between my legs
as he strokes his daughter’s blonde hair?
Bipolar for Couples
He: it’s never a good time with her, with us.
I’m her map but the paper is wearing at the creases
from the constant opening, closing, always.
She: I have paper cuts up and down my arms, fingers,
from trying to figure out this damn map.
I cannot navigate, I cannot see through the fog.
She: today I felt better but it’s a secret.
This mood feels like a giant and he doesn’t notice.
Not my smile, my touch, my possibility.
He: some days she’s a sun that I can’t look at.
The irritability becomes her, razors and forks.
I want to lash out like a whip, often I do.
He: some days she’s a moon and I don’t know
what to do, the crying, the couch or bed.
She becomes useless, won’t even bring in the tide.
She: I know he’s trying but it’s not enough.
I can’t do this, I can’t do this, and there is no
understanding like a bridge for me to walk across.
He: I’m calling her bluff, a bottle of pills,
the crazy thoughts. But do I want her watching
the boys, my sons—are they safe?
She: come home. Come home. Come home.
The children are driving me to madness.
I’m a thorn to them, I’m too fast—they aren’t safe.
He: driving the 30 minutes home. No music.
I don’t feel like a hero, I’m burdened.
I’m the shovel who digs her out.
She: under the earth, down where it’s quiet,
damp—I find myself again, unable to inhale, exhale.
Until the metal hits my shoulder. Safe again.
Monsters
We’re stones someone has thrown in the river. The soft plop and the ripples are what the water
has to give, nothing more. Somewhere an owl sleeps and the mouse is safe. The sun is a face to
the water where we stand on the edge. Just wait. There’s more quiet to devour. We stand on two
legs but we want to be on four, stability and steadfastness, anger. No horns, no fur. Just teeth that
tend to glisten in the sunlight.
Brandon Marlon
Manhunt
Were I not tasked with his capture,
I might commend the cunning of it:
where better for the foul-souled to elude
law’s arms than a midday souk congested
with buyers dickering for bargains?
Dispatching guards to corner and crevice,
I pursue among throngs perusing kempt stalls
of copper trinkets, pigmented stonelets,
incense crystals and woven calicoes,
narrowly dodging spice mounds
and intricate pyramids of produce,
hurtling past darting bread carts
randomly sped by grinning nuisances,
evading vendors’ hurrahs and clutches
at every turn, shunning their vaunted wares,
tracking in lockstep his flitting shadow,
just in the nick of time to catch at last
a glimpse of the unscathed hurdling streetward
where liberty awaits the wily open-armed.
Gregg Orifici
Here and Now
It’s darkening early now.
My timing is off. I’ll never make it
back from walking the dog,
blind to whatever
is crawling in those leaves,
within me, scratching my shoes
against the damp earth, half
burying my invisible trace.
A storm-darkened grid exiles
its own light.; stars
hunger more brilliantly
for their distant kin.
The evening hard stretches now,
limbering fires and primordial meals,
each one a forgiveness, a reimagining—
derelict now
that you
are no longer here.
Here, where all the warmth
self emanates and even my dreams
are deported to an unchartered place,
I long for a slow start, a dark shade,
a workday chiseled down to essence.
A return to that persimmon time
when longing would flicker
only ever so briefly—
the trapped whine
of a winter mosquito,
a leftover piece of pie,
the spark of sleep.
What difference does it make?
Those old revolving skewers of change
prod and stagger me forward.
Our Father
who art, by now, in heaven
—I hope and pray—
you stepped out on us,
shallow-rooted after all, just
when we needed you most.
Flush with corny charms
and undisclosed reserves,
you traded us in
for a foreign convertible—
a pearlescent two-seater
you never dreamed
of having.
You held top down grudges
against your mother-in-law
that lasted longer than she did.
We were teenage captives
to your bikini-clad stewardess
—bluegreen eyeshadow,
overcurled hair, lips pursed and pouting.
Driving, you’d pore over her slideshow
pressed up against the windshield, daring
us to look, or disapprove.
What sorry looked like you never
mastered. The other woman
gold-necklaced you, #1, and that
was all it took. For you to forget.
Were you happy? Or
was it all bluff and swagger?
We weren’t angels, we took sides,
We cold-shouldered.
We just wanted what we had,
while you wanted something
different.
The blame hardened as it shrank,
over time, and lodged itself, indigestible,
in your gut, as it did in ours. Sometimes
we forgot it was there. Mostly we acted
as if it no longer mattered.
How did we end up, even now
after you’re gone, still, what if’ing?
Zeitgeist Unplugged
Ecstatic, my hat rides
the brilliant waves
of the northern lights,
swashbuckling
a whole hemisphere
but mindful
not to suck the life
out of neighboring stars.
In this rapacious age
of all you can eat ego,
an unrehearsed smile,
a bit of je ne sais quoi
is an undisputed,
about-time act of rebellion.
You may speak
in tongues and witness Jesus,
but, I ask you, have you grasped
the bedazzling mystery
of magenta?
Never before have I
sailored so naked
or burlesqued at midday.
Now I rise
like the Freedom Tower,
sashay down Bourbon
like a Mardi Gras drag queen
and seed the uncut
meadow wild
with weeds.
Without a thought
for the cocoon, follow me
sojourner, as I butterfly
skyward.
Stan Sanvel Rubin
I definitely need to get out of here
while it’s still raining
I will walk to the corner
I want to see what’s happening there
Its like a church service in Indiana,
watching them pass by each other
in bright clothing in drab weather
All day it rains
until rain gathers to a hum
like a fist pounding a table
lightly, incessantly,
making a wave, a liturgy
I need to go to the corner
Someone might be passing
who could matter to me
We haven’t met yet
but I know we’re going to
if I can find a way
out of here
METABOLISM
He passes by and
never passes again.
Light does not stain him
and he resembles no one.
Surely the salt of his lonely eyes
stings like your own.
Surely his mouth contorts
to swallow the surly words
he must swallow, as you do.
Surely the effort he makes
leaves a tint in the air
others breathe without knowing,
following where he went.
TENT
This is not Abraham’s tent of noise
but a small voice breaking
like the moon tide breaking
leaving salt foam
covering shells
covering sand.
This is where the lost one lived,
eaten, beaten,
swallowed whole,
torn by teeth,
burnt on sand,
shriveled in sun.
Look more closely,
find a splinter
of the three layered
pearly home
still glittering
in your hand.
MAN WHO CRIES BLOOD
A Tennessee man who cries tears of blood
has spent the last seven years searching for answers and help.—CBS News
In the small morning
after the morning
cats wail
desire for something
that is not in this story
•
This is not about loneliness
or being afraid
but about arriving
perpetually
at the place we started
•
If I gave you
more than I give you
what would you give me?
He is not a saint
•
Blood will not lessen
Blood is no answer
Blood binds us with its secret
We are not saints
•
We are hunched
under a stairwell
listening for someone
to come down the stairs
Kerry Barner
THE SHOE SHINE BOYS
Morning
The bus was full. Vito had already let two go by. If he didn’t get on this one, he’d miss the early
shift. It was the best part of the day. Boots and shoes from all walks of life needing a shine. He
squeezed himself through the backdoor, his face nestling into an unwashed armpit. He tried to
hold his breath for twenty seconds, thirty seconds, but his lungs couldn’t last. Too many smokes.
He exhaled and breathed in, and held his breath once more. Ten seconds, twenty seconds. The
bus stopped. The armpit got off. Vito pursed his lips and let out a long sigh of relief.
It was short lived.
A wide-hipped woman boarded, twice as pungent as the armpit. She wore an off-white,
sleeveless T-shirt, a denim mini-skirt two sizes too small, and yellow flip-flops. Vito hated flipflops. No money in them. He could never understand why his fellow shoe shiners wore them too.
How about leading by example? The woman’s toenails were manicured and painted bright pink,
her hair stuck out at strange angles and there was sleep in her eyes. Her loose breasts squashed
against Vito’s chest. He felt a lurch in his groin and shifted to the side. There was no danger of
getting slapped on this bus. The woman couldn’t even raise her flabby arms to hold on. She just
used the tight packing of passengers and her hips to hold her upright. When the bus shuddered
off, Vito and the woman swayed forward with the crowd, curved like trees in the wind, and fell
back into position as the bus found its rhythm. She began to hum to herself. A Bahian tune,
thought Vito. Heads bobbed from side to side. To his left, a young man with headphones was
nodding to a popular carnival beat. Over the PA, the radio crackled with romantic love songs.
Vito closed his eyes and thought of the bed he’d just left. The blankets still skewed out of shape,
like a twisted armadillo. Months into the job, getting up early was a habit he was still not used to.
As a child his mother would have to call him several times before he was able to rouse himself. It
usually took a final pinch of the ear to force him out of bed. There was no one to wake him now.
Just the radio alarm flicking into life at five-thirty. Sometimes he would let it ring until the
family in the barraco next door banged on the walls. It would often cause a shower of plaster to
sprinkle the floor. The walls were, at best, a thin film between him and his next door neighbours.
He’d trained himself to only turn it off when he was sitting upright. There were too many
occasions when he’d turned off the alarm, rolled over and gone right back to sleep, dreaming of
diving or fishing or crab-catching.
No one at the Shack cared if he was late. It meant more business for his fellow workers. When he
first started there, they would tease him. Geraldo, the longest standing shoe shiner, would shout
across the Shack, “Hey, Screecher, why the yellow eyes?” Screecher, short for Screech Owl, due
to Vito’s whine at the early starts. “Caught any mice today?” “Time those claws got clipped.”
Yeah, yeah, very funny, Vito would think, and buff up a boot with even more energy. They
didn’t have the same long journey each day and were not disturbed by the night sounds of
gunshots, baile and dogs. They lived in quieter bairros, closer to the centre with their families.
The sun still wasn’t up by the time the bus stopped at Sé. Vito crossed himself at the statue of St.
Paul, skipped over the sleeping bodies of drunks and homeless, dodged the pack of dogs
scavenging around the bins, turned the corner and entered the Shack.
A collective cheer of “Screecher” rang out. Only Josafa “Big Conk” Koller said nothing. Vito
grinned and reached for his apron. He considered the empty row of seats, their wooden backs and
shiny leather padding worn down by the years. He pictured the people he might meet today:
Paulito, the cafe owner opposite, usually his first customer, the businessmen, the tourists. The
cafe lights were still off, but it wouldn’t be long before they threw open their doors to the early
birds.
A shout could be heard down the street. Benedito the Mad was rounding the corner, howling at
his imaginary enemy. Vito had been terrified of him at first. He always seemed to appear
unexpectedly and shout “Monkey!” in his left ear. Vito would jump out of his skin and shout
back, but Benedito never reacted. He was already halfway down the street waving his arms in the
air, cursing the robot who’d removed his liver without the correct permission form. Once, Vito
had tried to ask him why the robot had taken it. Benedito stopped shouting for a second and
looked straight at him. His gaze made Vito so uncomfortable but he forced himself to hold it.
Benedito closed his eyes and said, “What?” Vito repeated the question. Benedito, still with his
eyes closed, walked off, shouting out “Monkey” to the walls. It was the closest Vito ever got to
having a conversation with him.
No one knew where Benedito lived. He was relatively well dressed and always seemed to have
money in his pocket. He was often spotted on buses, terrorizing the passengers with his ranting.
No matter how packed it was, there were always spaces around Benedito. As far as the shoe
shiners knew, he had never attacked anyone, but none of them would ever stretch to calling him
“harmless”. This morning, Benedito was in a particularly voluble mood. He shouted “Monkey”
twice at Vito, shook his fist at Geraldo and punched the air at the Paulito cafe.
“How’s the liver?” said Vito, just low enough not to be heard.
Benedito disappeared out of sight. Vito relaxed and took a cigarette out of a new pack. He
handed them round. Geraldo, Dominique and Lucas all took one. Josafa was busy with his
brushes, but Vito knew he was not a smoker. Josafa was not an anything. He didn’t drink, he
didn’t smoke, he didn’t take drugs, and he never stayed out late. As far as Vito knew he was
loyal to his wife and had no girlfriends. They’d all fight for customers, Vito, Geraldo,
Dominique and Lucas, each trying to outdo the other by knocking down a centavo here and
there, but more often than not people opted for “Big Conk” Koller at no discount. What was it
about that guy? Why did people trust him? Vito asked this question like a daily prayer.
When Josafa was with a customer he kept his head down and rubbed hard. He worked so close to
his subject that Vito could often see the reflection of his nose on the boot tip. It was a hooter,
thick black hair sprouting out of both nostrils. Vito fantasised about setting fire to this jungle.
He’d once offered to singe them away in safety. Josafa smiled at him and shook his head, “I like
them.” It was the most Josafa said in a day. He would nod from time to time, quietly soaking in
Vito’s words like a sponge, never offering a drop of conversation in return. In all his days at the
Shack Vito had never heard Benedito insult Josafa.
A crowd of office workers came into view and Vito straightened his apron. If he could get in a
couple of shines before Paulito turned up, he’d be covered for breakfast.
“Shoe shine! Shoe shine!” they all cried at once. Geraldo had the loudest voice. A deep baritone
born of years with the local choir. He was at least a head taller than the others too and usually
managed to catch the first one through the Shack. Today was different. A businessman made
straight for Vito, removed his sunglasses and the jacket that was perched on his shoulders. It
made him look like a gangster. He asked, “How much?”
“6 reais,” said Vito. It was the standard price.
“How much?” the businessman repeated. Vito looked at the others. Geraldo shrugged and
bellowed out “Shoe shine!” Vito turned to the customer and said, “For you, five.”
The businessman nodded once, sat in the chair, wriggled his bottom a couple of times and looked
expectantly at Vito. Vito jumped into action. He laid out his brushes and cloths in a row,
inspected the first shoe and pulled a dark tan polish from the box in front of him. Expensive
leather, he thought, but the heels were well worn. The man looked about fifty to fifty-five years
old, slightly balding with mouth lines beginning to droop down. His hands were placed squarely
on his lap, a wedding ring on his finger, well-trimmed nails. The very tip of his middle finger
was missing. Vito stared at it. The businessman caught him looking and said, “God Bless
America.”
“Huh?” said Vito.
“Sawed off both tips when I was working over there. Insurance only covered one operation, so I
had to choose which one to keep.”
Vito looked closer at this hand. The wedding finger had scars around the tip, barely noticeable in
the early morning light.
“Don’t ever get old or sick in the States,” he said.
“Amen,” said Vito. He worked on the shoes, adding a thick layer of polish, buffing it hard,
before adding a second layer. “Where you work?” Vito guessed it was a bank.
The businessman looked down at Vito. It seemed to him as though he were assessing whether
Vito could be trusted with such a sensitive fact. “Here and there,” he said, vaguely waving in the
direction of the financial district.
The shoes were done. Vito grinned at the shiny leather, enough to see his teeth gleaming back at
him. More people were seated now and his friends were working away like a chain gang.
“That’ll be five reais, Sir,” he said reaching out his hand. The man handed him a ten-note bill
and waited. Vito reached in his pocket for change and realised he only had a twenty and four
ones. “One moment, Sir,” he said, not wanting the man to think him dishonest.
“Josafa,” he said, “lend me a real until I get change.” Josafa pulled five coins out of his back
pocket and gave them to Vito without a second glance. “My man,” said Vito and patted him on
the back. No haggling, no questions. If he’d asked Lucas there would have been a five minute
interrogation about when he would get the loan back, a further five minutes searching for the
coins, by which time his customer would have lost patience and never returned.
Vito handed the real to the businessman, who looked it at curiously for a second and handed it
back. “Keep it. A tip, for you,” he said. “So long, Vito!”
“Ciao,” said Vito and waved him off. He’d called him “Vito”. Had he met him before? He didn’t
think so. He was good with faces and would have remembered the missing fingertip. Maybe he’d
caught the others calling his name? Unlikely. The only person who called him Vito was Josafa
and he never opened his mouth. The rest stuck to Screecher or in Benedito’s case “Monkey”.
Vito recalled the man’s face, hair, hands, jacket. There was something familiar about him,
something that he couldn’t quite place.
“Vito, Vito…?” It was Paulito calling. “Thought we’d lost you for a second. Whenever you’re
ready.” Paulito was already settled into his favourite chair on the right with full view of his cafe.
Vito smiled at him. Paulito was as regular and reliable as the huge clock hanging over his bar
counter. Every morning before he started his shift, he would come and get his shoes cleaned.
They had a nice little arrangement going. Paulito paid a fifth of the price for his shoes, Vito paid
a fifth of the price for his coffee. In fairness, Vito came out the winner as he had at least three or
four coffees to Paulito’s one shoe shine.
“How’s business?” asked Vito. It was a routine question to kick-start their morning.
“Business is booming, Vito-lito,” said Paulito. “We’re in the best corner of the world, in the
wealthiest part of Sao Paulito. Workers get hungry and thirsty. And when they get hungry and
thirsty, who do they come to? Paulito, that’s who. My customers love me, my wife loves me,
why even my shoes love me. They’ve not left my feet in over five years.”
It was true. They’d been repaired so many times they looked like they were held together by
prayer alone. Paulito did occasionally buy new shoes, or rather his wife did, but he kept going
back to his old faithfuls. “I’m on my feet all day. I need comfort, not style,” he would say to the
shoe shine boys.
As Vito rubbed away the grease and splashes of yesterday’s meals, he noticed a tear close to the
little toe. All the stitching and glue in the world couldn’t patch up this hole.
“You might have to prepare a funeral procession for these guys,” said Vito, poking his finger
through the gap.
“Vito-lito, how many times do I need to tell you my tale? I used to drive an old banger, a
rustheap of a car-lito. From the outside, it looked terrible. My wife, she was too ashamed to sit in
it. But the mechanic said it was the best engine he’d ever seen. Said it would go forever, long
after the shell had rusted to nothing. I feel the same about my shoes. A few holes here and there
don’t make the shoes useless. It makes them…unique. Now, here you are, my man.” Paulito
handed Vito the money, smoothed his hair down to the side and strode into the cafe.
Today was pay day. One reais from Paulito, six from the stranger with the familiar face. Seven
reais in total and it wasn’t even seven o’clock. It was a good start. The flow of workers was
building into a torrent. Vito stepped into the crowd and called out, “Shoe shine! Shoe shine!”
Four customers at once walked into the Shack.
Afternoon
Vito looked across the street at the Paulito cafe clock. He had to duck his head low as the
chandelier in the dining area blocked his view. Three thirty in the afternoon, the graveyard
shift. He’d be lucky if he could get one customer in this dry hour. He pulled his last cigarette
from a crumpled pack in his apron pocket and tossed the carton away. A street cleaner caught it
in his path and swept it along the river of debris. Vito struck a match, turned it upwards to watch
the flame flare, held it for a second and drew in a breath.
Josafa was hunched over the only customer in the Shoe Shine Shack, a woman wearing brown
boots. She had straight hair tied back in a ponytail and a clip pinning her fringe into place. Her
face was round, with little make-up. European, thought Vito. It looked like she’d been paddling
in Sao Paolo’s dust for a fortnight. Josafa’s head was down and he was rubbing hard.
Out of the corner of his eye Vito spotted his uncle Silvio heading towards the Shack in a dark
green suit, a leggy woman draped over his arm. Not his aunt Lidia, thought Vito. Vito still owed
Silvio the money he’d borrowed for his latest unsuccessful business venture, selling cachaça at
the central market.
“Out of smokes. I’ll be back,” he shouted to Josafa as he leapt out of the open window, sidled
along the wall and down the street to the tobacco kiosk. Most of the shop fronts were decorated
for Halloween. He thought for a second about buying a mask. No, he couldn’t keep avoiding
Silvio forever. The man was his mother’s brother after all, but he just couldn’t face another
dressing down in front of Josafa and the others. They’d teased him mercilessly when he came
back after less than a week of “striking out alone”. All except Josafa. He’d said nothing, just
smiled at Vito, and handed over a brush and cloth as though saying, “Welcome back”.
Vito thought back to his four days as a liquor vendor. He’d enjoyed the camaraderie of the
market traders, the early morning buzz setting up the stalls, the smell of fruit and vegetables as
they were being hauled through the corridors in boxes. His only trouble, he wasn’t much of a
salesman. There was something about his face that people just didn’t like. He would look at
himself in the mirror, trying to spot which wrinkle, which laugh line it was that brought the
shutters down. Everything was in proportion. There was no outsized snout, no eyebrows meeting
in the middle, even his eyes were evenly spaced out, something his mother cared deeply about.
She treated anyone with close set eyes with suspicion. And yet…people took one look at him
and walked away. Maybe it wasn’t the face. Maybe it was the polish-stained fingers or the
chew-bitten nails that put people off. His father always said he had the hands of a “murderer”. It
was meant to stop him chewing his nails as a child, but had only caused him anxiety and further
nibbling.
By the time he’d paid the weekly fee for the stall, bought the stock of cachaça, the small taster
cups, a dustbin, the advertising flyers and the snacks, the money had all gone. His friends came
to toast his new venture and stayed, each taking a complimentary swig of the throat-burning
liquor. By day three most of the drink was gone, very little actually sold, and he had a filthy
hangover. By day four, with no booze left, his friends melted away. He’d had to pack up and go
back to the Shack, putting it down to experience.
“A packet of Marlboro and a box of matches, please,” said Vito. Elder, the kiosk man, reached
behind him without needing to look at the spot, pulled a packet from the shelf and tossed it
towards Vito.
“Business good?” asked Vito.
Elder shrugged, “So, so.”
Another talker, thought Vito. What does it take to get a conversation going round here? “Office
workers will be spilling out soon. Should pick up then.”
Elder shrugged his assent.
“How long you been in the business, my man,” asked Vito.
Elder raised his eyes to the ceiling and counted on his fingers, “Thirty three years, seven months,
four days.”
“Keeping count?” said Vito with a laugh.
Elder did not smile. He looked like he’d heard it all before. Nothing could shake him.
Vito unwrapped the cigarette packet and tapped out the first one with his forefinger. It was a
trick he’d learnt as a kid. His older brother would do it, then flip the cigarette into the air and
catch it in his mouth. Vito had practised this many times but, more often than not, it landed on
the floor. He sauntered back to the Shack, checking that Silvio had gone. “Smoke, anyone?”
Geraldo and Dominique took one and sat down in the wooden seats. Vito bent down and looked
again at the clock. It was five past four. He jangled the coins in his pocket. They were a bit light.
Breakfast, lunch and smokes were taken care of, but he still needed money for food and his
journey home. Anything left would go in the Silvio pot. He’d promised to put seventy aside each
day. That meant at least ten more customers.
Josafa handed him a coffee, patted him on the back and went to sit on the empty seats. It was a
pat of sympathy, as though he knew how much change lay in Vito’s pockets. There were only
five years between them but Vito felt it was more like a father/son relationship. He took a seat
next to Josafa, blew onto the coffee, took a slug, swallowed and whistled a slow tune under this
breath. Josafa tapped his foot to the beat.
Evening
The sun was sinking, giving the evening a bruised look. Street lights came on. Music from
Paulito’s cafe drifted across the street. A classic Bossa Nova tune – one of Paulito’s favourites
that he usually played around this time as he geared up to the office rush hour. Vito watched him
drying glasses and placing them carefully on the shelf above him. He’d seen his wife earlier with
a shopping bag in her hand. Someone else bothered by the hole in the shoe. Time would tell if
Paulito could be persuaded to part with his beloved footwear. Vito looked down at his own
shoes. He’d been wearing the same pair now for over two years. They were taking on a weary
look. But he needed every centavo for his next project, and to pay Silvio back.
He thought back to the man with the missing fingertip: the tailored jacket over his shoulders, the
expensive shoes, the confidence with which he negotiated the price down, the sense of
entitlement to a discount, before tossing the real back to Vito, just because he could. Vito dreamt
of the day when he would stop chasing tips like litter down the street, when he could flick a few
coins to the kids hanging around his own stall. To play the big shot, the generous guy, the man
with plenty. This stranger with the missing fingertip had travelled to the States – Vito had never
gone beyond the city limits. He’d suffered injury and loss. He’d returned to tell the tale as though
the missing fingertip were a mere nothing, a troublesome bit of unnecessary flesh, something to
shrug at. “Don’t get old or sick in the States,” he’d said. Don’t get old or sick at all, thought Vito.
Who would look after him when he got old or sick? Geraldo? Lucas? Dominique? He was on his
own.
Vito crossed the street to Paulito’s cafe.
“Vito-lito!” shouted the bar owner, “come and take the weight of the world off those polished
feet.”
One of the regulars moved to the side to make room for him. They nodded to each other the way
barflies do.
Vito slapped down several reais on the counter. “A beer, please, and a shot.”
Paulito arched his eyebrows. “Tough day at the office?”
“The usual,” said Vito. “You?”
“My life is just beginning.”
Vito took another coin and slotted it into the jukebox. He punched in the number 364 and
returned to his seat. He closed his eyes to listen more intensely. He pictured the record as it
juddered out of its slot, and scratched out the first few bars. It started with the whistle, then the
drum. His feet started tapping on the bar stool. It travelled up his legs and into his belly. The
music turned up a notch. The beat was faster, more frantic. Something in his mind clicked. It was
evening and he was drawn in. Each instrument from the shaker bells of the chocalho to
the tamborim, from the large bass drums of surdos to the band leader’s smallerrepinique filled
his body with sound. He couldn’t go home. Not yet. Not when the music was playing and there
were coins in his pocket.
