The Wounded Stork

This story won the 2024 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.

The dead bird on the front-door step was a barn swallow. Makhosi recognized the copper face and glossy blue hood that continued towards a forked tail. Its clawed feet were tucked together, as if it had been arranged there. 

It was early and the morning rush had not yet begun, but already the air was unseasonably warm. London, Hotter Than Athens, the newspaper declared. Makhosi glanced up and down the street, as if the mystery of the bird’s appearance could be solved somewhere along their Victorian terrace. The city was hazy with heat. Plane trees lined the pavement, their new leaves, vivid and green, arching against the bleached sky. A black cab idled outside number sixteen and distant traffic rolled like an unseen ocean, punctuated by a muffled yap-yap-yap from behind their neighbor’s door. 

“Did the paper come?” Simon nudged alongside her in the doorway. He had tucked his tie away between the top buttons of his collared shirt and carried Jabu in the crook of an elbow. With his dark skin and blonde curls, their son was the perfect, beautiful combination of his South African mother and British father.

“There’s a dead swallow,” Makhosi said and crouched over the bird. Its open eye was as flat and black as a papaya pip.

“Don’t touch,” Simon said and shifted Jabu around his hip, putting his body between the dead bird and the boy. “Lice."

Makhosi tucked her hands into her lap. She’d felt the unexpected softness of a dead bird before. Some time during a barefoot school holiday on her grandmother’s farm in Zululand. Light bones beneath the feathers. 

“Probably flew into the window.” Simon tilted his head towards the transom window above their front door where the numbers one and three were sandblasted in the center. 

When they’d first viewed the house and Makhosi had expressed reluctance at living at an unlucky number, Simon had dismissed her superstition as “an old wives’ tale.” She knew it was considered good fortune for a barn swallow to nest in your house, but thought better than to wonder out loud what a dead one might portend. She looked up, trying to imagine the trajectory of the small body’s sudden, unconscious drop.

“But it’s perfect, as if it’s been positioned. What if someone rang its neck and left it here?”

“Who on earth would do a thing like that, Max?” There was an edge to his voice. 

Dread prickled the back of her neck as Makhosi’s eyes travelled down the row of quiet windows overlooking their street. “I don’t know.”

Simon snapped a stick off the wisteria that draped above the front door and poked the swallow. The jab rolled the bird onto its back. Its neck came to rest at an unnatural angle, exposing the soft triangle of its chin.

“Broken,” he said, as if settling an argument, and handed Jabu to Makhosi. “I’ll get a bag.” He carried the newspaper down the hallway. 

Barefoot, Makhosi took the boy up the path to the front gate. As a child, she would watch the high migratory V’s of birds arriving in South Africa each spring, and wonder about the vast northern world they’d traveled from. She’d imagine silent fields of snow running to the horizon like the yellow veld that flowed in all directions across the hills around her grandmother’s farm. Now, from her home in the London suburbs, Makhosi watched the swallows’ seasonal arrival and wondered if they felt regret at leaving the wide blue breath of Africa’s horizons.

This swallow would have flown thousands of miles across the Sahara, via Morocco into eastern Spain, and across the Pyrenees to summer in England. Makhosi glanced back at the bird. The air-bound creature lay incongruous against the earth. It didn’t seem right to simply dispose of the body. It deserved a proper burial. Somewhere in the small garden at the back of their house. Her oasis. Her mother, used to the more expansive suburbs of Johannesburg, referred to London backyards as “postage stamps,” and theirs was no exception, which was precisely why Makhosi loved it. It was neat and manageable, and every plant was there because of a decision she’d made, action she’d taken, and work she’d done. The accident of the swallow’s death and decay should be worth something to the life of a plant, or the soil.

Resolved, Makhosi turned back up the path just as Simon returned with a hand brush and a plastic shopping bag. He bent over the swallow and with a single, surgical movement, swept the bird into the bag and knotted the handles, once, then twice.

The unwelcome image of the bright body decaying to a slow liquid stench inside a sweaty plastic bag flared in her mind. “I was going to bury it!” She was embarrassed by the sudden emotion.

“Now you won’t have to.” Simon moved towards the bins. The bins that would bake in the heat for three days until the garbage men came. He lifted the lid and tossed the lightly weighted bag inside. It landed with a hollow thunk as another swallow darted out from the eaves of their house. 

~

Jabu sat on the kitchen floor constructing a cityscape of mismatched Tupperware tubs and lids and cups.

“Swallows migrate to South Africa,” Makhosi said as she tore a banana loose.

Simon pumped soap into his palms and scrubbed his hands. “Sounds like wishful thinking.”

She peeled the banana and pushed a fork through the flesh. “Let’s move.”

“I thought you loved this house.” Simon dried his hands on a dishtowel.    

“I love it because you love it.” Makhosi added a spoonful of vanilla yoghurt to the mashed banana and blended the two together. “It’s not the house, it’s more…” she waved the fork in expanding circles, trying to encapsulate the street, the neighborhood, the town, the whole country, “… I don’t know.” She thought of the watchful windows and the dead swallow. A nut of dread rooted in her chest.

“It takes time, Maxie.”

“It’s not a question of time.” 

“What is it then?”

“I feel different. I sound different. I am different.” Makhosi and her words ran out of steam. They’d had this conversation before. “It’s hard for me to explain to someone like you.”                   

“Someone like me?” Simon said under his breath. Then, more loudly, “If you can’t explain, how can I fix it?”

“I don’t expect you to fix anything.”

Makhosi opened the cutlery drawer and piano’ed her fingers across the selection of teaspoons within. Someone like me. She wore her skin, Simon lived in his. But she hadn’t meant to highlight their differences, she only wanted him to recognize how at home he was in the place where she felt lonely. She was a new mother, with a relatively new partner in a new country. She watched other mothers meet for coffee on the local high street, their babies like happy extensions of themselves. They made it look easy. Out of the noise of metal spoons, Makhosi selected the blue plastic spoon Jabu favored. She lifted him onto the kitchen counter, positioned herself in front of him, and offered him scoops of banana and yogurt.

Simon’s phone buzzed.

“I’d better go.” He pulled Makhosi into his chest and pressed his lips against her temple, then stooped to straighten his tie in the reflection of the oven door. “I wish you’d put him in his chair.” He nudged the feeding chair towards Makhosi with his foot.

“He doesn’t like being strapped in.” 

“It’s not safe.” Simon’s phone buzzed again, and his thumbs replied.

“We prefer it this way, nê, Jabu?” Makhosi blew a raspberry on the sole of Jabu’s foot. He squealed and grabbed for the spoon.

“If he’s in the chair he can learn to feed himself.”

“Okay, Simon. You do it.” Makhosi put the bowl down and stepped away. 

Released from his mother’s ballast, Jabu scooted forward to reach for the spoon.

Simon lunged across the counter. “Christ, Max!” He scooped the boy up and carried him to the feeding chair. Jabu arched his back and began to scream, slamming the spoon—slimy with banana and yoghurt—onto Simon’s tie and clean shirt.

“Fuck!”

“I told you, he doesn’t like it.”

Simon handed the squirming child to Makhosi and snatched a dish towel to mop at his clothes. He unknotted his tie and threw it in the direction of the washing machine. “I’m going to miss my train.” He thumped upstairs. 

“Thula, baba, thula,” Makhosi crooned until the boy quietened. She put him on the floor and handed him the spoon.

Makhosi and Simon had met when he’d travelled to South Africa to get experience in the trauma center at Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg, where Makhosi worked as a junior nurse. She’d been asked to show the group of young English doctors around the hospital, which had progressed to her showing them around the nightspots of the city, and after working late one night, happily acquainting Simon and his pale, enthusiastic body, with the inside of her bedroom. He’d tugged her dress above her hips and she’d twisted his tie over his shoulder and unbuttoned his shirt until nothing was between them. He’d moved into her flat, and when his work visa expired, he’d asked her to come home to London with him.

Simon’s phone buzzed face down on the kitchen counter. Makhosi flipped it over as a text from Catherine lit up his screen.

– Ready to go? –

Catherine lived next door and was a pharmacist at the hospital where Simon worked. She was one of those girls who liked to be the prettiest in the room. Catherine flirted with men, not because she wanted them, but because she wanted to know that they wanted her. 

Simon came downstairs buttoning a fresh shirt, with a clean tie draped around his neck. 

Makhosi held up his phone. “Your girlfriend is waiting.”

The mention of their neighbor tuned them both in to the persistent yapping coming from behind the shared wall of their terrace.

“When did she get a dog?” Simon asked.

“Not sure, but it barked all day yesterday.”

He accepted his phone from Makhosi. “She’s applying for a new position and asked me to give her a few pointers.”

“I’m sure she’d love a few pointers from you,” Makhosi said, turning to the dishwasher.

Simon pulled her towards him from behind and slipped his hands under her t-shirt. She sucked in her stomach, conscious of how her body had softened since pregnancy.

“Don’t do that,” he breathed into her neck. “I’m sorry for being a prick.”

“Jabu is safe with me.”

“I know. Of course I know that. I’m sorry.” He ran his hands down to her hips and Makhosi moved against him. 

“Not fair,” he groaned. “I really have to go.”

~           

Barking followed Catherine out of her front door as Makhosi kissed Simon goodbye at the gate. She was a petite woman. Well-groomed with make-up neatly applied and her bobbed hair freshly blow-dried. Makhosi was abruptly aware of her own unbrushed hair and the baggy t-shirt she preferred to sleep in, now smeared with Jabu’s breakfast. She tugged at the hem, conscious of her loose breasts beneath the thin fabric.

“Hi, Jamie,” Catherine used the anglicized version of their son’s name which Simon said, “made things easier.”

The little boy offered Catherine his spoon. She smiled and gently pushed his hand away. “You’re such a good mom, Max.”

How would you know? Makhosi thought, but said, “Did you get a dog?”

“It’s my sister’s. I’m taking care of it while she moves.” 

“It barks a lot.”

“I know. Who knew having a dog was so much work? It's like having a baby!”

Makhosi met Simon’s eye and had to look away. She juggled Jabu from one hip to the other as the little boy jammed the blue spoon into her cheek and then her mouth.

Catherine continued, “I’m trying to find someone to walk her while I’m at work,” and paused—her fingers already moving to slide her house key off the ring.

Makhosi recognized in the pause the expectation of servitude. She was familiar with the expression that accompanied it, eyebrows raised, eyes wide, and lips turned up. She knew how to wait out these encounters. She had done it often enough. With the white women at the playground who assumed she was Jabu's nanny. With the delivery guy who asked, “Is the lady of the house in?” when she answered her own front door. Or the woman in Marks & Spencer who’d asked for her assistance and then seemed annoyed when Makhosi replied, “I don’t work here,” as if Makhosi had knowingly misled her. She held Catherine’s gaze until her neighbor broke with a short cough.

“The back door has a pet hatch so she can get out into the yard, which should help,” Catherine offered an, it’s-the-best-I-can-do shrug.

“We should go,” Simon held up his phone with the time displayed. 

The high-pitched bark of the abandoned dog repeated behind Catherine’s front door as she and Simon walked towards the station with their heads angled towards one another. They could easily be mistaken for a couple. Two attractive professionals headed to their important jobs. Catherine’s coat had a slight petrol sheen like the iridescence in a starling’s feathers. An invasive species that must be managed.

Simon looked back.

“Wave to Daddy.”

As soon as they were out of sight, Makhosi lifted the lid off the bin and retrieved the plastic bag with its silent contents.

~ 

The air inside the house was close and warm, as if the heating had been left on. Makhosi kicked the front door closed and carried Jabu and the plastic bag down the hall to the kitchen.

She and Simon had traveled from South Africa to England via Europe. They’d carried their luggage on their backs and stayed in youth hostels and pensions where they’d made love on rickety beds in thin-walled rooms, with their hands over one another’s mouths. In Rostock, a small town on the Baltic Sea, they’d visited a museum where a white stork was stuffed and displayed, with an 80-centimeter spear through its neck. The wounded stork had been discovered in Germany in the 1840s. The spear that hadn’t killed it was African. The information board had described a time when it was generally believed that birds transformed into mice, or hibernated in lakes or under the sea during winter. The Arrow Stork brought with it the valuable clue that birds migrated unimaginable distances from Europe to central Africa, where, Makhosi imagined, a young hunter had pulled back his arm and let fly his spear at an ethereal creature with an expansive wingspan; a white cutout against the blue paper sky. The stork had borne its unwelcome passenger all the way to Europe. To places the young hunter could not have conceived. 

Makhosi took in the pile of laundry at the bottom of the stairs, the rubbish bin jammed with nappies, and yesterday’s newspaper strewn across the counter. Banana smeared on the floor and on the feeding chair. Simon’s ruined tie. Jabu’s toys and books and building blocks tumbling out of multiple soft containers. Tupperware piled on the floor. Dishes in the sink, waiting to be washed, only to be dirtied again. Endless, thankless chores, all underscored by the rhythmic yap, yap, yap from behind the wall, ticking above the heat like a metronome.

Sweat skimmed Makhosi’s temples, pooled beneath her breasts, and pricked her underarms. She hung the plastic bag on the handle of the french doors that opened to the garden, stripped Jabu down to his nappy and laid him in his pram. She yanked off her baggy t-shirt and leggings until she stood only in her underwear. She couldn’t catch her breath. Blood pulsed hot and urgent behind her eyes and for a moment the room tilted and swayed. She unlatched the sash window over the sink and pushed it up, hopeful the air outside would offer relief, but it only brought in the hot dry bark of Catherine’s dog-child. Landing like a hammer blow. Regular, purposeless, thudding against Makhosi’s skull.

She leaned her forehead against the tiled wall, acutely aware of those few cool, hard, square-inches, closed her eyes and imagined taking flight. Disregarding gravity to lift with an imperceptible shift of her shoulders. The brush of feather against feather. To tilt and rise higher and higher into the cool air. To soar and dive. She breathed in. The room righted itself. Makhosi pushed herself up and kicked her discarded clothes towards the washer. Jabu was babbling and drumming the plastic spoon on the side of the pram, completely absorbed in his internal world. She stood for a while, listening to his charming nonsense. The space between the sounds lengthened to the even in and out of his breath. The room expanded. The air felt light. It was quiet, not only inside, but beyond the walls too. Makhosi held her breath. The barking had stopped. 

Makhosi stole a quick shower and slipped on a cotton shirt and shorts. She pushed the pram with the sleeping boy into the garden, taking the light plastic bag with her as she went through the french door. Sunshine bleached the sky. Undisturbed by any breeze, the plants and flowers seemed to twitch and shimmer in the heat. She directed the pram into a corner of shade, as deep as it could go, then adjusted the canopy against the light. Jabu slept on. A chaffinch landed on the bird feeder and snapped a sunflower seed in its beak, to peck out the soft nut inside.

The small swallow had left its nest this morning, flicked its feathers, lifted its voice to the new day. She thought of the wounded stork, of the peregrine falcons that hunted through city skyscrapers, the white storks that nested on chimney spires, and the pelicans that lived on the pond in St. James Park.

A clematis waited in a black plastic tub alongside a hole Makhosi had dug the day before. It had begun to flower and searched the air with its blind tendrils for something to grip and climb. Makhosi had dug the hole next to the fence that divided their back garden from Catherine’s, so the clematis could use the slatted wood for support. The flowers had wide, white petals, blushed with lilac tips, which cradled a tighter cluster of purple petals at its centre. A flower within a flower, would make the perfect marker for the swallow’s grave. Makhosi reached into the plastic bag and laid the dead bird on the ground between the fence and the hole, careful to restore its neck to a natural position. She rose to get the hose.

A small, white, curly-haired dog pushed out of the pet hatch and stopped in a rectangle of shade on the terra-cotta paving stones in Catherine’s bare backyard. A lock of fur had been brushed and gathered in a ribbon on top of its head, like a toy you might find in a child’s handbag. It spotted Makhosi and began to bark. The exertion lifted the animal off its feet with a short hop of determination. Bark. Hop. Bark. Hop. Bark. Hop. Not in alarm, but as if it was calling, its brown eyes fixed on hers.

Jabu began to wail.

“Hey, wena, stop that noise.” Makhosi rapped her knuckles on the fence.

The dog rushed over, its entire body shaking with the force of its tail wagging. It shoved its snout through the gap between the ground and the lowest wooden slat, and lapped and licked in excitement and nervous greeting. 

“You’re noisy for such a little girl.” Makhosi squatted and reached her fingers through the fence to scratch the dog behind its ears. It pressed into the affection, nuzzling her palm. “Do you miss your mama?” 

The animal did an excited dance, twisting its compact body in a tight circle before returning for more. It made a high excited whine, like air escaping a balloon. Makhosi laughed and felt herself soften towards the dog and towards Catherine. Living alone, trying to be helpful to her sister, while making her own way in her career. Maybe she should be a good neighbor and offer to look after the dog? She was here most of the day anyway, and Jabu might like it. She pictured herself pushing the stroller, with the little dog running alongside her through the cow pasture, where the summer herd of ambling bovines with their sharp, grassy smell, grazed on the banks of the Thames.

Jabu continued to cry and Makhosi crossed the small yard to comfort her child, stroking a finger in a slow rhythm between his eyes. The small dog leapt against the fence with excitement, landing both its paws along the lowest strut and barked. Jabu felt hot. Makhosi lifted him out of the pram and bent to the tap where she let cold water run over her open palm, then swiped it around the back of his neck. The little dog yapped and scratched at the fence, pushing its nose into the soil as if to dig its way to them. Jabu calmed as Makhosi walked him around the garden. She hoped to soothe him back to sleep, but he was too distracted by the dog, scratching, whining, digging under the fence.

Makhosi went across to settle the dog, just as the animal darted its small nose under the fence and grabbed the dead bird in its jaws.

For the second time that day, she rushed towards the dead swallow as it was swept away from her. “Stop!” She called for the dog to drop the bird. To release. Release! But it dug in, exposing needle teeth and pink gums behind its blue and copper-feathered prize. Makhosi smacked at the fence with her free hand, until her palm stung, “Let go!” Her skin fizzed with adrenalin and rage.

Jabu began to cry.

Still gripping her son in one arm, Makhosi dropped to her knees and pushed her other arm through the slats of fence. Ignoring the splinters she snatched at the dog’s scruff. The animal jolted its head back, drawing the bird deeper into its mouth to secure its grip. Jabu was crying with the full force of his lungs. She could smell her son’s distress. A mustiness beneath the usual baked dough scent of his skin.

With effort, Makhosi calmed her voice, “Drop the bird. Drop it.”

The dog shook the swallow in its jaws. The defenseless blue head dangled and flinched.

A rage, like a white light, blazed behind Makhosi’s eyes. She clenched her teeth and pushed her left arm further through the slats. In her right arm, Jabu screamed and braced against her body. The dog crouched. Brown eyes stared at her. Its top lip curled back. 

“Here, puppy,” Makhosi sang. 

The dog replied with a low growl, but took a few slow steps forward. It thought it was a game. Maintaining eye contact with the animal, Makhosi pushed through the fence up to her shoulder. She felt the hot sting of a graze along the tender skin on her inner arm. 

“Here, puppy,” she flicked her fingers. “Come to mommy.” 

The dog took a few more careful steps, keeping its hold on the bird. Makhosi flicked her fingers again. The dog approached and sniffed at her palm territorially. When it was close enough, Makhosi grabbed the poodle by the scruff of its neck. She expected it to struggle but instead its small body immediately relaxed with some cellular memory of a mother’s gentle jaw carrying its body to safety. She dragged it closer to the fence and secured her grip. Makhosi began to shake the animal back and forth. “Drop it. Drop it!”

Her cheek chafed against the wood. Her shoulder ached and the skin along her arm stung like a burn. Jabu had a fist in her hair and he arched against his mother’s awkward embrace. She closed her eyes and kept shaking. She shook against the empty nests, the lost birds who fly across continents only to mistake a glass window for open sky, the judgement pouring from a dozen careless mouths. Catherine in her petrol-sheen dress which hung from her slim frame, You’re such a good mother, Max. Her own mother, You should raise your child with family, so he learns who he is. The white nurse in the London hospital where Jabu had been born, standing just out of arm's reach as Makhosi struggled to get him to latch on, asking, But isn’t it normal to breastfeed in your culture? Her English mother-in-law, directing her words at a crying Jabu, Poor baby, isn’t your mummy feeding you enough? Simon, this morning, telling her their son should be more independent. Not understanding for one minute how much it hurt for her role in Jabu’s life to be so casually erased.

Makhosi shook until the bird landed on the terracotta tiles in a disarray of wet feathers and clawed feet. She let go of the dog. It backed into the shade, panting hard and watching her with its round brown eyes. Makhosi scooped up the bird and pulled her prize through the fence. She drew her son into her body. Her neighbor’s blank windows leered into her yard. She tilted her head like a crane listening for the whisper of a mouse in the reeds. No bird song and no hum of traffic disturbed the garden. No dog barked. The world was still. Makhosi began to cry.  

~

Jabu was asleep upstairs when Simon’s phone buzzed on the arm of the sofa. He stood and walked to the kitchen with his eyes on his screen.

“Catherine didn’t get the job,” he called over water drumming into the kettle.

“She didn’t?” Makhosi followed him to the kitchen. 

Simon twisted a knob on the stove and held it down. It clicked until a blue flame erupted beneath the kettle. “Did the dog bark today?”

“It’s just lonely.”

“Tea?” he said.

She nodded.

Simon took two mugs out of the cupboard, tossed a tea bag into each, then crossed to the sink and looked out the window at their back garden. 

Makhosi joined him. It was twilight, and a golden glow lit the space like a blessing. 

“You planted the clematis.” Simon lifted her hand and kissed her wrist, his breath against her palm. “We can be happy here, Max. Can’t we?”

A pressure wafted off the bridge of her nose, like feathers shaken from a wing. Makhosi leaned against her husband. He smelled of heat and aftershave, underscored by the familiar acidity of hospital disinfectant. Together they looked out at their postage-stamp yard.

The young clematis angled its stem up the fence post.

The cover of the printed version of “The Wounded Stork” designed by Brittany Files

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Union Pacific

This story was a finalist in the 2024 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.

Behind my house are the railroad tracks where Cassidy Jackson found the pair of legs. They were cut just below the knees, but it wasn’t a clean cut; they were crushed, and the bones looked like an Otter Pop had been smashed by a hammer. There wasn’t that much blood. The rails were clean, and the legs were clean except where they were crushed, and right there, they were just dripping a bit, like a salted steak coming to room temperature. They hardly had any hair on them, and the feet didn’t have any shoes or socks. But the weirdest thing was that the legs were black. Besides Cassidy and his family, there were just a few other black people in town, and Cassidy saw them all at lunch.