Vito’s head bobbed as he counted out his earnings. Along the bar there were seven piles all lined
up in neat stacks. About one hundred reais in total. Not a bad day. Not good either. He’d battled
over a couple of customers with Lucas, winning one, losing the other.
Sweeping four piles back into his pocket he pushed the remaining three towards Paulito. “Keep
me fuelled until this runs out.”
Paulito cocked his head to one side and said, “You’re the boss.”
Night fell. At the back of the bus, Vito slumped in his seat. He turned to look behind him, lids
heavy with liquor. The lights of the city were fading as the driver chugged up the hill slowly. He
felt inside his trouser pocket. Only chicken feed left. Silvio would have to wait. His next project
would have to wait. What was his next project? He thought again of the man with the missing
fingertip. Vito imagined sitting next to him, their arms around each other, confidentially, like old
buddies. Maybe they’d swap business tips or travel adventures. Maybe the businessman would
invite him home for dinner.
Vito’s stop drew close. He pressed the bell. The bus stopped and the doors opened. Vito took one
step down and turned to the driver. He dug in his pocket and found a real. He flipped it at the
man and said, “A tip, for you.”
As the coin sailed through the air, he looked at his forefinger. A thin line of polish ran across the
tip. It ran like a black river.
It ran like a scar.
Roy Bentley
THE WAR OF NORTHERN AGGRESSION
It had rained. The hillside was a black enormity both sides of the road as if the world had lost its
color or dissolving objects had become apparitions and blurred into one another.
We had never been close, my brother and me, standing apart even in family photographs, but he
rescued me from prison at the last possible moment by having me committed. What had I done?
The misdemeanor offense of aiming and firing at a man. All right, I ran a man who shall remain
nameless up a telephone pole with a .45 that I carried in my pocketbook—there were black bears
in that part of the state and randy bootleggers loose in the night. I might have felt kindly toward
TW, but I was thinking of Daddy and his locking me in a closet for three days.
It was one of those damp days in fall, everything a shade of gray. I was on leave from Eastern
State Hospital, known as Kentucky Asylum for the Insane before 1913. My brother TW thought
I should be at the funeral of our father, Quentin Wolff, who had burned to death in a field fire.
TW had signed me out on furlough and was driving me to Neon from Lexington in a 1930 Model
A Ford I recognized as one Daddy gave me to use for my eggs and butter route.
Shock treatments my brother signed off on at Eastern left me seething. And “seething” is putting
it mildly. If I had tried to kill someone who got me in the family way and then wouldn’t leave his
wife and children—if I had emptied an entire clip of store-bought ammunition at Nameless as he
scurried up a phone pole, what might TW and the rest of eastern Kentucky imagine I would want
to do next? TW seemed wary. He kept looking over in my direction. He acted like he had
something he wanted to say. He looked changed from the last time I’d seen him: a fletching of
gray at the temples, lace-like lines around the eyes. He always wore a kind of uniform: white
shirt, suspenders, wingtip shoes, a suit jacket. His feelings for Daddy were what I’d call a
grieving love. 1940 could have been a tough year for him already for all I knew.
My brother said, You look nice in that dress. Gray suits you.
I don’t want to talk, I said. I’m not mad. I just don’t want to talk.
TW looked over at me then back down the road. His expression hadn’t changed.
That’s all right, he said. Save me having to talk about the weather.
When I was growing up, my folks would talk about the hostilities that tore Kentucky apart in the
Civil War. My granny taught me the phrase The War of Northern Aggression. I’ve heard the
North wasn’t the aggressor and that the South was defending its right to own and trade slaves.
This was like that, a white lie. TW saying I looked nice. What you hear in place of something it
was understood you had spared the hearer. I’d been cooped up for three years in an institution
whose saving grace was that it wasn’t Kentucky State Women’s Prison.
I wanted to believe the shock treatments were necessary. If I closed my eyes I could see
attendants standing over me before the air turned gold then blue-black and I went unconscious
and woke to see the matron in charge—Hazel Lynch—with her black hair pulled back tight. I’d
see her giving orders with the carriage of one used to taking charge of others. I’d see an orderly
wiping up something. Riding in a car that had been mine, I had to tamp down my rage. Nothing
about what had happened was fair, but where in the black and white world was there a house
where what happened was fair? I was helpless in the face of the consequences of my one veryvisible act of aggression against the world of men. I was never demure, never girly, but I was
learning what it takes not to call attention to oneself. I held my hands folded in my lap.
If you were to look at old photographs of my brother Thomas William Wolff at medical school
in Lexington: Errol Flynn. All movie stars look crazy, but especially Flynn. Others whispered
TW had the world by the tail, but I saw the fear. His pencil-thin moustache was part of a mask. I
knew he was terrified he might crack up or become a man who buries money in a Maxwell
House coffee can in the backyard then forgets where he buried it—like Daddy.
Before my commitment I prided myself on dressing in store-bought clothing and a few fine
accessories that won me notice if not compliments. I had been the captain of my own ship—a
canary-in-the-coal-mine Model A—and I had seen what dressing well could lead to. I had money
and a smile on my face. I was someone others said hello to. I wasn’t someone about to crack up
and need to be put away. That is, until ol’ Nameless Married Someone noticed me.
I delivered eggs and milk and butter then. His neighbor Joe Samuelson was on my route. The
first time our eyes met—on the stoop at the Samuelson place—Nameless looked at me like he
couldn’t face a day without me in it. I was important to someone. Which was what I’d heard I
was on the earth for. I’d been married. I knew. That didn’t mean he didn’t take advantage of me.
He did. Three times he caught me alone and tried to force me, three times I said no. The fourth
time he cornered me. It was night. We were outside. Stars wheeled overhead, the spaces between
stars a sullen web. What was happening—it was like the color was being drained from the world.
A few months after, Daddy locked me in a closet. He had gone into Neon and someone had
asked him if I had taken up with a married man and “gotten in trouble.” It was the first Daddy
had heard of me and Nameless. Maybe the first time he had thought of me as having sex and
being someone men might want to have sex with. I’d been married, had two children, but this
was something else. I was under his roof. He was responsible for me.
The closet might have been all right, bearable, but after I went to the toilet in the slop jar he had
allowed me, I started vomiting. That made it, that confined space, take on a woozy stench.
I didn’t eat for three lost days. When he finally threw open the door, Daddy didn’t say anything.
Didn’t apologize. I went and drew water. Boiled it. I bathed. Dressed in other clothes. I had
found flour to make biscuits and was in the middle of rolling the biscuits when Daddy came in. I
had looked down at dough I was rolling and so didn’t see him raise his hand.
He hit me with his fist. I know I lost consciousness because, when I woke, I was lying on a bed
of feed sacks on the porch where I’d been dragged and left.
I made up my mind that someone was going to pay. If not Daddy, someone.
When I fired the pistol at Nameless, I was smelling that foul closet and seeing the last pieces of
the light become an inverted delta and disappear in that space as the door closed.
TW didn’t smoke or chew, didn’t swear unless it was something he did out of everyone’s
hearing, so he would have been designated a moderate man. A man who other men knew could
be trusted with their secrets or their money. But I knew TW had a couple of women up in the
hollows. You wouldn’t have known it to look at him, but he was something of a ladies man.
As he drove, and the black-tree-miles passed by on either side of the Model A, I thought of one
mountain woman named Beth Stallard. Beth was a quilter renowned in the mountains for her
skill. The rose pattern in the quilt on floor of the front seat was likely hers. The fact that it rested
where it did wasn’t an indication of anything, but I thought it signaled some fondness. The
quilt—like Beth—referenced the mysteries of a man who stood apart from others in and around
this part of Letcher County. There was a flame juggler prancing on the roof of a house. A Stars
& Bars and a crucified Jesus. I reached to the floor for the quilt.
You cold? TW asked.
He looked back at the road as I unfolded the keepsake quilt. It presented as a rising sun on a field
of patchwork clouds. It had a star-strewn, black square in the foreground that reminded me of
Hazel Lynch’s hair and of the trees at the side of the road. Black was, I thought, an odd color to
plant front and center like that. Morbid, to some eyes. Tacked to the sky in another square was a
rainbow above a Christ-on-the-cross. Ravens crossed the respective squares, streaming into the
assumed air like black water. I smoothed the quilt across my lap then sat and rubbed the place
between my thumb and forefinger on my left hand and rocked.
Sometimes I think too much, I said.
I don’t think enough, he said.
I know.
I’m glad you’re here.
He started to say something else. Thought better of it. Sighed.
We drove on. I counted the embroidered ravens on the quilt as I rubbed my hand.
It was the third year of my hospitalization. I had been married and divorced. My three children
had been taken from me. I was a stranger to them now. If I wasn’t a conversational companion, I
thought I’d earned some understanding. I knew my anger was a cloud between us.
And the way TW strained to see landmarks ahead, it had nothing to do with landmarks.
He opened the ashtray. Took out a pack of Camels. Tapped one into his mouth and lit it. In a
moment he cranked his window down.
I can stop at a diner I know up ahead, he said. If you want.
I knew he wouldn’t offer me a cigarette since he likely recalled I didn’t smoke. Smoking was not
among my vices, not yet, but I liked the smell. I liked that it reminded me that the air around
some men is poisonous. There were few other cars traveling the road my brother and I had been
on now for a little while. It might be nice to have a slice of pie. Apple. Maybe a dollop of vanilla
ice cream. I told him to stop. Which seemed to please him. He flipped the lit cigarette out the
window, blew the smoke out the opening, then cranked the window back up. I had the quilt
across my lap, but I said what I said not caring whether I might be thought odd or crazy.
TW had my future in his hands. A furlough was what he called this leave from treatment.
He would decide how long I had on the outside of Eastern’s red colonial walls.
Leave the window down, I said. I might like some air.
After the diner, we drove. The air brightened. The trees changed colors. Black became forest
green. Shadows flew. Maybe I did need a slice of Bluegrass State apple pie a la mode.
I didn’t remember the trip to Lexington taking this long, but I’d been in handcuffs and in a
different car, a sedan, and a state of mind that doesn’t allow for close observation of distances
and time. Ravens like those on the quilt had been in the impossibly blue sky as I stared out the
window of a sheriff’s car. I remembered wings. Blue-black wings. Snow either side of the road.
The smell of men in the front seat smoking cigarettes. That day, I remembered looking down at
myself at some point during the ride and noticing that my skirt had ridden up and no one had
smoothed it down. This was a different day. The birds in the air weren’t circling or sending
messages to one another in some language known only to birds. This was the day that the crazy
woman in the yellow Model A had lost her father. Today I could watch and listen to the birds
without worry that they were betraying secrets. I could smooth down my own skirt. I could ask
for, and be handed, a wedge of warm pie with a mini-mountain of vanilla ice cream on top.
I wasn’t sure how long I had been asleep. TW was smoking a cigarette. Driving. He looked in
my direction then back out the windshield and down the road.
You been asleep about an hour, he said.
How much farther?
Not far.
I fell back asleep and dreamed of Eastern State. Its orchards and ornamental trees. The trees
became attendants grabbing hold of me to drag me to a room for another session with the
electric-shock machine. This time, in the dream, someone was sayingAccording to E.A. Bennett
90 % of cases of severe depression which are resistant to all treatments will disappear after
three or four weeks of ECT. The words of the sentence remained now after the therapy had wiped
away my memories, though they came rushing back first as dreams then as nightmares.
When I awoke again, the car was stopped and TW absent from the driver’s seat.
Judging by a winged-horse swinging sign on a post outside, we were at a gas station. I heard a
laugh then TW was by the driver’s-side door and then the door opened.
I had to stop, he said. I was running on fumes.
The quilt had slid onto the floor. I picked it up and spread across me once more.
TW said, You like that, don’t you.
There were other cars on the road. One driver honked. Waved at a car driven by someone with
flame-red hair. A woman, judging by the lipstick-red smile. The woman waved back.
TW pulled out onto the road again.
We should be there in an hour or so, if I don’t get behind another coal truck.
On Sunday?
TW looked at me. This is Thursday, he said.
I felt myself looking at my brother. I saw him now as something other than the boy-man who
came back from medical school with a lightness to his step and a smile and a good word for
everyone. His face seemed sadder. The lines had deepened. At the temples his wire-rimmed
spectacles had worn a thin line of green in the gray, close-cropped hair. A patina. He had taken
off his glasses in the diner and I had noticed it then, but now I could plainly see green against the
gray. Like one of the doctors at Eastern named Gragg who coughed between endless cigarettes.
TW began speaking. He said, We can drive straight to the funeral home. Or we can just go the
house—the new brick house. You haven’t seen my house, have you? Let’s do that.
I didn’t know how to answer. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be made to see Daddy. Especially since
he’d died by fire. I imagined his body—seeing it—might cause me to get upset. It didn’t occur to
me to consider that the casket might be closed.
I said, I would like to see my boy.
Is that what you want? I’m happy to do that. Molly is waiting to feed us—she may have it ready
and on the table. You like ham, right?
The child in question was my bastard by Nameless. I had named him Charlie: Charles Leroy
Wolff. TW had been “seeing after him”—his phrase those times he’d visited me in the years I’d
been away. I wanted to try and add up the number of visits, but I couldn’t. Often when he had
come, I’d been in restraints for an outburst or rule infraction and was so mad I forgot who was
and wasn’t in the room. If I had to guess, I’d say he came to Eastern State Hospital twice a year:
Christmas and Easter. Always with something for me to sign. And always after the holiday.
On one such visit TW asked me to sign over—deed—to him my portion and share of the
bottomland-homestead forefathers had claimed when they came into the Big Sandy River Valley
area with Daniel Boone before 1800. My arms had to be released from a strait jacket then
massaged for me to be able to write. My brother waved to the attendants to make that happen.
He said he would bank my share. I would have what I needed out of the interest.
He’d manage the principal. Invest it.
I wasn’t sure TW had heard me. I was used to what I said being ignored or dismissed as the
ravings of a mad woman. I said it again.
You can do that. And you will. But you have to behave.
We were turning onto the two-lane that I recognized as leading into Neon. There was the Ford
dealership, a drugstore-soda fountain, the Bank of Neon, and The Neon, the town’s one theater.
The marquee at The Neon advertised The Wizard of Oz. I had heard attendants talking about it.
Someone said it was in color—of all things! They said it was a children’s movie.
I said, I’d like to take Charlie to The Neon. See that new movie.
His eyes turned from the road. We’ll see, he said.
The car was warm. I kicked off the quilt then thought better of that and scooped it up and folded
it. I tucked the quilt into the place where I’d found it. The flame juggler stared out from the fold.
The act of caring for the quilt seemed to meet with some approval on my brother’s part. He
pulled the car up a brick drive to a level spot. Parked. I’ll get your suitcase, he said.
Should I bring the quilt inside, I asked, knowing who had made it.
No was all he said.
The house smelled of bread and something else. Maybe—pecan pie.
TW’s wife Molly greeted me with a hug and kind words. After my time in Eastern, I recognized
kindness. If it had a color, I thought of kindness as blue. It was a Kentucky sky. Not the pewter
skies above the snaking two-lanes. Not the salt-colored smoke TW blew out the window of a
yellow Ford. Not the sentinel gray-then-black-then-gray confederacy of trees on the grounds of
Eastern lining both sides of a winding path referred to as the Main Building.
I was glad for her presence. TW kissed her and glided past and up a set of stairs.
Molly ushered me into the parlor. A picture of my parents stared down from a wall like the eyes
of Janus. My mother’s dour face and pulled-back-into-a-bun black hair answered the mystery of
why I had seen Hazel Lynch as a familiar evil. Mother’s pearls rested against a dress the front of
which was a blaze of roses retouched in by some photographer-artist. Daddy’s look was one of
broken heartedness that no amount of retouching could lessen or translate or soften.
Not a hint of blue anywhere in the photograph. Background golds raged the way flames will, the
way deciduous trees do in fall. The coloration of the faces served up a belligerence I felt hovered
over me, awake or sleeping. A wild in the blood that sooner or later consumes us.
I slept in an upstairs bedroom and so had to be called down to breakfast by a loud rapping at the
door of the room. It was TW. He was dressed and telling me what sort of Friday I could expect
before my feet touched the floor. His day involved arrangements at the funeral home for the
burial on Sunday. He said that today I’d be free to visit with Molly.
Calling hours are tonight and tomorrow night, he said and I nodded from the bed.
Molly has your breakfast downstairs, TW concluded and closed the door.
There was a pitcher and bowl on a washstand by the bed, but I knew it wouldn’t be necessary.
TW’s house had indoor plumbing. The bathroom was just down the hall. I had discovered this
the night before. It was furnished with a claw-foot tub and running water and a flush toilet. I ran
a bath with hot water and slipped into it. In a little while, I pulled the plug and watched water
spiral down the drain. Then I got out and dried off and wrapped a robe around me.
I went back to the bedroom and dressed in something from my gray suitcase.
My clothes were wrinkled but felt comforting. Familiar.
I made the bed and went downstairs.
Molly was busy in the kitchen. When she saw me, she stopped what she was doing and motioned
for me to sit. The kitchenette was a four-person affair with brushed chrome and padded yellow
chairs. It looked modern in a way that seemed appropriate for a house belonging to TW Wolff. In
a short while we were together at the table, eating eggs and ham and biscuits.
Light from one of four long windows in the room fell on Molly’s hands. Those bright hands
made me connect her movements to the idea that she might help me to see the boy.
I began by asking a question about what had happened to Daddy.
Molly said there had been nothing anyone could do. She began the story of the day they had
heard the news: a telephone call from the Junction alerted them to the accident. They were
calling the fire that, an accident, and it sounded right since the wind isn’t to be dictated to.
Some people have faces that stay with you, hall portrait or no hall portrait, and Molly’s face was
one of those. Soft-featured, mature but not old, intelligent green eyes—like the doctor at Eastern
who had leaned over me to describe the shock treatments and what I could expect.
The light wasn’t on Molly’s hands or face now. Not in the same way.
I asked my question: Do you think I could go to Merkie’s and see my boy?
I know what it’s like not to be listened to. This wasn’t that. She was listening.
When she spoke, I knew it wasn’t something she had thought would be asked of her.
Molly rose from the table. She began taking plates and glasses, forks and knives and spoons, to
the sink by the long windows. I had no choice but to wait. Waiting was something I had learned
to do at Eastern. I rubbed my hand and sat.
Why don’t you dry, Abby—I’ll wash. And we’ll talk about it.
I stopped rubbing my hand and got up from the table and began doing as she asked.
I had to guess where each item belonged in the cupboards, but Molly smiled and nodded, or
pointed with a soapsuds-white hand, and we got through the task. Afterwards she made a phone
call and talked to someone who seemed to make her repeat every other sentence.
I was standing in the hallway by the portrait of Mommy and Daddy and rubbing my hand,
though I was standing. I felt my heart sink as she hung up the phone.
It was clear that she had been talking with TW.
I’m to drive you to see your boy Charlie. Your brother will call Merkie and arrange it. He said
you’re not to upset him, Abby—your boy Charlie. He said you’d know what that means.
I thanked her. Not upsetting my son meant I’d continue to be Aunt Abigail.
Charlie had gotten so much bigger I almost didn’t recognize him. Merkie—America, my sister—
brought him out onto the porch after she had laid down a warning I didn’t need to hear.
He favored our side of the family, the Wolffs, and was tall for four years old.
Merkie had dressed him in his Sunday clothes. He smelled freshly bathed. His brown hair was
damp and I smelled soap as he settled himself into the glider between Molly and me.
Auntie, Mommy says I can’t feed the chickens. Can I feed the chicks, Aunt Abby?
Maybe the world is two things at once: a House of Pain and a House of Pleasure, but I figured it
would be the odd woman who could hear a son call another woman Mommy and not feel like
she’d been ushered into the House of Pain. I let that injured feeling slip from me.
I asked Charlie a question, ignoring the commandment against his feeding the chickens.
You’re dressed up—would you like to go see The Wizard of Oz with your Aunt Abby?
He perked up. Clearly, even at 4, he knew more about the movie than I did.
I had guessed right: Molly’s presence caused older-sister to check herself before she spoke.
America looked to Molly. What do you say about that? she asked.
Molly looked at me. Then at Charlie on the glider. She smiled.
I’ll chaperone, she said.
I shouldn’t have been happy, but I was. Daddy was dead and soon to be buried in the Wolff
cemetery overlooking the Pure Oil station and the A & P. I was headed back to that hellhole of a
sanitarium in a matter of a few too-short days. But to stand in line with Charlie at the Neon and
buy tickets—actually, Molly paid: I hadn’t been trusted with money—and then to go inside and
buy popcorn and Dixie cups of Co-cola and sit with my son was answered prayer. A blessing. If I
had believed in God, which I didn’t, how could I after Eastern, that God would have been a she
and would have looked like Molly and spoken in a voice like my sister-in-law’s.
The movie started. Charlie’s eyes were frozen on the screen. I thought my son was awfully well
behaved: not once did he ask for other treats or to go to the bathroom. He seemed terrified by the
green-faced witch. He looked down and away then back up for reassurance.
Charlie moved his eyes, following the singing silver can that banged on its chest and intimated
that all we need to survive is a heart and friends. A smidgen of kindness. Maybe the luck of the
innocent. Certainly a lot more luck than Daddy had the day his ran out.
By the time Dorothy got to see the Wizard the second time, with the charred broomstick of the
Witch of the West as proof she had accomplished her mission, Charlie Wolff was hooked. A few
more shock treatments and I might forget my whole life, but my hope was that he’d keep this
memory somewhere, remember me, us, when I could no longer do the same.
Julia Blake
HOW LIGHT ESCAPES
I only drink when I’m sad. Which means I buy a lot of wine to keep the sadness at bay, so you
would think I would actually drink less by drinking, but the wine’s in my hand when Saul’s
yelling at me again from his favorite spot at the bottom of the stairs:Celeste? Celeste! Did you
forget to buy coffee again?
No, I did not forget to buy the coffee. It’s just hidden from my husband in the cabinet under the
sink. Perfect spot, full of cleaning supplies, a place where we all know he won’t go.
I have my excuse; I grab my keys.
Of course, my house has a porch festooned with autumn regalia. Of course, I drive a Mercedes
SUV, black. Of course, I’m brunette and skinny and spend a few hours at the gym each day
because, well, why the fuck not when you’re pushing forty? Fine. I’m vain. I’ll admit it: I like
the trappings.
It’s no bother for me to go to the store, really. They host wine tastings there. They have a bar
inside. Yes, inside, right next to the seafood.
Additional benefit: no people lurking around under four feet tall demanding, demanding,
demanding. And I love those little lurkers, really: my kids are my all, the stars and the sun and
the asteroid belt and all other manner of celestial beings, but they are also a black hole and their
gravity is inescapable. Isn’t it true that light can’t escape from a black hole? Can you imagine if a
star got trapped inside, its light beating and beating and beating against the walls of that place,
black as a pit? Ah, science. Such extraordinary discoveries. Such metaphors for the casual citizen
to appropriate.
Anyway, I pull into the parking lot. I pull in beside the car. I say the car because, well, this:
there’s a sticker on the back windshield with an inappropriate gesture. A fist, but with three
fingers up, and the ring finger and thumb tucked against the palm. I know what it means. You
know how? My husband told me.
Celeste, really, let’s try that.
What the hell do you want to try?
That. An emphatic gesture, an impatient one. It’s called ‘the shocker.’ Two fingers in you, up
front, and then one in—he looked away—your back end.
Oh, I said. Oh, I don’t think so.
Perhaps I should’ve taken him up on that, since the usual me on top, him on top, heavepushmoan
was so predictable and efficient. I’d like to work for something every now and then, you know?
Right, so I’m next to the car, black like my SUV, but much shorter, much younger really—a
Ford Fiesta, naturally. I want to know who owns this car, who owns this bold piece of work
flouting a sexually suggestive bumper sticker, and, I thought, it has to belong to the guy in the
freezer aisle.
If you stepped foot in my grocery store just one time you’d know exactly who I’m talking about.
He’s got a ponytail and sports a few zits that lurk around the lackadaisical whiskers that dot his
chin and upper lip and cheeks. Ah, yes, you know the one. He’s there. Everyday. Inescapable as
that black hole from earlier, but the freezer aisle guy lets out my light a little bit. I like teasing
Saul about him: Ah, there’s my freezer aisle Romeo. Just look at the way his breath billows away
from him as he’s stocking the shelves. What lungs, I say. Saul says nothing but can’t you keep it
in the road for two goddamn seconds? No, I cannot keep it in the fucking road, Saul, until we go
to the bar flanking the seafood and have a drink. Then we can shop in peace. Fine, he says. He
doesn’t really give a shit because he likes the little waitress. Redhead, curvy, nice ass, crooked
teeth. I’d fuck her myself if I was into that sort of thing. Her name, predictably, Amber. Let’s go
see Amber, I’d cajole, let’s go get a drink with your love-ahhh. He usually growls at this before
acquiescing.
But he would forget about the guy in rows fifteen through eighteen, thick gloves on to guard
against the bite of repeated invasions into the deep freeze, the ponytail peeking over his pink
polo—HOW CAN I HELP YOU TODAY in all caps on his shirt, no question mark, which
drives me crazy. I will find a Sharpie and take it to him someday, stenciling in appropriate
punctuation.