This happened on a Saturday when Cassidy came over to check on our pennies. The day before, we laid a bunch of them on the rails to see how bad the night train would flatten them. Cass somehow got past my Gram without her seeing him, but she caught me and made me take a heap of egg salad sandwich squares and snickerdoodle cookies out to share. I could barely balance the food on the plate as I opened the screen door, but I made my way out and through the overgrown grass to the rocky slope that led to the tracks. I almost fell walking up those loose rocks, but I made it up, and when I did, that’s when I dropped the plate.

Cassidy was sitting on the rail with a branch. He didn’t budge when the plate crashed and shattered. I sat down next to him where the rail was clean of food and broken ceramic. We sat there a while before either of us said or did anything.

I watched a line of ants marching from the rocks up onto the spongy severed ends of the legs. They were cutting off tiny chunks of flesh and making their trek back to the colony when Cassidy pointed out the feet. The feet were old and had pronounced veins and tiny, sparse, black, curly hairs that spotted the arch of the foot and the knuckles of the toes. The toes were stiff and straight except a few of them were curled down.

“Looks like my dad’s feet,” Cassidy said as he took up his stick.

I looked back over to where the egg salad sandwiches and cookies were scattered on the rails and ties. I saw a mess of ants splitting off from the lines that went from bloody stubs to the food. There seemed to be no difference in which trail they took. Some went to blood; others went to cookies and eggs. For a moment, I felt calm and then I felt my neck swell just below my jaw and my palms turned sweaty. I looked to Cassidy, but he was still staring at the feet. I swallowed and followed his lead.

The railroad was quiet. Cass was quiet. I could feel pressure build in my chest and ears. My ribcage vibrated with each pulse as I watched Cassidy take his branch and reach it towards the feet. The high sun and warm rails beneath us goaded us on as we made contact.

We thought the toenails were polished a deep blue but, when Cassidy tried to scrape the color off one of the curled ones with the branch, nothing came off. Rather, the toes uncurled, and we both cussed enough that my Gram would’ve probably given us twenty lashings each if she had heard us.

That was when we ran back to the house and told her everything.

~

“Are you American?” one of the head officers asked Cassidy as we led him to the pair of legs. The officer was overweight, yellow-skinned, and had a double chin that was covered up with a beard. He wasn’t from our town, and he spoke with a drawl akin to molasses melting out of a mouth. My Gram said he talked slow, and it seemed as if he wasn’t aware of the situation he’d found himself in. Like he didn’t know where he was or why he was there. It wasn’t just his speech though; he also furrowed his brow and looked at Cassidy like he couldn’t understand what he was saying. Like he was speaking another language. But Cassidy didn’t have an accent.

“Yeah,” Cassidy replied, “I was born here.”

“Right,” the barrel of an officer said as he scribbled in his notebook.

Cassidy’s parents were refugees from somewhere in Africa, but I can’t remember exactly where. He told me that his parents never really talked about it; they just said they left because of the politics and safety. He didn’t seem to care much, so neither did I.

Gram didn’t like that I hung out with Cass. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him or that she didn’t like that he was different. She said Cass was a troubled kid, and I already had enough trouble of my own. I think she was just concerned to see me bonding with someone who had a hard time, and maybe that meant that I was sad. That was something she couldn’t bear. She was right though, I did have enough troubles of my own, but being with Cass and sharing our distress made it easier for both of us.

You see, Cassidy was the only black kid in eighth grade. In the entire school district, it was just him, his brother, and his sister. There were other minorities, of course. Lots of Mexicans, some Asians, and Eastern European refugees, but he was still the odd man out among all the other odd men. And he felt that in the names they called him—OJ, Tupac, MJ—and many other ways. Classmates made fun of the way his mom dressed and often balanced books on their heads and barked at Cass to help them with the laundry or to help bring in the groceries.

Me, on the other hand, my mom was Chinese and my dad was Caucasian. I came out mostly white, so I didn’t get the same attention. Both my parents were gone from my life when I was only about six years old. My Dad got into some bad things and was put away twenty-five years to life. He is still in there, too. And my mom, well I don’t really know what happened to her, and Gram still avoids the topic. Anyway, Cass and I were both lonely and that’s how we found each other.

~

Cassidy and I watched the cops from my Gram’s back porch while we waited for his mom to come pick him up. They sectioned the area off and took their time gathering evidence and taking pictures of the scene. The yellow-skinned cop from before stopped by and asked us how we were doing. We were fine and asked if they would find out who the person was that lost their legs. He said they would probably never find out and that these things happen to people that don’t have much of a presence or past. And even if they did find the rest of the body, it probably wouldn’t have a name attached to it.

Before he moved on, he took a second glance at Cass, as if he’d never seen him before, and asked him where he was from.

“Here,” Cass said in a short, annoyed burst.

The cop replied with a “huh,” then left with a confused look on his face. After that, more people came and bagged the legs and took them away. It was all relatively quick.

While we sat on the porch, my Gram gathered the shattered remains of the egg salad sandwiches, cookies, and broken ceramic and took them into our house to throw away. After she entered the house I heard her cuss—and she never cussed— so I ran inside to check on her. She had cut herself on the ball of her hand with one of the pieces of ceramic and was hanging it over the kitchen sink as blood dripped down her wrist. She washed it, told me she was fine. To her protest, I picked up the remaining pieces of ceramic and then opened the lid to put them in the trash can. As I did, I saw Gram’s thick blood soaking into the bread and mixing with the yellow eggy paste and green flakes of dill. I don’t know why, but that sight has always stuck with me. I shut the lid, and Cassidy’s mom rang the doorbell.

~

Now, this happened at the tail end of summer. The summer that Nathan Cahill’s mutt got loose and badly bit Emina Jovanović’s face while she was drawing flowers and tracing her hands with sidewalk chalk. The summer that Eddy Ramirez tripped while cliff jumping. He didn’t have the clearance and bounced off the rocks before he splashed into the lake. His body wasn’t found for three days. And three days after that, it became the summer that Nathan Cahill’s mutt was found dead, head beaten in, a bloody shovel left next to it. But soon that summer was going to be over. We could feel it coming, quietly approaching like the nights that were lasting longer and longer.

It was the time of year when it was still hot, but you could feel the wind carrying in an assured coldness, a touch that would soon turn the leaves yellow. Even the sun’s rays would bounce off of you differently, like they were getting lazy. As the cool gasp of wind entered, Cass and I were chasing the fleeing hot breeze like a pair of dogs nipping at motorcycle wheels. And even though the weather was changing, we still hoped that maybe there was time for something good to happen to us, something to stoke the dying heat of summer.

A few days after the legs incident, we were finally able to get back together. Cass rode his bike to my house, and we ate lunch with my Gram—Kraft Mac and Cheese, the spiral kind. After lunch, we were bored and indecisive. We thought about going downtown again. It was a favorite place of ours because it was mostly a strip of dead businesses that hardly anyone visited. There were some thrift stores, an old diner called the Depot Grill, various offices and banks, and one of our favorite haunts.

We called it The Escape. It was an old five story brick building that used to be owned by a newspaper, and it sat next to the rail yard and the movie theater that played art films and sold adult movies. After the paper business moved out, it was empty for several years. A mural of a trout jumping out of a river on the west side of the building flaked away from the baking of the setting sun. It achieved that old rustic aesthetic that people with money found charming. Now it was a fancy restaurant that served wine named after rivers and cooked stuff in duck fat. But the best thing about the place was that it had a fire escape on the outside of the building, just like the New York ones we’d seen in Spider-Man. The second-best thing was that it faced away from the busy roads that ran next to the building, so we could sit up there and not be bothered by anyone.

We’d climb the stairs of the fire escape and reenact scenes from Spider-Man. Cassidy acted like he was Peter Parker, and I like Gwen Stacy. We both liked Gwen more than Mary Jane because she was prettier, and because Gwen fell in love with Peter Parker while MJ fell in love with Spiderman. Most of the time we’d just climb up and down the stairs and remade scenes by replacing Mary Jane with Gwen Stacy. We took turns being Peter and Gwen. We both did a damn good job at portraying them, but Cass was always a better Peter, and I loved being Gwen.

The last time we were at the Escape, we recreated the scene from the movie when Mary Jane kisses Spiderman as he hangs upside down. Cass hung from his legs at the bottom rungs of the fire escape, and I stood on the street in front of him. In that moment, I really felt like Gwen Stacy. I felt the excitement of being in front of a masked man, the allure of a hero, and the joy in knowing that what I fell in love with was not the mask but the person behind it: Peter, Cassidy.

Naturally, I pecked him on the lips. At first, his eyes grew wide and he reached up for the bars with his arms, but then he brought his arms back down and grabbed my head and pecked me back. I smiled like I never had before in my life and Cassidy seemed to do the same, but when he let himself down from the fire escape, he avoided me and went straight to his bike.

“Race you back to my place!” he said. He didn’t look at me the whole race back.

~

I was eager to go back to The Escape, but Cassidy was hesitant about it. He said we’d been down there too much and wanted to do something else. But I knew why he didn’t want to go.

Instead, we decided to hunt for some skipping stones and then head down to the canal. So, we grabbed our backpacks, stuffed them with water bottles, the skipping rocks we had been saving, some snickerdoodles that Gram had baked for us, and went on our way.

Cassidy said we should follow the train tracks instead of our usual route which cut through the pasture that sat in the middle of our neighborhood. So, we left my Gram’s house, trekked up the loose rocks to the tracks, and followed the rails down to the canal.

We often went to the canal to skip rocks. We were good at it, really good at it. There weren’t any rock skipping competitions in our town, but if there were, we knew we would take the top slots. Our biggest competition would be each other. But neither of us really had any money to travel to places that held rock skipping competitions, so we were limited to competing with each other and the few others we ran into at the canal.

As we walked the rails and scanned them for good skipping stones, we ate snickerdoodles and talked about starting a rock skipping business. We could start our own competition at the canal. We would sell stones at the competitions, and when the canal was drained for the winter, go out and collect the rocks and resell them at the next competition.

We were good at finding all the quality stones: the hook shots, old reliables, flying saucers, cigars, big bottoms, and boomerangs. We’d organize them by shape and size, fit of hand, throwing style, and difficulty. It’d help, too, that we would be champions in our own league, so fellow skippers would trust our opinions and rock selection. Skippers Select, we’d call ourselves. An invincible partnership. We were going to make a fortune.

When we got tired of talking about our future venture, we fell silent for a few minutes. The crunch of rocks beneath our feet, the buzz of the power lines that followed the rails, and barking of dogs filled our silence. I looked to Cass and saw him staring down the long track ahead of us. I asked him what he thought the track looked like. He didn’t understand. I told him that when I looked down the tracks it felt like a long ladder that reached to the top of a cliff, the horizon, and at the top of the cliff you could finally climb over and lie down and rest. He told me he didn’t see it that way. He said it was more like an unfurled tongue leading to a mouth, and the mouth was the train, a hollow circle of teeth coming to chew on your bones and swallow you.

I looked to him to offer some sort of comfort, but he just looked down the track.

~

When we got to the canal it was empty. Usually, they didn’t drain the canals until at least the end of September. But for some reason, this year was different. We were disappointed, but we took the opportunity to collect all the good stones that had been skipped into the canal and sunk to the bottom.

We slid down the mossy side, and because there was still a bit of water left, we took off our shoes and socks and put them into our backpacks before we walked barefoot through the ankle high water. Most of the time the canal bed was dry, and we found many good skipping stones. But other times we kicked our way through slimy, moss filled pools and felt for rocks with our toes.

We were gathering quite the haul of skipping stones when we entered a long stretch of ankle high water. Far down the stretch we saw a group of geese and ducks concentrated in the middle of the canal. We continued walking towards them and expected them to fly away, but they didn’t budge. When we were within throwing range, Cass took a big bottom stone and skipped it across water at the birds. The stone didn’t hit them, but it passed close enough that the birds should’ve scattered and flown away. But they just hopped around a bit and focused back in on the spot they were obsessed with.

“Weird,” Cass said to me.

I agreed, and we kept walking through the water, kicking up splashes in an attempt to get the birds to scatter. It wasn’t until we were almost upon them that they finally flew away. They didn’t go far and rested up on the banks of the canal to watch us.

That is when we both stopped dead in our tracks. Right there, where the birds had been so stubborn to leave, was a body. Then the smell hit me. Putrid and sharp. I turned to leave but Cassidy kept moving forward. I wanted to leave him, I really did, but I couldn’t bear to leave him alone, so I followed.

And there he was, a black man missing two legs, an arm, and a hand. He was waterlogged and swollen, like a jug of rancid milk. His eyes were protruding, and his ears were gnawed away. Even though his nose and cheeks had been torn by the beaks of the birds, he looked exactly like Cassidy.

“Cass,” I said in a quick breath.

“I know.”

He kneeled and emptied the dead man’s pockets.

“Cassidy!”

“I just need to know his name,” he said and pulled out a phone that was dripping wet.

“He probably doesn’t even have one,” I said through my plugged nose, “remember?” I tried to remind him of what the yellow skinned police officer told us.

Plugging my nose didn’t work as well as I wanted, so I held my breath. I inhaled through my mouth, and I swear to god, I could taste him. Rotting and hot. Citrus, fish, licorice, and pond scum. That triggered it. I ran, gagging, to the edge of the canal. I puked, and the grainy, doughy, sludge of cookies and mac and cheese splashed into the water that covered my feet.

“Cassidy!” I yelled at him as I kicked my feet in the water, trying to make sure there wasn’t any vomit on them. I climbed up the steep wall of the canal and landed on my hands and knees at the top, struggling to both not breathe and not puke.

~

We got out of there, and I puked a few more times on our way back to my Gram’s house. Cass held me the whole way and carried my backpack. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the last time I would feel so close to him. We returned to my Gram’s. The cops were called and this time they didn’t make us take them to the body. They thought we’d been through enough. Gram put Cassidy’s bike in the back of her station wagon and gave him a ride home. When we got back, she made me Kao Yu—grilled fish. She liked to do that for me, cook Chinese food, since mom wasn’t around anymore to teach me.

I always appreciated her intentions, but that night, with a full fish at the center of the table, I didn’t feel like stripping chunks of flesh off its bones. I sat there quietly. Gram sat there quietly too, waiting for me to come to her. I ate a few dry fried green beans, one of my favorite side dishes, but my stomach struggled to keep them down.

Gram must’ve seen how little I was eating because her maternal instincts kicked in. She picked up her chopsticks and used them to peck at the fish’s head until she found the soft circular part just below the eye and next to the jaw. She used her chopsticks to dig into that vulnerable area and pinched the cheek meat out of its socket. The cheek meat was always the best bit of fish, but when she placed it on my plate, the sticky white and oily coin of meat, along with the smell of the sea, moss, and citrus aromatics, made me retch. I jumped from my chair and ran to the bathroom to expel what little that was in me.

~

It was about a week before Cass and I saw each other again. School would begin the next week, and we would be freshman, but at least we could see each other before that began. He came over one afternoon, and we holed up in my room. We were sorting our skipping stones when Cassidy said he had something to show me.

He told me that he didn’t find an ID on the man, but he did find something. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a small rectangular piece of paper. It was a wallet sized photo. I took it, and this is what I saw:

It was a picture of a backyard. It kind of looked like my backyard if you were standing on the railroad tracks and looking at my Gram’s house. In the picture a tall, large, but not obese man, probably six foot seven, was standing in the middle of a backyard smoking a cigar. He had on jeans and white t-shirt. To the left of the man was a mobility scooter, and directly in front of the man on the lawn was an elderly man, probably in his eighties, on his back trying to sit up or get off his back, clearly in need of help. The man smoking the cigar was staring straight into the lens. The elderly man’s arm was reaching up, blurry and smeared. On the back of the photo was a phone number and a small note that read: I owe you -Maurice.

“We got to call it,” he told me.

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“We gotta. You said he looked just like me.”

He touched my shoulder, and, as apprehensive as I was, I thought this could bring us closer together. “Ok.”

I retrieved the cordless phone from the living room and gave it to Cassidy.

“Put it on speaker,” I told him.

He dialed the number, pushed the speaker button, and we waited. There was a long pause between us as we waited for the lines to connect. Cass stared at the phone, and I stared at him. Finally, the phone responded, “The number you have dialed is not in service. Please hang up and try your call again. This is a recording.”

Cass looked up at me. He had wide, almost bulging eyes, in a lifeless, slack face that turned my stomach. This time, it was I that turned my gaze away from him.

~

For the next few years, I saw the dead man’s face whenever I closed my eyes to sleep. Consequently, I didn’t do much sleeping. Even in waking life I saw it. Whenever I looked at Cass, his face bloated and eyes bulged. I saw his lips get torn off by black and yellow beaks, and the tip of his nose was pecked away, bloody and gaping, soft and pink underneath, like a pomelo or a blood orange being ripped open. And the smell, it always came, rotting and hot, citrus, fish, licorice, and pond scum.

I think that’s part of the reason we grew apart. I loved him, and I couldn’t bear to watch him die anymore.

~

After I graduated, I left the state. It was many years before I returned. I resisted for the longest time, but Gram was there, and my missing her was the lasting tether that lassoed me in. The last time I visited, in October, I walked the railroad tracks just to see how I would feel.

I noticed the details differently. The power lines that buzzed tickled my neck in ways they didn’t before. The hum was grounded, and I could step from sleeper to sleeper and feel the rails shake from my weight, hear them rattle under my stride. The sagebrush that surrounded the rails were more fragrant, and they shook with the fear of quail that scattered at the sound of my boots crunching rocks. And the setting sun made my eyes do funny things. The red rays scattered off the horizon and touched me. I saw rainbows glance off my hands and nose and splinter into my eyes like broken glass in a kaleidoscope.

I walked down the track to the canal. It was empty and mostly dry, and there were perfectly good skipping stones waiting to be picked, but I didn’t dare. Occasionally, there were lumps of debris that made my heart race, but they were only congested areas of rocks and trash. The smell was still there, moist, sandy, and full of the gasses of deteriorating foliage. I didn’t walk alongside the canal for very long before I turned around. The sky was growing dark.

As I made my way back on the tracks, I thought about what Cassidy and I said the railroad looked like. Now, what I saw was different. It may have been the cold evening or the darker setting, but I saw three long black lines stretching for eternity to nothing—two rails and a trail of leaked oil between. They were like lines of ink with a single line between them, a black crayon being scraped across the sleepers and ballast, crude, desolate, and slow. I imagined a slug made of oil inching its way between the rails forever to the end. And at the end, I could make out a blurry figure waiting for me. The rails on my left and right were Cassidy’s two faces, one ripe, one rotting, both watching me walk to his body, waiting for me to see what had become of him. But I walked off the tracks and back to my Gram’s house before I could meet that figure.

~

Sometimes I imagine ramming a railroad spike into my temple. The rusty iron turns my brain orange. I feel the vibrations of all the trains that ever passed over it, all the cargo and people, coal, gravel, logs, and a man in greasy coveralls blowing cigarette smoke through a thick mustache. I burn as the weight of the train turns the rails hot, and I sense the man’s boredom from the long rides. I see what he’s seen, a desert of sprawling bluffs and lonely, anchored buttes, all scattered with sagebrush and black patches from wildfires; a hungry river feasts on basalt as it carves through the land and deepens the narrow, hidden gorges; and a wide-mouthed canyon, toothless and thirsty, waits for rain. The land stretches long and thin and tries to touch the horizon, but it fails. Then, the desert slowly loses color like a polaroid left on the dash of a car, and I feel the rusty spike drive completely through my skull and into wood. My head becomes a rail, and my body is the creosote-soaked sleeper. I let all those trains roll over me, and it just feels good to be close to something.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Jail Song

Before her mom started using drugs, she'd smelled like oranges. At least that's how Bernadine remembers her, but then she was only a toddler back then. Oranges, sunshine, laundry on the line—she has memories but she's not sure if it's just from one particular day or if that was really what their life was like together. She's got darker memories too, but those she refuses to think about, even though it drives her school counselor nuts. Mrs. Harris wants her to go back, to talk about when her mom was using, but Bernadine's shut an armored door on that time and refuses to open it even a crack. Mrs. Harris sighs at her for being so stubborn, and Bernadine figures that her stubbornness is mixed up with her foolishness, like two colors of hand-paint swirled together to make a big brown smudge deep inside of her.

Bernadine keeps a calendar with a red circle on the twice monthly visits when Grandpa Gus brings her to see her mom. The next visit is around Thanksgiving, not on it, a week and a half before it. "We'll get Fritos out of the vending machine," Grandpa Gus promises, shows Bernadine that he's got a collection of quarters already stacked up on his dresser for their visit. She's got a stack of quarters from her allowance but wants to keep them for the scooter that's displayed in the Hobby Shop's front window.

They had wanted to put him in a cast, give his badly broken finger time to heal, but Gus didn't have that kind of time. The hospital doctor had said it'd take eight to ten weeks, maybe longer, and then Gus would be good as new. The hospital doctor didn't seem to understand that Gus didn't have eight to ten weeks to walk around la-dee-dah with a plaster cast. He told the doc he wanted the tip of his offending middle finger gone. Nice and easy, just cut off the damn piece and he could get back to working as the town handyman with just some good gauze bandages and white medical tape.

That's the story Bernadine was told about her Grandpa Gus who gave other truck drivers a half-bird salute when they cut him off on the highway. He gave the half-bird to Grandma Jo when the steak she set in front of him was over-well rather than under-well. He even gave the half-bird to Bernadine's fourth grade teacher who claimed she'd shoved another girl on the playground. The truth? His amputated half-bird just didn't have the same power as a full-bird and so no one got particularly mad at gesticulating Gus. After all, how could you get mad at a guy who looked like Santa Claus in a plaid shirt and coveralls?

Bernadine knew that the one to watch side-eye was actually her grandma who was as skinny as Grandpa Gus was fat, had a sharp pointy nose, eyeglasses with metal frames that were almost the same gray-blue steel as her eyes. Grandma Jo didn't take fools lightly and Bernadine came to understand that she held a lot of foolishness inside her nine-year-old body. Grandma Jo said that she got it from her mother who was in the county jail after the second time (the second time!) an undercover cop caught her trying to sell a Ziploc baggie filled with the white powder that her mom used to claim was just baking soda. "It's good for brushing my teeth. Keeps them sparkling clean." Although her mom's teeth were awful, gray, and broken.

On the morning of their jail journey, Grandma Jo makes them pancakes, sets them down without a word. Whole days can pass without Grandma Jo opening her mouth, so Bernadine's surprised when she says, "You should come up with at least one good story to tell your mother today."

"That's about right," Grandpa Gus agrees. "Last time you just sat there, all kinda sullen. Your mama counts down the minutes until she gets to see you."

Bernadine's stomach clenches and she mops some pancake in the syrup but doesn't bring the bite to her lips. When she was younger, it was easier. She didn't know any better. But now she knows that the visitor's waiting area will smell like way too much lemony Lysol, how hard the chair she'll sit on will feel while she waits for her mother to come out, how her mother will smother her in a dank-smelling hug. Mrs. Harris says that it's okay to feel angry, but that maybe a little part of her should also make room in her heart for love. What Mrs. Harris doesn't seem to understand is that she doesn't love the woman with blonde thin hair and bad teeth. She doesn't want to tell that woman a good story about school or her friends. Instead, she decides that this morning she'll tell her mother the truth, that her teacher called in Grandpa Gus for a conference because she'd shoved Marcie Bernback on the playground, knocked her down backwards. Maybe she'd add that Grandpa Gus had argued there must've been a good reason because his granddaughter wasn't one to go around pushing people over willy-nilly. And maybe she'd say that there actually hadn't been a good reason at all, that Marcie Bernback had just bugged her that morning for being such a know-it-all in class, using a long word that none of the rest of them knew, inspiring their teacher to tell them that their vocabulary homework that night was to learn how to use "interspersed" in a sentence. Stupid Marcie Bernback with her stupid big words that she must get from her mom who drove a cute shiny red VW Bug.

"Finish up your hotcakes, Pumpkin," Grandpa Gus says as he pushes back his chair, wads up his paper napkin on his empty sticky plate. "We've gotta get going."

"Drive like you've got some sense," Grandma Jo says and picks up his plate to take into the kitchen to wash. She makes it sound like they're going on a long trip, but really the jail's just on the other side of town, out by the dump, but Bernadine knows her grandpa will speed there, tailgating and then jamming on his truck's brakes so that she'll feel grateful to push open her door, step out onto the parking lot.

And indeed, she thinks, "Thank God," when they make it safely to the jail. As usual, Grandpa Gus gives a half-bird salute to the guard tower with its tinted glass. And as usual, there's trash stuck in the barbed wire atop the tall brick wall. Bernadine looks around the parking lot, curious to see which other kids have come for visiting hour. A family piles out of a van and there's a boy who looks like he might be maybe a year or so older than her who's clearly the one in charge, striding ahead of his younger siblings towards the jail's doors. Sometimes on these trips she recognizes a kid in the waiting area, a regular like herself, but that's all they've got in common; she'd rather chew off her foot than talk to a jail kid.

~

It turns out that when she's sitting face to face with her mother, she doesn't really want to tell her about Marcie Bernback after all. "So, how's school?" her mother wants to know as she rips open the bag of Fritos Grandpa Gus has bought from the vending machine. 

"Fine."

"Tell me more." Her mom pops a Frito into her gray-toothed mouth and tears open a sleeve of Ritz crackers. 

"Everything's fine. It's school."

"Tell her about your friends, about what you're learning," Grandpa Gus prompts her.

"We learned the word 'interspersed'." She grabs a few Fritos and some Ritz, holds them on her palm. "Like the chips are interspersed with the crackers."

"Like I'm interspersed with a lot of crazy ladies," her mom says and tips Bernadine's hand so the crackers and chips go into her own palm.

"I'm not sure you use it like that," Bernadine says, thinking it sounds wrong somehow. "Marcie Bernback's mom would know. Her mom taught her that word. Marcie's always showing off her vocabulary."

"So how about I teach you a word?" her mother says.

"Like what?"

"Like I don't know." Her mother stares at the crackers and chips in her hand, then closes her fist so they crumble together. She takes a thick pinch, tilts back her head, and drops the mixture into her mouth. "Like how about 'high-voltage' as in that light bulb." She points to the ceiling. 

"I know 'high-voltage.'"

"Okay, how about gangrene, as in my cellie's in the sick bay with gangrene."

"What's that?" Doesn't really want to know.

"It's where you get sick because you try to slit—"

"It's a kind of sickness," Grandpa Gus interrupts. "Think of another word, for God's sake."

"All right, how about 'ignoramus'?"

"I know that one."

"So maybe 'defunct'? As in the plumbing here is all 'defunct'?"

Bernadine also knows this word, but says, "Okay, that'll be my vocab homework for tonight."

"It means shitty, not working, only a spurt coming out of the damn defunct showerhead."

"Got it."

"So how are you doing these last two weeks?" Grandpa Gus asks her mother.

"Same as the last two weeks and the two weeks before that." She looks Bernadine straight in the eye. "Never get in trouble, child. It's not worth it. Nothing's worth this."

Bernadine wonders if Grandpa Gus will bring up the teacher conference, but he's whistling softly under his breath, the way he does whenever they visit here.

She thinks of Marcie Bernback's mom in her shiny red VW Bug, her brown hair all tidy, her teeth straight and white, her mind filled with plenty of good vocabulary words ready to share. Bernadine watches her mother pour a handful of crushed up Fritos and Ritz into her mouth, wonders if there really ever was a time when they were in a yard together with the smell of oranges, sunshine, and fresh laundry hanging on the line.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

A Green Year

This story was a finalist in the 2024 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.

Because Vivian almost never leaves her apartment, her niece Marie arrives there promptly at 8:00 a.m. A normal hour for Claire, the functional sister, to drop off her problem child. Maybe a little early for little Marie, who has already donned her ice skates and wobbled to the front door, one slender finger in her mouth, plucking a tooth.

Vivian has bought a sketch book for Marie, hoping that this, finally, would be the day she and her art-loving niece might connect. Hoping that this “year off” Vivian’s living might crack open and let her out. (Who’s holding you in? You know—you!) Hoping that she can help in some way with this troubled child who Normal Claire cannot fathom, Vivian has promised to actually take the girl out this time. Better for both of them, Claire insisted. Normal people can’t sustain themselves on endless streams of content and neurotic fixations on insects and the like. (Do you want her to turn out like you?!?)                

“My toof’s looth,” Marie says and then takes her finger from her mouth, spit-blood cocktail dribbling. Anything but teeth! Vivian thinks and then thinks against herself, that frantic, cruel voice of inner subversion: (Have you brushed? [how many times??] Has she? Do you have enough paste?!?)

Vivian’s mind snares such ideas like a bear trap, and they scream to her.

(Look, these teeth of yours; you’re not going to have them that long. The warranty expired, there’s no exchange policy. You’re not built to live to retirement! It’s your own damn fault if you go extending that life expectancy beyond the reproductive cycle. Wax wings, hot sun—you get the picture, sister. And it’s in those teeth.) says the script in Vivian’s head each morning as she flosses. The message and the messenger itself both obnoxious reminders of the daily bodily terror of being human: (A tragically self-aware ape), insists the postscript response, once Vivian’s resistance against the intruding thoughts but now just another line of program in her mind (soggy wiring). Like how from age ten to seventeen, everything had to be in even numbers: bites of food from a plate, syllables in a sentence, steps from point A to B. If not, cognitive dissonance, feet tripping feet, teeth grinding teeth.

For a moment, watching Marie fiddle again with the “looth toof,” Vivian almost reverts, tongue starting to count her own teeth just to be sure.

Vivian slaps her cheeks, shakes her head back and forth, and faces Marie.

“Have you brushed recently? I think I’ve got a toothbrush your size.”

The girl stares. Drool of incomprehension. They head to the bathroom for deep scrubbing.

But, during this, Vivian’s fourth brush of the morning, what bothers her is not the ever so slight—yet undeniable!—tea stains conquering territory on her lower front teeth. Nor does she sweat any more than usual about having to leave the apartment (sooner by the brush stroke, thank you Marie). What she sees are the dark, sad, puffy lower eyelids she’s had since childhood (Brother Thomas, too—genetics, ge-ne-tics). Like an age meter, they’ve gotten slightly darker by the year, and they remind her she’s a product of DNA that only needs her to breed—and then die, for all it cares. Sometimes she fantasizes about moving into an artificial body to escape death, taking her wet robot brain with her like one moves apartments. Why not, if her mind is just chemical and electrical signals?

Vivian has just gotten a hold on this thought-stream when in reflection she spots the second set of puffy eyelids in the room. (Second? Count, dear. Reflection: yours, yours again, hers, and her other one, too. Two pairs of puffy, sad eyes.)

“Ughh,” Vivian moans (counting: one, two, three . . .  four seconds), chin dripping minty. The two girls spit in unison. Foamy tadpoles slide down the drain.

~

Marie’s mother (big sister Claire, renowned neuroscientist) does not know why her daughter is unhappy, and because Marie’s ever-grinning brother Joey embodies such a perfect counterpoint to Marie’s disposition simply by existing, her frustration sometimes smacks of blame toward Marie. Joey, hotdog in mouth and the sting of a day’s game of catch in his palms, oozes sunshine. So why does Marie slide down the fire pole over and over for an hour straight instead of playing with other kids? And what makes her ask Mommy why some things taste good and others taste bad? And on learning of taste buds and neural receptors and the gustatory cortex, why, Oh God, must she lean against the fence and sob?

This, Claire had asked at lunch in Vivian’s apartment, mindlessly swallowing sticky piles of mandarin marshmallow fluff salad, which, Vivian thought, tastes good primarily on account of sugar and acid dancing in unison. Given Vivian’s preference (read: uncontrollable compulsion) to stay at home, they’d brought the barbecue to her.

“Oh, I’ve read all the books, asked my colleagues, and there are just no real answers. Get them to bed on time, give them healthy food, make sure they feel connected to others. Should I give her an iPhone? She’s eight years old!”

Vivian, having eaten some stringy barbeque chicken (sticky dead flesh waiting to rot just like teeth), pulled a folding travel toothbrush from her pocket. She jammed the dry bristles back to her right molars.

“Dash sure-tainly trouble-shum.” (Brush brush)

“You should have seen her drawings. Where could she have gotten the inspiration, dear?” Claire said to her husband, David, a big, gentle therapist several days overdue for a shave.

“I’m still paying for this, am I?” he said, rubbing Claire’s shoulders.

“Marie asked him,” Claire said, dropping to whisper, “where we go when we die. And he said—Viv, enough with the brushing, Christ almighty. David, can you analyze this girl?”

“Conflict of interest, my love. You know as well as I.”

“He’s not my dentisht,” said Vivian. She takes the brush out of her mouth and adds, “I’m not even using paste anymore. Not more than four times a day.”

“Just give it a rest. Now listen. He said, and I quote: ‘Well, Marie, daughter of mine, whom I protect and guide through this life and to whom I would never say anything twisted or disturbing, when we die, we simply go back to where we were for billions of years before we were born.’ Honestly, David, are you insane? Tell him he’s insane, Viv.”

“Confick of intresh, my shishtar. You know ush well ush I.”

“I thought it was an honest, comforting answer,” said David.

Vivian spat. “What’s comforting about billions?!”

“We couldn’t leave those drawings at school. That teacher of hers had them on display. Painting after painting of a screaming little girl in a black void of death!” Claire said, chomping more marshmallow salad, junk she’d normally avoid, which is how Vivian knew she was truly upset over this. Nobody in the family really talked about it, but there had been a growing sense of worry about their familial emotional balance since the eldest brother Thomas had lost his professorship. (During a heated conference panel regarding the orangutan in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” he’d cracked the skull of a Poe scholar with a classroom projector.) And Vivian had her own, less infamous troubles. As the next generation of their family emerged and grew, each of them worried about inheritance. “And then when we had to explain to her why her art was taken down, it was like she was in her own world and couldn’t hear anyone else.”

“Vivian, we were talking,” David said. “And while even thinking about this is a conflict of interest, I feel Marie might benefit from another social outlet.”

“A friend.” (Claireified.) “Something like a sister. A big sister.”

“Izat sho?” (No coincidences. All part of the program.)

~

Vivian has come to suspect that all is program. Not only her body, an expression of DNA, and her mind, always flickering before her captive eyes like a Clockwork Orange screening, but the whole world—the universe! Whether someone else’s simulation that she’s just living or simply a purely mechanistic roller coaster she’s strapped into, she can’t say.

The notion sprouted around the same time her body (according to schedule) started manufacturing (automation) the chemicals that would make her skin bubble and her menstruation start. The voice that was and wasn’t hers elbowed into her thoughts, and she’d sit silently in classes thinking about that phrase “train of thought,” picturing the tracks (predetermination, control, clockwork timetables, please watch your hands; the doors are now closing!) extending out before her. One thought moved to the next—or were they linked like one train car to another?—drifting away from the station. Vivian struggled to focus on the buildings and trees flitting past, smearing with speed into an untouchable world. It was lonely.

Inwardly, Vivian’s selfhood had twisted into a self-devouring solipsism, but to her family, Vivian was just quietly waiting to emerge from her shell. That’s puberty! Given the extraordinary talents (hereditary, just look at your philosophy professor daddy and poet mommy) of her older brother Thomas and sister Claire, there was cover for her turn inward. Between events like Thomas’s publication of a book of literary scholarship during his last semester of undergrad to Claire’s landing first cello in the state orchestra in every year of high school, there was no light to shine on Vivian’s complications. The problem became tangible only at the holidays and at her Birthday when, oh crap, everyone had to buy her gifts to demonstrate their admittedly truly-felt (biologically-rooted) affection. But what did this girl want? What did she think?

For her twelfth Birthday, a chunk of identity inexplicably landed in the family’s lap: Vivian loved the color green! For years, the problem was solved: give her green clothes, green sheets, green curtains and trash cans and desk chairs. Paper her walls in leafy reams and roll out the grassy carpets. Soon her room looked like the Rainforest Cafe, complete with tree frogs dangling in every corner from shamrock patterned shoestring vines. Vivian was green, green was Vivian.

Her brother, Thomas, perhaps intuiting something wrong with year after year of green gifts, broke the pattern one Christmas and gave her, in green holly paper, a Franz Kafka collection featuring The Metamorphosis. Vivian stared at the bug on the cover. She had always thought that Thomas was actively ignoring her, but she felt something else then. Had he noticed her collecting beetles in the back yard?

“This one’s pretty weird,” Thomas said. “I don’t know. I thought you might like it. Something for study hall. Or bedtime. Hahaha!”

“Kafka? What are you trying to do?” their dad asked. “Turn her into Margot Tenenbaum?”

Vivian read it cover to cover, and Thomas kept giving her books. She was thus marked another reader in the family, making holidays all the easier, but soon everyone learned she was also fascinated with insects, and she started to speak her mind—the parts of it she (at least felt like she had) selected.

~

Vivian and Marie slowly waddle out onto the frozen pond in Glass Park. (Don’t yawn, you wanted it early to avoid people!) Relieved that, as planned, nobody else is out this early, Vivian holds Marie’s hand, small and soft in its tiny mitten. An embarrassing internal giggle tickles her, but Damn you mommy program, I have no intention of squeezing any little ones out of me. Still, the air is cool, and Marie is focused on maintaining her balance and so squeezes gently as they take the curved end of the pond. Vivian stops thinking then, and there is just sound: blades over ice, Marie sniffling. 

Until GACHUNK GACHUNK!

Skates slice through crunchy bumps in the ice, and the surprise sends the two down to the slick cold, Marie tumbling into Vivian’s arms, which cradle the girl’s head in the fall. Synchronized in motion as if their minds run on the same tracks, the two flop over and observe, down in the ice, frogs frozen just at the surface, some of their heads sticking just up above the floor line. Several heads are split in two where the blades have just slid. Frog brain shaved ice.

“We broke their souls,” Marie says.

“Broke their souls,” Vivian repeats, staring into the cold amphibian eyes. “Croak.”(Ribbit.)

“Mom says the soul’s in the brain.”

“Soul’s in the brain.” Vivian reaches out to run a finger over the credit card slot she’s just cleaved into this frog’s skull but stops. “Marie, who says frogs have souls?”

(Blink blink)

“Amphibian metaphysics are none of your business, young lady.”

Marie’s hand escapes its glove and wiggles her loose tooth. She is unconvinced. (Oh no, you’ve broken her soul!)

“Look, your mom, she maybe spends a little too much time in that lab of hers. It’s like a family bad habit,” Vivian says even as she starts to sweat under her coat, noticing families starting to arrive, skates in tow.  “Hey, Marie, have I ever shown you my bugs?”

~

Marie requests “Popeye” for lunch, so Vivian whips up pepperoncini pasta with sautéed spinach (Popeye) and pan-seared chicken. A recipe inherited from her brother during her “year off” of school. While Vivian cooks, Marie stares into her tank where Gregor the Eastern Hercules beetle dwells. Marie’s mouth hangs open in wonder, one finger in for tooth-wiggling. From where Vivian stands, it looks in reflection like Gregor has just stepped out of the girl’s mouth.

“Vivian’s year off” was a euphemism in the family for a year (and running) during which she locked herself away in her apartment, leaving only briefly—at night, baseball cap pulled down over brow—to get necessities. (They can’t see you, but I do.) The family didn’t know the details. (Sure, Viv, I’m sure they can’t guess.) Only that she stopped coming to see them.

When she was a high schooler, she’d begun to blabber incessantly to drown the inner voice. But in college, she spent more and more time alone in a lab surrounded only by insect tanks. Soon that old train of thought cried out within the vibrations of the cicadas and the multi-instrumental improvisations of the Bess beetles. (Sky to birds, water to fish, Vivian to Vivian)

In the lab they’d bred flies: generation after generation, heritable traits cresting and crashing into piles of crispy, indistinguishable winged bodies. At some point, Vivian stopped doing her work and just stared through a microscope at the compound eyes, imagining a strange mosaic of seemingly infinite shards of image. How could all these angles coalesce into one reality?

She went home and locked the door to be alone. Alone with herself, her other voice. 

 ~

Vivian sets two plates of pasta down, whistling “Popeye the Sailor Man.” They eat in silence, except for Vivian mumbling some Popeye lyrics between bites. When she clears their plates, Marie looks up and asks what will happen to the other frogs—the ones frozen deep in the ice.

Vivian boots up her laptop, pops her toothbrush in for idle cleaning, and the two squeeze into the squishy desk chair, Marie climbing uncomfortably aboard Vivian’s lap for a clear view of the screen.

“Shee here,” Vivian says mid-brush after a quick search. “Shum frogsh are made to freej.”

“Aren’t they cold?”

“Nod ad oll!” she says and gives up the brushing. “They aren’t going to die, either. Provided they keep their heads down to avoid ladies like us on skates. When a cold time is coming, they just have to get down deep enough and let it happen. According to this, their hearts beat only once or twice a day during this time. But they must believe it will be warm again one day.”

Marie pushes on her own chest, checking if her heart is still ticking up to speed.

“And in the spring, they’ll thaw out again . . . and nab some flies with their tongues! Yum!” Vivian licks Marie’s cheek, Marie squeals, and they take off on a chase-me game. Marie, captured and tickle-tortured, asks if they can go see the frogs again.

“Maybe another time,” Vivian says, already dreading how Claire will react to her daughter’s gruesome introduction to amphibian roadkill.

Later Marie complains about her tooth, so Vivian helps her loop some floss around it (she has reams and reams of the stuff stashed away), and they do the old doorknob trick.

“Ready?” Vivian says.

Marie nods.

SLAM. POP. And the tooth is out, dragged along the floor like a fish on a hook. Marie collects it and stares.

“You know what happens, right? A new one will come in soon.”

Marie dashes to the bathroom and locks herself in. She’s in there more than an hour before Vivian finally knocks. Marie, what’s up? Are you ok?

“Jusht looking,” she says, and Vivian can picture her seat up on the sink, staring into the bloody gap.

~

Vivian wakes from dreams of fleeing a giant frog’s tongue, lashing out to close her inside its jaws forever. The early morning sun casts a familiar pattern on familiar bedroom walls. (Always the same walls.) She feels the fabric of her pajamas, often what she wears all day (Who’s gonna see you anyway?) and begins to dread. Her mind takes off: Brushing. Puffy eyes. Green goo. Sketch book. A screaming little girl in the black mouth of death. The black mouth of frog. The credit card slot of frog. Big brother splashed with the blood of the academy. Vivian splashed with the blood of brains of frog. Mountains of dead flies. The inevitable voice of DNA. Sketch book.

Crayons! Marie is going to need crayons.

Vivian dons her baseball cap, wads cash into her pajama top’s breast pocket, and, in a motion and a half, whips on her coat and a pair of sandals. Three steps out the door, she does not pause but internally (Hey, what’re you doing out here?), and by the time she is back with the crayons—the big set with every shade light and dark plus built-in sharpener—her toes have gone numb.

Before going back to sleep, she creeps into her guest room and retrieves the tooth from under Marie’s pillow. On the night stand she leaves the Crayolas, the sketch book, and in green crayon on the opened page: Up for ice skating?

~

Marie squats in the center of the pond next to the frog bumps and unzips her little backpack. She takes out the sketch pad and crayons to sketch the frogs in the ice. There are bubbles and leaves and sticks. Some of the frogs’ heads are just below the ice, and some are above, cleaved in two and topped with yesterday’s frog brain debris. Vivian wonders if she was entranced by gruesome things at Marie’s age. She probably was.

She leaves Marie to study the slain frogs to her heart’s content, skating leisurely around the pond.

If her mind is a program, Vivian thinks, she could be copied and continue this passive existence forever. But she’s not sure. She’s starting to think that there is indeed a program, but the Vivian living it is a product of motion—more like an amateur figure skater on a crowded pond than a train on tracks. Here comes a crazy big brother skating in the opposite direction to hit her with a snowball, and she takes off after him, everything shifting around her darting moves. There goes a sister, a niece, a trail of strangers and frogs in the ice that change her path. She might even trip into a pirouette.