He’s mine, this freezer aisle guy. He is my space. He is predictable in a way that disarms me,
every conversation is something like this:
Scenario: I walk by. He stops whatever he’s doing, practically runs down the aisle to catch
me. Can I help you find something today, ma’am? The ma’am kills me by the way. I am
THIRTY-EIGHT, not a day older, so hold it, OK, with the ma’am? Or this:
Scenario: I get in his way with my cart as he’s pushing his huge pallet of frozen food around to
stock. Me: I’m sorry. Him: It’s OK, you get used to it. Every single time. It’s OK, you get used to
it. Fucking eh right, I guess you do.
Not a template but a new development: I’m in there hungover. I said to him, so I went to the wine
walk, and holy shit did I do the wine walk. He says, mac n’ cheese’ll take that right out, I
swear. No need, I hold up my big ass jug o’ wine, this’ll take care of it. But I still brought home
some mac n’cheese. Not the boxed shit but the prepared by the store stuff. I mean, standards,
after all. It did nothing for my hangover, although I later told him it did.
So now, before I go into the grocery store, I head to the little Italian restaurant next door. I sit at
the bar. I order a pinot grigio. A second one. I drink. I leave.
I walk into the store proper. I meander in the produce section because it’s a rule that you must at
least visit the produce section every time you go to the store. Ah, the curvature of the apples, the
splendor of the heirloom tomatoes, the pillowiness of the kale!
Moving on.
I don’t go by the coffee aisle since we are already in grand possession of coffee. And I’m
surprised, actually, by how fast my heart is beating, how shallow my breath has become. I
thought I had eradicated all such nervousness under the auspicious care of the pinot grigio
varietal, but alas, failure. I pass the yogurt. I pass the hummus and the cheese and random cold
things until I turn the corner and
He’s not there.
I stand in the middle of the aisle. I stop, because he is always there, always stocking and lifting
and toting. I wonder if he’s fucking Amber right that second because it makes sense. They work
together, and she has big tits and those fucking crooked teeth that men apparently like.
I pretend to have a hard choice to make about the contents of the cooler. Turns out I’m in front of
the perogies—should I like them? What do they pair with: red, white, a blush? I walk forward,
intent on the wine tasting I know is happening not five aisles over.
Behind me: Can I help you find something, ma’am?
I quietly exhale before turning around. And yet, seeing him, this random little elf with his
random little whiskers and slightly dull brown eyes and… what the hell is that, over on your
pallet?
Oh. He glances to the side. Just some book.
You…like Joan Wickersham?
Of course, this is my book, my collection of short stories that defines everything in me. How can
he even have heard of it? I’m standing on my tiptoes now, taller, taller.
I point a finger at him. You’re reading The News from Spain!
Yeah. Love her. He starts messing with the plastic encasing a box.
I step forward and pick up his book. The cover is cold, having laid atop an Eggo waffle package
for the last few minutes.
Huh. A stock boy who reads.
And I immediately regret it.
Sorry.
He shrugs. You get used to it.
It’s not him with the car, I think. Not him with the shocker sticker.
Anyway, I say, thumbing through the copy, I love Wickersham. It’s like a diary, some of the
pages.
Oh yeah? An eyebrow arches. Bet I can guess what entry is yours.
I stand there with my relatively skinny hips cocked out. (Did I mention I had three kids?)
Yeah, this, he says, and he flips through the pages deliberately, front to back, back to front,
before stopping towards the end.
“If I could only have rested there. I wanted so badly to be the woman to whom you could give an
inch knowing she would never try to take a mile. But even more than that, I wanted the mile.”
He stumbles on a few of the words, but I forgive him.
Wrong woman, I say. What mile do I need?
That shrug. Everyone needs a mile.
So we stand there, in the cold of the aisle, and someone, a woman, walks by and can’t quite
squeeze her cart through and saysexcuse me, I’m sorry, and he says no big deal, you get used to
it.
His voice has this edge of kindness; its lack of dismissiveness is unfamiliar.
We keep looking at each other, and there’s this gleam in his eye that I’ve always wanted to see
there, like he noticed me, but it went beyond that: he wanted me. To devour me.
And so I decided right then that I’d fuck him.
What time do you get off?
A couple of hours. Five o’clock.
I’m going to the wine tasting over there and then maybe later today… I let it drift off. He needed
to meet me halfway; I didn’t want to do all the dot-connecting for him.
He carefully placed the Joan Wickersham collection back down and ran a hand over his ponytail.
Waiting for his response, I shifted on my heels, left to right, right to left. Waiting. Come on,
already.
If you meet me in about twenty minutes, I think we could be alone.
Twenty minutes? Even better, although it would be a time crunch to get a drink and then freshen
up in the bathroom. But still, sold. I look at him, noticing how tall he is, imagining how his arms
must be overcome with muscles from so much manual labor. I bite my lip.
Where? I say.
Meet me by the big doors that go back into the freezer stockroom. I’m the only one on shift for
another hour or so since the other guy called in sick.
I hurry off to the wine section, have my tasters of not enough wine: a tempranillo, a sauvignon
blanc, a shiraz. There’s even a beer tasting going on so I stop by there, too—some terrible porter
beer that’s supposed to taste like chocolate and peanut butter. It doesn’t, completely false
advertising.
I buy a toothbrush and toothpaste and head to the most secluded bathroom in the store with only
five minutes to spare. After I rinse and spit, I look up and meet my own gaze in the mirror. But
only for a second. No one likes to see questions.
When I get over to the doors, he’s talking to a guy, another employee, and the guy gives him a
grin and they both look my way. My steps falter but I push on. As the other employee leaves, the
freezer aisle guy gestures to the big freezer doors.
Shall we?
Why say anything? I follow him.
Stating the obvious: it’s freezing. And immediately I think of the logistics—chattering teeth can
make for mistakes, there’s a shrinkage potential, chilled hands as a rule aren’t pleasant. But still,
I follow him further into the large warehouse in the back, frozen everything everywhere.
We stop in a secluded corner, behind a little outcropping of pallets piled high with boxes.
There’s a kiss he gives me. It’s tender. He cups my cheek in his hand, and it’s cold but lovely. I
don’t know if I’ve been this fulfilled since Saul and I took our first vacation alone after having
the children, a trip to a nude beach in St. Maarten. Decadent.
He leans away from me. Breath in plumes. Why are you so sad?
It’s like little flashes of memories, snippets of images. Birthday parties that take too much
planning, a college degree framed and collecting dust. The last time I had sex with Saul, staring
at the ceiling before I came.
Maybe I do want the miles, I say.
A look crosses over his face for a second, empty as a wine glass after last call, before he snaps
back. Let’s stop talking.
Chattering teeth, cold hands, all that, but he’s talented. I forget about everything, and he does
something with his hands. Three fingers spread out in two places. The sticker on the car. The
shocker.
I gasp. It is shocking, but excellent.
And as he moves into me, I notice the boxes on the pallets next to us. Chicken tenders on one,
shaped like dinosaurs. On the other, frozen vegetables. Broccoli. All the things in my freezer
right now, all the things that I feed my children.
I close my eyes.
It’s not over quickly, but it’s still over too fast. As we get redressed—my panties curled into a
dusty corner—I want another kiss but the freezer doors across the large space squeaks open, and
he points to a back door.
You can leave that way.
I don’t like scurrying out, but fine.
He opens the door for me. Thanks for that, he says.
Maybe I can see you soon?
Sure, he says.
I walk around the vast expanse outside of the store. It’s warm and breezy with the sky a lazy
shade of sunshine. I reach the front of the building, walk back inside, and buy coffee.
When I return home, Saul’s on the couch, watching TV. He might have muttered hello, but I
don’t think so. My kids definitely say hi. They yell and squeeze and the youngest clings to my
leg. I laugh.
I place the grounds in the filter, fill the well up with water. It percolates. I grab a mug and pour a
cup in. Black. I come into the living room and hand it to Saul. He looks up in surprise.
Thanks.
I walk back into the kitchen, humming. I didn’t know my voice could do that anymore. I think
about black holes, how maybe they can be punctured. How maybe something can be powerful
enough to break that gravity, to perforate the dark matter to let little slivers of light out.
I putter around the house, help my oldest with an art project, stare at the clock. The freezer aisle
guy—I still don’t know his name—said he would be off work at five. I put on my workout
clothes, tight and flattering and sexy, I hope. Saul actually says OK when I tell him I’m going to
the gym.
I pull back into the store parking lot. I park close to where I was earlier, down a few spaces
from the car. As I’m putting lip gloss on before getting out, I hear a beep outside my lowered car
window. The lights flash on the little black car touting the shocker sticker.
I sit up, stare. Someone was going to get in it. Mystery solved. Finally.
Two silhouettes at first. A guy, a girl. Tall and short. Familiar smudges in the coming twilight. I
squint as they move into the downpour of light from a streetlamp. It can’t be the freezer aisle
guy.
But it is.
I hear the tone of Amber’s voice first. Needling, bitching. I’ve done it to Saul myself. The
intimacy of being able to complain and poke in a way you wouldn’t do with total strangers.
She’s saying well, give me my Wickersham book back then if you don’t give a shit about reading
it.
He shrugs. You know I just borrowed it to get in your pants.
I assume there’s an eye roll, but I definitely hear her giggle. Stop it, she says. Stop.
Amber gets into the driver’s side, he the passenger. They reverse and drive away until the red
rear lights disappear. The shocker sticker fades from my view long before the taillights do.
I’m still holding the lip gloss. I carefully screw the cap back on and look in the rear view,
ignoring everything but my hair. A few strands have escaped from my hair elastic. After one
unsuccessful attempt, I tuck them back into place. At least I don’t own a car with the shocker
sticker on it, right?
Roll up the window, get out of the car, lock it.
I walk to the Italian restaurant, back to the bar. I order a pinot noir. When it’s in front of me, I
trace the rim of the wineglass with my finger. Rich and complex, spicy and sweet, yet still light. I
should’ve ordered a cabernet sauvignon—a heftier weight, a lingering wine. I nod thanks to the
bartender when he brings the next glass to me. I take a sip.
My face is reflected in the mirror behind the bar, the dimness of the room softening my edges
and lines. My daughter inherited the shape of my mouth. My sons, my eyes.
I see them, little streaks of light bouncing around in me, needing a way out.
And so I pay and leave.
Mark Connelly
DOING THE DRILL
I
Newman woke before his alarm. Eight years of prison had fixed his biological clock. He went
to the kitchen and made coffee. The coffee maker was old, and despite frequent cleanings the
French Roast tasted bitter. He poured a mug, took a burning sip, then headed upstairs to collect
his laundry. He tossed his worn bath and hand towels into the broken plastic basket full of soiled
shirts. After a moment’s hesitation, he tossed in his khakis. He headed to the basement laundry
room and began his wash. The soft pounding of the machine was welcome. It killed the
silence. He was the first one up, so the music had not begun. Nearly all the residents of the
halfway house turned on a radio, a recorder, or an iPod as soon as they woke to hear their
music. Rock. Country. Rap. Hip Hop. Show tunes. Salsa or Chopin. It formed the soundtrack of
their lives, gave them companionship, solace, maybe the illusion of purpose or direction.
Waiting for his wash, Newman went to the makeshift gym room across the hall. The exercise
bike was a lawsuit waiting to happen. But the treadmill had been recently serviced and oiled,
and Newman trudged away. After fifteen minutes, he did fifty pushups, a hundred sit-ups, then
pumped iron for ten minutes. He put his clothes into the dryer, then returned to the
treadmill. Doing pushups Newman remembered high school football. A wide receiver, he was
fast and powerful. Lean but heavily muscled, he could blitz past defenders and get into position,
but he never seemed to read the quarterback’s moves fast enough. He scored touchdowns but
too often missed easy catches that led to fumbles and the occasional interception. He spent the
summer after his junior year in France on an exchange program. A faculty advisor from Utah
who played on the Eagles practice squad before getting his doctorate drilled Newman during
study breaks. His European classmates paused their soccer games to watch the strange ball spiral
through the air as Newman dodged imaginary safeties to snatch it from the sky. Back in
Wisconsin, he scored four touchdowns in the state semi-finals his senior year. He wanted to go
out for football at Madison, but his father, who encouraged him in high school, was
dubious. Newman had no problem keeping a 3.8 at Tosa East, but college would be
tougher. Preparing for law school, his father argued, was rigorous. He suggested his son take a
double major in English and political science. There simply would not be enough time for
football. Once in college, Newman joined a campus health club, reading books on the
Stairmaster and listening to lecture tapes while pumping iron. In prison he lifted weights, played
football, coached basketball, and ran track to kill time. He fought the loneliness of holidays with
marathon workouts that kept him from thinking and left him exhausted.
After folding his laundry, Newman went upstairs. He showered, shaved, donned his khakis and
blue shirt, and put on his tweed sport coat. He had a final cup of coffee, then headed out. The
morning was cool but bright. Newman slipped on his sunglasses, a designer pair purchased on a
trip to San Francisco with Chrissy. He remembered the store in Ghirardelli Square and paying
$425 with a casual swipe of an AMEX card. After drinks at McCormick and Kuleto’s, they
walked to the Cannery where Chrissy bought earrings and T-shirts for nephews. They strolled
along Fisherman’s Wharf to Pier 39 with its shops, mimes, and jugglers. Yelping sea
lions. Alioto’s. Alcatraz.
At the bus stop Newman joined his fellow commuters. A hunched woman who wore a raincoat,
rain or shine, and always lugged a pair of bulging shopping bags from defunct department
stores. An obese custodian whose green uniform fit him like sausage skin. For whatever
reason he always bore two security badges, one clipped to his belt and another hanging from his
neck like press pass. Today the long-haired music student was missing. He and Newman and
sometimes chatted about Sondheim and Sinatra, Brahms and Bernstein. His absence was
troubling.
When the bus arrived, the driver, sour-faced as usual, released the door, which parted with a Star
Trek hiss. Newman took his customary window seat and watched the sunlight dazzle on
fluttering gold leaves. Another month, another meeting with his PO. Time on parole was
slipping quicker than time in prison. The bus bore him through the center city, a neighborhood
that had not changed since his childhood. He found this oddly comforting. Away from
Milwaukee eight years, so many things had changed. The new condo towers, office complexes,
and expanded museums that delighted city officials and community boosters only made Newman
feel more like a stranger, an immigrant in his hometown. The new buildings reminded him how
much time he had been away, how many years had been lost. The prison was sixty miles from
Milwaukee, an hour’s drive. It was not so much distance but time that separated him from his
hometown. Returning, he felt more like a time traveler than an exile. He had seen smart phones
and tablets only on television. They seemed like science fiction devices. And he could not get
over how conventional and ordinary they seemed to everyone around him. Sitting on the bus, he
watched bored teenagers checking email or taking selfies to send friends riding other
buses. Newman had gone away in the flip-up phone era. He found the new phones
fascinating. But asking to look at someone’s smart phone with curiosity would now seem as
outlandish as marveling over a mechanical pencil.
Lacking keys or change, Newman walked through the lobby metal detector without pause,
nodding to the thin, bored black security guard who waved him through. He took the elevator to
the second floor, pressing the security buzzer and gazing up at the camera until the door clicked
open. The small waiting area was empty. It often was. Parolees were famous for missing
appointments. There was a reason Alton Jackson treated him with a degree of deference and
respect. A former attorney who did the drill, Newman was no doubt a welcome change from the
endless disappointments of parolees who skipped appointments, made excuses, or called from
jail.
Jackson stuck his head out the door, “Ready, Newman?”
Al Jackson was forty-six, black, trim, but worn. He had hypertension. At times his lips looked
purplish, and Newman worried about him. He could not afford to lose anyone. Without friends,
Newman relied on familiar faces and voices to keep his loneliness at bay. A casual conversation
with the mail man or an interaction with a delivery driver brightened his day.
Jackson beckoned him to sit, then sank into his own chair. He looked at Newman’s file and went
over his card. “So, things OK? Any problems? Anything we need to talk about?”
“No. Just keeping busy.”
“You speak with your mother since we talked?”
“Once. I leave messages . . .”
“Remember what I said. That’s not uncommon. Just because they don’t respond doesn’t mean
they don’t want to hear from you. The important thing is keeping the lines of communication
open, staying in touch.”
Jackson tapped Newman’s file and changed tact, “I have a community service assignment for
you.”
“What is it?”
“Giving a talk.”
Newman nodded. He had done a half-dozen talks to ex-offenders about staying clean, signing up
for GED classes, keeping up with AA, and applying for jobs. It was an extension of the briefings
he gave in prison to the men about to leave on parole. The talks were easy enough and part of
the drill. Correctional officials assumed respected inmates made better mentors than prison
personnel, and it freed their staff for more pressing concerns. Parole officers believed exoffenders preferred listening to one of their own. The talks had little effect. Those in prison were
too eager to get out to listen, and those on the street too burned-out to care about going back.
“Wauwatosa East needs someone for Parent Student Night next Tuesday. They had somebody
cancel. Ten minute talk.”
“About what?” Newman was curious. A suburban high school was not likely to need a lecture
on parole violations.
“Drunk driving. Also, these days texting while driving.”
“Why me?” Newman asked softly.
“You went there, right?”
“What?”
“Tosa East. You went there, right?” Jackson tapped his file.
“Twenty years ago.”
“The media advisor said she saw your GED podcast. She likes the way you talk. Says you got
real appeal. Personally, I think she’s got the hots for you,” Al smiled. “Look, I got a standard
script from DMV. Just work off this. Like the get-your-GED-pep talk. Standard talking
points.”
Jackson handed Newman a stapled printout. “Bob, I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it weren’t
important. You’ve given speeches before. Just show up, make nice, and do the drill. You’ve
done it before.”
Newman glanced down at the first paragraph:
Last year 223 people were killed in drunk driving accidents in Wisconsin, which has the highest
rate of drunk driving in the nation. 36% of all fatal accidents in our state involve alcohol, and
26% of adults in our state admit to driving drunk . . .
Newman lowered the paper, his hand trembling. “Al,” he said quietly, “this . . . this is different.”
II.
Newman had not visited Wauwatosa in nine years. He was no longer connected to his
hometown and had to consult his map to determine which buses to take. He had repeated the talk
to himself for days, so the words became dull with repetition. On the treadmill, over coffee, on
the bus, over his salad, between classes he read and reread the speech. He was sure he could
pronounce “drunk driver” without hesitation, the phrase having as much poignancy as a weather
report. Just do the drill, he told himself. Just do the drill.
The bus glided down Wisconsin Avenue, heading west into the sunset. Rolling from the city to
the suburb he grew up in, Newman noticed that amid the rows of new condos and upscale strip
malls and the inevitable Starbucks, childhood landmarks remained. Hansen’s Steak House. The
Empress of Shanghai. The London Hat Shop, still needing a paint job. The large display
windows of Rossbach’s furniture store, a place Newman had never seen anyone enter or leave in
his life.
The bus pulled to a stop at 76th Street. Newman alighted, and, glancing at his watch, quickened
his step. The trip had taken longer than he anticipated, and he did not want to be late. Do the
drill, he repeated to himself. Just do the drill.
Security measures had tightened since he had graduated. The side doors were locked, so he had
to enter the main entrance and pass a security guard, who nodded, mistaking him no doubt for a
parent or teacher. Newman headed toward the auditorium and smiled when he was flagged
down by Ms. Jones. She was grayer and thicker than he remembered, but immediately
recognizable.
“Mr. Newman? Jane Jones.” She shook his hand with weary brusqueness.
“Yes. Do you remember me? I was class of . . .”
“So, you’re the attorney talking about driver’s ed? The DMV speech? Binge drinking, texting
while driving, whatever?” she asked dismissively.
“Yes.”
Her phone buzzed, and she glanced down, sighing. “Good, God,” she muttered, “This night will
never end. The talent show went long, and these people handing out awards think they are
giving the state of the union address. I hope you can keep your talk short. The kids have school
tomorrow, and I’m getting texts from the parents asking when they can leave. We can wait
backstage.”
He followed her to the auditorium. They slipped up a short flight of steps and
stood in an alcove behind a decorative curtain. The brick wall behind them was decorated with
faded pictures of guest speakers. Former governors. Milwaukee mayors. Baseball
legends. WWII heroes on bond tours. Talent show divas and Hollywood stars. Forgotten
feminists and dead senators. Commencement speakers and celebrities. Groucho Marx. Joe
McCarthy. Bart Starr. Ira Hayes. Scott Walker. Paul Newman.
Jane Jones glanced at her watch and sighed. Motioning to a director’s chair, she whispered,
“You might as well sit. This is going to take a while.” She shook her head, “I could sure use a
Scotch,” she muttered. She drummed her nails on the arm of her chair as they watched students
receiving civic awards from community groups. One by one, gawky teens bobbed awkwardly
across the stage, stoop-shouldered and self-conscious, for the obligatory handshake shot. An
athletic award drew a few brief laughs when a hulking black senior bounded across the stage and
held his plaque over his head like a WWE wrestler.
“OK, you’re next. Remember, try to keep it short.” Jane Jones stood, brushed her hair, and
straightened her skirt. She walked across the stage to the podium, her rimless glasses flashing.
“Our next speaker is Robert Newman, Class of ’92. He has an important topic for everyone here
. . .”
Newman took a deep breath. Do the drill. Just do the drill.
The welcoming applause was faint, barely polite. Newman took the podium and looked out at the
crowd. It had not changed in twenty years. Students sat down front with their friends. Their
parents, no doubt embarrassments to the images they so carefully cultivated to impress
classmates, were banished to the rear rows.
“Good evening. My name is Robert Newman. You know, we have a lot to be proud of in this
state. A team that is 5 and 1 . . .” There was no applause or even a measurable
reaction. Normally, any mention of the Packers in Wisconsin sparked an automatic flash of
patriotic applause. He glanced down at a pair of kids texting and half a dozen others nodding to
earphones and went right to the drill: “ . . . but one thing we can’t take pride in is ranking number
one in drunk driving. Last year 223 people were killed in drunk driving accidents in Wisconsin,
which has the highest rate of drunk driving in the nation. Thirty-six percent of all fatal accidents
in our state involve alcohol, and 26% of adults in our state admit to driving drunk . . .” Newman
studied the bored faces, the teens toying with smart phones, the adults making obvious shows of
looking at their watches. Heads drooped over tablets and paperbacks. He bit his lip, then slowly
folded his speech. The pause caused a few faces to gaze up.
“OK,” he sighed. “I know it’s been a long night. I can see you’re bored. I went to this school,
and I was dragged to Parent Student Night. I even got an award one year,” he confessed, shaking
his head. His derisive tone drew scattered chuckles. He pointed to the texting students in the
first row, “I sat with my friends up front right here, and we made our parents sit in the back. And
we had to listen to a lot of stupid speeches and watch a lot of geeks we did not know or didn’t
like get a lot of dumb awards we never heard of. We had homework to do and were missing our
favorite TV shows.” The mocking tone in his voice caused more faces to look up. Students
smiled and nodded. At last some grownup seemed clued in.
“Look,” he sighed, “you don’t want to be here. Well, I don’t either. But I got dragged here
tonight against my will. You see, I have to be here, too. It’s part of my community service
because I’m on parole for manslaughter,” he stated quietly. He paused a second, then added, “I
killed two people.”
Every face in the auditorium looked up. Elbowed by friends, a few removed earphones and
looked around, confused. Whispers and nods flashed through the crowd. Despite the lights, he
could distinguish the rows of parents leaning forward.
“You know,” Newman said wistfully, “ten years ago they might have invited me to be a
commencement speaker. I was a success then. A role model. I worked for a major law firm. I
had a lakefront condo, a Mercedes, a Porsche, a thirty-foot sailboat. I charged five hundred
dollars an hour for my time. I used to watch Packer games from a skybox in Lambeau with
Congressmen and CEO’s. I handled national and international cases. I knew governors. I met
senators. I coached lobbyists how to testify before Congress. I helped convince a Chinese
corporation to build a factory in Waukesha instead of Kentucky. I had a wall full of awards, a
Rolodex jammed with names and numbers of important people. My teachers, my parents, the
people who gave awards on Parent Student Night were all so proud of me.
“You know . . . when I went to this school and made the Honor Society, when I scored a
touchdown in Camp Randall during the state finals against Appleton,” he shook his head,
pressing his lips together, “. . . I never thought I would end up in prison. I never thought I would
ever go to prison when I went to Madison and certainly not in law school.”
He picked up the speech and tapped it in his hands. “They sent me here with a lot of statistics to
impress you, to get you to take driving seriously. But they are just numbers. And no one thinks
they are going to become a statistic. I certainly never did. We all think we are too smart. We all
think we can beat the odds. I sure did. I was not a big drinker. I was too busy. I lived on Diet
Coke and coffee.