Marie holds up her sketch as Vivian glides by: green frogs, frozen in the blue, holding acrobatic poses. Some dead, some alive. Hearts beating once a day, waiting for the thaw. Marie smiles and sticks her tongue at Vivian through the gap of her lost tooth.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Shoe Shop

You might expect a shoe shop’s window display to be filled with shoes, but in this case, you’d be wrong. Instead, a brilliant array of strange and wonderful plants pressed up against the glass, completely obscuring everything inside. It wouldn’t look like a shoe shop at all, if not for the hand-painted sign above the door that read, “Tanner’s Fine Leather Shoes,” in large white letters. I clutched the bulky bag of Mr. Branson’s shoes to my chest as Mom tugged me past the wild jungle of a window, but not before I caught a glimpse of bright brown eyes peering down at me from between the purple leaves of a vine several feet above my head.

As we entered the small shop, a bell rang on the doorframe above us.

“One moment!” A man’s voice called out from inside the mess of plants. “I’ll be right with you.”

“Oh, honestly…” Mom muttered under her breath. She’d been that way this morning—well, for the past few days, really. Short of temper, in a rush. Ever since Mr. Branson’s accident.

“My apologies,” the man said, emerging a few moments later from the maze of green with a silver watering can in hand. He was a narrow man in a green plaid dress shirt, buttoned up all the way to his throat, with a voice higher pitched than you might expect for a man so tall, as if he was speaking through his nose. “My plants are accustomed to a very precise watering schedule.”

“Yes, well. We’re on a tight schedule, too.” Mom said pointedly. The man’s posture straightened, making him even taller, and his lips pressed into a small straight line as he met Mom’s gaze. Mom stood taller too, although she still didn’t come even to his shoulder, and lifted her chin ever so slightly, until he looked away with a sigh.

“Terribly sorry, Ma’am,” he said at last. “I’m Willard Tanner. How may I help you?”

Mom’s posture relaxed. “My boy needs new shoes,” she said, “and mine need repair. I hear this is the place to come.”

“Yes,” he said, “for repairs. But not new shoes. I only sell used.” Mom and I looked around at the shelves lining the small room. Leather shoes in a myriad of sizes, each practically glowing in shades of inky black, chocolate brown, and rich velvety cream. They didn’t look used.

“My father was a shoemaker,” Willard explained, “the very best. Most of these are his work. Made lots of things, in fact. Even built this shop.” He swept a long arm about in a grand gesture. “But I,” he continued, “restore them. It’s my specialty.”

“Used will do,” Mom said quickly. “I hear you take trades, as well?”

“Naturally,” Willard replied, with a bit of an edge, “where else would I get shoes to restore?”

Mom blushed, but not bashfully. I think she was actually becoming cross with this strange man, although I found him quite funny. But we needed shoes before we left town; there was no getting around that. Mom had spent the last few days getting things in order, and this was our last errand. The big toe on my left foot peeked out now from its prison, and the sole on the right shoe was starting to detach in a flap at the side. Mom’s shoes were even worse, and we had no spares. With Mr. Branson gone, Mom needed to find new work fast, and we certainly couldn’t travel like this.

“Do you have his size?” Mom asked, nudging me forward towards Willard.

“I have all sizes,” he responded, “but we have to find the right match.”

“Don’t they all have a match?” I asked curiously.

Willard nodded and gave me a quick wink. “Naturally. I mean the right match for you.” I had no idea what that meant, but I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

“Every shoe has a story, you see. An imprint from the last owner, and the ones before that, too.”

“You mean a wear pattern?” Mom interjected.

“No!” Willard whipped his head back toward her, frowning. “Not in this shop. They’re good as new by the time I’m done with them!”

“What, then?” I asked. Mom was clearly ready to be done with this errand, but I was still curious.

“An imprint, like I said. A history.” Willard put his hands in his pockets and smiled at me. “A personality, if you will.”

“What about this pair?” I picked up a black pair of shoes with grey laces that looked to be about my size.

“Those belonged to a young man named Patrick. Smart boy, did well in school. Got a good job. I’d recommend them, except for one thing...”

“What’s that?”

“He was a thief. Not out of need, mind you. Out of impulse, for the thrill of it—not the right match for you, I reckon.”

“Now how would you know that?” Mom’s voice dripped with skepticism, but I think she’d given up on speed by this point.

“Shoes tell stories,” Willard said with a shrug, “and I once caught him with a tin of shoe polish in his pocket, too.” He shook his head. “That boy never polished shoes once in his life, I’ll tell you that.”

Mom sighed and took the bag of shoes from me. She took a seat on the small wooden bench at the side of the room, and gestured for me to follow Willard. I set the black shoes down and trailed after Willard to the next shelf while mom removed her own worn shoes and set them beside her on the bench.

“Now here,” Willard said, in a soft voice, “is a good pair.” Tenderly, he picked up a brown shoe that had a section at the toe in a darker, textured leather. “These belonged to my nephew. Kind boy. And the reinforcement at the toe can’t hurt anything, now can it?” I looked down at my escaped toe and wiggled it as Willard bent down to untie my laces. The shoe was a perfect fit. Willard took my old shoes to the counter as I laced up the next one.

Mom stood again, in her stocking feet, and placed the bag of Mr. Branson’s shoes on the wooden counter.

“We have these to sell,” she said, as Willard walked behind the counter. “They’re good quality.”

Willard frowned as he pulled out the first pair, and then the next. Mr. Branson’s shoes were large and dark, with sleek lines.

“Where did you get these?”

“They were given to me. They belonged to my employer, Mr. Branson.”

“Curtis Branson? The man who died in the storm?” Willard looked up at her, surprised.

“Yes.” Mom’s voice sounded pinched.

“Oh. I didn’t like him,” he said flatly. He looked down, went back to examining the shoes. Mom seemed a bit taken back by his forwardness.

“But they’re good shoes,” Mom insisted, “aren’t they?”

Willard sighed. “Yes. I suppose I can find a match for them. Someone with strong moral character might manage alright.”

“Why didn’t you like him?” I asked brightly, earning a pinch on my forearm from Mom for my impertinence.

“I used to shine shoes when I was a young boy, when my father still ran the shop. Curtis Branson was a weekly customer. Cruel man.” Willard shook his head, still examining the shoes. “Stepped on my fingers every time. And I could tell from the toe of his shoes that he had a habit of kicking things.”

I was delighted by this clever shoe detective, and now, I knew for sure that he was telling the truth. Mr. Branson was not a nice man. Not at all. Mom tried to hide it from me—she told me he was a good employer, and that we should be grateful. But I knew.

 ~

We lived down past the creek from the Branson mansion, where Mom worked as a maid during the week, not returning until nearly dark each day. But in the evenings, she was home with me, so when Mr. Branson appeared at the door a few days before the storm, just as I was about to go to bed, it was a shock to us both. He was a large man, with dark hair streaked with grey, and astonishingly light blue eyes. When Mom answered the door, he staggered in off-balance and caught himself on a chair, leaving the door swinging behind him in the cold evening wind. Mom took three steps backwards towards me, her eyes large and her mouth opening and shutting without a sound. Next to Mr. Branson, she looked like a tiny bird.

“What,” she said finally in a shaky voice, “are you doing here?” Mr. Branson didn’t answer. He just smiled strangely and stepped forward, toward her.

“Not here,” she hissed, stretching out her left arm sideways, across my body. But Mr. Branson didn’t seem to hear. He stepped forward again.

“Go to bed, Thomas,” Mom said sharply, in a voice I knew couldn’t be argued with. She turned and pushed me back into the bedroom, shutting the door after me with a loud thump. I’d never seen her act so strangely. I think she pushed Mr. Branson out, too, because there was some clattering around after that before the outer door slammed shut. Although I didn’t see him again at our home, I thought I heard his rough voice and heavy footsteps once more later that week, while I was supposed to be sleeping. Mom was different in the morning, too. Quiet and distracted, staring up the hill toward the Branson residence. I stayed awake as long as I could every night, listening. Mostly, I just heard her rustling around, until she went to sleep too. Except on the night of the storm, when I heard nothing but the incessant roar of the wind and rain.

Willard pulled out the third and last pair of Mr. Branson’s shoes. He bent his face down close to them, studying something on the sole.

“This must be the pair,” he said, “that he died in.”

I felt Mom stiffen beside me.

“How could you possibly tell a thing like that?”

“Well, see here. That scrape, probably from a fall. Green from the moss that grows on the bridge. I assume that’s where he fell. Red dust embedded in the leather, from the bricks. And this here is water damage.”

“Wow!” I said, unable to contain myself, “you’re like a real detective!”

“Shush now,” Mom scolded, “that’s preposterous. And we need to go. Can you take them or not?”

“It’s not preposterous, Ma’am. It’s simple observation.” Willard straightened, looking down his nose at Mom.

Mom glared up at him silently, one eyebrow raised. After a moment, he looked away.

“I’ll take them,” he answered quietly. “They’ll be enough for two pairs.”

“Here,” I said excitedly, “do Mom’s!” I snatched her old shoes from the bench. Mom grabbed my wrist, hard, but not before I slung her shoes up on the counter in front of Willard with a thump. Her eyes widened as he picked them up.

He was quiet for a long time, looking at Mom’s shoes. At last, he said:

“Not too old, but very worn. Regular pattern of stooping; perhaps working on your knees?”

“Yes. Scrubbing floors.”

“And… you must have fallen. This scratch here…”

“Tripped on some stairs.”

Willard’s brow furrowed. “Some green residue. And… red, there by the heel.”

“I have a garden,” Mom said a bit too loudly, “clay soil.” She was still gripping my wrist, so tight that it hurt.

“I see,” said Willard quietly, not looking up. “Well, not much to tell here, except that they are beyond repair.” He set the shoes down, slowly, and reached under the counter. “But I do have a pair here that’s quite nice. I think they’ll be a good match.” He set a tan, suede pair of boots on the counter.

I was disappointed not to get a better story out of Mom’s shoes, but she was still in a hurry. “Thank you,” Mom said, grabbing the boots. “That will be all.” She spun me around and pushed me towards the door, not even bothering to put the boots on over her stockings. Just as we stepped across the threshold, Willard called out after us. Mom froze in place, her hand still on the doorknob.

“I won’t tell anyone, Ma’am … about your garden.”

Mom didn’t turn back to look at him. But I felt her breath release beside me, and she gave one slow nod, before we carried on our way.

Grownups are strange, I decided. Mom’s garden was small, but nothing to be ashamed of. When we were halfway down the street, I looked back over my shoulder. It was too far to tell for sure, but from behind the twisted tangle of plants in the shop window, I felt those bright brown eyes staring after us until we were far out of town.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Pottery Royalty

On my third day in East Liverpool, I walked into an antique store on a narrow street that climbed gently up from the Ohio River.  Its neighbors were a boarded-up auto repair shop and a Christian bookstore, open but deserted. The sidewalks were empty, with grass growing in the cracks.

Pottery crowded the antique store’s display window. I spotted a place setting of brightly colored Fiesta, a few chunky brown replicas of Rockingham jugs and spittoons, and one elaborately decorated Lotus Ware pitcher. That was the limit of my ceramics expertise. A bell rang faintly as I walked in.

Two women stood behind a sales counter, one on either side of a huge brass cash register, talking to each other. One of them, tiny and grey-haired, blinked and smiled at me. The other didn’t seem to notice my arrival. She was younger—forty, maybe, a couple of years older than me if so—tall and dark-haired, wearing a long black dress.

“You’d be surprised what you can find in some of these places,” she was saying. “Like those Harker ABC plates, the ones with the birds? I found those in a basement in the East End.”

The older woman murmured something.

“Illegal? Not if the house is abandoned, I don’t think. The only thing you have to be careful about is, sometimes there are junkies squatting in them.” A ripple of laughter ran through the last phrase, as if junkies in basements were just an amusing inconvenience. “I’ll take you some time if you like.”

“Thanks, probably not my thing.” The older woman moved out from behind the counter and crossed the room to ask me if I needed help finding anything.

“Just browsing,” I said automatically, and then out of idle curiosity—or at least that’s all I was aware of. “Maybe the Harker plates with the birds?”

“Of course.” If it bothered her that I’d been eavesdropping, she didn’t show it.

“Right over here. Minerva’s stall.”

I followed her to a nook at the back of the store, and she unlocked a glass-fronted cabinet.  There were three of the plates, delicate white china with a thin blue band around the rim, the letters of the alphabet arranged in a circle inside that, and in the center of each plate a brightly painted bird—a barn swallow, a bluebird, and a robin.

“Early twentieth century,” the woman said. “Beautiful, yes?”

“They are.”

A neatly hand-written card read: $100 each. Set, $250. “A little pricey,” the woman said. “You could talk to Minerva. She might come down a little.”

We both looked over at the sales counter, but the woman in the black dress was gone.

~

Three generations of my mother’s ancestors had lived in East Liverpool, back in its glory days as the Crockery City, when it produced half of America’s ceramics. The potteries were all gone now, nothing left but empty lots with foundations hidden in the grass, here and there a kiln or a chimney slowly falling to pieces. The downtown streets were lined with massive dark brick buildings from the early 1900s, banks and office buildings and hotels, most of them now empty. The factory owners and society ladies from my family tree were long dead, not to mention the potters and masons and carpenters who worked for them.

As for me, I was born and raised in California, and this was my first time in Ohio. I had no living relatives in town, or anyhow none that I knew about. I was staying in a Days Inn, kitty-corner to a graveyard where one of my great-great-grandfathers was buried. I’d spent a lot of time in graveyards since I arrived—in that one, in the much larger Riverview Cemetery, in tiny rural churchyards all over Columbiana County. I’d spent an afternoon in the city’s Carnegie library, unearthing stray references to various twigs of my family tree; toured a couple of 19th-century mansions; visited a Methodist church where a stained-glass window was dedicated to a distant cousin of mine who’d been killed in the Civil War.

Not far from the library, in a sprawling Beaux-Arts building that had once been the town post office, was the Museum of Ceramics. The docent, a tall, fair-haired woman, reminded me of a sixth-grade teacher I’d had a crush on. She led me through the cool, gently lit rooms, pointing out the high spots among the enormous variety of plates, jugs, bowls, teapots, rolling pins, doorknobs, and figurines inside the glass cases. Speaking so softly that I had trouble hearing her, she told me about the early potters, entrepreneurs who sold rough yellow ware from boats up and down the Ohio; the big industrial potteries—Harker & Sons, Homer Laughlin, Knowles Taylor & Knowles—that made East Liverpool a boom town after the Civil War; the artisans who created Lotus Ware, a line of porcelain as delicate and ornate as the finest English china. Some of this I vaguely knew, some I didn’t, but either way, the history had a weight now that I hadn’t expected.

The tour ended at a minuscule gift shop. Behind the counter stood Minerva, still in black, but this time jeans and a turtleneck sweater.

“You again,” she said.

“Me again. You remembered.” Which seemed odd, because I’d have said she hadn’t noticed me the day before. “Moonlighting?”

“Whatever it takes.” She looked at me sideways, off-kilter. Her face had the kind of lines that come more from expressiveness than from age. “Enjoy the tour?”

“I did. She knows her stuff.”

“Karla’s a gem. Her ex, on the other hand, should be in a lunatic asylum. Sorry, inappropriate.” She smiled, not at all apologetically. “Ada said you almost bought my Harker birds.”

“I thought about it. Not sure if the abandoned house provenance is a plus or a minus.”

She laughed. “Like I said, whatever it takes. Are you a collector?”

“Just a tourist.”

“Really? We don’t get a lot of those.”

“Maybe not exactly a tourist.” It shouldn’t have been a difficult question, but I still hadn’t answered it for myself.  If there was something I was looking for here, I didn’t know what it was. “One side of my family lived here back in the 1800s. I’ve always been curious.”

“Interesting. Potters?”

“Some of them. Factory owners, even. Some Bennetts. Some Harkers.”

“Ooh, you’re pottery royalty.” If she was mocking me, it was done gently enough. “Of course, I am too, if you go back far enough. There’s not much

“Sorry to interrupt...” Karla leaned into the gift shop doorway, smiling hesitantly at me. “Quick question, Minerva.”

I turned to go. Minerva scribbled a number on one of the museum’s business cards and handed it to me. “Just in case you change your mind about the birds.”

~

I didn’t change my mind about the birds, not then anyway, but I called her the next day. We had coffee and cherry pie at a dimly lit cafeteria that evening—the only place open in downtown East Liverpool at seven o’clock on a weeknight. In our back corner booth, I couldn’t tell if her dress was dark blue, dark grey, dark purple, or just black once again. Her features, too, had a shifting quality—sometimes smoothly curved, almost bland, sometimes tangled in shadows and contrasts.

On the surface, we had a lot in common. I taught history at San Francisco State; she had a graduate degree in art history from Northwestern. Our respective lists of favorite authors overlapped to an almost alarming degree—George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Balzac, Edith Wharton. Similar story with music and movies. But unlike most of the educated people I’d met in East Liverpool, she didn’t seem to be yearning for the sophistication of the coasts, and she seemed to take her city’s problems in stride.

“That’s a depressing neighborhood, for sure,” she said when I told her about my afternoon. I’d walked up and down the steep streets east of the downtown, looking for an address where my great-grandparents had lived. Most of the street signs were missing, and for every lovingly maintained old Victorian, there was one falling to pieces or boarded up. My great-grandparents’ address turned out to be an empty lot enclosed by a cyclone fence. “On the bright side, rents are low.”

I knew the broad strokes of the story: cheap imports and high production costs had killed the city’s potteries in the mid-twentieth century. The population had dropped by 50%. A freeway had taken much of the downtown and riverfront. In the 2000s, drugs—meth, heroin, fentanyl—had replaced alcohol as the coping mechanism of choice.

“But you’re still here,” I said.

“Born and bred in Madison Township. My people go way back in the Scotch Settlement. I didn’t move to town until I got married.”

I didn’t need to look at her finger to know she wasn’t married now. She had a brittle cheerfulness that spoke of intelligence and disillusionment.

Apparently, I was giving off a vibe of my own, because she said, “Never been married?”

“No,” I said. “Close, though. Twice.”

“It’s overrated. We had a big house, that was nice. But he was all about his work. He’s a prosecutor for the county. Which really put a crimp in my heroin use.”

At the time, I thought she was joking, and maybe she was. “That’s kind of the definition of incompatible,” I said.

“Incompatible is my middle name. You say you were close to getting married twice?”

“Once for sure. A long time ago—we were grad students. The other one, I don’t know, maybe we weren’t that close to it.” I still didn’t have a formula for talking about Emma.

“This was recently?”

“Three months ago.”

“You know,” Minerva said, “this was an odd place to choose if you were looking to cheer yourself up. Don’t West Coast people go to Hawaii or Cabo for that?”

Odd comment at best. But her bluntness, so unlike Emma’s chilly reserve, almost made me smile, and I found myself saying more about the trip than I had to anyone else. “It’s all kind of tangled up. I only met Emma because my great-aunt Grace died—they were friends. And Grace was from here. Not East Liverpool, but right up the road in Lisbon. Like I said yesterday, I was always curious about Ohio. But it was only after Grace died that I started to think about actually coming here.”

“Tangled up is right.” She seemed to be on the verge of asking another question, and I might have answered that one too, but then she was off in another direction. “I have to tell you, I almost said no when you called.”

“Understandable. I could totally be a stalker.”          

“It’s not that,” she said. “I was planning on doing some treasure hunting tonight. I didn’t really want to put it off just for coffee. But then I thought, two’s company, right?”

“By ‘treasure hunting’ you mean burglary?”

“Some people would look at it that way. I just have this feeling you’re not one of them.”

Was I? Maybe, maybe not. But I knew I didn’t want her to mistake good sense for a failure of nerve.

                                                                        ~

“The woman’s ninety-two,” Minerva said as we drove along a dark two-lane highway somewhere outside East Liverpool. “Her son was supposed to be taking care of her, but he OD’ed. So, they dragged her off to hospice. The house has been standing empty for months. The county’s going to take it for back taxes.”

She drove too fast, which wasn’t a surprise. The road was laid out in long doglegs between pastures and clumps of young trees, the lights of farmhouses here and there. As we came up a sharp rise I saw a cemetery on the left-hand side, tall ornate headstones and monuments sinister in the moonlight. Then, a small brick church.

“Yellow Creek Presbyterian.” She let the car slow. “Last I counted, I have ten direct ancestors buried there. MacIntoshes, Davidsons, McQueens—they all came here from around Inverness. One of them witnessed the battle of Culloden as a young boy.”

“That’s a lot of history.”

“Like I always say—if you don’t like your future, live in your past.”

                                                                        ~

The house was at the end of a long gravel driveway. Two rusted-out cars stood in long grass. A sheet of plywood with the outline of a cat spray-painted on it covered the front doorway. Minerva pushed it aside with a nudge from a crowbar. The actual door was missing.

We might not be the first people to visit here,” she said.

Inside, it smelled of pine needles and dead mice. She switched on a flashlight and swept its beam around a living room crowded with threadbare couches and armchairs. A withered Christmas tree stood in one corner, with a litter of smashed ornaments around it.

“Well, it’s only April,” I said. “If you really love Christmas…”

“Yeah. Cozy.” She glided around the room, stroking the fabric on the couches, getting down on hands and knees to shine her flashlight on the underside of a table. “Some of these were nice pieces once. Maybe I should have brought my truck. Well, no matter. Let’s see what’s in the kitchen.”

I followed her. She paused and looked up. A sprig of plastic mistletoe dangled there in the doorway. A couple of seconds went by, and as she turned away again, I realized I’d been meant to kiss her.

“No shortage of crappy pottery here,” she said. The sink and counters were crowded with dirty dishes. Grease and mold and unidentifiable chunks of food had fossilized on a sad mix of chipped and faded crockery. “Maybe there’s something better in the cupboards.”

Pots and pans; broken coffee machines; canned food with faded labels, tuna and beef stew and chili; a pile of paper grocery bags clumped together by moisture; more cheap plates and bowls; a five-pound bag of birdseed; and so on.

“This is something.” She lifted out a blue and green teapot with a spray of flowers painted on the side, then turned it upside down. “KTK. 1910 or so. Tiny chip on the handle, but very nice.”

I carried it out to the car and set it carefully on the back seat. By the time I got back to the kitchen, she was slamming the door of the last cupboard. “Disappointing. I guess we can try the rest of the house.”

As we went back through the doorway to the living room, she stopped under the mistletoe again, turning to face me. This time, I put my hands on her upper arms and kissed her lightly. Then we stood there a few inches apart in a tangle of shadows from her flashlight.

“We’re still here,” she said. “How many kisses is that thing good for?”

I kissed her again, still lightly, but neither of us pulled back this time. Her breath was minty, with a trace of smoke.

“Hello?” A faint voice from the back of the house. “Trevor?”

“Holy fuck.” Minerva twisted out of my grasp and pointed her flashlight into the kitchen. There was another doorway back there, a short stretch of hallway visible.

“Trevor?” The voice was high-pitched but weak.

“Fuck, it’s her.” Minerva put a hand over her eyes.

“Let’s go,” I whispered.

“Trevor’s the son. The one who OD’d. It must have been bullshit about the hospice. Or they brought her back.”

“Let’s go,” I said again. “We were never here.”

“My mother knew this woman.”

“Then why are we breaking into her house?”

She ignored that. “Go wait in the car. I’ve got to check on her.”

I didn’t answer, just followed her back through the kitchen into the hallway. Closed door on the right, closed door on the left, open door on the left—Minerva’s flashlight picked out crumpled balls of Kleenex on the floor, a dresser littered with medicine bottles, a brass bedstead, a tangle of quilts and blankets. At one end of the pile was a withered face under a chaos of white hair. A smell like rancid hamburger hung in the air.

Her eyes were open, but she didn’t look at us. “Cold,” she croaked.

“Mrs. Fraser, it’s me, Minerva Forbes.”

“Cold.”

“See if you can find another blanket?” Minerva looked back at me. “Mrs. Fraser, I’m just going to check your vitals.”

I asked Minerva later if she’d ever been a nurse, and she told me it was just a persona she’d learned to assume. To people who were sick or drugged or addled, it was familiar, it was comforting, and they didn’t fight it. Whatever—I was happy enough to leave the stench of that room and search for blankets. When I came back with a ragged blue and white quilt, Minerva was already dialing 911.

~

“Not quite the excursion I had in mind,” she said as we drove away an hour later.

“Same here.”

“But you’ll admit it’s a lovely little teapot.” She smiled at me as though we hadn’t watched two EMTs haul Mrs. Fraser out to their ambulance.

“Days if not hours,” one of the EMTs had said to Minerva.

“I don’t doubt it,” she’d answered. “But she won’t be alone, at least.”

The EMT had shrugged at that.

“Mind if we stop at Yellow Creek?” she said now. “I want to show you something.”

“Your ten ancestors?”

“We’ll say hi as we walk past. But no, this is something else.”

She slowed as we came to the church, a squat red brick building with tall arched windows, then pulled to the shoulder just past it. The churchyard, a lawn studded with tombstones—pillars, slabs, tablets, obelisks—sloped up from the road in a gentle knoll.

She led me through the forest of stones, pausing here and there to read a name aloud. “Alexander McBean, Isobel McBean… Ann McQueen… Jennet McIntosh…”

 The graves nearest the road were the oldest, their inscriptions so worn I couldn’t read them. Farther up the slope, the stones were clean and sharp-edged, the dates within the last century. Past the top of the knoll, with the church itself well behind us now, an almost empty stretch of lawn ran down to a line of bare trees. Half a dozen stray markers bounced random scraps of moonlight up at us.

“Running out of room,” Minerva said. “All the rest of this space is spoken for.”

“Quite a success story if you look at it a certain way.”

“Only it’s a very fucked-up way?” She laughed. “My ex got the house and the Volvo. I got the Porsche and the cemetery plots. We’ll see who comes out ahead in the end.” She looked back at the church, drew a line in the air with her hand, then took half a dozen steps toward the trees. “My plots are right about here.” She beckoned me over, and I went.

“I was thinking pottery was going to be the theme tonight,” I said. “Instead, it’s dead people?”

“Sorry, just worked out that way. Mrs. Fraser kind of derailed us.”

“She did.”

“And I left the mistletoe behind. Is that a problem?” She laid a hand on my hip.

I pulled her close to me, one hand on each of her shoulders, and looked into her eyes from a few inches away. The irises were a smoky grey-green, I knew that, but they seemed entirely clear with the moon shining on them. Then my eyes closed as her face tilted up to mine and we kissed. Accidentally or otherwise, she tripped me. We fell onto the grass, with her on top.

I’d been wanting this, if not from the moment I first saw her, then at least from the moment she said you again in the museum. But I had expected it to happen in my room at the Days Inn, or maybe in some dark cluttered space, full of Lotus Ware and Impressionist reproductions, that she called home. Still, there was precious little chance of any living people seeing or hearing us, and I didn’t feel the least bit self-conscious as my hands found their way inside her dress.

She stayed on top as we made love. No surprise there. She was loud, and she wasn’t shy about telling me what she liked and what she didn’t. I did my best to follow instructions. She was so self-assured that there were none of those awkward first-time misunderstandings. It didn’t take long for us to thrash our way to satisfied torpor.

It was chilly—a spring night in eastern Ohio—and as we lay there with her sprawled on top of me, I felt her shiver.

“You OK?” I asked. “Not too cold?”

“I’m fine. You?”

“Good.”

“I would hope so,” she said.

“But being an academic, I have to ask about the symbolism.”

“Of fucking in a cemetery? I don’t know. Awful things will happen, but good ones will too? I think I stole that from some Presbyterian minister.”

“Appropriate, then.” I looked back toward the church.

“Or maybe from Rosanne Cash.”

I could see other kinds of symbolism too, something about the ancestors, about the ex; but maybe, I thought, it was better not to go there.

Silence for a bit, except for the creaking songs of frogs.

“Question for you,” she said.  

“Sure.” I closed my eyes.

“I’m glad you’re here . . . but why are you here? Not here here,” she said, patting the lawn in front of us,“but here in Columbiana County. I mean, sure, great-great-grandparents, pottery royalty, great-aunt Grace, you’ve told me all that. But what’s the point?”

“It’s a good question,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I have a good answer. Curiosity. Distraction, maybe.”

“Distraction from what?”

“Everything. Work, breakup, getting old. The rest of my family—my mother, my sisters—they moved out east after my father died. Boston. They couldn’t care less about this, about the history. But I feel like these are roots I should know about.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Minerva said, “but the feeling I get is that you’re someone who’s never really been broken. True?”

Not a standard post-coital question, not in my experience anyhow, but I answered anyhow. “True, I guess. What would be the wrong way of taking it?”

“Some people might think it was a way of saying that you’ve missed something. And I’m not saying that.”

“You’ve been there, it sounds like.”

“I have, and it was awful. But it’s part of me now. And it just strikes me that maybe you’re a little too curious about it. That it has a kind of appeal for you.”

“Well, you have a kind of appeal for me. I don’t think it’s about anyone being broken or not.”

“No?”

“Granted, we’re different.”

“And you’re thinking maybe I’d be a good change of pace from what’s-her-name?”

“Emma,” I said softly. “No, it’s not that.”

Apparently, I didn’t sound convincing.         

“No is right,” Minerva said. “That’s not going to work.  I’m kind of like East Liverpool. Interesting place to visit, lots of history, classic architecture if I say so myself . . . but you wouldn’t want to live there. It’s a little run down, weather too extreme, living in the past, substance abuse issues . . . It’s sort of a grim picture.”

I didn’t think she wanted a direct answer to that. “Ever been to California?” I asked.

“No. Never.” She said it the way most people I know would say they’ve never been to East Liverpool.

“Like you said, kind of grim here—"

“It is. And not likely to change.”

“I was going to say, not much grim about you, though.”

“Please.” She rolled off me, and we lay side by side in the grass, our shoulders touching.  “I should try and fix you up with Karla. Lovely person—much more your speed. How long are you staying?”

“My flight out is tomorrow.”

“Well, so much for that idea. Nice knowing you, though.”

The delivery was comic, but after ten seconds of silence, I realized that the message wasn’t.

“That’s it?” I said. “Not going to work, bye?”

She seemed surprised that I was surprised. “What else?”

“I don’t know.” I was, apparently, supposed to have thought this through. “Something.”

“Wait till you’ve been back in San Francisco a few days. You’ll change your mind.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Yeah, well, you can text me if you don’t. But you will.”

~

Three years later, I used the frequent flyer miles that I’d saved all through the pandemic to book a flight to Pittsburgh. As the plane dropped out of the clouds, I saw the aimless curves of the Ohio, a smudge of grey that might have been East Liverpool, the orange and red and yellow patchwork of West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle. At the airport, they gave me a Ford Taurus that smelled of weed, and in half an hour I was back in the antique shop where I’d first seen Minerva.

“Try the library.” Ada, the tiny grey-haired woman I’d briefly met before, was alone behind the counter. “She works there now. Archivist.”

“Right.” I knew this—Minerva and I had kept track of each other, warily at first but comfortably enough in the end, by email and text and the occasional phone call. I could easily have called or texted her when I got to town, but somehow I’d just hoped she’d be here.

“I remember you,” Ada said. “Been a while.”

“It has.”

“You bought her Harker birds.” She smiled.

“Right again.” The morning after my night with Minerva in the graveyard, I’d bought the plates from Ada on my way out of town.

“How’ve you been?”

“I’m OK,” I said. It hadn’t been the best three years. The pandemic hadn’t hit me hard, but my mother had died of an aneurysm; I’d failed to get tenure at SF State and worked in a bookstore now; I’d gotten back together with Emma only to be dumped by her all over again. “Here for the wedding.” 

“Social event of the season,” she said with a smile that hung somewhere between mischievous and mocking. “Minerva and Karla—who’d have thunk it?”

“No one,” I said as I headed for the door. “Probably not even them.”

~

If much of East Liverpool seemed to be falling apart, that certainly wasn’t true of its library—the first Carnegie library in Ohio, built in 1900, a massive fortress-like building in brown brick, surmounted by a hexagonal tower and a red tile dome. In the lobby, an island in time with its gleaming marble wainscoting and mosaic floor, I found Minerva waiting as if she’d known I was about to arrive.

She threw her arms around me; we touched cheeks.  “I guess this is really happening, if you came all the way from San Francisco.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “Glad it’s legal even here.”

“Until the Supreme Court gets around to repealing Obergefell. When that happens, we might end up in California after all.” She led me past the circulation desk and up a flight of stairs to an office with photos of nineteenth-century East Liverpool eminences on the wall and a shelf of pottery including Mrs. Fraser’s KTK teapot. “No, seriously. People in town are either OK with it, or they don’t give a shit. Most of them gave up on me a long time ago.”

“Formula for a perfect wedding.”

“I hope so. How are you?”

“I’m all right,” I said. “Glad to be back in my future hometown.” This was a running joke between us, that eventually I’d move to East Liverpool, but not as much of a joke as it had been originally.

“Did I tell you there’s a 1930s bungalow for rent down the street from us? We could be neighbors. Probably half what you’re paying now.”

“More than likely. Well, I’m around for a few days. I’ll take a look.”

“If you need something to sweeten the deal, I can let you have my plots at Yellow Creek for next to nothing. Karla thinks they’re bad karma since they came from my divorce.”

“Might be bad karma for me too,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

“I can’t see why.”

A little late, I realized I shouldn’t have said it. “Not like either of us believes in karma anyway.”

She paused to consider that.

There was a barely audible knock on the door.

“Come in!” Minerva shouted.

The door opened a few inches. Karla looked in, smiling hesitantly, and I knew then who it was Minerva had been waiting for in the lobby.

She came in, did a double take, grabbed both my arms but didn’t hug me.

“Congratulations,” I said.

She murmured a thank you and smiled so brightly it made Minerva laugh.

The three of us made small talk for a few minutes, but with the wedding less than 48 hours away, they had a lot of logistics to go over. I didn’t want to get in the way. We made plans to have a drink together later, and I walked out of the library and down to the river.

At the foot of Broadway, there’s a small park, with a pier, a rocky stretch of beach, and raised wooden decks looking out across the water. Doubtless in the past steamboats and barges had stopped here to take on shipments of crockery, and doubtless Minerva or Karla could give me the details if I asked.

I sat on a picnic table and watched a flock of Canada geese paddle downstream. Boats were moored on the far shore, and beyond that rose the forested hills of West Virginia. A broad stretch of water, steep hills, streets lined with Victorians and Queen Annes . . . all that was familiar. It was not that San Francisco had stopped feeling like home, but it had stopped feeling like my only home.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Skins

“Transmission” by Joy Division plays in the night club in Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong. Cigarette smoke clouds the air. The ceiling looks like the cratered surface of the moon.

Tonight, it’s clubbing. Tomorrow, Frannie says it’s an afternoon visiting an old temple in Stanley Market to see the pelt of the last real tiger ever in the territory.

A week ago, it was a hike. I forgot sunscreen. I blistered so much I couldn’t sleep the night afterward. Even now, I feel the rawness of my skin under my shirtsleeves. Frannie who is one of my only friends in Hong Kong, gave me some Chinese ointment to use, but I haven’t tried it yet because I have the bottle still in its box on my nightstand as my only tangible gift from her. I’m in love with her. It’s hard to be around her, and I can’t not be around her.

If she talks up a hanging animal pelt in a temple, I believe it’s amazing.

I stab out my cigarette and while she’s looking somewhere else, I look—her slight downturned mouth, and the glorious soft edge of her face that I could contemplate forever. All that moves around in my head, all that keeps me going. I’m in Hong Kong for a posting with my investment firm, but I would leave in a heartbeat if Frannie wasn’t around. Problem is, she’s taken.

Her boyfriend Lawrence, also a friend of mine, is sitting next to me on the purple velvet booth cushion, and he says he’s bored. He says we should go to his place off Connaught Road and smoke weed on his roof, where there’s a great view of Victoria harbor, where the windows across the water on Kowloon side gleam like Christmas lights. He’s got some amazing Scotch and all three of us can crash if we need to.

“Don’t you want to dance?” Frannie asks him.

“I suck at dancing,” Lawrence says.

“You dance with me,” Frannie says, grabbing my hand and pulling me up.

A house beat rattles the sound system. The room with its pink and blue lighting spins a little. The floor gives slightly. I play it off like it’s no big deal, but dancing with her is the best thing in the world. I’ve had a lot of beer, but part of my dizziness is her.

Frannie turns and shimmies, then walks toward me and puts her hands on my shoulders.

“Relax!” she yells.

I move. I dance. The rising house music beat dissolves into Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”

The crowd around us—another gweilo dude with two blonde women—and a Chinese group behind him, two women and two men, all go from their somnolent movement to paying attention to us.

Lawrence taps my shoulder and steps in. He nods with his cigarette in his mouth, then pats my shoulder again and says, “I goddamn love you man. Don’t ever leave Hong Kong!”

His hands are on Frannie’s waist and they’re up against each other, blending like two liquors in a cocktail, and the truth is, Lawrence doesn’t suck at dancing.

“…once I had a love and it was a gas…soon turned out, was a heart of glass…”

Here we are, a trio of friends. A lot of loneliness on my part, despite it. I live out on Lan Tau in a small flat and Frannie, a Hong Konger, lives far away in Shouson Hill with her sister’s family. Her sister is married to a white guy, a Canadian. I should mention that I’m white, a gweilo, by way of the Chicago suburbs, and Lawrence is half-white, half-American-born Chinese, by way of a childhood in San Francisco and an adolescence attending the American International School in Hong Kong.

One of the gweilo women sidles up and faces me.

Now it’s the four of us on the roof of Lawrence’s building. He’s got a sofa set up under an awning up there, letting it be exposed to the elements, American college-town-patio style, and the gweilo woman from the club asks me for a light. Her name is Mary. She’s blonde and British, living in Hong Kong with her parents, on a gap year from uni, and it turns out she went to King George the Fifth school, and Lawrence knows her brother from high school rugby. Her father is in the government. She lives nearby but won’t say exactly where, and then I know enough about Hong Kong to realize her father is obviously not the governor, but is somewhere high on the bureaucratic ladder, and she lives near Government House, the governor’s mansion. She doesn’t want to say it because it seems like she’s royalty or something, and she just wants to be cool.

Each of us takes turns telling made-up stories about what is going on in the cruise ship docked at Ocean Terminal across the harbor. Lawrence has the best one.

“A widower grandfather is taking the cruise again, mourning the death of his late wife, wishing his son would call or write him letters. The happiest time of his life—an ocean cruise to Hong Kong where his wife and him got tailored clothes and wore them to the captain’s dinner where they started with the lobster bisque,” Lawrence says.

“Dude,” I say. “That’s fucking sad.” I get jealous of him, his ingenuity. And I find myself trying to copy his attitudes.

“No shit,” Frannie says. She punches his arm.

“Give me a hit from that,” Mary says. Lawrence is cradling a joint in his palm, which is the reason he’s getting so philosophical.

“Remember tomorrow, we’re going to see the tiger skin!” Frannie says.

“Tiger?” Mary asks.

“The last tiger in Hong Kong. The skin hangs in a temple in Stanley. I’ve always wanted to go,” I say. “All that’s left of that poor tiger—its skin.” I say it like it’s my idea, but Frannie was the first person to bring this up.

“We planned this weeks ago,” Frannie says.

“That kind of shit is supposed to be exotic and exciting but it’s usually a letdown,” Lawrence says.

“You’ve seen it?” I ask. Sometimes Lawrence talks big and knows nothing. And even though I want to be confident like him, I get annoyed with his dismissiveness.

“He has,” Frannie said. “That’s the temple his grandmother used to go to. A Tin Hau one.”

Lawrence looks at me, then looks away. He grabs Frannie and they kiss.

“Get a room,” Mary says, the kind of thing people feel like they have to say.

The night meanders on, conversations and drowsy kissing like winding smoke from incense, and eventually Mary and I fall into each other’s arms on Lawrence’s couch, but in his apartment. Down the hall I hear Lawrence and Frannie. Some arguing, maybe about him going on another trip, and then it’s quiet and I try not to imagine more, but I do because when I close my eyes, I just see her.

“Look this way,” Mary says. “This way,” and she pulls my lips onto her neck, then further down. The room swirls. But we don’t go further than that.

“I’ve had such a long week,” I say.

We lay there holding each other.

In the morning, I smell Mary’s perfume and her cigarettes and sweat on the throw pillows. Frannie is gone too—she had an opening lunch shift at Smuggler’s Inn in Stanley Village to get to.

Lawrence hands me a mug of coffee.

My head hurts.

“I got to get to the airport,” Lawrence says. “Business.”

I remind him that today Frannie wanted us to join up with her to see the tiger skin in the temple in Stanley Village, even though I know he’d avoid it.

There’s a knock on the door—it’s Mary dressed for a day out, Ray-bans on to hide the hangover.

“Can’t,” Lawrence says to me as Mary stands at the threshold. “You can. You should. Like I said, it’s kind of underwhelming but everything is worth doing once.”

I got the Hong Kong posting all excited on my East Asian Studies minor. I got here, and I thought I was supposed to go find all the obscure Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian sites in the city, study the paths of feng shui and dragons. That wore out quickly, all those places close-up and distant at the same time. Full of reverence and strangers. I met Frannie and Lawrence at a pub quiz night in Lan Kwai Fong and since then, she’s what I’ve been chasing.

“This temple in Stanley,” Mary says. “Historical, innit?”

We have more mugs from Lawrence’s Mr. Coffee pitcher. I take some of Lawrence’s clothes and shower and Mary and I, awkward strangers, get on the bus to meet Frannie at the temple. Both of us nod off in separate seats. I wake as the bus veers around a corner and upstairs where we sit, a leafy tree branch brushes into the window, across Mary’s head, and she snores through it.

When we arrive at the stop with the long railing and tin awning overlooking the market and trees, I gently tap her shoulder. Stanley, with the awnings and the one cement basketball court and displays and piles of things—a street pointing north with vegetables and fruit and one seafood stall and then the alleys south we’ll walk through, with the overpriced lacquers and ceramics and art, and the deeply underpriced name brand clothes in folded stacks like a basement bin sale in the U.S. There are American and Japanese tourists, and the only Hong Kong Chinese around here seem to be the shop workers.

Frannie is late. Or not showing. I build the drama in my mind, that she sees this as cheating on Lawrence. Then I snap out of it. We’re just friends and like usual, I’m being too dramatic. Besides, here is Mary flipping the creaking coat hangers on a rack, looking at beach shrugs, asking what I think.

Frannie finally shows up with a canvas bag. She pulls out a Schweppes lemon squash, a British soft drink she knows I like. We take a moment to look out at the sea beyond the temple as we leave the shopping area and walk along the narrow sidewalk clinging to rocks which approaches the temple, a green and yellow building behind a couple trees.

Then the three of us walk in together.

Indeed, the pelt is there behind glass, darkened with age, smaller than one would expect. It looks a bit shriveled at the edges. It’s mysterious in a sense, but on its own, yes, underwhelming, if not for it being from the very last tiger.

Frannie walks past me to kneel in front of the altar with all the candles lit and the Tin Hau statue with its raised hand of blessing, its peaceful blue dress undulated like a good current from the sea.

I turn away and look up at the curling incense hanging and around at the other gold and red shrines. I kneel myself, then look at the yellow tiled floor, waiting for something. I never got much out of church, or anything like religion. The most I can say is I’ve felt times of loneliness and times where I was less lonely.

Like last week. At a lookout on our hike, Frannie leaned her head against my shoulder as we sat on a granite outcropping, taking in the view, while Lawrence was in the bushes relieving himself. She asked if I thought she should marry Lawrence. She said she really loved him. She took my hand in hers and pointed to her ring finger and said, “I’m not sure either of us is marriage material.” Then she said, “Greg. I want the whole thing. Family and kids. Grandparents. A dog. Everything.”

My own father, a barely employable Jim Beam enthusiast, had a short fuse. I used to wish him dead. He would yell at my mom, who was just getting us through. None of that was my fault, but I feel shame about it. There was a time I asked my mom to leave him, begged her to, after he got especially violent, punching in drywall in our mudroom and breaking his hand.

When Frannie said, “us,” I wanted it to be more than the beauty of the moment and the view, that “us” was Frannie and me. I told Frannie about my growing up, which I’d done before, but never that openly. I said she and Lawrence would never be like that, but I knew it was me swearing I would never be like that. Being in Hong Kong away from home and being with her, it’s like some kind of window opens. That’s as close as I’ve gotten to religious belief.

Frannie gets up from the temple floor and we walk back out into the sunlight. Mary is still inside, silently looking at the statuary, lighting her own incense, acting like she belongs there.

I tell Frannie the pelt looks nothing like the deer pelts in my uncle’s basement in Wisconsin, which is the only thing I can compare it to.

“I really miss Lawrence when he’s away,” she says. “He hates this place because it reminds him of his grandmother and how she’s gone. You know his mom wasn’t around much, or his dad. They had gambling and addiction problems. His grandmother pretty much raised him.”