“But one day I had a big win at work. I was the hero. I pulled off a major coup for my firm. My
boss gave me an eighty-thousand dollar bonus on the spot. Eighty grand! I was headed to junior
partner. Everyone was celebrating. We all had a few drinks. But I was on a high, on a roll, and
I wanted more. I had to celebrate. I wanted to fly to the moon! I went out with some friends for
a few more. Well, they left, and it was only seven-thirty. Too early to go home. So I went to a
nightclub and had some champagne and did a little coke. I walked out feeling like a million
bucks. I thought I had it all under control. I wasn’t stumbling. I wasn’t slurring my words. I
was just high. Just a little high. And I was going to be responsible and call it a night. I had Diet
Coke at the bar to clear my head. I went to the men’s room and threw cold water on my face. I
got into my car. I put on my seatbelt. I looked both ways . . . just they teach in driver’s ed. . .
pulled onto the street and hit the onramp for the freeway. . . Then I slammed into another car and
killed two twenty-year old college students. Two twenty-year old girls.” He stabbed the air with
two fingers, then lowered them to point them at a pair of blondes sitting in the fourth row, “just a
few years older than you two.” He looked toward the parents in the back of the room, “Some of
you have daughters that age.”
He paused, swallowed hard, then looked up. “There are some mistakes in life you can correct.
Goof off and fail a test, you can take a makeup. Flunk a course, you can go to summer school.
You want to really get your parents upset? Be a rebel. Drop out of school. You can always get
your GED. But you make a mistake behind the wheel – drinking, texting, daydreaming?” He
shook his head bitterly, “There’s no summer school for that. There’s no pause or rewind
button. There’re no mulligans. No delete key. You make a mistake driving, you live with it.
“There was no one to blame but myself. I plead guilty. I gave the girls’ parents all the money I
had. I lost my condo, my cars, my boats, turned over my stocks, bonds, bank accounts. But it
was never enough. Nothing I can do can ever make up for what I did. I hurt so many people that
night. Those girls, their parents, their boyfriends, their classmates. I hurt my colleagues, my
clients, my friends, my parents and teachers, and the people who helped and believed in me. I let
them all down and disgraced myself.
“It was so unfair. I was so unfair. All those people who loved me . . . and I hurt them. I went to
prison and lost my friends, my family. When my father was sick, dying in a hospital I couldn’t
be there for him. When my brother got married, I wasn’t at the wedding. He has two kids
now. He never told them they have an uncle. I have nephews who don’t even know I’m alive. I
cheated myself out of so much, and I cheated those girls out of the rest of their lives. And
nothing I can do will ever change that or make it right.
“So I went to prison for eight years. Christmas is very lonely in prison. I spent eight
Christmases there. Eight. I lost my self-respect. I lost my soul. I always thought I was special,
a good person. I thought I was strong. I thought I was powerful. But I let myself become drunk,
selfish, and stupid for maybe just two minutes. Two minutes. And that’s all it took for me to kill
two girls and trash my life.”
He pointed to a boy who had smirking earlier. “How much money you got in your pocket? I
have four dollars and a bus transfer. A hundred and thirty in the bank.” He shot a glance at a
girl who had been whispering to her friends. “I bet when you go on vacation you can’t fit half of
what you want to take into your bags. Everything I have in this world fits in two suitcases. A
hundred and thirty-four dollars and two suitcases, that’s what I have. That’s my net
worth. Without a halfway house, I’m homeless. I make ten dollars an hour teaching GED
classes. Ten dollars. Some of you kids probably do better.”
His mind was spinning like a kaleidoscope. Facts, memories, faces, quotations, lines highlighted
in books, comments heard and remembered, scenes from movies, Bible verses,
paragraphs, jokes, statistics, and poems whirled in his head like leaves in a storm. He was
struggling to make sense, fumbling, like a man juggling on a tightrope. He kept hoping he was
not slipping into profanity or nonsensically repeating himself. He was shaking and gripped the
podium to steady himself.
“In prison you have a lot of time to think. You sit in a concrete box with your thoughts. No
phone. No email. No texts. At night in the dark you stare at the shadows on the ceiling.” He
shook his head, tearing up. “And things come to you. Lessons you were taught but never
learned.
“I read a lot of books in prison. I remembered the books I read in school and read them
again. And again. Until they made sense. I kept remembering Ms. Jones’ junior English
class. She told us the story of Icarus. Our textbook had the poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ by
Auden.” Newman noticed students nodding in recognition. “You remember the painting by
Brueghel? It’s probably still on her wall.” A few students broke nervous, knowing smiles. “It’s
almost like Where’s Waldo? Where’s Icarus? You see the ship, the ploughman, some guy
herding sheep. Mountains in the background, then . . . then if you look closely enough,” he said
in an almost whisper “you see those tiny frail legs down in the corner . . .” The poem came back
to Newman as if he had written it himself and he found himself effortlessly delivering it from
memory:
. . . everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Slowly sweeping his hand across the room as if casting a spell, Newman saw several girls in the
front row tearing up.
“You know,” he said softly, “when your parents give you the car keys, they are handing you the
wings of Icarus. They can take you very far, very fast. When you take those keys, think of
Icarus. Icarus did not die because he disobeyed his father, but because he ignored the laws of
physics. The sun melted his wings. He destroyed himself. Hubris, remember that
word? Today, we’d call it ego. Impulse. Thinking you know it all. Thinking the rules don’t
apply to you. So, it’s not about obeying your parents or doing what the cops want. It’s about you
and your future and your dreams. It’s about self-preservation. Be careful, don’t let a drink or a
distraction destroy your future. Don’t be Icarus . . . and don’t let yourself become an unimportant
failure like me . . .”
He could not go on. His head was reeling. His mouth was dry, but his face was wet with
tears. Newman muttered a few words, bowed awkwardly, stumbled from the podium and
walked briskly toward the door.
He choked up, his eyes burning. He stumbled down the steps, lurching past Jane Jones who
called out something to him, and pushed open the door. Staggering down the corridor, his legs
were shaking. He was in a cold sweat for the first time since the accident. Shivering, he felt the
goose bumps on his arms while beads of perspiration rolled down his forehead. His stomach
clenched, and his mouth salivated suddenly. He found the men’s room and shoved through the
door, racing into a stall. Standing over the toilet, he felt his stomach rise and clench. He gasped,
he coughed, he panted. His throat burned and a strange metallic taste formed in his mouth. He
bent over, but nothing came up. His stomach cramped and spasmed painfully. He felt hot and
dizzy like a man with sunstroke. He left the stall, his shirt damp with perspiration. At the sink
he washed his face with cold water as another spasm tore through him. He looked into the
mirror, studying his panicked eyes, wondering if he were having a heart attack. He had seen a
custodian stricken in prison. Bent over his throbbing machine, he was polishing the gym floor,
when he contorted and collapsed, his face turning white then blue. Incarcerated physicians
rendered first aid as the guard shouted for a crash cart, “Man Down! Man Down!” He
remembered the janitor’s purple tongue protruding between swollen lips. A convicted internist
was doing chest compressions when the heavyset nurse arrived with oxygen and hypos. Too
late.
The spasms subsided. Newman washed his face again. There was no place to sit, so he leaned
against the wall and began to sob. He wanted to get back to his room, to his bed. Why did
Jackson ask him to do this? Why? Hadn’t he been punished enough? Was it necessary to
humiliate him, to ask him to humiliate himself, expose himself, degrade himself like some
carnival freak? Was that the point? Why not strip, crucify him, and post him on a median strip
in warning?
Newman left the men’s room and walked to the exit. The chill air against his damp shirt made
him shiver, and he felt swamped by a fresh wave of nausea. He tried the door, but it had locked
behind him. He walked half a block, his mouth salivating. A burning acid welled at the back of
his throat. He went into an alley and leaned against a dumpster. He tried to vomit, but nothing
came up, except the strange metallic taste. Stroke symptoms?
A minute passed, then another. Newman limped from the alley. He felt drained, exhausted,
ill. Mercifully, the bus shelter contained a bench. He sat, rocking back and forth. His stomach
felt like he had done a thousand sit-ups. It felt so tight, he wondered if he could even stand
upright.
Newman shivered and waited, his mind spinning with thoughts. His rage at Jackson faded. He
only wanted to go home. Home. What did that word mean to him? A pillow on an assigned bed
in an assigned room. A cab rolled past. It might as well been a private jet. He had four
dollars. The ride home would cost over twenty.
The bus finally arrived. Newman sat near the door. The bus slipped south, rolling through the
Village, a cluster of brick and stone specialty shops and European bistros. Stores he had shopped
with his mom to buy bread and cheese for family parties were dark but still there. Le Reve
Patisserie and Café Hollander where he dined with Chrissy or lunched with suburban
clients. The buildings slid by like abandoned film sets, the faces in the lit windows like so many
extras from his past.
At the halfway-house, he signed himself in and mounted the worn stairs, empty and
troubled. Lying on his cot, he remembered his first night in prison. He tried to envision
something lighter to help him drift to sleep – a sailboat skimming the lake, a multi-colored hot
air balloon sailing away, away, over trees of gold and green . . . but closing his eyes he could
only remember the cold concrete cell and sweeping searchlights.
James Hanna
HUNTER’S MOON
Handcuffed and chained, a constable on either side of me, I shuffle out of the courthouse. The
way the handcuffs are biting my wrists, you’d think I was Public Enemy Number One. Hell, I’ve
only broken into Bentleys and Rolls-Royces—cars whose owners are ripping off the working
stiff. I’ve only robbed porno shops—places where drug money gets washed. I’ve only iced the
scum of the earth. None of this is crime when you think about it. Karma is what it comes down
to. That’s something the courts ain’t too good at dispensing—so maybe I’m helping them out.
At the bottom of the courthouse steps, the meat wagon is waiting to take me back to the looney
house. A mob of real riff-raff—prostitutes, pimps, junkies—are milling about on the
sidewalk. Their eyes follow me as I walk down the steps, eyes glassier than marbles. They look
like human flotsam—like they oughta be lying in graves.
Slowly, painfully, gasping for breath, I ease myself into the back of the meat wagon. My joints
are howling. My breathing is ragged. My sick heart is pounding like a bill collector at the
door. Once the security locks are set and the van is rolling along, I stare through the rear
window of the van. I watch the city roll by me.
The van is passing through Kings Cross, the red light district of town. My favorite hotspots are
all still there: The Whiskey A-Go-Go, The Pink Panther, and Les Girls, where I’ve rolled my fair
share of faggots. I never hurt ’em too bad though—just enough to teach ’em a lesson. And, after
rummaging through their wallets, I always left ’em money for a cab.
This afternoon, the Cross is like a morgue. The strip joints and nightclubs haven’t opened up yet
and there ain’t no pussy in sight. Not unless you wanna count a mob of transsexuals on the
corner of Darlinghurst and Roselyn. Noisy fuckers who need a good bashing for mocking the
fairer sex. I’m pledged to defend the weaker sex because nothing’s more sacred than pussy—
realpussy. Since they locked me up a year ago—a paranoid schiz they called me—I ain’t had a
bit of cooz.
The looney bin comes into sight. Beyond the barred fence, patients are playing cricket on the
lawn. Fuckers so full of downers they look like goddamn zombies.
As the van pulls up to the gate, my pants are feeling looser. Kinda like a tent that’s folded
down. By the time the checkpoint guard unlocks the gate, my Willie’s smaller than a grub.
*
Hours later, I’m sitting in my room. A room that I don’t share with no one. It’s a six-by-ten foot
chamber with an iron-back bed and a chest of drawers. My fucking reward for being a model
resident for the past twelve months. But it’s better than being in one of the dorms with a bunch
of crazies.
The window to the room is heavily screened, but I can see out it just fine. I can see the flower
beds, the acres of scabby lawn, and the eight-foot barred fence with spikes on top. I can also see
a whole bunch of mole hills. The place looks like a badly kept cemetery.
My caseworker, an old Irish bloke with a bulbous red nose, has just let me out of his office after
another of his lectures. His name is Patrick O’Casey, but I call the fucker Abraham. That’s
’cause he’s gotta be older than dirt. My ears are still ringing from his gibberish.
Ryan, me boy, he keeps sayin’ to me. To let go the past you must first admit it happened. Or
those ghosts will never go away. And so you must raise the dead, dear boy—remember what you
seem to have forgotten. Admit that you were born in a crack house, that you were raised in a
nunnery, that you were probably beaten by the nuns. Admit that you suffer from grandiose
daydreams—that you have seen too many adventure movies. Admit you’ve been acting like scum
all your life—a drug addict, a jailbird, and a petty thief. Admit these things, lad, in order to let
them go. How many times must I tell you this?
Gestalt therapy, that’s what old Abraham calls that crap. Makes him sound like a goddamn
Nazi. That dude wouldn’t last a day on the streets. A man can’t be thinking too much on the
streets or the streets will grind him into hamburger. But there’s no way a therapist fucker—a
dude who hides in an office all day—can know shit like that.
I wanted to tell him the dead should stay buried—that’s why they were put in the ground. Hell,
the only thing worth raisin’ is a stiffy. But I smiled like a fat cat and kept my mouth shut. Gotta
play by Abraham’s rules if I want to get out of this mausoleum.
I rise from the bed, walk over to the window, and look out over the grounds. It’s dusk and the
moon is rising—the biggest damn moon I’ve ever seen. It’s larger than a medicine ball and as
orange as a jail-issued jump suit. It seems to fill the whole fucking sky.
A Harvest Moon—that’s what the Indians call it. I saw a moon like it in a movie once—an
American flick about settlers and redskins. It’s also called a Hunter’s Moon. That’s ’cause
when the corn is high the Indians go out hunting. Gotta bag themselves game for the winter.
My spine starts to crawl as I look at the moon. It’s as smooth as a tit and brighter than a
headlight. I ain’t never seen it this close to the earth.
*
At ten o’clock the next morning, I’m back in Abraham’s office. And the wanker is picking the
wax from his ear. He acts like he’s only pinching the lobe, but he’s sneaking his pinkie right into
the hole. The sight is disgusting, but who gives a shit?
“Me boy, me boy,” the dude keeps repeating. “The judge wants you to make a wee
statement. He wants you to admit the error of your ways before he releases you on
probation. He wants to know your plan for the future.”
I shake my head and try not to scowl. How many hoops do I gotta jump through? How many
lies do I have to tell? Admit to the error of my ways—he says. How is it an error to ice a snitch
or bash a poofter? Gotta give folks what they’re asking for, don’t I? Anything else would be
dishonest.
I look at the floor and pretend to be thinking. “I’m one baaaad dude,” I say finally. “And that
you can take to the bank.”
Old Abraham arches his eyebrows. “It’s your plan the judge wants to bank on.”
I think a bit more and my whanger expands. ’Cause that horny court reporter is all the plan I
need. If I plan on more than screwing that bitch, I’m gonna be shit out of luck. Man plans, God
laughs—ain’t that what the wise men say? No point in having God laugh at me, is there? That
would piss me off good.
I stare back at Abraham and grin like a ghoul. “It’s the straight and narrow from here on out,
pops. That’s gonna be my future.”
“Mr. O’Shaughnessy,” old Abraham says—his voice is getting sharp. “I’m aware that you suffer
from Alzheimer’s. I’m aware that your brain is like Swiss cheese. But what do you remember
from your past? What significant things?”
I pretend to be thinking again, but my memory ain’t worth a fuck. Head bashing, meth, and
pussy fill the horizon of my mind. And it’s probably for the best. But today something different
pops into my head—something damn near sacred.
“Meat pies, pops,” I say. “I remember when meat pies cost just a nickel. And a quarter would
get you a pitcher of beer.” I smack my lips because I’m starting to drool. “There’s nothing
holier than a meat pie and a beer.”
Abraham sighs like a tire losing air. Like maybe he doesn’t think beer is profound. His gnarly
hands shake as he opens my file. The file is practically six inches thick.
“Mr. O’Shaughnessy,” Abraham wheezes. “I’ve decided to read you something. This was
prepared by our psychiatrist a month after you were committed here.”
Abraham peels a report from the file. He clutches it carefully, as though it might burn
him. Slowly, he begins to read.
“After much testing and interviewing, I believe Mr. O’Shaughnessy to be the purest type of
sociopath. He exhibits cunning instead of intellect, libido instead of love, and narcissism instead
of introspection. His forty years of petty crime is not a life he regrets. To the contrary, he
sentimentalizes his deeds with bizarre exaggerations and a macho image. If Mr. O’Shaughnessy
regrets anything, it is that he has not accomplished greater crimes. Of further concern are Mr.
O’Shaughnessy’s hallucinations, a byproduct of long term drug abuse and the stress of
homelessness. As he ages, and the strain of maintaining his street persona increases, his
hallucinations are likely to intensify.
“All in all, Mr. O’Shaughnessy is utterly lacking in remorse, perspective, or even memory. As
such, his capacity for self-renewal is abysmal while his potential for recidivism is high to the
point of inevitability. In summation, he is a sixty-year-old mugger who thrives on his ego the
same way a camel might live on its hump.”
I fold my arms and shrug. Ain’t sure what that claptrap means, but I do know a frame job when I
hear one. But that’s what shrinks are for—to cut a man down to size. Make him fit where he
ain’t supposed to fit. That’s why they call ’em shrinks.
I crack my knuckles and grin. “Money used to be worth something, pops. Meat pies once cost a
nickel. A quarter would buy you a pitcher of beer. Can’t beat numbers like that, can you pops?”
Ol’ Abraham frowns and wags his head. “There’s another kind of inventory, me lad. The kind a
man takes when his number is up.”
I cover my mouth so he don’t see me chuckle. Deathbed confessions don’t bother me
none. Heard too damn many of them back when I was collecting for the loan sharks. Back when
I was giving deadbeats a little dose of karma. But I always let the fuckers talk before smashing
their noses or cracking their skulls. Can’t risk killing a man until he’s had a chance to bare his
soul. Plead his case to Jesus and all. Wouldn’t be right.
Old Abraham frowns then wags his pinkie—the same hoary pinkie he stuck in his ear. “May I
tell you a story, me lad?”
“I’ve heard enough stories, pops—they bore me.”
“I’ll try not to bore you,” Abraham says coolly. “We lost a patient a few years ago—a street
goon just like you. Congestive heart failure, he had. I thought his heart was made of stone, but
the bloke started blubbering like a baby one day. He said he could see a dark angel in his
dorm. He said he wanted to light a candle to the Virgin.”
Old Abraham swallows and draws a slow breath. “Well, I said all the right things to him, lad. I
told him he still had time. I told him the Virgin would answer his prayer. But I was lying like a
sinner. The reaper took him an hour later.”
Old Abraham smiles like a possum with gas. “Mister O’Shaughnessy, you too are running out of
time.”
I hang my head and try to look humble. But a chuckle escapes my throat. “A meat pie and a
pitcher, pops. That’s as close to heaven as a man needs to get.”
*
As I sit in Abraham’s office, my chest starts to thumpety-thump. And my life, for some
godforsaken reason, flashes before my eyes. And what an ass-kicking life it was: dodging cops,
stalking snitches, and bashing up fuckers in street brawls. A life only brave hearts can handle—
men with iron knuckles, lightning reflexes, and the instincts of a wolf. Men who hunt jungle cats
under the moon. Men who bust cherries with only one thrust. Real fucking men—not slackers
like Abraham. Yet fuckers like Abraham are the law.
I scratch my head like I’m thinking real hard. Gotta stroke that old fucker if I wanna get out of
here. “Pops,” I confess, “I’m a hellbound dude. You’ve read me like a book.”
Old Abraham shakes his head. “In your case, sir, it’s like reading a pamphlet.”
“Waddaya gonna tell the judge?”
Abraham frowns and starts tapping on his desk. “Mr. O’Shaughnessy,” he says, “you still have
time. A wee bit of time if you don’t strain your heart. Either you straighten out your life, sir, or
you will die. Whichever way it goes, there will be one less thug on the streets.”
“You’re supposed to be curing me, pops,” I tease. “Makin’ me a better man.”
Old Abraham flushes and bows his grizzled head. He looks like a drunk that’s drooling in his
grog. “Mr. O’Shaughnessy,” he mutters. “I will tell you what you already know. Here, we cure
no one. We warehouse our clients and keep them doped up. We confiscate their street drugs and
dirty magazines, which somehow they keep smuggling in. But we cure nobody. I do admit, lad,
that we’re making them even worse.”
Old Abraham pauses then heaves a deep sigh. Like he’s blowing the foam off a beer. “So I’m
telling the judge that it’s time to let you go.”
*
The Hunter’s Moon is rising as I stroll around the grounds—a privilege I got by kowtowing and
ass-kissing. So every evening at sunset, they let me roam the grounds for half-an-hour. Nature
therapy is what the nurses call it. Like I’m supposed to get a hard-on by sniffing flowers,
hugging trees, and tripping over mole mounds. Fuck that crap. But it’s good to get away from
the crazies for a while because a full moon stirs them up. And I’m gonna need peace and quiet if
I’m gonna see the error of my ways—understand my despicable life of crime. But the
only real crime is how much things cost now. That’s gotta be inflation, but fuck it.
My blood starts to pound as I look at the moon. I can make out the mountains, the craters, the
seas. And it’s shinier than a stripper’s ass.
I shoulda been marooned on a desert island—like that Robinson Crusoe fucker. The islanders
would have taken one look at my schlong and made me a fertility god. They would have built
me a temple and brought me their virgins for deflowering. Boom ba ba, boom ba ba, boom ba
ba—that’s how the drums would sound.
The moon is now bright enough to read by. Not that I read much. Reading is for geeks and
Nancy boys. And fuckers who don’t mind getting themselves confused. But the moon also
stretches my shadow. I can make out my hulking shoulders, my bulging biceps, the panther-like
grace of my stride. What a magnificent savage I am.
“Hunh unh,” someone laughs—a familiar voice. A voice I ain’t heard in months. I turn my head
and see her, an elfin teenage girl with dirty bare feet. She sits on a bench with a handkerchief in
her hands and she’s polishing a cucumber. I’ve known the bitch for forty years and she never
ages a day. All she does is giggle, talk bullshit, and piss me off. Still, she is the most harmless
of my spooks so I don’t get too aggravated. Not until she hops off the bench, titters like a
sparrow, and throws the cucumber at me.
I duck.
“Missed you,” she laughs.
I curl my lip and wave her away. “Get out of here, Dolly—beat it. They’ll lock me back up if
they see us talking.”
The bitch shakes her head and starts clapping her hands. “What do you want me to beat?” she
pipes.
Grinning mischievously, she skips right up to me. I stroke her long blonde hair. “Hit the road,
Dolly,” I snap. “I ain’t going to tell you again.”
Brushing my hand away, she laughs—a sound like a babbling brook. “Missed you,” she
giggles. “Missed you. Missed you.” Her voice melts away as she runs towards the gate.
I shake my head as I watch her go. She’s gotta be dumber than a box of rocks. But at least she
hauled ass. Can’t be having her kind around if I want to get out of this place. Still, the bitch
ain’t as bad as the rest of those fuckers: wizened clowns, hump-backed dwarves, and an eightfoot-tall nun who’s the creepiest of the lot. Not that I can’t stare down a spook or two, but I’d
just as soon save myself the trouble.
After scanning the grounds with my eagle eyes, I resume my little stroll. The shadows are
shrinking, the trees stand alone. The moon continues to climb.
*
“Tomorrow,” says Abraham. He’s looking at me from across his cluttered desk. Tomorrow I
go back to court.
“Mr. O’Shaughnessy,” old Abraham mumbles—the dude smells of whisky and lint. “Once the
judge sets you free, you will have to make a choice. As God is my witness, you will have to
make a choice. What goes around comes around—remember that, lad. Our blessed Lord always
evens the score.”
I squirm in my chair and try to look cool. But my nerves are as wired as a hot toaster. I need a
hit of meth. I’m putting in hard time now—that’s for sure. “Gonna score me a choice piece of
ass,” I say.
Old Abraham wiggles his eyebrows like he’s trying to shake ’em loose. The dude needs a weed
whacker to keep those fuckers trimmed. “Mr. O’Shaughnessy,” he says, “you’re a man in his
twilight years. The walls of your heart are paper-thin. So be very aware of the choice you now
face. It is not a choice to break the law. It is not a choice between jail or the streets. It’s a
choice between life or death.”
I bow my head like I’m thinking about Jesus. “I’ll listen to my heart, pops.”
“Listen to your maker,” snaps Abraham. “Make peace with the Holy Ghost.” Old Abraham
wheezes and shakes his head. “Is there anything more you would like to say, sir?”
I clench my fists and try not to scowl. I heard enough Bible thumpers when I was back in
jail. Sallow faced nuns trying to humble real men. Goddamn soul suckers—that’s what they
are. Those bitches have given me the willies ever since I was a boy.
“That ain’t how it happened,” I finally say.
“What are you saying, lad.”
“That fucker you told me about yesterday. The deathbed confessor. The angels took him
straight to heaven. He wiped out a lifetime of sin in a second. That’s a damn good deal if you
ask me.” I grin like a ghoul. It’s too easy to mess with fuckers like Abraham—civil service
burnouts sucking the taxpayer’s tit. You just gotta know what button to press.
“You think that it’s really that simple, lad?”
I shrug and try to look humble. “Ain’t you a Christian, pops?”
Abraham flushes and my grin gets broader. But I gotta be careful with that old Irish
pervert. Can’t be slippin’ no confession to him. Because I’m planning to go to Valhalla like
Kirk Douglas did in The Vikings. In Valhalla you get to drink mead all day. And get into sword
fights. And meet Odin, the war god. The only way to get there is big time sin—killing off
villagers, looting their churches, and raping their wives in the bargain. I shoulda been born a
Viking. Ragnar O’Shaughnessy—that’s what they’d have called me. I’d have filled up a
longship with pussy and gold.