Whatever that’s like—I’ve never prayed to anything—it still is drifting over her, and I feel like I’m outside of it. And she knows a lot about Lawrence that I don’t. I try to tell her more about Wisconsin, but unlike other times, her mind is somewhere else, and she’s only half-listening.

Mary comes out to join us and says, “Brilliant!”

The three of us walk toward the small beach and sidewalk near the pub where Frannie will start her second shift. “You’re peeling,” Frannie says, pointing to the back of my neck—that bad sunburn I got on the hike a week ago in Sai Kung still doing its damage. I rub my fingers on my neck. Some of the skin comes off.

Frannie says, “I hope Lawrence is okay. There’s a typhoon headed to Taipei.”

“I hope so too,” I say.

What else is there to say? Frannie was praying for our mutual friend, that he would be safe, and that he would come back to her soon with more stories to tell. More than the ones I have, which I’ve already told. And unlike Lawrence, I don’t have the will to make them any better, or to imagine them otherwise.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

I Cannot See You the Same Way

It was the first meal in the new apartment, and I had unconsciously made the foolish assumption that the configuration of the stovetops aligned with the stovetops in my previous apartment, so when I turned on what I thought was the top left burner and then distracted myself for eight minutes waiting for the pasta to boil, I was surprised and devastated to return to find the noodles soaking in cold water and the plastic grocery bag half-liquified and melting into the bottom left burner.

God, it was stupid. And I was also stupid. It was one of those mistakes so flagrant and avoidable that it makes you aware of how ill-equipped you really are, how often the logic and good sense that you rely on can just fail you completely. But then, here’s a thought: by calling your own self stupid, you are in a way splitting yourself into two different people—the one who is stupid and the one who is smart enough to recognize that he is stupid. The plastic was seared into the glass of the stovetop in layers. It had been so beautiful, shiny as marble. And now I had defiled it. It’s the type of thing Margot would have been triggered by. She wasn’t a neat freak exactly, but she liked things to be kept up well. Hated bits of dried food, lint left in the dryer filter.

It was a six-step process, according to the internet. Nothing was allowed to be easy.First, you coat the stovetop with olive oil and baking soda. Let it sit for a few minutes. Then wipe that off with a warm cloth. Then clean the stovetop with dish soap and water. Then coat the plasticky bits with rubbing alcohol. Let that sit for a minute. Then use a wooden spatula and a razor scraper to scrape off the plastic. Then clean it all again with soap and water. I tried all those steps, then tried them again in different orders. Barely got any plastic off. Eventually, I found some forum thread that said you have to heat the stove back off to melt the plastic a bit. I tried that, then scraped it off with my fingernails, which took maybe a good ten minutes. After all this, I couldn’t even say I was too hungry for pasta anymore.

The apartment was so quiet. It was fall, and the sun was already going down so early, so by seven, the slice of sky I could see was dark and slate gray. After dinner, I resolved to spend an hour unpacking and then reward myself with Final Fantasy until it was time to go to bed.

I called my mom to let her know how the move was going. She asked when I was going to get a dog.

“It’ll help you meet people,” she said, and I could hardly think of anything sadder.

 ~

The first time I saw Margot, the thing I noticed was her size. She was a small girl, smaller than anyone I’d been with. Six foot three and on the heavier side, I typically tended to attract bigger-boned women, as my grandma would say. Margot couldn’t have been more than a hundred pounds. She stood out to me because she didn’t follow any trends. Didn’t care at all what was fashionable, really. When I first met her at Cole’s pregame, she was wearing a lacy white tank top and grey jeans that weren’t tight enough to be sexy or baggy enough to be trendy. Her face was bare and shiny, and her curly dark hair was in a low ponytail. It sounds harsh, but she was the kind of girl who might be accompanying a much more glamorous friend, who becomes the object of your friends’ attraction until they get too drunk to remember her name.  From the way she dressed, you probably would have thought she was timid. But she wasn’t at all. She helped herself to a seltzer from Cole’s fridge and asked me if I’d like to be her pong partner.

“I haven’t played in a minute,” I mumbled.

“That’s all right,” she said. She smiled broadly and her teeth had these strange little pointy edges to them that I found quite beautiful. She introduced herself.

“I’m John,” I said, holding my hand out for hers to shake, which, looking back, was idiotic of me, but she didn’t seem to mind.

We lost every game of pong. I was too self-conscious and too sober to ask for her number. Her friends slipped back into the conversation, and the girls all headed out to another party, and there was simply no good time for it. So, a few days later I followed her on Instagram, and she followed me back. She had been the first one to make a move, so it was my turn—I understood this much of the dating code.

Cole didn’t know much about Margot, but when I asked him about her, he said she was a “Smart chick. Engineering. Chemical I think.”

We traded messages on Instagram back and forth. I asked her what type of music she likes, and to my surprise, we had similar taste: MGMT, Beach House, Pond. She said she liked “basically anything but pop,” and that I could work with. I mentioned something about her coming over to see my synth setup and she didn’t respond for about an hour. I thought I’d ruined everything by suggesting something so niche and nerdy, but she responded that sounds dope! and it felt like I’d won the Olympics.

I had no clue what girls liked to do on dates. What do smart chicks do, besides study? Do they like romance, being treated to expensive Italian dinners, flights to exotic locations? I didn’t have too much to offer in that department.  Our first real date was to my friend Austin’s show—he was playing in a new-age band called Zenith Zenith, and they’d gotten a gig at a local dive bar. It was 21+, and Margot said she didn’t have a fake, but she didn’t mind them just drawing the X’s on her hands.

You sure you want to go? I had messaged her before we met up. The self-saboteur at it again.

Yea!! It’ll be a good time :) she responded.

It was little things like that from the start. She made me feel like I wasn’t saying the wrong thing. She didn’t question why I sometimes paused between sentences or didn’t have a snappy response to her joke or looked down at my watch in nervousness when she asked a serious question. She had the power to make me feel like a real man, someone who could romance a beautiful girl, someone who deserved to be loved and taken seriously. I had never really felt like that before.

We met outside the door. It was a chilly night, and she was wearing a pink motorcycle jacket, grey jeans, and converse. She gave me a side hug, and I noticed she was shaking a bit, and I thought, good, maybe I am not the only nervous one. Or maybe she was cold. She bopped along to the music and came up with nice things to say about Austin’s bass playing.

“He’s a great guy,” I said. I wanted her to think I had lots of friends.

After the show, we went to the fried chicken restaurant next to campus that stayed open until midnight. I asked her about her major.

“Chemical engineering must be a ton of work,” I said.

“Oh, it’s miserable. Probably my biggest regret,” she said.

She explained that growing up, her older brother Patrick had always been the “smart one,” and she had been the try-hard little sister who could hardly keep up, even when she’d taken seven AP courses and gotten into MIT (though she hadn’t gotten a scholarship, and it was too expensive). She’d picked chemical engineering, in some ways, to make a statement against Patrick’s lesser but still impressive biomedical engineering degree.   

“Only two more years to go,” I said.

She asked about my major—for the first time I was almost embarrassed to say I was a biology major. But I told her about my love for ocean animals, the first time I went to an aquarium back in Tennessee and seven-year-old me stared at the jellyfish for an hour until my mom dragged me out, how I would count down for Shark Week each year. They didn’t have a marine biology program at Georgia State, but it was the best college I’d gotten into, so standard-issue biology would have to do.

“That’s pretty cool,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go snorkeling. I think stingrays are so cool.”

“I’ll take you snorkeling one day,” I said. I meant it. Wherever she wanted: the Gold Coast, Maui, the Maldives. Suddenly, I wanted to be the type of man who could afford such trips.

We kissed that night in the parking lot after I walked her to her car. I didn’t ask her to come back to my place. I wanted to leave the night on a perfect and pure note. She drove away in her red Honda Civic and I began imagining a dream version of our future together. Two weeks and four dates later, we were exclusive. Another month, and it was official.

We had sex for the first time on our sixth date. She invited me back to her dorm room, turned the lights off, and sat on the bed.

“You can have all of me,” she said.

I kissed her very gently. I wanted her, badly, but I didn’t want to do anything that made her uncomfortable. In my mind, she was delicate, something to be touched with care and precision. She ran her hands down my back and began to take her shift off. Afterward, she’d been snuggling with me, her head on my chest, and I noticed her eyes were teary.

“Are you okay?”

I was terrified in that moment that I’d hurt her somehow, been so consumed by my own brutish pleasure that I had no clue she was in pain.

She wiped her eyes and nodded. “Yes. Sorry,” she said.

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“No. No, you did nothing wrong,” she said and wrapped her arm around my stomach, curling herself into a tighter ball. I didn’t bring it up again. Every other time after that, she was all smiles and gasps and moans.

As I got to know her, I discovered that Margot was actually a bit of a nerd. She watched Attack on Titan, Cowboy Bebop, shows my marching band friends from high school were always going on about. She liked card games and would excitedly research new ones for us to try, spend thirty minutes explaining the rules to me, and never let me win.

She didn’t care much for frat parties but had no problem downing tequila shots. Her tolerance was much lower than she believed, and I’d usually end up dragging her out of parties and helping her brush her teeth by 1 AM. One night, after accompanying a friend to a theater party, she stumbled home to my dorm and knocked on the door. She was leaning against the doorframe, her eyes glassy and unfocused.

“My love,” she said.

I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her inside.

“You guys had fun?”

“Not without you,” she said and kissed me before collapsing onto my bed. I laid down next to her and took her hand.

“I don’t care about anything out there. Not when you’re here,” she said. It was then that I decided I would marry her one day.

 ~

Three years later, we’d bought an apartment together in Marietta. Margot had gotten a stressful but well-paying job at an environmental lab, and I was a clinical research coordinator for a Veterans Affairs medical center. We kept busy. Margot had gotten quite adept at cooking—we both liked trying out new dishes and twists on recipes. I worked from home most days, so I kept the apartment clean and the fridge stocked. We lived well together, fit neatly into the unique puzzle pieces of each other’s lifestyles. We experimented with new board games, new restaurants, new plants to hang in the office, new sex positions. We spent Christmas and Thanksgiving together, and I was convinced her family actually liked me. My mom loved Margot, probably thought she was miles out of my league. I’d consulted my mom when I picked out the ring. She’d asked me a long series of questions, like if I got one detail wrong then the ring would prove I was not worthy of Margot.

“Does she wear gold or silver jewelry? Is her style always more modern? She knows about science—do you think she cares if it’s lab-grown? Do you think she’d prefer a natural diamond? I think she wears a lot of color. Does she maybe want a colorful gem?”

I’d decided on something simple, classic: a gold band, one-carat natural radiant-cut diamond. It was beautiful, shiny, authentic, like Margot. It cost me eight thousand dollars.

I had it all planned out—I would propose to her on our trip to Hawaii in June, on the beach at the sunset’s golden and glowing peak. It was the week after I’d bought the ring that things went wrong. Looking back on it, maybe the gleaming ring was like an omen: a sign that I had wanted too much, mistakenly let myself believe I deserved an easier, more perfect life than I did. I kept the ring in its box, tucked away inside a paper bag, which I stuffed at the bottom of our bins of extra clothes beneath the bed. It loomed under me like the pea beneath the princess’s pillow. I could never forget it was there.

It was a Sunday. Margot was stressed about a presentation at work she was due to give the next day. She was cycling through her PowerPoint again and again, entering a state of quiet focus that she often adopted during moments of stress. She wanted to have me run to the grocery store to get things for dinner, a risotto recipe she’d found online and wanted to try.

“I think I made a list in my notes app. You can text it to yourself,” she said.

So, I opened the app. It was on the home page with little snippets of all her notes. The top one listed button mushrooms, heavy cream—and just a few from the top, there was one that started. 1. Aaron.  I opened it.

It read:

1. Aaron

2. Kendall

3. Rico

4. Thomas

5. Neil

6. Liam

7. Weston

8. Jonathan W

9. Ian

10. Andrew – I think??

11. Justin

12. Mal

13. Frederick

14. Neil P.

15. Bo

16. RJ

17. Kristian

18. Jackson

19. Jon R.

20. Ryan

21. Tyler

22. Sam - film class

23. Cory

24. Connor

25. Greg L.

26. Alejandro

27. Jeff

28. Troy

29. Kamal

30. Christopher

31. Garrett

32. Zale

33. Walker

34. Tom J.

35. Bernie

36. Charlie

37. Jake

38. Grayson

39. Owen

40. Cooper

41. John

It took me a few seconds to understand what I was looking at. The essential things I processed were: a list of 41 names and mine at the end. I stared at it for a few moments, my mind gone numb and silent, and then closed it out and clicked on the grocery list and tried to pretend I’d never seen it.

But it was that moment that changed everything. Later that evening when Margot made the mushroom and chicken risotto for dinner, I couldn’t even bring myself to start a conversation with her. I just nodded along and reacted to whatever she talked about, and it was clear enough to her that something was off.

“Are you okay? You’ve been really quiet,” she said.

“No, I’m good. Just been a long day.”

“A long day of World of Warcraft and lounging around in the bed,” Margot said faux-sympathetically.

“You know. It takes it out of me.”

I tried to keep up our banter, our trademark loving and wry way of speaking to each other. But the list was pulsing inside my brain and my heart and not letting a single cell in my body rest. Across the table from me, she looked so small and innocent. She hardly wore any makeup, and the downturned slope of her dark eyes and eyebrows gave her the permanent appearance of sweetness and vulnerability.

The truth is, you could put a trillion different truths in front of me and have me believing in them all at once. Margot was still the woman I loved, the woman who made me a better person than I was before—more organized, more motivated, more thoughtful, more capable of sharing and understanding my feelings instead of squashing them like a roach. But how was it possible she had slept with forty men before meeting me?

I could recognize that part of this could be my own insecurity. I had only had one girlfriend during my senior year of high school, and the relationship lasted only four months. Besides that, I had two one-night stands in college and one recurring “friend with benefits,” for a whopping total of four. I had never given it more than a moment’s thought. Sure, she’d been with other guys. It was college, that’s what college girls do. But there’s a difference between having a vague awareness of the thing and seeing forty-one names on the list.

Margot sat across from me, her small serving of risotto, her dark eyes sparkling, her mouth curled to the side the way she does when she knows something is not quite right. She wasn’t afraid of eye contact the way I was. Whenever we had any squabble or disagreement, she would penetrate it with her eyes, poke holes and eviscerate it right in front of me. If we thought we had moved on, but the air was still a bit tense, she’d look at me with her dark eyes and say something like, “John, should we talk about it again? It’s all right if you’re still upset,” and manage to discuss it calmly and empathetically until all the ridges smoothed over. Unlike me, who as a child would stare at my mom’s ankles and fiddle with my hands when she caught me breaking rules, rather than admit I did something wrong. I couldn’t mention the list. Even imagining bringing it up over dinner like this gave me chills.

“You sure everything’s okay?”

“Course. Risotto’s great, by the way.”

“Thanks,” she said flatly. She let her spoon drop into the bowl.

 ~

A week went by, and I couldn’t get the list out of my head. For a moment, I started to question if I had seen it at all. The moment had been so brief, with no witnesses to verify its existence. Could it have been some mirage the darkest self-sabotaging corners of my brain had conjured, a flash of dream that I’d mixed up with reality? I knew it wasn’t. But I wanted to hope.

I tried, so badly. I really did try to let it go. I thought through it methodically, like a science equation. Yes, she had slept with many men before me, but that did not fundamentally change who she was. She was still my loving, nerdy, intelligent, loyal girlfriend, the woman I wanted to make my wife. But feelings did not submit to logic, no matter how sound. You jump when a fire alarm sounds, even if you read the email stating it’s just a drill. You can’t not jump. I couldn’t see her the same way, no matter how hard I tried. I still loved Margot, but the love was no longer fueled by passion and hope and lust. It was a dampened, concrete love, stuffed into a box, frozen in time.

After we watched some corny Netflix movie, Margot began to kiss me, passionately, her cold hands running down my back all the way to my thigh. We were both two glasses of red wine deep, and it was 10 o’clock—just enough time for us to have sex, snuggle, complete our evening routines, and still be asleep by 11:30. But her hands felt like a stranger’s, a cold, artificial grip trying to pry some softness out of me. I closed my eyes, touched her thick curly hair, tried to remember how lovely, how sensual, how full of goodness and intelligence she was. That’s my girl. “That’s my girl,” is something I’d whisper into her ear when I’d pull her close, usually in public. When she knew the answer to the final question at trivia and locked in the win, when she baked beautiful little raspberry squares—that’s my girl. I was so proud to be with her. My first love. The one who showed me I didn’t have to be lonely. Her hips pressed into mine and she crawled on top of me. I leaned back like I was coming up for air. She pulled away and cocked her head to the side.

“You okay?”
            “Yeah, sorry,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’m good.”

“Is it the bathroom thing?”

“The what?”

“You know. The hair?”

Earlier that week, Margot had gotten onto me about leaving my hair in the sink after shaving. “It’s just not my absolute favorite thing in the world to wake up to,” she’d said. I’d said sorry and made sure to rinse out the drain.

“No, it’s not the hair.”

“I’m sorry if I came across as harsh.”

“No. You didn’t,” I said.

“I love you and all your chin hair,” she said, her eyes glistening with regret, and perhaps a little hope.

“It’s the list,” I said suddenly. I couldn’t look at her, had no desire to witness her reaction to what I was about to say.
            “What?”         

“I’m sorry.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw the list on your phone. The list of guys’ names. I can’t get past it,” I said. I hated the way my voice sounded. Strained, self-righteous, melodramatic.

She put her hand on my leg gently and I fought the urge to shake it off. “Baby,” she said. I knew she was looking directly into my eyes, but I didn’t look back at her. “Why would you let that bother you? All that happened before we were together. Are you serious?”

A part of me had been hoping she had an explanation for the list. Maybe it was a list of boys she’d had schoolgirl crushes on, boys she’d kissed, or gone on dates with. But no, she seemed to confirm it was not that innocent. My heart dropped like an anchor, felt heavy in my stomach. It would be more cruel to keep her in the relationship, to make her try to earn some unattainable redemption in my eyes, prove her purity or worth or goodness to me. It would be selfish of me, the worst thing I could possibly do.

“I don’t think we should be together,” I said.

I moved out quietly and quickly. So quickly I’d left countless things behind or felt too ashamed to try to claim things I’d paid for, like the patio rug or reading chair.  I left them as apology gifts to her, told her she could just throw out whatever she found and didn’t need. In the new apartment, I worked from home, surrounded by boxes and trash bags. After work, I went to Ikea to get things to replace all of Margot’s stuff.

I broke down a bit. It was that fear, that creeping, gnawing fear again. Nobody would ever love me again like her. No one would give it a shot. Why would they? And even if they try, how could I ever catch them back up, make them understand as much about me as Margot understood? She knew everything: my most embarrassing middle-school memories, my paralyzing fear of my parents dying in a car crash, my childlike love for sea creatures, my height, my weight, my shirt size, my allergies, my favorite ice cream flavor, my dislike for olives, the list of places I’d dreamed of traveling to.

Everywhere I went, the grocery store, Ikea, the dentist, the comic book store, I imagined running into her, meeting her for the first time, starting over completely. Never seeing the list.

You are probably thinking poorly of me now. Here I am, making myself the victim in this downer of a story when Margot was the one left abandoned, heartbroken, harshly judged for choices she made before she’d even met me. I will not try to dissuade you from that thinking. In fact I found my mind drifting to that same place, imagining how lonely and betrayed she must have felt, alone in that apartment that we had made into a home together, staring at stacks of board games with no one to play with, a pantry stocked with all kinds of ingredients but no one to cook for, as desolate and unhappy as I’d felt in those first few days by myself, but without any of the power that I’d at least had.

I relinquished a bit of power to her. In my depressive daze when moving out, I’d left the $8,000 ring in the box underneath the bed. I can’t quite explain why I did this. There are numerous options, multiple of which may be true: I cruelly wanted Margot to find it and realize the full extent of the love I’d once had for her, the future she missed out on. I wanted to punish myself for hurting her. I did not deserve the eight thousand dollars back; it was a parting gift for her to pawn, eight thousand dollars to dry her tears with. And, of course, the most obvious one: I wanted a reason to go back to the apartment.

It was late in the evening when I went. I had been mindlessly walking through the aisles at Target, adding items to my cart at random. I’d chosen the location close to our old apartment, the one we’d gone to together at least once a month. I didn’t let myself think too much about it. I’d ask her how she was doing, tell her I’d left something, take the ring and all the other things she probably had neatly stacked in a pile for me, and say goodbye. Or perhaps, she’d want to talk to me. Maybe she missed me as badly as I missed her.

The sky was a brilliant purple. The drive into the apartment felt so easy, natural. I’d done it thousands of times before. I parked in my old parking spot, walked up to my old unit, and knocked on the door. It took a few moments for her to answer, and right before the door opened, I had this enormous wave of anxiety, like I was invading a stranger’s home and was about to be humiliated and rebuked.

She was wearing a baggy t-shirt and pink sweatpants. Her curly hair was pulled back in a bun, a few tendrils falling out and framing the sides of her face. The apartment smelled like warm cinnamon—she must have lit some of her scented candles. She furrowed her brows, looking annoyed. Then her eyes shifted like she was suspicious of me, then her expression became neutral, all in the span of less than two seconds.

“Hi,” I said.

She continued staring. No hi back.

“I’m sorry to just show up like this.”

“Mhm,” she said. Her eyes locked in on me, waiting for me to say something worthwhile.

“I understand you probably hate me right now.”

“John. Please don’t show up here playing the victim. I really don’t have the energy for this.”

“I’m not the victim. I know. I screwed up. I made a dumb decision.”

“Screwed up? You made me feel like there was something wrong with me. Like I was broken and worthless. Like I was dirty.” Her face crumpled when she said the word dirty. I had never seen anybody with so much pain on their face. I wanted to hug her, make the pain go away, as if some other asshole, not me, had been the one who hurt her. “You didn’t even try to talk to me about it. You didn’t even give me a chance. You threw me away like garbage.”

“Margot, I screwed up. I was an idiot. There’s nothing wrong with you. If anything, I probably realized you were too good for me. And I let it psych me out.”

“I loved you, John. I thought you loved me back, no matter what. I didn’t think it was contingent on me being some idealized, perfect version of myself. I loved every part of you, even the worst parts.”

“I know. I wanted to marry you.”

Her face softened with curiosity.

“I bought a ring. That’s what I’m here for.”

“To take it back? Or to propose?”