“Mr. O’ Shaughnessy,” old Abraham says—the dude has had enough. “I believe our
conversation is over.”
*
The looney bin is silent as I return to my room. The dorm lights are off and the door to the day
room is closed. There’s no one around but a fat old night watchman who’s sleeping in a chair in
the hallway. The watchman ain’t even made his rounds yet. He ain’t even locked down the
building. Goddamn civil servants.
After closing the door, I take a look out the window. I see only the shadows of drooping
trees. The moon fills the whole damn sky. It looks ready to fall on the earth.
Usually, I sleep like a cat on hot coals, but tonight I ain’t sleeping at all. It’s too damn bright to
think about sleeping so I may as well play some music. Hell, I’ve already mastered the battered
ukulele I stole from the day room closet. I’m gonna take it with me when I’m discharged—so I
can make a wad of money playing for change in the coffee houses. Gonna shoot a wad too when
the pussy comes crowding around me. There ain’t a bitch alive who won’t spread her legs for a
musician.
I snatch the ukulele from under my bed then peek through the door of my room. The hallway is
quiet except for the ragged snorts of the night watchman. I’m supposed to check with that dude
whenever I leave my room, but fuck it. I don’t need no fat slug’s permission to bring joy into the
world. Clutching the ukulele like a club, I walk on down to the day room. The acoustics there
are to die for.
I slip into the day room like a ghost. It’s empty, but the lights are on. A tiny stage sits at the far
end of the room where lecturers come to bullshit. A damn good place to practice up for the
coffee houses. I hop onto the stage, clear my throat, and start plucking the ukulele. I fill up the
room with my rich tenor voice.
And if I kiss you in the garden
With a hard-on, would you pardon me?
And tip-toe through the tulips with meee.
I keep my eyes on my hand as I strum, like I’m shaking loose a booger. And so I barely see
them come drifting into the room—a procession of people as silent as smoke. Not until I finish
my song—not until I pause to catch my breath—do I look into their faces. And what a motley
gang they are—prostitutes, pimps, meth heads. It’s the same bunch of losers that watched me
last week as I walked down the courthouse steps. And now they’re all standing around the stage.
I think of the cast from The Living Dead, a movie I saw before they locked me up. Because it’s
clear from the dead fish glaze in their eyes that they ain’t come to hear my music. The only
thing I know for sure is they’ve come to take me home.
My skin crawls like it’s covered with fire ants. My heart starts kicking like a trapped
animal. But my jaw clenches up with a warrior’s resolve. Fuck all this! It’s bad enough that I
gotta live in a mausoleum. It’s bad enough I gotta put up with Abraham—a drunken sot hiding
behind the law. Now I’m being badgered by dead-eyed freaks who ain’t come to hear me
sing. Stiffs who won’t even toss me a nickel. Well, I may be a hellbound dude, but this ain’t the
company I’m gonna keep.
My stomach kicks like a mule. My nostrils boom like wind tunnels. FUCK ALL THIS! It’s
time—high time—I broke out of this place. And if those stiffs wanna stand in my way, I’ll beat
’em to death with my tallywhacker.
I leap off the stage and snarl. “HAUL ASS!” I yell and those dead heads back off.
The freaks let me pass. I bolt towards the door. Their expressions are flat—their heads bowed
like monks. Guess they know areal man when they see one. Only the night watchman, a wannabe cop, is standing between me and the doorway.
“I say,” the man stammers. “I say, I say.”
I don’t let him say nothing. The ukulele is hot in my hands as I slam it into his midriff. “Ooof,”
says the fucker. He falls on his ass, clutching the ukulele like it’s a pot of gold. I jerk it away
from him, quick as a cat, and bring it back down on his head. It smashes into a dozen pieces.
“Umph,” the dude says, and then he don’t say nothing more.
I move efficiently—scientifically. After checking the dude to make sure he ain’t dead, I
rummage through his pockets. Since the ukulele’s busted now, the fucker owes me some money.
When I find the dude’s wallet, I open it up. It has a condom and a wad of twenty-dollar bills. I
leave the condom in the wallet and I pocket just one of the bills. That’s all I need—I like
traveling light. Meat pies once cost a nickel—no more. And a quarter was good for beer.
*
I stumble through the front door of the looney bin. My chest is thundering like a jackhammer.
The meat wagon is parked beside the guard shack—like it’s waiting there for me to grab. And
that ain’t gonna be no problem cause I’ve hotwired thousands of cars.
A police siren wails like a cat in heat. A guard jumps out of the shack—a sunken-chested fucker
who’s screaming like a woman and waving a can of pepper spray. “Don’t hurt me,” he
shrieks. “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.”
Ignoring the asshole, I dash to the meat wagon. Screw the guard—he ain’t worth a real man’s
time. Ragnar O’Shaughnnessy don’t fight chickenshits.
I pick up a stone from the driveway and aim it at the driver’s side window. With a mighty hurl, I
let it fly. The explosion is louder than a bomb going off. Bulls-eye.
Glass litters the seat like a carpet of jewels as I stick my head under the dash. It takes me just
seconds to remove the access cover, locate the starter wires, and strip them with my teeth. A
split second later the van gives a roar—a roar like the fires of hell. I clutch the steering wheel,
hit the pedal. The van gathers speed as it hurtles towards the gate. The tires are squealing like
banshees.
The gate is in my headlights now—a tall row of bars clamped up tighter than a hymen. I hear the
guard holler, “Code Red! Code Red! Code Red!” He’s pressing a hand radio to his mouth like
maybe it’s his mama’s tit.
I hit the gate like a battering ram. My head bangs the windshield. Lights blanket my eyes. As
the flashes dissolve, I let out a whoop. The gate has been knocked clear off its hinges.
The steering wheel’s slippery with blood, but I manage to hold it tight. Again I hit the pedal.
The van gives a snarl then fishtails into the street.
I grit my teeth as the van careens sideways. The tires are shrieking and the air stinks of
rubber. The chassis is bucking like a bitch.
*
The steering wheel stops yanking at my hands. The tires start humming like tops. And I’m
tearing down Oxford Street—flat as a tack. I gonna hide out in Kings Cross where I can vanish
into the crowds.
The wail of the siren is louder—the cops will soon be on my tail. But cops are already in front
of me now. At the intersection of Oxford and Darlinghurst, a police car blocks the road. And
three goddamn cops are standing beside it. I see them kinda pulsate in the cherry-red sweep of
the flasher. They look like they ain’t of this world.
“PULL OVER.” The voice is full of iron—like maybe it came out of heaven. “PULL OVER,” it
repeats. “PULL OVER. PULL OVER!”
Let the fucker yell—I ain’t about to pull nothing. ’Cept maybe my Willie if I don’t get some ass
tonight. Gunning the engine, burning the tires, I slam the van into the side of the police car.
Lights are popping like fireworks as I leap out of the van. The cop car is crushed—the air reeks
of gas. But there ain’t a scratch on me—how about that? And a tire iron has appeared like
magic in my hand. I lift the tire iron over my head and bellow like a bull. The cops are closing
in on me and I gotta mow ’em down.
I drop the first cop with a blow to the neck. I brain the second one so hard his helmet goes flying
off. The third cop I stagger with a kick to the knee. As the cop hits the pavement, all the time
tugging at his holster, I smash the iron across his wrist. The bones crack like walnuts and that
the dude howls in pain. A handgun goes spinning into the street.
I let the gun lie. The cops are all down so there ain’t no point in shooting them. But I gotta get
out of here and quick. Before I have to hurt a whole lot more.
Shrewish cackles are hammering my ears—they sound like a murder of crows. I clutch the tire
iron—puff out my chest. My eyes dart left—right.
When I locate the sound, I drop the tire iron. It’s just a flock of whores on the other side of
Oxford Street. The bitches are watching me—checking me out. And they all got lust in their
eyes.
*
Ducking into alleys, crouching behind cars, I stumble in the direction of Kings Cross. I hear the
sirens long before the squad cars go zooming past me. The cops will never nab me with their
stupid sirens on.
WooooooOOOOOOEEEE. Another damn siren is approaching. I chuckle as I jump into a
shadow-filled alley. Ducking behind a trash bin, I wait for the squad car to whiz by. Big
mistake. Someone has spotted me. Someone who’s taller than an ostrich. Someone who’s got
my number. As the creature stalks towards me, my heart leaps like lightning. It’s that goddamn
soul-sucking nun. And the bitch is squealing like a slut in heat.
WOOOOOOOEEEEEEE!! Her eyes are beady, like eyes of a mole—her face sports colorless
beard. And she’s coming at me like a cat about to spring. Looks like I’ll have to beat her up,
too. Slap her silly with my two-foot whanger. Don’t matter a damn that she looks like shit—that
her eyes are watery, her habit soaked with sweat. Don’t matter that she’s hemorrhaging from the
waist down, kinda like a stuck pig. If the bitch don’t haul ass and quick, I’m gonna lay her out. I
ain’t takin’ no pity on her—that’s for sure.
WHOOOOOEEEEEEEE!!!! Her shrieks are like icepicks stabbing my brain. Her skin has
morphed into the color of tallow. “ARRRGH!!” I shout back—I can barely hear my voice. My
heart is booming. The shadows are hovering. The alley grows darker than a cunt.
*
The nun is gone when I wake up. There’s nobody around but that little elf girl. She’s sitting on
the trash bin, wiggling her toes. She’s wearing a pair of gold earrings.
Slowly, painfully, I stagger to my feet. My throat is raw, but I manage to speak. “Beat it,
Dolly. I’m wanted for mayhem.”
She chuckles like a brook. “Missed you,” she laughs. Pocketing the earrings, she leaps from the
trash bin. Seconds later, her arms are hugging my waist. “Missed you,” she pipes. “Missed
you. Missed you.” Her teeth are shinier than pearls.
I slap her on the ass, dig into my pocket, and hand her the twenty dollar bill. “Hit the road,
Dolly,” I say. “Buy yourself some fries.”
She tears up the money and throws it in my face. “Fries need ketchup,” she laughs.
I shake my head as she skips from the alley. She’s gotta be dumber than broccoli. But at least
she ain’t bugging me no more.
I peak from the alley. My nerves are ablaze. My heart is pounding like a war drum.
Once again, I hear the sirens. Once again, I’m on the run. Once again, I’m a target for phantoms
and cops.
Thank god for the Hunter’s Moon.
Gregory Koop
TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION
Nuna runs from the clearing to the cabin. “It’s Billy and Cardinal! Sister Anne sent Billy and
Cardinal.” Her rapping rattles the window of Father LaPierre’s home.
The rabbit howl of Kimi’s baby fills the cabin. Kimi puts a warm damp rag over his lips. She
pulls the latch of the door and stretches her neck out for a look. Outside her sister is gone. The
tall meadow grass bends in an arctic breeze. She looks down the worn black line of earth parting
the field back towards town, the church, the residential school.
“I am so scared for you,” she says to the baby.
Billy’s and Cardinal’s heads rise over the roll of the meadow.
Kimi tips her chin to the sky to call to her sister, “Nuna, where are you?”
Branches snap and crack in the brush behind the cabin.
Kimi looks into her arms. Her baby’s eyes are wrinkled ruddy slits opening over blue globes. She
runs around the cabin into the woods. “Nuna. Wait for us.”
“They’re not in the cabin, Billy.” Cardinal’s voice is mostly air as he struggles to catch his
breath.
Kimi hears him cough and spit.
Billy’s voice isn’t so laboured. “They have to be around here somewhere. They’re not running
through the bush to the Reservation—it’s forty miles away.”
Red, orange, yellow, brown jagged leaves drop about Kimi as she huddles beneath some balsam
deadfall broken by a Chinook that screamed over the mountains onto the prairies. She tastes the
acidic bite of pine needles as she pants. Her hands quiver. She shakes a black carpenter ant off
her wrist. She presses the bundle of blankets against her chest. Her baby squawks. The shrill,
fragile voice pierces the forest. She gasps and pulls at her blouse. The buttons will not slide free
from the loops. She yanks and yanks. A patter of buttons rains upon the damp forest floor. She
fumbles for a breast.
Billy’s and Cardinal’s voices forge together into a singular tempered tone. It feels like the cold
bite of winter stabbing at Kimi’s bones.
“Where would they go? No more Indian in them. Father LaPierre whipped it out of them. Now
for that half-breed baby. They mustn’t be far.”
A crow caws. It pulls Kimi’s eyes from her son gumming at her nipple. The bird roosts on the
edge of another fallen balsam stump. Its long black-feathered tail twitches up and down, keeping
the bird teetering on the wood as it points an onyx glare at Kimi and the baby.
“There! Crows,” Cardinal says.
“Crows?”
“Granddad says crows follow lone, sick animals and lost people. They must be here.”
Kimi looks beyond the crow watching her from its perch into the tree tops. Branch after branch
after branch drop their pointed tips towards her. Another caw from her neighbor sets off an echo
inside the forest. And another crow lands on a tree not three yards from her. She hears the snap
of branches and the crush of dead leaves underfoot.
“They’re back in here somewhere,” Billy says. “Sarah! Come on out now and give Father
LaPierre that baby. You know you can’t take care of it. Do the right thing, girl.”
Kimi shimmies back deeper into the hollowed trunk of the tree, pulling her legs from under the
last band of sunfall draped upon the ground. She swipes at her neck. The scratchiness of the tree
fibres crawls down to the small of her back. Another cry fractures the stillness. She presses her
breast, pointing her nipple into the baby’s mouth.
She turns to the forest.
Twenty yards away Cardinal, wearing grey slacks and suspenders pulled over his bare dark
shoulders, pushes past a birch branch. Deep lashes—red sunburnt furrows—of scar tissue blaze
across his shoulder blades.
Kimi’s lashes have healed and look like rows of sand on skin the color of baked clay.
Cardinal seems to be pulling something. More leaves flutter to the ground as more crows land
above her.
Cardinal swats at an orange leaf that has landed on the top of his uneven bowl cut. His black
bangs jostle. He lifts a rifle up to his eye and jerks it upwards twice. Cardinal eases the tips of a
pointer finger and thumb into his mouth, folding his fuzzy light brown lip over his teeth and
whistles. “Look what I found!” He laughs. “Why don’t you come out of there? You’re going to
miss Mass.”
Cradling her son’s head, Kimi bounces the baby in her arms. The infant hums low.
“Where’s the baby?” Billy says, joining the scarred, shirtless Cardinal. He combs his hands over
his forehead and through his dirty blond hair, minding two fresh black eyes. He doesn’t have a
rifle, but he does have suspenders. They are neatly drawn over a pressed white shirt and black
slacks that stand apart from his green chore boots.
Rifle fire cracks, three, four shots chasing the crows into the skies.
The baby’s limbs jerk from his body, his fingers grasping at air. His mouth holds open for a
second before the screams follow. Kimi squishes her breast against the baby’s face. She sucks on
the timber air, holding her stare on the two teenage boys as her mouth runs dry.
The smooth burn of gunpowder sews its way through her lungs.
Cardinal draws Nuna—Kimi’s younger sister—by a braid to her feet and into view. The black
braids, woven together with tanned strips of leather, are crowned with a leather band surrounded
by polished stones.
“Sister Anne says you roughed her up pretty good,” Billy says, standing off from Cardinal and
Nuna looking through the brush. His face becomes rung, his gapped teeth clenched. “Where’s
your sister, huh? Where’s that Sarah?”
“Her name is Kimi,” Nuna says.
Billy strides over and yanks on Nuna’s free braid. She tries to keep standing, tipping all her
weight onto one leg. Billy kicks her and she falls. “No. I like you better on your knees.” He gives
her face a slap with his fingers. “Open your mouth.”
Nuna spits at Billy.
Billy scowls. His dusty blond eyebrows push into the muddle of Saskatoon berry bruising spilled
around his eyelids and cheekbones. He drags her by the hair into the ground. His fist rises.
Slamming her eyes shut, Kimi flinches with each—one, two, three—hollow crack.
“Now tell us where your sister and that baby is,” Billy says. “Should I say please? Please open
that pretty little Indian mouth of yours and tell us where she took that baby.”
“He doesn’t belong to you,” Nuna says.
“I know,” Billy says.
Cardinal calls into the brush, “Sarah! Bring us that baby. It belongs to Father LaPierre now.”
“Her name is Kimi. And he belongs to Kimi. She’s his mother.”
“Shut up,” Billy says. “That baby belongs with us.”
“No. We do not belong with you.”
“Then why did your parents leave you here? That’s what these schools are for—for you. Indians
can’t take care of themselves, so what makes you think she can take care of that baby? You all
belong here. Where were you going to go? I know if I was fifteen—and hell I’m near twenty—I
know I’d give that baby to Father LaPierre. You shouldn’t sound so ungrateful. Father LaPierre
has given you everything. If it weren’t for him you’d be off banging rocks together and dancing
for rain. And this is how you repay him for feeding you, clothing you, schooling you? He
brought you to civilization.”
“He’s a monster.”
Kimi hears another hollowed thud of knuckles into bone, but Nuna keeps right on talking.
“You’re right, she is fifteen. Did you think of that? That’s when he started coming to her?”
“Shut up!” Billy yells.
Another thud.
Kimi squeezes her eyes so tightly her temples hurt. Her fears slip off her tongue, “I am so scared
for you.” She rocks herself for the baby.
Nuna keeps talking. “He came to her again and again and again.”
“Give us the baby, Sarah!” Billy’s scream seems to have risen from the earth like a fog. “Father
LaPierre expects us to bring him a baby, and we’re bringing him one—one way or another.”
Opening her eyes, Kimi sees blood covering her sister’s nose and upper lip.
Billy drags his hand back and forth over her face. “Clean yourself up, nichi.”
Nuna tries to use her hand, wiping her fingertips around her nose and lips.
“Use your shirt,” says Billy.
Nuna slides her hands behind her belt, easing her white grass-stained blouse free, and lifts the
cloth to her face. The fabric takes away the blood.
“Now look what you’ve done.” Billy lifts the bloody ends of the cloth to her face. “You’ve
ruined it.” He laughs.
Cardinal laughs, too. “Take it off.”
Nuna freezes.
Cardinal grabs and rips the blouse open. “I said take it off.”
She slides the blouse off one shoulder.
Billy says, “Don’t tease us.”
Nuna yanks the other shoulder free and chucks the blouse into Cardinal’s shins.
“Look at her nipples. They’re tiny.” Billy pinches one, and then slaps her breast.
Nuna turns her face to the treetops.
“I thought you were the older sister.” Billy strokes the back of Nuna’s head “Fifteen. And what
does that make you?”
“Younger,” says Cardinal.
“But she looks old enough, doesn’t she, Cardinal?”
“Yup.” Cardinal laughs. He rests the rifle against a tree. He turns to Nuna and snaps his
suspenders against bare skin.
Billy looks down to Nuna. “Father LaPierre told us to bring him a baby.” He turns his voice to
the forest. “Sarah! This doesn’t have to happen. Just bring us the baby.” He shoves his finger into
Nuna’s forehead, “And don’t you dare use her dirty Cree name.”
Kimi stares down at the baby, tracing her thumb across a fuzzy eyebrow. They could be tent
caterpillars munching, feeding on poplar leaves. The tip of her thumb touches his eyelid. The
baby closes his eyes. Kimi holds her hand over his face, her fingers spread. She looks at her
fingers, follows the roll of her dark skin to his new skin that is almost the color of a steelhead.
She brushes her hand back over his forehead. His eyes open. They are blue with speckles of
green—the colour of sandy lake water—shattered throughout. She looks away, burying him into
his feast. “I am so scared for you.” Her hand slides back behind his neck, her fingers spread. She
looks up to the teenagers.
“You like that,” the shirtless Cardinal says, kneeling on the ground. His suspenders rest on his
calves.
Nuna is almost hidden behind the boy’s pulsing body. Billy presses his lips against her ear,
pulling on her hair with one hand and clutching her chin with the other. “Tell him you like it.”
Nuna whimpers.
Kimi squeezes the baby. His little voice creaks. Both of her arms fold around his length from
head to hip. His knees pull up against her chest. His eyes bulge.
The teenagers trade places. Billy takes off his shirt and ties Nuna’s hands behind her back and
shoves her face down. He slaps her hip and laughs.
Kimi’s hands cross deeper over her son, her fingers grasping her elbows. Her shoulder blades
protrude towards each other over her spine and her shoulders flare. The baby’s little fingernails
slice into her body. She grits her teeth, her eyebrows wringing the pain from her gaze, watches
the boy heaving into her sister.
Tighter, gurgling, tighter. The little knees fall over her arms. A swell of creamy milk pools at the
corner of the baby’s mouth, its roundness engorging, trembling, before it ruptures, spilling into a
soft white line down his cheek, tracing its way to his earlobe. The milk leaps onto the blanket
and disappears into the threading.
Kimi gulps at the forest. The taste of moss makes her spit. She feels a flap of skin dangling from
her tongue. She bites it and spits again. She swallows more of the piney air, more and more and
more. Paper birch, trembling aspen, jack pine, elm, and cedar surround her. Overhead the sound
of the boreal forest combs though the atmosphere, and the spin of the world—its immensity
never resting—throws Kimi. She falls forward with her son onto the ground. She takes him from
her breast, cradles him to her neck.
She whispers, “I was so scared for you.”
Her lips search for his. They’re cool, his face wet from milk. She touches her forehead against
the forest floor. Her hands pull at the ground, her fingers searching and clutching, throwing
twigs, sticks, leaves, bark and pine needles over her baby. She wipes her face, feeling the heat
upon her wet cheeks. She is as calm as the soil clinging to her hands. She opens her eyes and
focuses on the boy still pushing themselves into her sister. She pulls her blouse together over her
breasts. She grabs an aspen limb, its fibres braided and gnarled around a knot. It is heavy
enough. She fumbles in the leaves and pine needles under her legs and finds a stone just larger
than her fist. It is warm in her grasp. She stretches to her feet and moves towards the boys.
Michael McGuire
“¡..basura..! ¡..basura..!”©
‘…garbage, garbage…’ was the cry of one of the three men who manned the garbage truck, #1 in
fact, el alcoholico, who walked in front crying his all-too-familiar cry and ringing his relentless
bell.
The others were #2, the man on top, who sorted the bags thrown up to him by the hands of
#1, el alcoholico, by a system known only to him, #2, among whose distinctions were the wellknown activities of his wife that contributed so substantially to the family income, and #3, who
drove the truck with a beam of contentment, perhaps because he had no other duties.
But the three more or less permanent occupants of the corner, la esquina, were Fabiola, who had
been sizzling discount tacos in her little stand for 30 years; Afinado, who played for backed-up
cars till they began to move, played for pesos handed or even dropped out windows; and
Angelina, 12, who wore a short skirt, carried a light bag that said “Chivas” on both sides and
hopped in with drivers who leaned to open the door, whether they rooted for her team or not.
The fourth occupant of the corner, who would understand if he weren’t counted, was Feo,
Afinado’s mongrel with grease so deep in what remained of his mortality that he was nearly
indistinguishable from asphalt, and a wound that never seemed to heal. The attached smell was
reason enough for keeping his distance from his master, as well as from Fabiola and Angelina,
for he knew it was not good for business.
Anyone’s.
Feo warmed his scrap of concrete at the end of a carefully paced out space, witnessed much of
what came to pass on his corner,la esquina, and noted the progression of Afinado’s
repertory…for Feo knew not only every composition the man could draw from his instrument, he
knew the order in which they were likely to be played.
Time was Feo had gone from car to car with a little basket under his neck, but he was so dirty
that drivers failed to associate him with whatever harmonies they might be hearing or maybe he
looked a little dangerous for the dog met whosever eyes met his and few windows were lowered,
not even low enough to toss out a coin. But the mongrel, and Afinado too, knew the game was
definitely up when the wound that would never heal deepened, spread…
And added its unambiguous bouquet to the smells of the city.
The dog would stay where he was on the sidewalk; the man would fiddle between the cars by
himself.
Life on la esquina was unremarkable in comparison with that on other corners in the
city. Occasionally los contaminantes left many unable to see a block though, on a cold morning
in February, a man or woman might witness his or her breath blending with the haze. Buses
were often at a standstill, minor mishaps would block traffic either way; even then, there might
be so much annoyance, so much antagonism, in the air that no one had time for a taco, a tune or
even love.
Afinado, el músico, had not begun life on his corner.
He had started it somewhere else or it would have never occurred to him to take up his chosen
instrument and play where he now found himself. Once he had even aspired to first or second
chair in the youth orchestra of the metropolis. But youth was gone, perhaps the orchestra
too. The day had come, with a father disappeared, a mother sick in her bones and six hermanos,
brothers and sisters, to feed, that Afinado simply abandoned his studies, picked up his violin and
stepped into the street.
Surprisingly–at the beginning it must have been his charm or his youth–the move had proved
instantly rewarding. At the end of the day he could put tacos on the table. Sometimes he could
even bring a chicken home for his hermanita to cook. At first, of course, he had not found his
niche, the corner he was likely to finish his life on. Afinado wandered the streets, played
wherever he could gather a semblance of a crowd, while his younger brothers and sisters went to
school and, in the end, just went.
But the day, or night, came when, having paused long enough to sustain himself on one of
Fabiola’s cut rate tacos, he found himself reluctant to travel on. The lady noted his continued
presence and engaged him in conversation.
“From the other side?” she asked…for Fabi knew her accents and the other side meant the other
side of the city. Afinado, thoughtfully chewing, nodded. Fabiola nodded at the instrument held
tenderly to his side. “Why not give us a melody, viejito, my clients might well appreciate what
you have to offer.”
‘Little old man’ was not Afinado’s chosen form of address but, he supposed, the
years had passed and he responded willingly enough.
“Why not?”
It turned out that Afinado’s classical repertory was not entirely inappropriate for Fabi or her
clients or for the cars that backed up on her corner during the hours of his recital, as Afinado
liked to term them, and so nights followed days and days followed nights. At moments of
gridlock, the best of his solos could be heard a block in either direction.
Sometimes of a night, though more often of a day, as happens anywhere, dead spots fell upon the
threesome, or foursome. Then Fabiola threw no tacos in the fat, Afinado stepped not into the
street, Angelina’s winsome gazes stopped no cars and Feo, his isolation unrequired, relocated
himself measurably nearer to his friends who, with a box or a crate to sit on in tow, had already
moved closer to each other.
These were the trio’s, or the quartet’s, moments of reflection and each and all treasured them.
“Tell me, Angelina,” said Fabiola, though she had her reservations about raising the subject,
“what will you be doing in ten years?”
But Angelina was unfazed, she feared the future no more than she did the present. She hesitated
contemplatively, long enough for Fabi to picture the girl covered with babies, worn out with
childbearing and child raising, still walking those legs of hers, or what remained of them, to their
corner each night, if only part time.
“Maybe I’ll be a teacher,” said Angelina, as if she had just thought of it.
“Only if you’ve gone to school yourself,” said Afinado, though he had spent enough years
getting himself educated to know it might not lead anywhere at all.
For a time, Fabiola and Afinado just looked at the girl who appeared to be considering what
Afinado had said, for both had just remembered that Angelina had never given any indication
that she could read, much less write. And both knew there were some things it was better not to
know or, in any event, to put into words.
But Angelina appeared to be considering Afinado’s statement, the dead spot continued a bit
longer than most, and Fabiola continued.
“If I ever save enough, I’m going to travel.”
“Where will you travel to, Fabi?” asked Afinado who, if it hadn’t been for a houseful of hunger,
would have seen the world as a young man.
“The Yucatán,” answered Fabi, “and Chiapas. I want to walk in the jungle and climb the
pyramids of the lost civilizations.”
“What’s a pyramid?” asked Angelina, who didn’t want to reveal total ignorance by asking what a
lost civilization was.
“Pyramids are what they made in Egypt,” said Afinado, making a pyramid in the air; “it’s what
they buried the pharaohs under.”
Angelina knew she wasn’t going to ask what a pharaoh was, though she knew all about burying.
With her parents she’d visited the resting place of her abuelita, her mother’s mother, who’d
worked herself to death before Angelina had had a chance to meet her. And she knew from the
news that her father watched when he was feeling well enough that there were fosas
clandestinas all over the country, hidden graves that, when discovered, coughed up dead young
men who had been killed in the drug wars: machine gunned at the gravesite with a cuernos de
chiva or executed with a bullet to the back of the head, el tiro de gracia.
These were the kinds of things that Angelina being, if a creature of her times, not quite one of
those angelitas who depart this earth as children, couldn’t help knowing though there were times
when she knew her knowledge might not be worth very much. But Fabiola, having opened a
little, opened a little more.
“Some say our pyramids are better than theirs,” she said, though she couldn’t remember where
she’d read that and she wondered how, when she got there, she’d know if the pyramids of her
country were any better than those of Egypt. Maybe a tour guide could tell her and she knew it
was cheaper to go in a group, but Fabi had had enough of groups, of crowds, even of living in a
civilization that might not be entirely lost.
What she did when she could do what she wanted to, she’d do alone.
“And you, Fabi?” asked Afinado, “in ten years, after you’ve climbed the pyramids of Chichén
Itzá and Palenque and maybe even been to Egypt to see for sure whose pyramids are better, what
will you do then?”
Fabi may have been surprised by the question, but she knew the answer.
“I’ll come back here, Afinado, to see how you two are getting along, if by then our Angelina can
fry tacos as well as I can.”
The thought of an overweight Angelina sweating tacos had them all in fits; it was as irresistible a
cartoon as one of Fabiola working the corner in a short skirt with a weightless Chivas bag half
full of secrets. At this moment of shared delight, though none might have said it quite like that,
Fabiola and Afinado and Angelina were not life’s throwaways, not to each other anyway: they
were family.
Then the dead spot that had given them all a breather, as well as a breath of life, passed and each
returned, as chance beckoned, to his or her chosen or not so chosen task.
Life, as any one of three, or four, might be able to tell you, was not easy on la esquina. Weeks
followed weeks and months months and, as was becoming clear to almost everyone, one day
years might follow years.
Afinado’s hands began to tighten and twist so that some days he found it almost impossible to
play, one day Angelina had stumbled back to her corner with a swollen cheek and a little streak
of blood in one eye and just last week the police had come through and knocked down, trashed
and taken away all the stands of the street vendors, los comerciantes ambulantes, including
Fabiola’s, even though it was a nice metal set-up and her only joy.
“Why? Why?” screamed Fabiola.
One policeman deigned to answer.
“Because it’s bad for business.”
“Whose business?” screamed Fabiola.
The policeman, after throwing the last of Fabi’s wrecked stand on the truck–she had managed to
save her cooker by placing her body before it with a hot spatula in hand–indicated the established
businesses with a thumb over his shoulder, businesses with glass windows and doors you could
lock, businesses that did not require the total commitment of an old man, a young girl or a
woman who had turned tacos for thirty years.
“Do they play nocturnes for nothing?? Do they wink and wave at cars?? Do they fry tacos day
and night and sell them for a song???” screamed Fabiola.
“Am I in competition with them?” she added as the truck, the police and a tortured crowd
of comerciantes groaned like a living thing and moved on.
Fabi knew in her heart that every level of business sneered at the level beneath it–especially
those who had to walk their merchandise home at night–and did everything they could to get
them out of the way. She knew it like she knew the facts of life, but it was not enough to stop
her.
“I will never be beaten,” said Fabi, though no one heard her.
When young, Fabi had believed in curanderas, gone to them for every ill and sent her clients
too. But time had taught her thatcuranderas did not cure, that exhaled cigarette smoke and the
sign of the cross did not take pimples off a teenager or fungus from between the toes of those
who subsisted in situación de calle, street persons who could not afford her tacos when day was
done and she was very nearly giving them away.
It was only a short step from there–a step that took about ten years to take–to seeing that the
Virgin herself took no count of your bloodied knees as you labored towards her, that even the
recently sanctified sister of their fair city had performed no miracles that merited
beatification. The testimonials of those she cured had been, however sincerely, fudged. They
were fabricado, which was almost Fabiola’s name, if not quite, and so, only a little late, she
reached her conclusion.
In this life, you were on your own. Maybe you could help a man or a woman out now and then
with a free taco, but that was about it.
But Fabi had saved her money. There might be no trips to Egypt or even Chiapas, but she would
never be in the street–period–the way some people were. Una soltera, she lived alone in a rented
room, slept on a narrow bed and, with help, had managed to get her cooker home before
someone stole it.
Within a week she was back on la esquina watching her new puesto put together out of sheets of
white metal. Not allcomerciantes were as fortunate. Some, their goods gone with their stands,
goods not yet paid for, could hardly think of starting over until they had accumulated the
necessary capital–by whatever means–which brought Angelina to Fabi’s mind, as well as to
Afinado’s. Angelina and her parents. Sus padres.
Angelina’s mother was also a sexservidora, though she worked a different territory, and her
father was dying of el sida, a deadly disease which wasted him daily.
This Afinado knew for, when he was not playing between the cars, and Angelina was not off in
one of them, the two sat on boxes about equidistant from the rebuilt puesto of the reborn
Fabiola–for her humiliating “defeat” and thus far successful counterattack had given her new
energy–and Feo, who lay comfortably downwind on his scrap of sidewalk. And sometimes old
man and young girl found they had some things to say to each other.
“What do you carry in your little bag, Angelina?” asked Afinado.
“Do you really want to know, Afinado?” asked Angelina.
“I do,” said Afinado, for he was at least five times her age and, at that grandfatherly distance,
might substitute for the father who didn’t seem able to see through his sickness, at least not well
enough to see her.
“Well…” began Angelina.
Afinado made a note of the fact, as he often did, that Angelina’s voice was musical, soft as a
child’s–because she was, in the end, still a child–and he hoped her voice would never suffer the
loss of its musicality.
“Well,” said Angelina, “this is what I have, this is what I carry in my little bag…”
Here Angelina opened her Chivas bag in a way the contents could not be seen by anyone driving
by. Afinado, whose eyes had never been as good as his ears, leaned close. Angelina raised her
bag to make it easier for him, then opened it further for him to fumble in.
The bag was half empty. Afinado was unable to make sense of stuff he could half make out, getups men liked to see their little angel pull on. One piece, which an old hand singled out, was
notable: a pink satiny heart, probably cardboard, cheap and shiny and fitted with a couple of
elastics to hold it in place. Afinado held it this way and that until he figured out what it was and
where it went.
Angelina had smiled as Afinado chose it–life, in some way she didn’t fully understand, was
already a comedy to her–but her expression changed when she saw the look on Afinado’s face.
“Oh, my poor Angelina,” muttered Afinado, whose words were never as clear as his notes, “my
poor, poor Angelina.”
It seemed Afinado had nothing more to say and no further interest in the little bag Angelina was
holding out to him, so she replaced her heart of hearts and closed it. This was when Afinado,
though there were no cars backed up on their corner, stood and stepped into the street, tucked his
instrument under his chin and played.
Afinado had always understood that a musician plays, not for himself, but for others. He had
never approved of músicos who fiddled so that their own tears ran down their own faces, tears
that caught the light and thus became part of the performance.
Afinado played for Angelina and as he played, it was her features that changed. The old man
could not claim to see all the ages of child and woman, of the less than immaculate conception
that preceded them, much less the dirty death that might well follow, playing across them, but he
did see that, to Angelina, life was not always funny.
Sometimes it was something else too.
Angelina knew Afinado was playing for her and the music reached so deep inside that she forgot
to watch for cars that might be slowing.
“Oh, my dear Afinado,” she said, though he may not have heard, and nearly echoing his words,
met his eyes and added “my dear, dear Afinado.”
This, she knew, he heard.
Afinado knew he was playing better than he usually played for he saw the girl’s heart beating
deep within her and hoped he was doing the right thing in disclosing the other side, the side he
now knew she knew all too well. He also, at that moment, heard a cough from Fabiola that
indicated that, though beauty was beauty and she too knew it when she saw it, or heard it,
enough was enough. Even Feo lifted his ugly old head from the sidewalk and, launching his
stench upon the air, added his two centavos in a most unmusical howl, a cacophony that was all
too clear, but he repeated it anyway.
“¡..Basta..! ¡..Basta..!”
Enough. Enough.
The cars however had backed up–which was, after all, the reason for more than one soul to have
chosen this corner–and Afinado–since survival was survival–pulled a livelier piece out of the air
and turned to them.
A door swung open for Angelina and she was gone.
Business, always an unpredictable and highly variable detail, suddenly swelled at
Fabiola’s puesto and she sent the good fat sizzling around a horde of hungry customers and
perhaps even several meters into an unclean sky.
Angelina was soon back and soon gone–whatever she did didn’t take long–and day progressed
into livelier night. Always, perhaps for good public relations, Angelina gave a perfunctory kiss
to the man before her timely exit, flashing legs that might one day make her fortune as she slid to
the street.
The man, sometimes pleased, always surprised at that parting kiss, drove on. Though one,
Afinado noted, just sat there, his hands on the wheel, apparently having been brought to a stop by
that kiss until the cars unblocked before him, the horns leapt to life behind him and he was gone.
“Death on wheels,” mumbled Fabiola, who had seen it all and seen it all before and, as usual,
days flowed into days, nights into nights.
Afinado’s hands managed, thanks to the greasing of Fabiola’s good fats, to loosen and uncurl at
least long enough to give him several hours a night at gainful employment. The police did not
return to knock down Fabiola’s new puesto. They were saving that for later when it would be
more of a surprise. Angelina was in and out, in and out and, one day, she got in a car and did not
return.
“We know all we need to know about her parents,” said Fabiola, “we just don’t know where they
are.”
But sus padres, her parents, knew where Angelina was, or where she was supposed to be, and
sometime after midnight, suddenly there they were. Angelina’s mother was an overweight
woman in a scanty dress, her father was a walking ghost. Both were in agony. The foreseeable
had become the inevitable. It had happened.
Angelina was gone.
Inquiries proved fruitless. The police said Angelina had probably had enough of Fabiola’s fats,
of Afinado’s oeuvre, of the part she played on la esquina and run off with some fast talker in a
fast car who promised better. Without a body–an injured one was best–there couldn’t be a crime.
Life was not easy. Even the police had families, were lowly paid, and only got by on
graft. They listened to the story of Angelina as told by her parents, by Fabiola and Afinado, and
had no more time to listen.
La patrulla, lights no longer flashing, drove off. Onlookers and bystanders resumed their
characters as walk-ons, underfed shadows who relished their roles as Fabiola’s loyal clientele
edging forever closer to her refabricated enterprise.
But life was no longer the same on la esquina. Fabi and Afinado both were always expecting
Angelina to slide those legs from the next car. Perhaps such incomparable discount tacos never
lost their tang, but Afinado’s art was going downhill.
Afinado had to ask himself: had he been playing for Angelina all along? He’d lost his parents,
he’d lost his brothers and sisters, one after the other, and now he’d lost… What? The child that
he and that enduring soltera in her narrow bed, Fabi the fabulous, would never have?
Though, for a while, he would be the first to admit, after Angelina had joined the disappeared, if
not the machine gunned or the executed, Afinado’s art got not worse, but better, as if he were
calling, calling to her, and his notes had a plaintive note that was not abominable self-pity, but
only loss, loss itself and, hearing it, people for meters in every direction–not all, but some–would
stop, stand still, look up, or down, and even, sometimes, place a hand upon the beating heart.
It was as if Afinado had discovered his first aria, if one could play an aria on an aging, even
breakable instrument, and it began “oh my dear Angelina, my dear, dear Angelina,” but only he
knew that.
Strangely, their loss did not draw Afinado and Fabiola closer, but further apart, as if, as the ages
called him–maybe well before Fabiola, but not so long after Angelina–Afinado was suddenly
five times the enduring woman’s age as well as the lost girl’s. But they too, the aging couple
who would never couple, were on the way out. And, in time, the man’s aria too flew, flew away
from him. There was no longer any angelita to call out to, not even a thousand meters up; far,
far above the befouled air.
Afinado’s art had left him, everyone knew it and, to add to his misfortune, it wasn’t long before
Feo–after an extended period of strangely regarding Afinado as if he, the dog, knew something
he, the man, didn’t–died.
With help Afinado got the reeking old body up into the truck and three men returned to their
routine, #1, el alcoholico, in front, ringing his relentless bell and crying his all-too-familiar cry…
“¡..basura..! ¡..basura..!”
Arthur Plotnik
GUEST INTERVIEW
Arriving by taxi, he’s impressed—distressed, actually—by the TV station’s majestic campus,
located in a northern section of Chicago still dotted with green spaces. Studio buildings rise like
mausoleums from trimmed lawns. Massive satellite dishes stand by to catapult his blood-drained
face through the Midwest, should he somehow gather his nerve and go through with the
interview.
But after the taxi drops him at the visitors’ entrance, he enters a less daunting corridor,
reminiscent of warehouse spaces with cinder-block walls and polished cement floors. The
plainness should calm him somewhat—nothing fancy, so maybe less is expected of Noontime
Hour guests—except that his terror of a live performance cannot be calmed. Building for weeks
now, it has infiltrated every twig of his nervous system. Even at night, bolting out of sleep, he’s
been thinking he should will himself to die before he has to appear live.
He’s been instructed by e-mail to go the Green Room, where guests are accommodated until
called. But right now, as usual, he has the irresistible urge to pee. He passes door after door,
panicking, and it feels like the nightly dreams where he can’t find a men’s room or where the
urinals he’s about to use morph into somebody’s posh velvet furniture.
Down the hall a handsome woman emerges from a doorway and offers a smile as they intersect.
She’s fiftyish—about his daughter Lily’s age—Latina features, meticulously dressed and madeup. He recognizes her from somewhere.
“Excuse me—is there a men’s room . . . ?”
“A few doors behind you,” she says, her voice chirpy. “Where you headed?”
“Green Room—wherever that is.”
“You’re a show guest?” He nods. “Good then, the Green Room has its own john. Come—it’s
just there.” She takes his arm and guides him toward a marked door a few yards further.
“Very kind,” he says. “You look—do I know you?”
“If you watch the lottery draw.”
Of course. Rosa somebody, the flirty, winking lottery lady who draws the numbers during
the Noontime Hour program. He’d seen her a few times before agreeing to be interviewed,
before icy dread kept him from watching the show any longer.
“Now I recognize you. You’re very good. Animated.”
“‘Animated!” she says, amused. “I like that. And what brings you here?”
“I’m supposed to be interviewed on Noontime Hour. I’m, uh, promoting a book. Written a long
time ago.”
“Really? What’s your name? Do I know the book?”
“Oh, it’s just an old novel that suddenly people want to read. Breath of Love. My publisher keeps
pushing for publicity, but to tell the truth I’m terrified to go on . . . ” He stops. Why is he telling
her? It’s bad enough already. “I’m Charles Featheroff,” he says.
“That’s a nice author’s name. And you’ll be fine,” she assures him. “Just try to relax.” She leaves
him at the Green Room with a gentle arm squeeze and one of her patented winks.
Try to relax. That’s what his daughter Lily keeps telling him. Easy for her to say, a motivational
speaker and consultant when she has work. He’s always admired her natural courage and
outgoingness—a benign version of her mother, whose outgoingness led her out of his bed and
into another after nineteen years of marriage. Charles partly blamed himself for the breakup,
even if Lily didn’t agree. He had circumscribed his life to accommodate his so-called
glossophobia, the fear of speaking before a group. It didn’t make for a lot of fun at gatherings or
for a dazzling career. Through high school he’d been so anxious, so flushed and sweaty when
called on that he’d been sent to counselors and later even therapists before refusing to continue.
He served two years as an Army grunt in Korea and got through college playing the taciturn,
shell-shocked vet, bearded, burying himself in the humanities. In his one required speech class,
the sympathetic young instructor—a doe-eyed theater type and, like many others at the time, an
aspiring Beatnik—helped him cope by hand-holding and then sleeping with him for a semester.
That unthinkably happy turn of events and its awful ending inspired his one novel.
He’s heard of Green Rooms with buffet tables and upscale amenities, but this one feels like
there’s a carwash on the other side. Vinyl floors, couches with plastic upholstery, cheap coffee
tables, and snack and drink machines. One table holds bottles of free water—the last thing he
needs as a pee-er, but just what he craves to relieve the sawdust-dryness in his mouth. On the
couches sit three people: a stout young woman with an eager face and two tote bags full of props;
a weathered-looking guitarist, instrument on his lap; and a trim middle-aged woman. He nods to
them, spots the bathroom door, and goes in.
He opens his trousers and shorts and disposes of the small absorbent pad covering his leaky
apparatus. He runs water in the sink to disguise the sound of his dribble into the toilet. It takes so
long for so little. They’ll wonder what he’s doing in here, but the point is to not to wet his pants
during the interview.
I got a prostate like an Idaho potatah. As he does almost every time he pees, he recalls Marlon
Brando saying that line in “Last Tango in Paris,” But if the still youthful Brando character had a
potato back then, his own prostate must be akin to a watermelon. His urologist regards it as such,
urging him to have surgery, even at eighty. But no thanks. A little pad is one thing—he takes a
fresh one from his briefcase—diapers are another, your certificate of superannuation.
Charles leaves the bathroom, takes a seat on the last empty couch, and pulls out the two sheets of
notes he’s written and rewritten trying to anticipate the questions. He started the notes with just a
few simple cues to trigger longer responses. “Just wing it!” Lily kept telling him. “You’re talking
about your own book.” But he couldn’t imagine himself winging more than ten words without
panicking and going blank—browning out.
For example, he would probably be asked why a novel published some fifty years ago is getting
critical attention today. Long story! He’d have to explain how back then a professor in grad
school helped get it published through a connection with a small indie press; how it was quickly
out of print and forgotten, including by himself more or less, during a long career in back-room
library technical services; how his daughter read it and showed it to a friend who showed it to a
publishing friend, and blah blah blah. Well, he could hardly spew out all that information under
pressure not to pause or pass out. So he’s jammed in more cues on top of cues until the notes
look like a killing field of squashed flies.
From this mess he picks out one legible line and rehearses it. I’ve been told the book is the story
of a generation, but it’s a generation I felt estranged from. He’s tried to memorize several such
simple lines, but they melt away in his fears. Damn fears. Damn ridiculous fears. Every six-yearold now performs like an old pro in front of live cameras. How hard can it be? Why must he fear
failure at this stage of life? Why should he care what anyone—
“. . . Do you have a dog?”
The woman with the tote bags is leaning at him from the adjacent sofa, awaiting his reply. He
shakes his head, manages a smile, and returns to his notes.
“Maybe a friend of yours does. Children? Grandchildren?” She’s showing him a large paperback
book, Crafting Pet Accessories, by Nora Lundgren, with a photo of a beaded dog collar on the
cover. “I’ll be demonstrating some samples on the program. You’ll see how much fun it is. You
can’t get this book in bookstores, but I can give you my website.”
“Sure. Okay,” he says. She pulls a card from her purse and hands it to him. “I’m Nora?” she
says, chin out, waiting. “Charles,” he responds.
“You an author, too?”
“Just one old book. And I can barely remember writing it, so I have to . . . ” He gives his notes a
shake and notices his hands are shaking, too.
“Oh, sorry. You’re not nervous, are you?” He shrugs. “Don’t be,” she says. “There’s really
nothing to it, believe me. What’s the worst that can happen? There was one show, I locked my
keys and all my craft stuff in the car, had to just blab away and make word pictures. Went fine.”
“Well . . . I’m not very good at—I’ve never been on television or live anything, so I need to just
. . . ” He tries to wet his lips. Sandpaper. “I wonder if you might pass me one of those waters by
you.”
Nora does so. He gulps at the contents, knowing he shouldn’t. About to return to his notes, he
sees that the other woman in the room is looking at him.
“There’s a very simple pose for relaxing,” she says. She rises from the couch. “It’s called
Standing Forward Fold.”
“No, no,” he says. “Thank you, but I—”
Nora puts a hand on his arm. “Really, it’s a good idea,” she says. “That’s the health lady Barbara
Stiles.”
The woman acknowledges Nora and turns back to him, coming closer. “What you do,” she says,
bending forward, “is hang your head, then fold your arms like this and let them hang, and gently
swing them back and forth like a pendulum, gently, gently . . . you can swing the head, too, if it’s
comfortable.”
“No, I’m afraid it’s too late for me,” he says.
Now the guitarist speaks up, in a country-inflected baritone. “Never too late, m’ friend.”
“Diet is so important, too,” says Barbara Stiles, still swinging her arms. “Come on, don’t you
want to try this?” Charles resists, feeling ganged-up on, but he’s saved by a woman entering the
room as if flung into it. She is short, with curly red hair and oversized glasses with purple
frames. She carries a clipboard.
“Hi, everyone,” she says breathlessly. “Sorry not to get here earlier. I’m Carol,
your Noontime PA—production assistant?—so I just want to make sure you’re all set to go. Any
problems? Do you all have what you need?”
The others nod. Charles thinks, I am not “set to go.” What I need is to be somewhere else or
vaporized.
“I don’t know if they told you, but our regular Green Room is being refurbished,” Carol says.
“It’s kind of spare here, so, sorry about that, too.”
“Been in a hell of a lot worse,” the guitarist says with a gravelly laugh.
“Okay, good,” Carol says. She looks at her clipboard. “Now—Charles? Is that you?” He nods.
“You were scheduled to go on after the healthy-eating segment—that’s Barbara, right? But her
table still has to be—well anyway we had to reshuffle a bit. So you’ll be first guest, then the pet
crafts—Nora?—then Barbara’s demo, and close with the music segment—Denny? Okay. Good
with everyone?”
“Long’s you don’t cut me short,” says Denny.
“No, no, that’s blocked in. Mike’s a big fan of yours, you know.”
Charles figures she means Mike Gallagher, the long-time anchor of Noontime Hour and, he
recalls faintly, an amateur rockabilly musician who sits in with performers around town. If Mike
is doing the author segment, he was probably given Breath of Love just this morning, maybe with
summary notes and a few generic questions: Why did you write the story? Can you tell us what
it’s about, in a word, and why it’s catching on today? Charles has already answered such
questions in several written e-mail interviews done to keep his editor and her publicist happy—
except they aren’t the least bit happy with him. As fast as they’d set up “incredible ops” for radio
and television appearances, he’d turn them down, claiming age, shyness, health, family crises,
disposition—whatever he could say to put them off. He managed to get through a couple of
phone interviews with genial newspaper critics, but declined a hard-won, major NPR slot that
was to be taped in a studio. That, for his editor, was the last straw.