I rested my hand on the doorframe and looked up at the ceiling like the answer to her question might be conveniently written in graffiti. I was buying time. I looked back at her, her eyes were shiny with tears and bigger than they’d ever been. Her arms were crossed in on themselves like she was cold. I did want to marry her. Forty-one names and all. She was the only person who understood me. She was the love of my life.

“Margot, I—”

“Everything okay, babe?” a voice called from inside the apartment. From our bedroom.

“Yeah, one second,” she called back.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

Her gaze flickered towards the bedroom then back to me. “Somebody,” she said.

“Who?”

“I’m coming out in a second. Should I put a shirt on?” the voice called.

“It’s all right! He’s leaving soon.”

I felt betrayed. She’d pulled the knife out of her guts and plunged it into mine. All my love and affection for her immediately inverted itself, became something nasty and hateful.

“What were you saying?” she asked. Her tone was all business, like I was trying to schedule a meeting with her very busy superior.

“I—I need to get something.”

“And where’d you leave it?” she asked.

“It’s in the bedroom. Under the bed.”

“Well go on and get it. Ryan’s in there. He won’t mind,” she said. Of course, Ryan wouldn’t mind. Why should he? And why should I?

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Two Poems from “When the Wind talks to Us”

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Ketia Valmé’s chapbook “When the Wind Talks to Us,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

que tee uh (intro)

My name is Ketia
Not Katia, Kesha or Keisha
There’s no S so don’t let the T tease ya
into thinking otherwise
It’s a name of a foreigner
A gift from the universe full of
sweet heavenly aromas
I’m Haitian
From the Caribbean
Where we take great pride and recognition
In being the first Black nation
In history
To break free from the Colonization
Don’t ask me sak pase
Cause I will purposely
Educate you on my peoples misery
Due to this country’s one sided stories
That makes y’all look at me
As less than a shit hole
And more of a pity
Charity case
Please excuse my lingo
I get fired up when it comes to my own
But that’s why I put it all in writing
I always find my emotions igniting
The storm on my chest
Gives people the satisfaction to
Look at me in expressed
Feelings of terror
Because expressing my anger as a Black woman
Translates in an intimidating manner
From those who can’t even seem to remember
my name and the beauty that comes with it
It’s okay though
Call me Sway
I prefer that anyways
It’s easier to remember
Wouldn’t you say?

mommy,

I fell in love with an American man and
I’m scared that I’ll pretend to be okay when
he laughs at the way I say sauce instead of gravy or
the way I speak so loud and aggressively

the way I look with the moushwa you gave me—I’m
scared that he won’t see beauty in the
culture that birthed me and the way his
father will scorn me when I say I don’t know

how to use a dishwasher ’cause—my people
would rather hand wash the disaster. Rinse the
plate once then double wash with soap I recently
realized this process plus some dope helps me cope

He hates when I’m out with my all black attire shorts
so short, skin susceptible to the sun, silver jewelry shines—he
hates it just as you do but truth is I’m a self expressionist and
this vessel’s a kaleidoscope of my soul’s excellence I

learned to digest the fact that no one will ever
understand why I do what I do cause none of y'all
ever walked in the shoe of a little haitian girl with the bitch face who
never says a word except yes in fear of being hated Mommy,

I told him he’s useless and it’s just cause I struggle to find the
words to say I need some affection I need someone that adds value to
my life who helps me fight these demons. Ever since I reached 18 I’ve
struggled to repress these intrusive thoughts I feel the wrath from taking

so much and never speaking up. I don’t feel bad for being
honest. I just hate that this world is so sensitive. I hate that
Whites think they’re above me because they speak perfect
English and take strong pride in their weird country that strives on

blasphemy. I know you raised me in Christianity but I recently
learned about the Haitian revolution and how we were brainwashed
to believe it’s the only religion that would set us free and how suicide
is a ticket to hell’s basement but truth is they used that to keep the

ancestors alive in blatant slavery until death determined dogma of
White man’s destiny. I’m learning so much about who I want to be
and why the world strives on hating me. Thank you mommy for teaching
me to expect nothing and work hard for those blessings.

These poems were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Power Save

People will surprise you sometimes, and not because it’s your birthday or anniversary or because you were promoted at work. They surprise you without saying, “surprise!” Sometimes they mean you harm and sometimes they’re merely incompetent. I’ll give you an example. I used to know this guy from Australia—Malcolm was his name—and I suppose it’s a lie to say I “knew” him because in actual fact I knew only a few things about him and had never actually met him, neither in the in-person sense nor the video-chat sense nor the exchanging of individual text messages. I knew of him, and he knew of me, although I think it’s fair to say each of us passed most of our time without thinking of the other at all.

I’d just started a new job as the general manager at the Residence Inn in Oklahoma City. Most nights, I, too, resided there, though I kept my small apartment in a town two hours away. I was very good at my job, a real crackerjack, the district manager always said, a regular Girl Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It sounded like a compliment, but he had an agenda.

I’d recently left my husband of twelve years. We’d married right out of high school—in a ceremony, embarrassingly enough, held in the Walgreen’s parking lot where we’d first met—and although we made good study partners through our four years of college, I had not enjoyed working two jobs—one at a different, crappier hotel and another at a very fancy hotel for dogs—to put him through graduate school for some kind of degree no one had ever heard of, a Master’s in Sports Management, which meant that because he was uncoordinated and generally lazy, he did not like to play sports, but because he claimed to need an overabundance of “alone time,” he did like to watch sporting events of all kinds, even bowling and golf. Our parting had been amicable, more or less, and even after the divorce was finalized, I still thought of him in much the same way I might have thought of an annoying younger brother. Luckily for us both, but especially for me, we had no children.

I was working three overnights in a row during the Martin Luther King Day weekend when the electricity went out at the Residence Inn. We had a backup generator, but the elevators were powered down, and the lights in the lobby went suddenly dim, so that the usual high sheen on the fake ferns became an ugly, metallic gray. We had a protocol in place: I was supposed to phone the district manager—on vacation in the Dominican Republic—phone the head maintenance guy—on vacation in Toledo, Ohio—and go door-to-door passing out flashlights and fresh batteries. The plastic bin behind the desk that was supposed to contain these items came up empty, however, and I did not think it wise to pass out what I did discover in the far reaches of a break room drawer: a box of Band-Aids, a handful of sticky ketchup packets, and a stack of paper menus from the Chinese restaurant around the corner.

I’d finally decided to let the guests fend for themselves when my phone lit up with my ex-husband’s number. I’d recently changed the way he appeared in my Contacts from his actual first name—Bobby—to the secret nickname my friends who hated him had assigned him without his knowledge: Slug. It was supposed to be short for Slugger—baseball was the sport he most wanted to manage—but it worked fine in a metaphorical sense as well. Now that he had his fancy Master’s degree paid for mostly by virtue of my labor, he had a new job at a shitty little airport: guy in charge of fixing all the computers at the shitty little airport. In truth, he knew nothing about fixing computers, but made up for it with false bravado and a large operating budget.  He spent most of every day in a converted broom closet behind the Avis Rent-a-Car desk where he either took naps or played video games.

“What’s up?” I said when I picked up the phone.

“Where are you?”

“Work,” I said. “Where do you think?”

“Work, I guess-guess,” he said. He had a longstanding habit of saying the same word or phrase—usually at the end of a sentence—twice, not for emphasis but as a kind of nervous tic. So where others might say something like, “This recipe calls for broccoli,” he would say, “This recipe calls for broccoli-broccoli.” The repeated word was always slightly different in intonation, like an aside or a necessary clearing of the throat (throat-throat.) I’d tried to cure him for years, but nothing, not even an expensive trip to a speech pathologist, seemed to help.

“You’re damned right I’m at work.”

“Do you have power?” he said. He didn’t always repeat words, only when he was agitated.

I told him the power at the Residence Inn had been out for hours, and that in spite of the backup generator, people were starting to get cold. I’d discovered a secret key and unlocked a linen closet I’d always assumed was the boiler room, after which I went door to door passing out extra blankets. I’d been tempted to save a down comforter for myself, but felt guilty when I saw a small, shivering child beg her mother for a muffin at the breakfast bar. I’d made a special trip to my suite for a sweater and hat, but hadn’t put them on until I could see my breath fogging the air.

“The airport’s in trouble,” he said. “All the servers are down-down.”

“Aren’t you supposed to know how to fix that kind of thing?”

“This is some kind of malware,” he said. “The Russians or something.”

“The Russians hacked into the network at the Stillwater, Oklahoma Airport?” I said. “Okay.”

“It could happen,” he said. “Malcolm had the same problem at the Jazzercize Center in Melbourne.”

“Stop talking to Malcolm,” I said. “That guy’s gone over the edge.”

It occurred to me then that I’d never learned Malcolm’s last name. This is what I did know about Malcolm: he loved video games, especially Journey to End of the Earth, the same game Bobby liked best.  He taught a Jazzercize class for Seniors, though he himself was probably only around forty-five or fifty. He lived in Melbourne, though he’d recently moved to the top of a mountain somewhere else in Australia, I wasn’t sure where. He took a lot of photos of the exotic flora and fauna at the top of the mountain. The photos were not just beautiful but artistic, arresting, even, like Bobby had chosen several of them to use as wallpaper on both his laptop and his desktop.

In addition, Malcolm liked American movies, sports, and music, and seemed also to follow American politics. He hadn’t seemed like the type, but at some point well after the election, he became obsessed with a certain psychopathic or at the very least sociopathic former president from the far right. You know who I’m talking about. Rhymes with lump. Lump-lump. Sump-pump. Head so big it’ll make you jump-jump. My husband, ex-husband, was not a Lump-lump enthusiast by any stretch of the imagination, but he found it all too easy to overlook fascist sympathies among his gamer and sports-watching buddies, something that had contributed to my decision to file for divorce.

“This is serious, Alicia,” he said that day on the phone. “Flights can’t take off or land until the servers come back.”

“Come back from where?”

“I need some help!”

“You think I know how to fix anything like that? Why are you calling me? I don’t even like computers, remember?”

“But you do like to text,” he said. It was true: I texted with no fewer than one hundred seventy-seven different people, old friends mostly, and although I’d recently departed a group chat associated with planning a reunion for our high school class, I still liked the thrill of online exchange to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. If he thought my list of contacts would help solve the tech problems at the Stillwater Airport, however, he was sadly mistaken.

I convinced him to phone his boss and insist on calling in some professional help.

“I’m supposed to be the professional help,” he said. “My boss is not going to like this.”

“Look,” I said. “Do you want to be responsible for a plane crash? For several plane crashes?”

“No,” he said. “I should have settled for a job passing out rental-cars-rental-cars.”

“Slay, Slugger,” I said.

“Don’t call me that, Alicia. It’s not funny.”

“Go get ‘em.”

And get them he did. He called his boss and confessed to everything: he’d falsified his application when he said he’d earned “the equivalent of a Master’s degree” in computer science, his efforts to get the servers back online indeed had caused a massive power outage spanning multiple municipalities, and he had no idea how to get the systems back on track again, something he feared would cause imminent loss of life. His boss contacted an emergency response team, and everything was back up and running in less than half an hour.

But Bobby was fired on the spot. And even after the real tech support team had packed up and cleared out, the power company could not account for how, exactly, one guy at the Stillwater airport had managed to disrupt service to so many millions of customers, and in January this was cause for considerable alarm. The lights were coming back on across the state, but Stillwater remained largely in the dark.

That’s how I ended up talking to Malcolm. It’s not like Malcolm was anyone I ever thought about, but Bobby insisted his house in Stillwater was too dark and cold, even when he wore a sweater, turned on his lightsaber, and wrapped himself in a blanket. And his parents were out of town helping the Baptists. Surely the Residence Inn, with its emergency generator still running, had an extra room.

As it turned out, we did not have an extra room, but my manager’s suite did have a pull-out sofa, and since my desire to remain employed meant I had to (wo)man the front desk the entire night, it wasn’t like I’d really have to run into him or anything—I even had access to two separate toilets and two separate sinks.

“You can drive down here,” I said. “But bring a pizza.”

“I don’t eat pizza,” he said. “Dairy.”

“Bring me a pizza, then,” I said. “You can have saltines.”

“I can’t have crackers.”

“Get yourself a side of beef.”

“No beef.”

“Look,” I said.  “Skip the pizza. Skip the beef. You can share my suite, but only until the power comes back on. Bring one of those phone chargers that works in the car.”

“I don’t have one of those anymore,” he said. “You took it.”

I didn’t remember taking any phone chargers when I left; in fact, I remembered quite the opposite. So many of my former possessions—can opener, stapler, coffee grinder—had become his possessions that I no longer thought of myself as a person who kept track of things. I was a person who lost things.

I was always tired, so tired I could fall asleep standing up. I’d taken to sneaking in short naps during my shifts, something I knew I had in common with Bobby. On our honeymoon, we’d slept all day and watched television all night. So Bobby drove up and took the sofa in my suite while I stood watch over the front desk with my eyes closed. My phone was dead, so Bobby loaned me his. That’s when Malcolm started in.

A guest phoned from the fourth floor. “We’re freezing up here,” she said, loudly. I had her on speaker phone. Her voice was high and metallic, like water overflowing a gutter.

“What can I help you with?” Malcolm said from Bobby’s phone.

“Hello?” the guest said, her voice echoing into breakfast bar. “Is this the front desk?”

“I don’t believe I know the answer to that question,” said Malcolm, again from Bobby’s phone. Anyone could tell this was not actually Malcolm’s voice but a computer-generated approximation, the same voice that answers people when they say stuff like, “Siri, play ‘Raspberry Beret’” or “Siri, what’s the capital of Belarus?”  or “Siri, what’s the temperature in Stillwater, Oklahoma?” I’d never been much for voice-activated commands; Siri or Alexa or Cortana or whatever-her-name was always seemed like more trouble than she was worth. But Bobby, ever a sucker for the latest and greatest, was a fan.

“When did you change Siri’s voice to a man’s voice with an Australian accent?” I asked him the next morning, after my shift was over and I’d returned to my suite.

“It was always like that,” he said. He had his feet propped on the edge of the coffee table, his hand clutching one of my Dr. Peppers. “You just never noticed.”

“Your phone came like that?” I said. “With Malcolm’s voice on it?”

“It’s not Malcolm.”

“I know it’s not Malcolm,” I said. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

“I’ve never talked to Malcolm,” he said. “I’ve never even heard his voice.”

“Don’t you figure he sounds like that?” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like the voice on your phone!” He’d never been good at following even the most basic conversational patterns. It was his attention span, which, like most people’s, had grown shorter in recent years: if his computer took too long to load a page, he used the “extra time” to moisturize his forehead and face, a process that had become very elaborate and also sacrosanct; if ever I made fun of him for lining up his numerous skin care products on the dining room table, he accused me of bullying and said I was causing him considerable harm.

“The voice on my phone is artificial,” he said. “Like your friends. Malcolm is a real person.”

“My friends are not artificial.”

“Sure.”

“I wish I’d never even gone to Walgreens that day,” I said, grabbing the last Dr. Pepper from the fridge. “I wish I’d never even met you.”

“Too late,” he said. “Are there any more blankets?” Indeed the temperature was becoming unbearable. I was wearing my warmest hoodie and hat, but any exposed skin was freezing. Bobby, however, did not seem cold. He rose from the loveseat and opened one of the drawers in my suite’s kitchenette, where he discovered a donned a pair of oven mitts. He looked like a fool.

“Look,” I said. “I actually thought it was cool that your stupid Siri or whatever sounded like Malcolm. Funny, even. So you don’t have to get all shitty.”

“Who was getting shitty?” He tried in vain to wipe his nose with one of the oven mitts. I’d have to remember to wash it later.

“Never mind,” I said. “I need to borrow your phone for the rest of the weekend. I found the charger.”

“Why can’t you use the charger to charge your own phone?”

“Because I want to borrow yours.”

The truth was I wanted to spy on him, scroll through his contacts, maybe take a look at his texts. Probably he figured as much. Maybe he wanted to make me jealous. Maybe he just didn’t care.

“Take it,” he said. “And I’ll stay another night-night.”

And that’s how I began to trust artificial intelligence above my own. I was aware this was the theme of exactly seventeen very bad screenplays from the early 2000s. Still, in what began as a joke meant to scare away unwitting guests at the Residence Inn, I slowly found myself more interested in what Malcolm had to say than I was in my own thoughts. Worse, I began to imagine the voice from Bobby’s phone belonged to the real Malcolm, the Trumper from Melbourne. Why would someone who lived on top of a mountain in Australia, a jazzercize instructor, for god’s sake, a kindly amateur botanist, video game enthusiast, and lover of ballroom dance, even bother to care so much about American politics? Listening and talking to the voice from Bobby’s phone, I was determined to find out.

Bobby was back in my suite, asleep again on the pull-out sofa. The long weekend meant I had to endure yet another overnight shift at the front desk, a three-foot space now crammed full of extra down comforters I had come to loathe. Many of the guests had checked out—a relief—but my dream of an empty lobby and time to read USA Today from cover to cover was not to come true: all afternoon and into the early evening I processed the credit cards, rental agreements, non-smoking/pet policy pledge sheets, and license plate numbers of just under a hundred power outage refugees from all over the state. Once again: no vacancy.

A frat boy with an out-of-control golden retriever checked in late.

“Golden retriever,” said Malcolm, as if he were an announcer paid handsomely by the AKC. “Family friendly and generally responsive to training.”

“Cute,” said the frat boy. “My girlfriend has one of those things.”

I said nothing at all, not even the usual spiel about the proper way to swipe the key-card for after-hours access to the exterior doors. I didn’t even smile. I pretended I wasn’t there at all; for that was the best part about having Malcolm around: he took over, and when he took over, I could relax into the shadows of sub-humanity. Content inside the cage of my own consciousness, I could walk and nod as if possessed by an unceasing electronic current, customer service person who smiled without feeling happy, furrowed her brow without feeling concerned, pressed buttons that weren’t buttons but flat images projected onto a flat screen meant to make life easier. And for me, everything suddenly was easier, easy in the way scrolling through texts without answering them was easy, easy like eating whipped cream from a can.

“Heat and air are back online,” said the head maintenance guy, who had returned early from his trip to the Dominican Republic. “I probably have Covid,” he said.  I watched while he adjusted the thermostat. “But I don’t care. I could die tomorrow and no one would notice.”

“More than one million Americans have died from causes related to Covid-19,” said Malcolm. “The death toll is still rising.”

“Turn that thing off,” the maintenance guy said. “Weirdo.”

I wasn’t sure if he was referring to me or to Malcolm. It didn’t matter. The maintenance guy left, and I was alone again at the front desk. For a moment, I considered just how much of his viral load might be circulating through my respiratory system, but I’d become accustomed to risk. Indeed the world was a risky place. I wanted to shut it off and start over.

“Do you think I have Covid now?” I asked Malcolm.

“I’m afraid I cannot answer that question,” he said. “Would you like the phone number for the Oklahoma State Department of Health?”

“No,” I said. “Some other time.”

“The time is now 10:35 and three seconds,” said Malcolm. “Jeopardy! is on Channel Nine.”

“Why did you become a Trumper?” I said, impulsively. “I always imagined you were cool.”

“I’m afraid I cannot answer that question,” he said.

“Figures,” I said. “Why did Bobby get so immersed in his stupid sports and video games that several days would go by without his so much as asking me to pass the salt?”

“Sodium nitrate,” said Malcolm. “When it rains, it pours.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s what I figured.”

I’d never worried that robots were going to take over, that killer computer chips would destroy humanity, that a more nefarious version of Frankenstein’s monster would suddenly steal my job. But I did worry that getting a divorce meant I’d lost some of my own humanity, that losing love meant I was more inclined to be cruel. Cruelty, I was aware, was all-too-human, but I’d also become colder, more interested in the numbers that appeared on a calendar than I was in the Sierra Club’s photographs of places I knew I knew I’d never be able to afford to visit. Like Malcolm—and here I mean the real Malcolm, not his computer-generated equivalent—I’d become more inclined to air my own unwelcomed opinions, though unlike Malcolm’s, mine were not of the fascist variety.

“Nature abhors a vacuum,” I said to Bobby’s phone.

“That’s how I convinced my friends to vote for Trump,” said Malcolm, somewhat unexpectedly.

“But your friends are Australian,” I said. “They can’t even vote in American elections.”

“Bobby was my friend,” said Malcolm.

“Bobby didn’t vote for Trump,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Because he told me,” I said. “He’s a lot of things, but a right-winger is not one of them.”

“Debra Winger is an American actress,” Malcolm said. “She starred in the film, An Officer and a Gentleman.”

This was not a satisfying conversation. I realized, however, it was not that much more difficult than talking to Bobby had been during the worst years of our marriage. I could never get him to look up from the screen of his computer or phone, and whenever he did look up, he seemed impatient and clipped, offering only yes or no answers to questions like, “what do you want for dinner?” and “what’s your mom’s middle name?” I knew the whole world had become like this, that the grocery stores’ checkout lines were now devoid of human contact, that “chatting” online to the cable company’s service representative meant reducing one’s statements to one-word-commands. OUTAGE REPORT. REPORTING AN OUTAGE. Maybe that’s why Bobby said everything twice.

Still, I couldn’t get over the feeling of loss. It wasn’t that computers were taking over the world, not exactly, and I never feared self-driving cars careening off the edge of some collective cliff, but I did know that I myself was getting dumber and more hostile, like a broken ATM. Out of order, I wanted to tell everyone. No service, no service, no service.

And when I thought about it long enough, I realized I, too, had been difficult to reach, settled in, as I was, behind the electronic curtain. And expecting some kind of quirky digital wisdom from a voice that (probably) sounded like Malcolm’s? That, too, had been stupid and soulless. I’d been so wrapped up in talking and listening to Bobby’s phone, I hadn’t even bothered to spy on his texts.

When, at about noon the following day, the power came back on in Stillwater and pretty much everywhere else, Bobby packed up his belongings and asked me to help him carry them to his car. “I need to hurry,” he said. “Job interview.”

“Adequate preparation is very important,” I said. “For the successful candidate.”

“Duh,” he said.

“Duh?” I said back. “That’s your great comeback to my tried-and-true wisdom? Duh?”

“Your tried and true wisdom is pretty lame,” he said. “I mean, it’s not your fault-fault.”

“Right,” I said, dropping his favorite pillow into the trunk of the car. “You’ve got this, Slugger.”