“Honestly? We’ve busted our butts pushing this book,” she told him. “We can understand your
shyness, Charles, but really, we put ourselves on the line for you, opened an unbelievable
window of publicity—which is about to slam shut if you can’t go one step of the way with us.
And truthfully, my enthusiasm is starting to run thin.”
She is a force, his editor. She wants him to build his brand, his platform, work the bookstores,
libraries, broadcast media, reviewing media, social media. Considering that she inherited his
book from the elderly colleague who acquired it (and who subsequently retired), he appreciates
her aggressiveness, even if he has to dodge it to survive. Meanwhile, the publicist plays the good
cop, telling him how excited she is to get him this or that media slot, how absolutely marvelous
he will be on it.
The more he declines, the more he can hear them saying, what the hell were we thinking,
publishing this useless old fart? And so, finally having to say yes to something, he caved in on
the next “op,” which was The Noontime Hour, a popular Chicago news-and-features show. It
wasn’t exactly All Things Considered or Charlie Rose, but with a signal reaching as far as
Wisconsin, Indiana, and Iowa it claimed up to 300,000 viewers—all watching for him to die on
camera.
He feels the urge to pee again; but as Carol is leaving the Green Room he finds himself hurrying
after her, calling her name. She stops. “Yes, Charles?”
“Just wanted to—I wondered if I’m allowed to take my notes in there?”
“Sure. As long as they fit on the table, in front of you.”
“Good. Good. But I need to look at them a bit more . . . Do I really need to go first?”
“Yeah, I’m afraid so. But you still have about twenty minutes before then.” In the pause that
follows she sees the signs of panic. “Listen,” she says, touching his arm. Everyone seems to want
to touch his arm today. “There’s nothing to worry about. Just think of it as a conversation. Like
you’re having a drink with a friend, and he asks you about your book.”
“In front of three hundred thousand people.”
“Forget about them. Just have your little one-on-one talk. It’s only a few minutes.”
“My mouth is so dry. I can hardly speak.”
“You sound fine to me. And there’ll be water there. Really, you’ll be great. Gotta go—I’ll come
get you when they’re ready.”
He returns to the Green Room and goes to the bathroom again, horrified by what he sees in the
mirror: a beaky snow owl caught in the headlights. Would anyone believe he was once
broodingly handsome, irresistible to the fairest, sexiest young instructor on campus?
Coming back into the waiting room he sees the show’s anchor, Michael Gallagher, standing over
Denny and excitedly talking guitars with him. “Really looking forward to hearing you,”
Gallagher tells him. “And you, and you,” he says consecutively to Nora and Barbara. “Better get
back.” He nods uncertainly at Charles on the way out. Had he even gotten the book in his hands?
Does he even have a list of questions?
It occurs to Charles that he still has an option. He can get up, walk out, and tell his publisher to
do whatever the hell it wants. But the truth is, he needs the book to keep selling. So far, with
about thirteen thousand copies shipped—a spectacular start for a reissued novel by a no-name—
he figures he’s earned about $20,000. For this he can mainly thank a gushing review in The New
York Times, a purely providential “find” by a staff critic enamored of the book’s time period and
“emotional authenticity.” Other good reviews followed, and his publisher thinks that with a lot of
quick hustling by “Team Featheroff”—which now includes a rights agent—the hardcover and
then its paperback could make $75,000 in sales, more in subsidiary rights, with a fair possibility
of scoring a film option. “You don’t throw away a hundred grand,” is the carrot his editor thrusts
at him.
And she is right. He cannot discard any means of cushioning Lily from the trials of the coming
years. His only child has already spent half her life between the rock and hard place—abandoned
by her partner, heartbroken by a venomous son who calls only to hiss at her, and now edging into
a caregiver role as Charles heads toward decrepitude still embroiled in his own trials. But Lily,
believing to have failed with the two other men in her life, has made Charles her special project,
so much so that he has to hold her off, not easy, since he happily let her occupy the studio
apartment in the basement of the house where she was raised—the bungalow he himself has
lived in since he was married. So there she is, keeping an eye on him. When he isn’t home, she
checks in on the mobile she taught him to use.
Today he told her not to call until after the interview. In fact she wanted to postpone a consulting
job to drive him to the studios and be with him through the ordeal. He wouldn’t hear of it; how
would he bear the look in her eyes when he let her down, kerplunk, after all she’d invested in his
belated literary emergence—all she’s meant to him since the day she was born? Lily was always
daddy’s girl, with her curly black locks—now going gray—her little songs, her brave cartwheels
on spindly limbs. She was his burst of excitement after a day of numbing detail, his ally and
emotional prop at the end of his marriage. When laid off from high school teaching, she cobbled
a new career rather than find work elsewhere and leave him by himself. Her brief joy at giving
him a grandson was sabotaged by her partner, who stormed off to Florida in a psychotic fit and,
over the next years, handed his son a perfect template of victimization. As Lily struggled to make
ends meet and keep the kid out of trouble, Charles had to beg her to accept what little help he
could offer.
He would never have shown her Breath of Love, his novel, because he couldn’t be sure how she
would relate to the small secret it held, just as he’d worried about his wife’s reaction should she
read the book—though, true to form, she’d shown no interest in seeing a copy or discovering any
relics of his former life. But Lily wasted no time when the Internet gave her the tools some years
ago; she dug up the title online and managed to buy a used copy rather than put Charles on the
spot. And when she read it, marveling, sometimes weeping, at its poignance, she discovered why
she had been named Lily and felt it to be an act of transferred love.
“Okay, Charles, we’re ready to roll,” says Carol as she returns to the Green Room. Charles is
still trying to make sense of his notes, shocked that the twenty-minute interval has expired.
He rises unsteadily. “Maybe I should hit the john one more time.”
“Okay, but real fast. We have to be there in two minutes.”
In the bathroom, nothing happens, though he feels an urge. Carol knocks on the door. “Coming,”
he says, and flushes the toilet, runs the sink, before exiting.
“Mess ‘em up,” the guitarist calls to him. The other two raise fists of encouragement. But as
Charles heads down the corridor toward the set, the words dead man walking shoot through his
brain and spine and ganglia until he can barely feel his legs. He puts a hand to the wall to brace
himself.
.
“You all right, Charles?”
He nods.
“Take a deep breath.”
He does so and wills himself forward, all the way to the foyer of the set—of the execution
chamber—curtained off from the cameras. He hears meteorologist Anna somebody giving the
weather, and then Gallagher’s voice:
“When we return for today’s book chat, we’ll be talking to local author Charles Featheroff,
whose only novel has been making waves some half century after he wrote it.”
“Four minutes,” someone says, and Charles is ushered to the platform where Gallagher is seated
at a small glass table, holding a copy of Breath of Love. The lights are blinding. Charles is seated
and miked. He fits the two pages of notes, barely, next to a water glass. Another PA takes the
briefcase and puts it under the chair. “All set,” she says. “Stay in this position, speak normally.”
Charles takes a drink. “My mouth is very dry,” he says to Gallagher.
“My God,” Gallagher says, looking into his face, “I didn’t realize it was you in the Green Room.
I am so sorry. When I read your book I kept imagining a young author. A bearded dude.”
“You read it?”
“I sure did. Couldn’t put it down. That whole era—man, you had me living in it. And that ending
. . . . I wish we had an hour to talk.”
“I’m pretty damn nervous. My first television. I can hardly breathe.”
“Hey, we’re just gonna have an easy chat, the two of us,” Gallagher says, leaning in closer. He
taps the book. “About this. It’s all good. Short, too. My kind of read.”
The PA holds her arm up, drops it.
“Oh, poor Dad, he looks like he’s been gutted,” says Lily as Charles and the book are introduced.
She has timed her workshop lunch break so she can watch Noontime in the client’s executive
lounge. Her father appears bigger than life on the sixty-inch screen, his anxiety coming through
in high definition. Three organization officers watch with her as they eat sandwiches; Lily is too
tensed to start hers.
“Hey, motivator, didn’t you get him motivated?” kids one of the officers, a genial AfricanAmerican woman named Pam, seated close to her.
“Right,” Lily says. “How about a medal for getting him this far?”
–So tell me Charles—there’s usually some true events that prompt a love story like this. It seems
very personal to me. What happened?
— . . . What happened?
“He’s buying time,” Lily murmurs as Charles pauses and takes a long drink of water. “He’s
going blank. Oh, god.”
–I mean, wasn’t the story prompted by real events? I know you served in Korea, but was there
really a Lily? . . . An instructor who took you under her wing, so to speak? . . . Or would you
rather not say?
–Uh, yes. . . . There was a Lily. Only that wasn’t her real name. I didn’t want to, you know.
“But it’s your real name,” Pam whispers to Lily.
“A matter of luck,” Pam won’t understand what luck she means: that she ended up with a name
she adores, partly thanks to her mother not knowing its source—not until after leaving Charles.
–You didn’t want to what, Charles? To identify her?
–No. Well, maybe. I’m not sure. To spare the family. But she, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t there.
I mean to feel one way or another.”
–Then, that part is true? By the time the book came out, this person had actually, uh . . . I don’t
want to be a spoiler here.
–Well, life already does that, doesn’t it. You could, uh, I guess you could say the book is about
how things get spoiled. Partly about that. How happiness gets taken from us.
–But did the real person you call Lily, the one who helped you overcome certain fears—
–I only overcame them with her. For her. Once she was gone . . . I think they’re still pretty
much with me. Sorry to say.
–So she actually did what the book says? To herself?
–You’re asking did that sweet, beautiful, free spirit . . . did she go off and die alone in some
miserable hole in Rome? Yes, the real Lily took her life there. It . . . . “Whoa,” Pam says.
“Name doesn’t sound so lucky to me.”
–Okay, let’s leave it to your readers find out why. I can see it’s hard for you to talk about.
–I don’t know, I didn’t expect . . . . I mean, it used to be, back when I kept thinking it was
somehow my fault.
–You still think about her today?
–Well, I’m doing so right now. Oh, hell. . . . I wasn’t going to get into . . . I’m sorry.
“God, I think he’s crying. Get a grip, Daddy, please! Look at his eyes. Where is this coming
from? He never cries.”
–You all right, Charles? I didn’t mean to . . . Why don’t you take a moment? I think our viewers
see that this is an extremely emotional story. About finding and losing someone who—I don’t
know, your soul mate, that first deep connection. It’s a sad song, in a way, about real people. I
teared up myself to tell the truth. And I’m a doggone hard case.
“God bless you, Gallagher,” Lily sighs. “He’s covering for him.”
–So, Charles—you’re okay? Good. I have to ask you: You write this great book when you’re
young, it gets published—now it’s headed for the bestseller lists— and as I understand it you
never wrote anything again. This isn’t the usual pattern, is it?
–I don’t know. I didn’t have the so-called writing bug. I just had something I needed to tell. And
then I didn’t have anything else worth writing about.
–Well that hasn’t stopped a whole lot of writers, has it? . . . We’re talking to local author
Charles Featheroff, whose novel Breath of Love takes place between the Beat and Hippie
generations, when Charles came back from the Korean war. A New York Times critic calls the
book, quote, one of the most heart-tugging campus love stories to come out of that era, and I
have to agree. A final question, Charles, before our time is up: Could this story have happened
outside its time? Could it happen today?
“Come on, Dad—you don’t have to search your notes for the answer. What’s he doing?”
“He’s writing something on his notes.”
–I . . . I’ll have to go think about that.
“He’s showing the notes to Gallagher,” Pam observes. “Sort of strange.”
“No—I know that look. He’s has to pee. Oh, Dad.”
–Good enough, Charles—and it looks like we have to think about a break. Thank you so much
for stopping by and sharing your feelings with us. When we come back . . .
“He’s getting out of the chair. Dad, you can’t . . . ”
“Man in a hurry,” says Pam as a pharmaceutical ad comes on. “He did great.”
“Well, that was different,” Gallagher tell Charles. “Strong stuff, though. Sorry I didn’t realize,
you, uh . . . ”
“No, no, I appreciate . . . ” Charles shakes his hand quickly and heads off the set, briefcase held
over his crotch. Gallagher motions for Carol, the PA, mouthing the words: men’s room.
“Very moving,” says Nora the pet-crafts guest as he hurries past her in the foyer. Carol shows
him to the nearest men’s room and Charles races to the urinal for the slow process of relieving
himself.
Back in the corridor he switches on his mobile. Two missed calls already from Lily and a text
from his editor. The text says,Cheering you here. The crying bit was just marvelous. Today
Show, here we come!
“Dad, I don’t want you to go through this anymore,” Lily tells him when he calls her back. “It
was wonderfully affecting, but what are you going to do—cry every time?”
“It’s okay, sweetheart. Funny, I don’t know why it happened. The nervousness, I guess. My
editor thinks it’s the big breakthrough.”
“Yeah, really. You’d actually do another show?”
“I don’t know. I did kind of get through this one.”
“With flying tears. Maybe the next time you can pee on camera.”
He laughs. “I’m moving up to diapers. It’s time.”
“That Depends, har har.
“Hardee har. And how is your day going?”
“Great. They love me.”
“Wonderful. I love you, too, Lily.”
“And I love my celebrity dad. Anyway, gotta get back. We’ll talk tonight
if you’re still talking to nobodies.”
“I’ll consider it,” he says, but she’s already off the line. He wonders if he should contact his
editor to get that “Today Show” idea right out of her head. Does he need another hundred nights
of cold sweat? Another now-ridiculous breakdown before a mass audience? He is inclined, as he
leaves the studio building and breathes in the scent of mown grass, to embrace the life he has,
Brobdingnagian prostate and all; to talk things over with Lily, see what she thinks about
forfeiting the big bucks—the money arising, after all, from the tragedy of the other “Lily.” He
invokes her real name: Madeline. Maddie, he called her Oh, Maddie.
Jan Ramming
DANCE LESSONS
George grappled with the remote control, trying to read the tiny goddamn print on the buttons,
unable to hold it up close enough to his face since it was secured with a thick, black wire to the
side of his hospital bed. Finally he located the power button and the screen on the little TV that
tilted precariously over the far corner of his bed went black. The Tigers were losing, again.
They’d been playing lousy for a few weeks already. Those slackers had nothing on the Bless
You Boys—Whittaker, Gibson, Trammel—the guys who took the team to the Series. How long
had it been—1984? He felt too tired to do the math. The pitching was off this year. It had to be
the pitching. They had thrown themselves into a losing streak.
“Time for your pills, Mr. Brinkhammer.”
George sat up. He hadn’t noticed the day nurse come in. She was a new one, in a bright pink
smock, navy blue pants, and running shoes. When did nurses start wearing such crazy get-ups?
Her hair fell over her shoulders in long braids, like some flower child from the sixties. By golly,
the last time he stepped foot in a hospital, the nurses were wearing white dresses and little hats,
their hair tucked away in tight buns. They looked respectable, back then. But this one, she looked
like she should be teaching kindergarten. And bossy too, with her hands on her hips—not a drop
of compassion. He scowled at her.
“Those things just make me tired, and I don’t wanna sleep right now. I haven’t got that long, you
know,” he squawked. “I’ve got the cancer, didn’t they tell you that? Didn’t you read my chart?”
He fumbled with the blanket to cover himself.
“I can’t leave you alone until you take your pills, Mr. Brinkhammer. But I can get you some
apple juice if you’d rather take them that way.” She waited, smiling, and shook the little paper
cup full of pills in his face. Her fingernails were painted purple.
“I don’t want any apple juice, woman.” He crossed his arms.
“Well, what else can I do for you then?” She stepped back and took a good look at him.
George grunted. “How about putting the Tigers in the World Series and finding a cure for me?”
“I’ll see what I can do, Mr. B.” She held out the cup. “Take your pills, or I’m going to put the
game back on and make you watch every last homer by the Blue Jays.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You’ve been watching?”
She winked at him. “We have a TV in the lounge. I’ve been passing by it as often as I can. The
Tigers could sure use some help with the pitching, and they look like they couldn’t hit a ball if
you threw it underhand to ‘em.” She reached over and drew the window curtain back, letting the
harsh afternoon sun fall on George’s scrawny white legs.
He perked up a little, taking the pill cup from her and shaking it into his gaping mouth, then
taking some water through a straw. She smiled at him.
“Atta boy, Mr. B.” She patted him on the back and turned to leave just as Margaret walked in.
Sweet, normal Margaret. George needed her stability. Nurse Crazy Clothes and the rest of the
brightly dressed characters on his floor made him feel like he was in the circus. The women
nodded at each other and passed, like the changing of the guard. George watched as his wife
stopped to take a deep breath and put on a happy face for him. His momentary joy turned to
aggravation. He didn’t want her to be his boppy cheerleader. He grunted a hello and thought
about turning the game back on. See if she could take a hint.
“Hello, my love. How are you feeling today?” She studied him up and down, just as the nurse
had, but he could read her better. He saw the truth in her eyes, the way the corners frowned at
him. They told him he didn’t have long. They told him Margaret knew. He softened.
“The Tigers are down by 6, and my nurse is a pill pusher. How are you?” He puckered up for
kiss, and she plopped her sturdy frame sideways on the bed, leaning over to meet his lips in a
quick smooch.
“I’m sure they’re just trying to keep you comfortable, dear.” She fluffed up his pillow for him.
“I’m tired of all the tests and diagnoses and prognoses. They should just bring me some cyanidelaced applesauce and be done with me.”
“You don’t mean that.” Margaret patted his arm.
“Maybe I do,” he said quietly.
“But George—“
“Who knows what the cancer’s going to do to me, Margaret? Sometimes I’m afraid to find out.”
She took his hand, smiled stiffly. “I’ll be right here with you, dear. We’ll face it together.”
“That’s what I mean, Margaret. This might be too hard to handle for the both of us.”
She shook her head and widened her eyes at him. “The doctor said you should be able to come
home tomorrow, and I’ve made some plans for us.” She smiled more sincerely then and pulled a
brochure out of her pocketbook.
“They’re letting me go home?” George wasn’t sure if this was such good news. The doctor had
said they would try some new treatments on him, but there were no guarantees. The cancer was
too advanced. Maybe there was nothing else they could do for him after all. Maybe they were
just sending him home to die. He took the brochure from Margaret. It was from the Martingale
Dance Studio.
His brow furrowed in confusion. “You’re taking dance lessons?”
“No, we are, George. I signed us up for a six-week class for couples. Isn’t it exciting?”
“But the doctor said—”
“Doctors! What do they know? I really think that if we take this class we might be able to loosen
up and have some fun. You’ve always been light on your feet, George.” She nuzzled him with
her shoulder.
“Heh.” He caught himself smiling at an old memory of swinging a younger Margaret around a
dance hall. He chuckled.
“So let’s do it. I already put down a deposit. And you can sit and rest any time you get tired. I
told them you haven’t been feeling well.”
“I’ve got the cancer, Margaret.”
“Look what it says, George.” She pointed to the brochure. “We can learn ballroom style, Latin,
salsa, swing, tango, or night club!”
“Night club?”
“Sure! And then we can go over to that disco down the street and show off our stuff.” She rocked
her round hips back and forth on the bed, making him bounce.
He shook his head at her, but what else did he have to look forward to besides doctors’
appointments and experimental treatments? The pills started taking effect, and he yawned, laying
his head back on the pillow, a smile lingering on his lips. She had won, again. He knew he
couldn’t fight her with what little strength he had left, so he gave in and let himself get carried
away in her crazy optimism.
“I better rest up then, Margaret. Sounds like we’ll busy for a while.”
They had met decades ago at a dance. He had noticed how pretty she was, full-bodied, and how
she was always smiling. That smile of hers had knocked him over and picked him back up again.
She hadn’t been dancing with anyone all night and didn’t look like she even came with a fella.
He asked her girlfriend for her name, and at the last song, he swatted at his butterflies and
approached her.
“Margaret, would you give me the honor of a dance, please?” and held out his hand, hoping she
wouldn’t mind a fella with big ears, the left one even bigger than the right, if you stared. At least
he could dance.
“How did you know my name,” she asked him.
“An angel told me,” he said, waiting for her smile.
“Oh, really?” She raised an eyebrow. Her girlfriend smiled and waved. “Well, she’s no angel,”
Margaret said, leaning in to him, lowering her voice “and neither am I.”
George didn’t know what to say, and she giggled at him. That smile. He swung her around the
dancehall as gracefully as he could manage, holding her close, breathing her in, his eyes locked
on her cherry lips, and all he could think about was how much he wanted to taste them. After he
walked her home, she gave him the opportunity. And after that, he never left her side, other than
to sleep and work. He adored her, and six months later offered her a shiny diamond ring in
exchange for having to put up with him forever. It was the first time he saw her cry.
They were the oldest couple in the dance class, by at least 40 years, George reckoned, but that
wouldn’t slow them down. He worried that maybe the cancer would. The new pills he was taking
made his tongue swell, and he had wanted to skip class. Margaret wouldn’t hear of it.
“YOLO, George,” she said, patting on some makeup.
“Yo-low?”
“You only live once.”
“Cancer thuckth,” he mumbled, getting his shoes on.
“What’s that, dear?”
“Nothing. I’m coming.”
He caught sight of himself in the mirrors that lined the wall of the dance studio and straightened
his posture. There. He sucked in his small gut and looked ten years younger. It was all about the
posture, the young instructor said. That guy didn’t even look old enough to shave, George
thought. He imagined himself with hair again, muscles. He’d show those kids.
Margaret wore a tight top and a silky skirt that he hadn’t seen before. The skirt’s layers floated in
the air when he twirled her. He couldn’t stop watching them rise up and slowly slide down the
backs of her thighs. He felt his manliness expanding in his drawers—she could still do it to him.
He worked in as many twirls as he could.
“Stop it, George, I’m getting dizzy,” she said, trying to swat him and missing, almost falling on
the wood floor.
He took hold of her and tangoed past the couple on their right, an awkward fella with two left
feet. His girlfriend let out a yelp as the fella stepped on her toes. George waved and waltzed
Margaret to the left around two other couples who were hanging on to each other, staring at their
own feet, trying to get the steps right. He was on a roll.
Dancing made George feel strong again, dashing even, and it was just the thing to bring him
back to life. Margaret seemed younger too; her face let go of some of the worry wrinkles. After a
while, the whole class stopped to watch them, so he tipped Margaret back in a dip. Not an easy
task, since she outweighed him by several pounds, but George pulled it off. Margaret even raised
her arm dramatically. The other couples clapped as he pulled her to her feet, and she beamed at
him.
“Bravo,” said the instructor.
“Thee you nekth week,” said George.
But he was terribly worn out the next day, barely able to climb out of bed, his legs too feeble to
hold his fluttering weight, his arms too weak to lift his toothbrush. He looked at himself,
hunched over in front of the bathroom mirror. His grey hair had fallen out, and his face was a
mass of sagging skin with hollow eyes. At least his tongue wasn’t swollen any more.
Who was he trying to kid? He was an old man with a serious disease. He had no business being
out on the dance floor again. He’d embarrassed himself, and Margaret too, trying to act like a
stud. Trying to keep up. Trying to seem healthy. Bah! Margaret would have to understand. He
was a sick old man. She’d been so thrilled the night before that he’d summoned enough energy
for a little hanky-panky. He’d felt like Superman, but the cancer was his kryptonite. He had to
respect it. It was stronger than he was, and it was taking him down.
He and Margaret had been married 51 years when they found out about the cancer. He’d been
feeling kind of weak and more tired than he should have and had been losing weight, his pants
falling off of him. Margaret nagged him to see the doctor, but when they got the news, they both
wished he hadn’t. He knew she was as scared as he was, but she’d never admit it. She was trying
to be strong for him, cooking his favorite pot roast to fatten him up, pretending his nausea was
just a bug. She tried to make it seem like it was all no big deal, and he loved her even more for it.
But he was done dancing.
She found him sulking in the bathroom.
“Nonsense,” she told him. “You’ll be fine in a day. Our next lesson isn’t until Tuesday.”
“I might not make it that long.” He limped over to the tub and sat down on the side of it.
“Don’t be dramatic, George. Try some of my bath salts; they’re good for sore muscles.” She
spritzed something flowery-smelling on her neck and smiled. “I’m signing us up for salsa
lessons next.”
“Look at me, Margaret. I can’t even stand up.”
“And afterward, we can go to the salsa club downtown and boogie.” She spun herself in front of
the sink.
“Another class, my ass. He rubbed his sore legs. “I can’t do it.”
“Sure you can.” She flounced in front of him.
“Dammit, Margaret, listen to me for once! I’m dying!”
She stopped and dropped her arms. Turned away from him.
“You’re not. You’re fine.”
“I’ve got the cancer, and it’s eating me up. Don’t you get it? I’ve got nothing to dance about, and
I’m sick of pretending for you.”
She whipped around and faced him again. “You’re pretending for me? Were you pretending last
night? Because it was—we were—“. She caught her breath. “It was real. You were fine. Damn
you, George. Don’t give up! Stand up and fight this!” She pounded her fist into her other hand.
“Make sure they give you a refund for those classes when I kick the bucket.”
She reached for her hairbrush, threw it in his direction, and left the room.
They could never stay mad at each other for very long. By evening they were snuggling again,
working the crossword puzzle together, after he told her it wasn’t all pretending, hehe, and she
said she didn’t mean to throw her hairbrush at him. By Tuesday, George felt better, except for an
itchy rash on his chest, probably caused by the goddamn meds again. He knew Margaret
wouldn’t stand for his dropping out, so he scratched his way through class. The cross-eyed guy
with two left feet was actually making some improvement, bounding along with his worriedlooking girlfriend. He threw George a smile, but George didn’t reciprocate. He was having
trouble concentrating. Someone bumped him from behind, and he growled a “Watch it!” at them.
The instructor worked in the corner with the youngest couple, a tall redhead with a pierced
eyebrow that gave George the willies and her tattooed boyfriend. Margaret had heard that the
two were getting married soon and were taking lessons so they could dance together at the
reception.
“Let Tyler lead, Brittany.” “Eyes up, Tyler.”
George’s rash seemed to be spreading to his arms and legs. He itched all over and bounced
nervously to the music. Even Margaret sensed that something was wrong.
“Are you OK, dear? You seem a little antsy.”
His neck felt hot and swollen, and his breathing came in wheezes. His brains sloshed around in
his head, and the dizziness made him stumble. A curtain was coming down over his eyes. The
music stopped, and he heard the instructor shouting.
“Somebody! Quick! Call 911!”
Waking up in the hospital was the last thing he wanted, aside from not waking up at all. Margaret
sat in the chair beside his bed, playing Scrabble on her cell phone. The room smelled
antisepticky. The machine they had him hooked up to blipped and hummed. The doctor’s tone
was low and serious. He wore checkered golf pants under his white coat.
“I’m afraid the treatment regiment isn’t working, Mr. Brinkhammer. You’ve had an allergic
reaction, so we’re discontinuing the medication.”
“But what about the cancer?”
“I’m afraid there’s nothing else we can do.” The doctor patted George’s shoulder and turned to
Margaret.
“Just try and keep him comfortable,” he told her. “Enjoy your days together.”
Margaret put her phone in her pocketbook and stared at her hands. George swallowed loudly.
“I’ll take a look at my will. Make sure it’s in order,” he said quietly. Margaret wouldn’t look up.
George waited. Swallowed again.
“I’ll get you a new pair of trousers for dance class. You tore the knee on the old ones when you
fell.” She picked a piece of fuzz from her dress.
“Margaret.”
She looked up. “You just need to dance, George. It worked. It really did. We were young again!”
Her eyes weren’t even watery, and she smiled wide for him. He’d seen her cry through the birth
of their daughter and every wedding anniversary and birthday, but she hadn’t yet shed a tear
about the cancer. It frustrated him. He wanted her to let go, let him comfort her, but he didn’t
know how to say it or how to do it.
“OK dear, we’ll keep dancing, if that’s what you want.” He patted the sheets next to him and
lifted up the blanket for her. She nudged him over gently and crawled in, weighing down her side
so that George rolled into her. She put her arm around him and he slept.
In the Night Club Class, they learned disco, hip-hop, and modern. George would have thought
that he could dance his way right past his expiration date, except that he could feel the weight of
it coming down on him. He could feel it taking control, leaving him weary, with a tired so deep
that it owned him. It made him angry, the simple things he couldn’t do anymore, like bending
over to tie his shoes or lifting his leg over the side of the tub. Margaret bought him loafers, and
helped him into the shower every night. He’d eventually taken to using a cane when he walked.
He could lean on Margaret when they danced, but he knew he wouldn’t last forever.
He called his lawyer to go over his will. He’d leave his baseball card collection to his freckled
grandson, Jake. He’d only gotten to take him the ballpark once, a double-header against St.
Louis, but the boy never fidgeted. He’d be in middle school next year.Next year. George’s throat
turned too dry to swallow.
Meanwhile, Margaret remained stoic and cheerful. He spent his days thinking of ways to break
her.
“I think I’d like you to have my body cremated, Margaret,” he told her one morning during toast
and coffee. “I don’t think I want our friends gawking at me in the casket when I’m dead, saying
how thin I look, how frail. Poor George. Sheesh.” He rolled his eyes and took a slurp from his
steaming mug, while the percolator over on the Formica sink burped and hissed.
Margaret sat across from him, poring over the newspaper. Her bathrobe fell open above the
waist, revealing her lacey nightie. He’d barely managed an erection last night, despite all of their
efforts. She had even tossed his boxers in the dryer for a few minutes to warm them up, while
they shared a glass of Martini & Rossi. He watched her now take a bite of toast, the crumbs
dropping onto the shelf of her breasts and falling into the abyss between them. She licked her
lips. His pecker twitched. He looked down. Too late, you numb noodle.
““There’s a new dance class I want us to try.” She didn’t even look up from the paper.
“Margaret, who is going to take care of you when I’m gone?”
She set the paper on the table. “I’m sure if anything happened to you, Janice would be here often,
with Jake.” She rose to fill her coffee cup.
“Our Janice? The girl who mailed her hat and put a letter on her head, that one?”
Margaret sat back down with a steamy cup.
“She’s a grown woman now and not nearly as distracted. Besides, look at you, dear, you’re fine.”
He looked back down at his half-swollen pecker and grimaced.
The Tigers managed to make it into the playoffs that summer. With any luck, they’d be back in
the Series, just like in ’84. But George knew he wouldn’t make it that long. He couldn’t stay
awake for more than five innings. On a few mornings, he couldn’t get out of bed, the cancer
holding him down, his legs like dead weights. One morning, he drifted in and out of sleep, while
Margaret rose and made some toast and coffee and came back to the bedroom to check on him.
She crept up on him. His body was still, his face frozen in a peaceful expression, his chest silent,
not rising and falling in breaths. She said nothing at first, just held his hand.
“You can’t go, George. You just can’t.” Her tears splashed down on his face.
He opened one eye. “Enough with the dance classes, Margaret. Are you trying to kill me?”
She jumped back, and he grabbed her hands so she wouldn’t fall off the bed, but she pulled him
down with her. And there was her smile, lighting up her face through her tears. It might be the
last time he’d see her cry, and that single thought made him cry, too. He couldn’t leave her. He
couldn’t leave his dear Margaret.
Jay Todd
GREEN
We were at that old dining table, the one I’d been dragging behind me since college, having
finished our first annual St. Patrick’s Day dinner. I had a half pint of green-tinted beer in front of
me; she had half a plate of corned beef and cabbage in front of her.
We were talking about important things like the tenability of Irish folklore.
Why, do you think, I asked, would anyone ever have believed in little people living amongst the
clover playing all sorts of trickery and creating all sorts of trouble?
Why wouldn’t they believe in such things, she asked.
I lifted the glass to my mouth and sighed: green is not the color of potable things. You can’t be
telling me, I said, you believe leprechauns exist.
You can’t prove to me, she said without pause, they don’t.
By the next St. Patrick’s Day, we would be divorced, irreconcilably so, and I would spend much
time blaming the leprechauns.
Kathryn Watterson
WHAT WAS I SAYING?
I wake up. A young man is on top of me. I feel the rhythm of his body as he fills up the space
inside me with his exuberant thrusts.
The only sound in this darkened room is the young man’s breath, which I soon realize is a
counter-beat to the whish from the hallway, where the oxygen machine is delivering air to the
other residents—especially those who have trouble breathing.
It comes to me, what is happening. I do recall my grown children moving me into a nursing
home. I was assigned to a wing for those who are losing their memories or have already lost
them. I saw old men and women tied to wheelchairs, looking into space, perhaps seeing
something beyond, out in the universe.
I hoped I didn’t look like them.
My children gave me a list about myself: you can’t find the trolley home; you forget what to buy
in the grocery store—you go to buy bread and come home with toothpaste. You leave the stove
on overnight. You leave gas flames burning. You ask a question and get an answer. Ten minutes
later, you ask the same question. Mother, you kiss strangers.
In the midst of all this remembering, I realize that, in the present moment, of which I am
conscious, my body is responding with pleasure to this encounter. It has been some years since I
have engaged in an intimate human exchange, so this juicy feeling and the actual physical
contact comes as something of a surprise. I am moist with excitement. It’s miraculous. I
congratulate myself. How human it is of me to wake up for sex.
It’s so human of you.
I move with abandon, enjoying a refreshment of sexual memory in this moment, separate from
any other and yet linked through time.
Once, during a rendezvous with my Kevin, I looked up into his face and didn’t know who he was.
I knew I knew him and his body well—that much was evident—but his identity, personality and
relationship to me was a blank. I decided to pretend I knew who he was until I found out the
particulars. Later, when it came to me that he was my beloved of thirty years, I worried about
myself.
I started noticing how, at lunches or dinners with family or friends, I’d be in the middle of a
story, and, zap, I’d lose my thread of thought. What was I saying? What was my point? I knew I
was headed somewhere, but where?
I found myself following my fingers with my eyes. I fluttered them in the air—words taking wing,
butterflies lifting, floating away.
My skillful listening also lost its way. Another person, a friend, was telling me something
fascinating, when, wham, I had no idea what he was talking about. I had no context. What
happened before this? Who were the characters? Were they “real” or imagined? The story was
irretrievably sucked away. It disappeared.
If I’d been stoned, my forgetfulness could have been explained. But being or not being stoned
had nothing to do with it. My mind was adjusting its own altitudes, creating hungers in its own
organic garden.
I breathe in the fresh and pleasurable smell of the young man’s musky sweat and spicy
deodorant. For him, I am just a body. I realize that. I also realize that the young man initiated this
sexual act with me because he thought I wouldn’t know the difference. He barely knows I’m
here. So it’s a rape, really. But I’m not thinking of it that way. He’s gentle enough, and, clearly,
he’s in a desperate state of dire human need for contact. I believe I will let the poor man see this
through and find some modicum of relief. It occurs to me that I, too, might let loose, let go, fly
free.
Since I’ve left the conventional human experience and am living on another plane, I give myself
permission to see this through the lens of my own transformation. In no way do I justify rape, but
I am treating this as an opportunity for my own enhancement. I accept that this sexual act might
be my last, or at least my last conscious one, so I am determined not to interrupt until we both are
finished. I hope I make it to the end still awake.
I stir and ride the flow. Electrical charges intensify and fireworks shoot through me, relaxing my
cells—fingertips to toes. I haven’t used my voice, at least not that I recall, for a long time. But
when the young man is lying on me with the wonderful soothing weight men have, like satiated
babies, fully released from all that tension they carry in their bodies—and when I, too, am spent,
with the bonding hormones triggered in my body flowering into nurturing feelings of love—I
speak clearly and easily.
“Well, this has been a nice surprise, Elmer.”
Don’t ask me how I know his name because I can’t remember, but the fact is, I know it. I say, “I
lost track of sex except for when I’m naked and young as a jay-bird. So, I thank you.” I think of
saying, “I like it better being here than in a dream,” but I’m not sure if that is true—since a
dream also happens and you feel it—so I stop speaking.
The young man named Elmer rises up on his elbows and looks at me with the terror of having
been caught, identified and spoken to by a corpse come alive. His big eyes open so wide, they
stick to his eyelids. Something shifts in his face, and I believe that in this moment, he sees me
and realizes my presence as an actual living woman underneath him. I imagine that his mind is
exploding.
He backs away so quickly that he almost forgets to pull out his penis and take it with him. I
squeeze and hold, feeling it go as the rolled edge of the condom, slick with come, slips out of
me. He stands at the end of the bed, pushes his slippery member into his boxer shorts and zips up
his pants.
As he tucks in his shirt, he speaks in a trembling voice. “I’m sorry, Miss T, but, telling you like it
is, you had your legs spread, and I just wanted to put it in a little bit.”
I’m still pensive as I speak again, “It makes me remember other times and places, somewhere
behind me or on the outer edges.” My skin feels satin. Purple and red colors glide around the
young man.
“I know it might sound crazy, but I don’t do this. I don’t have sex with people who haven’t said
okay, but when you spread your legs that way, I….”
“I can’t say I blame you.”
“Somehow I got it into my head that you actually might like it. I know it’s wrong, but I
convinced myself. I’m sorry.”
“I accept that apology. Next time, ask first.”
“You know, I like taking care of you in here. You’re nice. You smile even when you don’t know
how to lift your fork to your mouth.”
“I do? Should I be glad about this?”
“Miss Teagarden, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, and I really, really, really hope you’ve forgotten this
by tomorrow. Please forget all about it.”
His young, earnest expression strikes me funny. I hear my own laughter. “Don’t worry, young
man. I will have forgotten it in five minutes.”
I find that what people call “minutes” or “hours” has nothing to do with time. That clock there?
It has nothing to do with time as I know it. My time is in my mind and beyond it. Without
measure. My kind of time isn’t “time” as I used to make of it. It’s a substance, a vibration. I float
in it. I move through.
I have days I don’t recognize the faces of my beloved children, but I feel their spirits hugging me
when nobody’s looking. Not that anybody would see their spirits if they looked. Living in the
invisible, I forget about the frantic activity of the mind, the striving for purpose, and the desire
for control that I have abandoned.
But then I have days when I see my children and know their names. I know them. I feel them
near me.
I see my son by the ocean, far from here. He’s playing in the sand with his wife and children,
putting flags around the moat of their sand castle. Their sweet sounds of hilarity lift and carry
me. Dionne packs a picnic basket and adds a bottle of wine and a bottle of apple juice. They’re in
their car, coming to visit me.
I sit up in my bed and hear myself laugh out loud along with them.
My daughter Chloe, sitting next to my bed, knitting a turquoise and green cap for me, looks up.
“What’s happening, Mom?”
“Would you mind helping me spiff up for our visitors?”
“Sure thing.” She gets out a brush. “Who’s coming?”
“Your brother Oliver. He’s driving here from the ocean with Dionne and the children. They’re
getting close.”
Chloe holds the brush above my head with her school-marm look. “No, no, Mom. No, no. He’s
on vacation. Oliver’s at the shore. This is only their second day. He’s not coming now. He’s not
arriving for another week. He will be coming then. They’ll all visit you soon.”
Even though she doesn’t believe me, she brushes my hair, which sticks up like chicken feathers.
She dabs a little moisturizer on my face. She shows me a mirror, but I don’t recognize the
woman pictured in it.
“Oliver’s here,” I report to Chloe. “He’s parking the car across the field. Oh, what a nice red
shirt. He’s carrying a picnic basket, Dionne’s carrying a smaller basket, and the kids are carrying
little buckets to show me what they’ve caught. Here they come across the field.”
I float across the field with them, enjoying their banter, the energy linking them one to another
as they walk along.
“Mom, I don’t want you to be disappointed, but they’re not here. You’re imagining it.” Chloe
kisses my cheek and begins knitting again.
She knits and purls half a row before Oliver walks into the room with his sunburned family. He’s
wearing a new red shirt and the children are carrying pails with rocks and little creatures inside
them scratching the sides to get out. Gracie and Jasper holler for me to look at what they have.
Oliver sets down his picnic basket to hug Chloe, while Dionne uncovers banana bread squares
and wraps her arms around me.
Chloe is crying into Oliver’s chest. “I can’t believe it. She saw you coming. Mom even told me
what you were wearing. I don’t understand it. Did you just park and walk across the field? This
is incredible.”
Oliver and Dionne nod yes, and they all begin to compare notes. I’m more interested seeing the
little crabs Gracie and Jasper caught at the beach and listening to how they plan to return them to
their ocean home that night.
My son kisses both my cheeks. “Mom, I hadn’t had a chance to tell you we were going to Cape
May, so I wanted to tell you in person. It seemed a perfect day to see you.”
“I’m so happy you came. I loved that big sand castle, too.”
“The sand castle?”
“And the flags and moats.”
“How….?”
“Sometimes it happens,” I say as I smile at my son.
Then I remember the young man. I add, “Sometimes it’s a little jarring at first.”
I tend not to talk too much about things invisible to ordinary life. It confuses people. Me, too.
Most of the doctors say “hallucinations” are part of The Disease of Alzheimer’s. But what they
call Disease, I call the Door to the Next Stage. If I think about it, this so-called disease is simply
an early exit from the drudge of doing all the counting and keeping track of things before our
bodies die.
Really, who cares if we forget appointments? Or wear diapers? Or can’t remember how to get
dressed or comb our hair? I’m getting over it. My body will catch up to my mind and turn to dust
soon enough. For the Big Exit, not one of us gets to take along our teeth or our glasses. Not even
our eyes. At least now we still have bodies, even when we forget what to do with them. We have
our feelings, and, occasionally, our thoughts. Of course I didn’t choose to lose my mind or to
leave it behind, but I figure, now that I’m here, I’ll notice when I can and see what I find. I’ll
practice my flying and see where I go—without clocks or timing or counting fast and slow.
Literary Bios
Kerry Barner
has lived in London, UK for over 20 years. She is an
editor for an international academic publisher. Her work has appeared in Brand literary
magazine, Notes From The Underground, Anthropology and Humanism, Spilling Ink Review,
The Bicycle Review, the Momaya Annual Review (2012), To Hull and Back Short Story
Anthology (2014) and now happilyRed Savina Review. In 2011 she co-founded The Short Story
competition and now runs it solo: www.theshortstory.net.
*
Roy Bentley
has received fellowships from the NEA, the Florida
Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Ohio Arts Council. Stories and poems have appeared in The
Southern Review, Shenandoah, Pleiades, Blackbird, North American Review, Prairie
Schooner and elsewhere. Books include Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama, 1986), Any One
Man (Bottom Dog, 1992), The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine, 2006),
and Starlight Taxi (Lynx House 2013). He has taught creative writing and composition for over
20 years at colleges throughout the Midwest and in south Florida. These days, Bentley teaches at
Georgian Court University and lives in Barnegat, New Jersey with his wife Gloria.
*
Julia Blake
lives in Washington, D.C. and is an adjunct faculty member
in both an English department and a Mental Health Counseling program. She earned her MFA in
Fiction at Spalding University. Her work has been published in Soundings Review and is
forthcoming in Spry Literary Journal.
*
Ace Boggess
is the author of two books of poetry: The Prisoners (Brick
Road Poetry Press, 2014) and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled (Highwire
Press, 2003). His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Rattle, J Journal, River Styx, Atlanta
Review, and many other journals, with new work forthcoming in North Dakota
Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review and others.
*
Mark Connelly’s fiction appeared in Indiana Review, Cream City Review, The Ledge, The
Great American Literary Magazine, and Digital Papercut. He received an Editor’s Choice
Award in Carve Magazine’s Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. In 2005 Texas Review Press
published his novella Fifteen Minutes, which received the Clay Reynolds Prize.
*
Darren C. Demaree
is the author of As We Refer to Our Bodies (8th
House, 2013), Temporary Champions (Main Street Rag, 2014), and Not For Art Nor
Prayer (8th House, 2015). He is the managing editor of the Best of the Net
Anthology. Demaree is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
*
Allen Forrest was born in Canada and bred in the United States. He works in many mediums:
oil painting, computer graphics, theater, digital music, film, and video. Forrest studied acting at
Columbia Pictures in Los Angeles, digital media in art and design at Bellevue College, receiving
degrees in Web Multimedia Authoring and Digital Video Production. He has created cover art
and illustrations for many literary publications including New Plains
Review, Pilgrimage Press, The MacGuffin, Blotterature, and Under the Gum Tree. His paintings
have been commissioned and are on display in the Bellevue College Foundation’s permanent art
collection.
*
James Hanna
is a former prison counselor and probation officer. As a
probation officer, he worked in a domestic violence and stalking unit. James’ stories have
appeared in many journals and have received three Pushcart nominations. His novels, The
Siege and Call Me Pomeroy, are available on Amazon.
*
Gavin Van Horn
forages for stories and builds cairns with what he
finds. He works for the Center for Humans and Nature (humansandnature.org) and is the coeditor of City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness (University of Chicago
Press, 2015). Many writing ideas are simmering in his head.
*
Nearly 200 of Sandra Kolankiewicz’s
poems and stories have appeared
in journals over the past thirty-five years, featured in such places as Mississippi Review, North
American Review, Confrontation, Gargoyle, Rhino, Prick of the Spindle, Cortland Review,
Fifth Wednesday, Louisville Review, and in the anthologies Sudden Fiction and Four Minute
Fiction. Her chapbook Turning Inside Out won the Black River Chapbook Competition at
Black Lawrence Press. Blue Eyes Don’t Cry won the Hackney Award for the Novel. The Way
You Will Go is available from Finishing Line Press. She teaches at a community college in
West Virginia.
*
Gregory Koop grew up on the border of central Alberta and Saskatchewan. Living the life of
Garp, Gregory cares for his daughter, practices Muay Thai, and writes. A past finalist for an
Alberta Literary Award, Gregory has also been a resident of The Banff Centre’s Writing Studio.
His work has been featured in Carte Blanche, Drunk Monkeys, The Nashwaak Review, Other
Voices Journal of the Literary and Visual Arts, paperplates, and Raving: The Raving Poets
Magazine. He is currently polishing a novel through the support of a WGA Mentorship Grant.
*
Amy Krohn
lives in an old brick house in rural Wisconsin with her
three young children and her dairy-farmer husband. Even with important motherly
responsibilities, she says “God has provided her time to write and read.” Her book of short
stories, A Flower in the Heart of the Painting, was published by (Wiseblood Books, 2013).
*
Sarah Lilius
currently lives in Arlington, Virginia with her husband and
two sons. She’s assistant editor for ELJ Publications. Her publication credits include the Denver
Quarterly, Court Green, BlazeVOX, Bluestem, and The Lake. Lilius is the author of the
chapbook What Becomes Within (ELJ Publications, 2014). Visit her website: sarahlilius.com.
*
Brandon Marlon
is a creative writer from Ottawa, Canada. He received
his B.A. (Hon.) in Drama and English from the University of Toronto and his M.A. in English
from the University of Victoria. brandonmarlon.com.
*
Michael McGuire’s
stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The
Paris Review (x2), Hudson Review, New Directions in Prose & Poetry (x2), etc. His plays have
been done by the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Mark Taper Forum of Los Angeles, and
many other theatres, and are published by Broadway Play Publishing. One, La frontera, set in the
same world as the stories, won the $10,000. International Prism Competition. The Scott
Fitzgerald Play, University of Missouri Press, a Breakthrough Book chosen by Joy Williams, is
now available as an Author’s Guild Backinprint edition. Both playbooks are also available on
Kindle. His collections have been finalists in the Drue Heinz and Flannery O’Connor
competitions. He is a member of the Authors Guild, the Dramatists Guild and Pen America.
*
Marlene Olin was born in Brooklyn, raised in Miami, and educated at the University of
Michigan. She recently completed her first novel. Her short stories have been published in Emrys
Journal, Upstreet Magazine, Biostories, Vine Leaves, Arcadia, Poetica, The Jewish Literary
Journal, Poydras Review, Ragazine, Edge and The Saturday Evening Post online. Stories are
forthcoming in Meat for Tea and The Broken Plate.
*
Gregg J. Orifici
is an MFA student and international educator at the
University of New Hampshire. With a neglected law degree from Vanderbilt University, Orifici
has lived and worked in Europe and across the United States, and travels whenever possible. He
plants trees and gardens obsessively and has lost his heart too many times to count. Fascinated
by misunderstanding, longing and serendipity, he writes poetry and essays.
*
Arthur Plotnik
is the author of eight books, including Spunk & Bite: A
Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style and The Elements of Expression, a featured
selections of the Book-of-the-Month-Club when published. An award-winning author also of
articles, fiction, and poetry, he served as editorial director for the American Library Association.
He lives in Chicago. Website: artplotnik.com
*
Jan Ramming
was a freelance journalist until she decided to write her
own stories. Her work has appeared in Bohemia Journal, Gravel Magazine, and Pithead Chapel.
*
Stan Sanvel Rubin has work forthcoming in The National Poetry Review, Hubbub and The
Laurel Review. His fourth full-length collection, There. Here., was published in Fall by Lost
Horse Press (2013) . He lives on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state.
*
Robert Joe Stout has written about Mexico for a variety of publications, including America, The
American Scholar and Notre Dame Magazine. He was a member of two Rights Action
emergency human rights delegations to Oaxaca and continues to live there. His books
include Hidden Dangers (Sunbury Press, 2014) and Why Immigrants Come to
America (Praeger, 2007).
*
Jay Todd
studied writing with Frederick Barthelme and Mary Robison at
the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and now teaches at Xavier
University of Louisiana. His fiction has appeared in journals such as the Southern California
Review, the Chicago Quarterly Review, Fiction Weekly, and 971 Magazine.
*
Krista Varela
received her MFA from Saint Mary’s College of
California, where she is now a lecturer. Varela is a contributing editor for The East Bay
Review and occasionally writes for Booma: The Bookmapping Project. She was awarded first
place in Toasted Cheese Literary Journal’s A Midsummer Tale narrative contest (2014).
*
Cady Vishniac is a former human statue and current copy editor studying creative writing at
UMass Boston. She has work out in Literary Orphans and Sporklet, among others, and was a
finalist for Cutthroat’s Rick DeMarinis Short Story Award (2014).
*
Kathryn Watterson
has written eight books, three of which have been
named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times. She’s also written articles, essays
and stories, which have appeared in TriQuarterly, Fourth Genre, The Santa Monica Review and
other publications, including The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. She’s
been teaching Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania since 2003.