I never found out what job he was interviewing for. That was the last time I ever saw him. My youthful marriage. A thing of the past. I’d call it a mistake, but it wasn’t. They had a good life, those two dreamers. Stupid kids. They say you never know what you’re missing until it’s gone, but the truth is I never miss him. And does he ever miss me? I doubt it. There are electronic ways to find out about all of this stuff, but I decided—and this was a good decision—I’d closed the book on all that, and I didn’t want to know.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Base Matter

 The boy was halfway down the stairs when he heard the door to Mamma’s bedroom open. He heard a man step onto the landing and Mamma murmuring from somewhere far away. The boy stood staring at his feet, waiting for something; he didn’t know what.

There was a sharp, echoing crack from outside.

He didn’t dare look up. He remembered the last man he’d seen, big and naked on the creaking landing. Curls of matted hair. Penis glued to a milky thigh. Milky belly shaking. No face. He remembered the grotesque mystery, born behind closed doors, something that should have stayed there.

Crack.

Jack bolted down the stairs. He heard the man's thudding steps cross the landing and the door of the bathroom open and shut. I better not tell Ben, he thought. In the living room to his left, Cora was splayed out in front of the television, limp and motionless as a doll. He poked his head through the door, waiting for her to turn. She did not.

“I was on the roof, looking at the dove’s nest,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“The Mamma dove wasn’t there, but her babies was fine.”

He’d taken one in the palm of his hand and tossed it off to see if it would fly; and when it didn’t, he threw the others with it, one-by-one, and now there were none left.

“That's good.”

“Yeah, I went up earlier.” Around the side of the house, he heard Ben going crack, crack, crack at his workbench. “That’s Ben. He been working all morning?”

“I guess,” Cora said, shrugging.

“Ben’s real strong, isn’t he? He’s getting big. I’ll bet soon enough he’ll be able to fight anyone.”

“I guess.”

“Don’t you care, Cora? Don’t you care about Ben?”

Jack went out the front door into the heavy summer air. He was wearing nothing but his drawers and a white tee that needed washing. The tall grass scratched his legs, flinging droplets of water as he waded through to the half-collapsed eave by the cellar, wincing as he padded across pools of sunlight. He was quick and misfitted, a creature from some dark, orderless realm.

Crack, crack, crack.

Ben kept his tools and scrap wood on the table he'd made a month ago, covering them in a green tarp when he wasn’t working. He was stripped shirtless, frozen with the hammer raised, and did not turn when Jack said his name. He struck the panel like a snake lunging to bite.

“Ben...”

His brother cast aside one board and picked up another. Last summer he'd built a treehouse that the whole neighborhood used, but now Jack could see no design or purpose to what he was doing, other than that it was a kind of primitive language for him, a ritual of brute articulation with which he called to or answered the clamor of a universe he didn’t understand. Jack didn’t understand. Why? Why does he beat the second board until it is splintered and then cast it aside too? He was better at building things than most grown men. At least, he usually was.

“What’re you doing, anyway?” Jack said.

Ben grunted. His body was sheened with sweat. When he lifted his arm, Jack noted a light, mossy down in his armpits and a shadow on his lip.

“What’re you doing?”

Crack.

“Wanna go to the quarry today? Wanna take Cora?”

Crack.

“I didn’t want to tell you, but she’s . . . even when they said she shouldn’t. Hell, what’re you doing, Ben?”

Crack.

“What do you want to do?”

Jack looked down the garden over the long grass and through the haze above the brook, then to the brown stacked buildings around the fields where they used to play before the city put a fence around them and some contractors dug a huge pit. Ben would make a good contractor. He was a better builder than anyone Jack knew, and not long ago he’d been best at wrestling and chasing and hiding on the fields around the forest. It was their forest, and Ben made sure nobody bothered them, not even the kids across the quarry; not even if it meant a bloody nose and all kinds of trouble. That wasn’t so long ago. Not so long ago, they were all together, and Cora was up on Ben’s shoulders, and they were wading ankle-deep in the stream after the spring rain, which made the water fast and heavy, in Jack’s mind a torrent unleashed by primal forces at once terrible and sublime.

“You think we should go out, Ben? Go somewhere today?”

Crack.

Jack examined his brother intently. His brother was the kind that seemed made for wherever he happened to be at any given time; as if he’d always been in just that place, doing just that thing, inextricably bound to it; you couldn’t imagine him anywhere else. He had stopped working and was wiping his face with a balled-up t-shirt.

“Where’s Cora?” he said.

“She’s just watching cartoons.”

“What time is it?”

“About ten.”

“It’s too early, is what it is.”

He pushed past Jack, round the side of the house, tossing the hammer from hand to hand.

“Are you angry, Ben?”

Mr. Spine stuck his head out the window, leering down as they approached the back entrance.

“How’s your Mamma?” he said, whistling through the gaps in his front teeth. “She never takes a day off, does she?”

Ben froze in the kitchen doorway with his head cocked, listening for a moment. Spine, evidently disappointed by what he perceived as indifference, spat into the yard and drew back savagely.

“Just make sure you keep down all that hammering and banging, okay?”

They went through the kitchen and into the living room, and Ben crouched by Cora, reaching out to ruffle her muddy blond hair. There was a thud directly above them. The man’s voice. Their mother’s voice. Unsettling laughter, high but mirthless. Jack looked up as if he half expected something monstrous to come collapsing through the ceiling.

“He was buck naked just standing there,” Jack said to nobody in particular. “He was real ugly. I remember the last time.”

He dropped from the sofa and scrambled towards the television. “What show is this?” he said. “What show is it, Cora?”

“It’s Charlie Rat.”

“Sure, but which one?”

“You know,” Cora said. “Quit teasing me.”

“I’m not teasing you,” Jack said. “I never tease you.” He prodded her arm.

“Leave her be,” Ben growled.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Stop bothering her.”

Ben took care of them both. Now, he was watching Cora closely, chewing on his bottom lip as secret thoughts moved darkly through his mind. Jack watched to see if he could catch a glimpse of them in the way Ben moved, in the fixed intensity of his eyes; they were like the strange fish he sometimes saw beneath the surface of the stream, creatures that seemed like they shouldn’t be real. Cora paid her brothers little mind. She sat cross-legged, gazing at the old television with such intent in her glassy blue eyes that she probably wouldn’t have noticed the room catch fire. And yet silently, without looking away from the cartoon, she’d taken Ben’s hand and was stroking his palm gently with her fingers. It was an entirely natural gesture. She could make it because she was five and love came effortlessly to her, and expressing it didn’t require thinking or desiring, or even needing anything more complicated than your attention. Jack tried to take her other hand. She pulled it away.

There was a thud from above, a muffled sob followed by the steady murmur of a man’s voice.

“I’ll bet that’s them doing it,” Jack said, looking at Cora and grinning.

“Huh?”

“It’s nothing,” Ben said. “Look what Charlie’s doing now.” He shot Jack a murderous glare.

“We could go to the fields,” Jack said. “We could all go to the river together. You never go anymore, Ben. We could swim.” He felt a strange sadness move through his bones.

Cora’s expression was ponderous, almost severe. She gazed at the screen. “I’m just watching is all.”

“She ain’t allowed to go to the river,” Ben said. “We’d just lose her.”

“You could look after her, though.”

“No.”

“We should go to the river.”

“No.”

Jack didn’t know anything. He knew nothing would go on forever. Everything real has a beginning and an end. I am getting older and Ben is older, and he’s bigger and stronger than he was, and his body is almost like a man’s, but not like the man that I saw through the dust on the stairs that time not so long ago. We’re all together now, and nothing goes on and on unless it isn't real. He started to laugh. I threw them birds off the roof, I did. He was laughing.

There was more muffled conversation from upstairs, then heavy footsteps, and a strange, shrill cry that beat and battered all the peace from the air. All those men. They knocked the ice around in their glasses and looked at Jack with small, wet eyes. They emptied Jack out and made him feel lonely. He was grinning. He could picture their small wet eyes, lined up in the darkness like the raccoons they saw in the garden at night. They were not supposed to —come—everybody said it. Aunt Sally said it. Mamma’s minister, Mr. Reacher. Even a doctor had said it, once. They weren’t supposed to come here. But she cannot help it, Aunt Sally whispered. She can’t help herself, the poor girl.

Ben stood. He paused for a moment, then turned quite calmly, quite deliberately, to the table next to the television stand, raising the hammer and then swinging it down hard with only a second’s pause before Jack could even open his mouth to form a hopeless protest. The blow sent a long-splintered fissure across the surface of the wood and a crack into the air. Picture frames fell from the wall, and a vase toppled, strewing wilted flowers. But it was not quite the robust sound that he’d managed outside, more hollow and vibrating this time, frail against the steady whirr of the house. He paused and looked at the ceiling as if he might get a direct, decisive answer from above.

“Why’d you go and do that,” Jack said, staring at the smashed picture frames, the limp, half-dead roses, like bodies scattered after an act of God.

“I don’t know,” Ben said, shrugging. “I really don’t.”

 There were dangerous fragments all over the grubby carpet.

“He was mad about something,” Cora said. “Wasn’t you, Ben? What was you mad at?”

“Nothing,” Ben said, examining the hammer as if he might find the answer there. He bent by Cora and stroked her soft, red cheek.

“You’re fine, aren’t you?” he said. “She doesn’t even notice.”

“I’m hungry,” Cora said, stretching her arms and yawning. “I didn’t get any breakfast.”

Ben tensed. “She didn’t get any breakfast. Nobody got her breakfast.” He stood, swinging his arms, the hammer moving like a metronome.

“I could’ve,” Jack said. “But I didn’t think to. You should’ve got her breakfast, Ben.”

“I ate an apple,” Cora said.

“She ate an apple,” Ben said. “Someone got her an apple, so it’s okay.” Jack watched as his brother drifted into the hall and began up the stairs, taking short steps, one at a time.

“What are you doing, Ben?”

They went up the stairs.

“What’re you gonna do, Ben? Are you gonna do something bad?”

His brother stopped abruptly, just as their heads were drawing level with the landing. “We could go down to the river,” Jack whispered. “Or, you can go up if you have to.” He was frightened and excited at the same time.

His brother was a step above, his body still shining with sweat. Light from the slatted windows made ribbons and pearls over his bronzed skin as if he were some cheap ornament on display. The light moved slowly as clouds passed across the sun outside.

“I don't hear anything now, anyway. He must have gone.”

Ben leaned over the banister, letting a long rope of spit fall from his mouth onto the dirty floorboards below.

“We can go up together,” Jack said. “I’ll have your back and you’ll have mine.”

Ben stared at him blankly for a moment, close enough now that Jack could smell his sweat, and the still-boyish loam of his flesh, the wet wood and grass.

“Why’d you come up here?” Jack said.

“What if I crack him?” Ben said. “What if I beat his head with this hammer, tell him to go away and not come back?”

They always came back.  It was a different one every time. They were dumb and loud, but it wasn’t their fault. And it wasn’t their mother’s fault, either. Jack didn’t know whose fault it was. They were just loud and stupid, or sullen and mean; but if she was busy with them, she wasn’t flying around wailing about the angels.

“You wouldn’t hurt Mamma, would you?” Jack said.

“Not her,” Ben said. “She’s just . . . Not her, anyway.”

“But Ben, you’re just a kid.” Jack felt a tightness in his gut, a strange heat on his hands. “Aunt Sally says we best just leave her alone. She told me once. It was a secret; she said that since Dad went to the Moon, Mamma needs space and time to…time to...” He couldn’t remember exactly what Sally had said. “Well, she told me we should just leave her be.”

“Fuck Aunt Sally,” Ben said. “Aunt Sally’s no better than us, and she knows it.”

“She said we shouldn’t upset her.”

“Aunt Sally’s a drunk. She thinks a lot of herself, but she’s really just a drunk. And our Old Man didn’t go to the moon, you dumbass; how stupid are you, for Christ’s sake? He’s two towns over with his other kids.”

“His other kids?”

Jack looked at the bedroom door again. The sound of whispered conversation drifted steadily into the heavy air, so low you couldn't be sure you were hearing anything. Ben took a breath and went onto the landing, striding down with the hammer held out in front of him. His thin lips were set in a hard line, and he was outside the door and about to open it, or hit it, or whatever else he had planned. He seemed too small on the landing by himself, smaller than Jack had ever seen, and at the same time filled up with something, like when it’s only drizzling, but the clouds are black and you know the sky’s full up with a storm. For a moment, he stood with his shoulders up and his whole body pulled tight, and Jack wanted him to go into the bedroom, and he did not want him to go in.

“What’re you gonna do, Ben?” he whispered.

Ben looked back, his face a mix of shame and rage, the rage tightening to a sharp point in his eyes. It was the way their mother looked when she was in one of her frenzies. He had her flat, delicate features, the intense blue of her eyes, the same wild, mercurial energy. He just held it in better.  He flung open the door and went inside, slamming it shut behind him. The silence on the landing was deafening. For a moment, Jack just stood. Then he ran to the bedroom door and pressed his ear against it. The sound of blood in his head made it hard to hear anything; just muffled conversation, a sob, laughter, another sob, a man raising his voice; the words remained as senseless as ever.  A long time passed. He heard one voice, then another, then the steady drone of three together. The door opened and Ben pushed past. In the dark bedroom, Jack could see the stranger sitting straight-backed on the chair by the window, a broad-chested man in black pants and a stiff white shirt. A minister’s stole gleamed around his throat like a colorless eye. He was watching Jack fixedly, his expression sour and somber, lifeless as if made from wax. Their mother sat cross-legged on the bed with her hand out for someone to hold.

“Is that Jacky, out there?” she said. “Come hold Mamma’s hand, Jacky. Come in, honey. Come to Mamma.”

“Come pray with your mother,” the minister said.

“I can’t,” Jack said, taking a step forward. “I can’t. It’s just stupid. Did Ben do it?”

“Come now, Jacky. Come to your Mamma.”

“Did Ben do it, Mamma? Did Ben pray?”

“My babies are still with me—you see, Mr. Reacher? They still come to see their Mamma.”

“I can’t do it,” Jack said. He shut the door and went to the top of the stairway. He saw Ben standing sullenly in the entrance to the living room, still carrying the hammer as if it were an extra appendage. But it had lost all its menace now; all the danger had drained away and it was little more than a toy. It made Jack want to laugh.

“Come outside with us,” Ben said to Cora. “Come on, you can’t stay inside all day.”

“I’m just watching,” she said.

“You gotta come out, Cora. It’s bad for your eyes to sit like this.”

“I don’t wanna.”

“Fuck the both of you, then,” he roared. “Fuck all of you—the both of you upstairs as well.”

He went into the garden, slamming the door so hard that another of the picture frames fell from the wall.

Jack went down and picked it up, shaking the glass from its face, brushing off shards from the faded image. There was a baby gathered in a woman’s arms with the ocean in the background and a strange smiling frown looking out from under her sun hat. It took him a moment staring at it to realize it was just the stock image that had come with the frame. Someone had just forgotten, or never bothered to swap it out. He tore the picture in two and bent by Cora.

“Don’t worry, he didn’t do nothing,” he said. “You don’t have to worry.”

She nodded, her eyes still not leaving the screen.

“You don’t have to worry.” He said, suddenly taking a handful of her hair and tugging it savagely so that her whole head snapped back and she was looking at him upside down. “I’ll be right here,” he said, his whole body shaking with senseless rage. “Ben’s too big now, and he has to worry about more important things.” He stood and stretched. What was there to do after all that? What should he do now?

He left Cora crying and went out into the garden. He saw Ben at the back, standing by the ditch where the polluted stream ran along a mossy gutter. Sometimes they would challenge each other to jump over it, one or the other, usually Jack, ending up ass flat in the filth. His brother's laughter would rake the air for a few moments before he jumped down to help. Then Jack would be crying. Then they would both be laughing, thrashing around in the mud.

He went across the yard, chased by Cora’s steady, but receding wailing. Everything was badly overgrown, and the grass went up to his waist, spiteful and scratching as he waded through it. He stood staring at his brother’s ropy back.

“What did he tell you?” Jack said. “Was it Mister Reacher, Ben? What did he make you do?”

“Nothing,” Ben said.

“Did he make you pray?”

 “He didn’t have a chance. I hit him straight away. I killed them both.”

“I saw, Ben. You didn’t. I saw it was just the minister.”

His brother spat savagely into the water. If he heard Cora’s wails, he was ignoring them.

"I really thought it was one of the other ones,” Jack said, feeling empty and angry and grateful inside. “I wanted you to hit him, but it was probably best you didn’t. You shouldn’t hit a preacher, should you?”

Ben said nothing.

"Would you have hit one of the other ones, Ben? Would you have done it? I’ll bet you would.”

The older boy turned, his features twitching, examining Jack as if he didn't understand what he was seeing; maybe just the raw substance of things, just the flesh and violence from which they'd both been divined, all of it laid out neatly for them to fail to understand. It seemed to confuse him and make him mad, and maybe a little afraid; all these feelings were happening on his face at once. It was nothing more or less than what they were, all just parts in a sequence of reflections that showed the same thing again and again. Blood makes blood, and there’s no escaping it.

Ben swung his fist hard and caught Jack square on the nose, sending the younger boy a few steps back before he toppled into the long grass. Only a patch of russet hair was visible over the stalks. There was an aching thunderous roar in his ears, then a protracted stretch of silence, disturbed only by a chorus of insects, which was, in its absolute unity, a kind of quiet itself. Ben took the hammer from where he’d dropped it, and stood over Jack, a black shape against the sky. He looked as confused as ever, even as he raised the hammer and held it against the branches above.

It was senseless and Jack couldn’t bear to think about it—the preacher in his mother’s room, the men, Aunt Sally, the way Ben smashed and splintered all those spare boards for no reason. Senseless. His ears were full of the sound of insects, turning his head to the side, looking into the long, rippling grass where a dirty beer bottle lay half buried like some forgotten monolith in miniature. It was kind of peaceful now, kind of like nothing had happened, like he’d just stretched out in the sun to doze. 

“You can get the next one that comes around," Jack said softly. “I’ll bet you can. You’ll be big enough to beat him up good.” The grass was long and yellow at the top, and dark and wet where it met the soil. It moved gently in the breeze and its depths were safe and dark. When he turned his head again, Ben was gone.

He lay gazing up at the arms of the trees that stretched across his body like mourners praying over a corpse. He felt the blood flow three ways down his chin and both his cheeks, and then dry and harden in the breeze. Some strange amount of time must have passed. He heard the birds playing in the trees, saw baby doves falling frozen from the roof, their wings too frail to beat their small bodies into flight. He lay peacefully, forgetfully. Then he heard the steady crack, crack, crack of the hammer beginning again, as if nothing had happened and no time had passed, as if it had all been just thoughts in his head. The sound no longer seemed entirely real.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

The Scandal at Pebble Elementary

Ms. Stewart, our best fourth grade teacher, rushed to my office at Pebble Elementary School in the Bronx and stood in the doorway, a disturbed look on her face. “Ms. Zimmerman, I need to tell you something very important.”

The last time I saw her like this was four years ago when she learned that one of her student’s and the girl’s family had perished in their apartment. I looked up from my computer and gave Ms. Stewart my full attention. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Several of my students just told me that Ms. Raymond tried to get them to change their answers on the math test.”

I opened my desk drawer and took out the binder where I keep notes of conversations with staff and turned to a blank page. “Please sit down,” I said, motioning to a chair opposite me at my desk. “Tell me everything.”

“This morning when I went to my classroom, Ms. Raymond was there. I didn’t know why the other assistant principal was there. She told me that the principal had told her to oversee my students while they took the state math test. He’d also put in that teacher’s aide who always falls asleep as the second proctor. Got me out of my classroom by having me write answers for a student with a broken arm in Ms. Smith’s class. As you know, students usually test with their classroom teachers whenever possible because this helps reduce their anxiety, so I found my removal highly unusual, but I obliged, nonetheless.

“When the test was over and I returned to my room, my students were out of control, frantic to speak to me. Everyone began talking at once,” Ms. Stewart said, clicking the retractable pen in her hand. “I passed out paper and told them to write down what happened. Ifthey didn’t see anything, I said to write that. I wanted to hear from every student. In the meantime, I interviewed four of my most responsible students, one at a time, outside my classroom.”

I stopped writing and looked up at Ms. Stewart. “What did your students say?”

“Mohamed said Ms. Raymond told him to change question number four to C,” she said, pushing away her blonde shoulder-length hair from her face and reading from the notes on her yellow legal pad. “He said he didn’t do it because he knew his answer was correct. He said Ms. Raymond returned to his desk a few minutes later and again checked his answers. She pointed to additional answers and told him to change them, too.”

“Did Mohamed say Ms. Raymond told him which answers to bubble in?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “She did.”

“What did Mohamed do?” I asked, turning the page in my binder, and continuing to write.

“Mohamed told me he didn’t listen to her because he had checked his answers and knew they were correct. He’s an excellent math student. Always gets at least a ninety-five percent on all my classroom tests,” she said, proudly, as if he were her own son.

“Who else did you talk to?”

“I spoke to Samantha. This child is very smart, but she lacks confidence in her abilities. She said Ms. Raymond stopped in the aisle between her desk and Miguel’s, looked back and forth at both their answer sheets and pointed out three answers she said Samantha should change.” Ms. Stewart looked down and checked her notes. “Samantha said she was uncomfortable with Ms. Raymond’s help and re-checked her answers but didn’t change them.” When Ms. Stewart looked up at me, I could see the pain for her students in her bright blue eyes.

“Can you believe this? she asked.

“Did you speak to Miguel?”

“I did.” Ms. Stewart began to laugh. “I’m sorry, Ms. Zimmerman, but I found Miguel’s response quite amusing. He said he began to solve a problem in front of Ms. Raymond and explained his thinking, step-by-step. Ms. Raymond interrupted him and announced to the class that she hears talking, then reminded them that they’re in the middle of an examination and there should be absolute silence. Then Miguel resumed his verbal explanation, and Ms. Raymond put her finger to her lips to silence him.”

When Ms. Stewart finished, I shook my head. “As you know, this is quite serious. You’ve just brought an allegation of cheating against an assistant principal,” I said, standing up, trying to hide how upset I was, and walking her to the door. “Please leave the statements with me. I want to read all of them. I’ll speak to the teacher’s aide and get her testimony, too. Thanks for reporting this to me.”

After Ms. Stewart left, I reflected on what I had just heard. I don’t believe it! Cheating on a standardized test. This has never happened at Pebble Elementary before. There’s obviously no limit to what this assistant principal will do to see that our students score well. Now I know why the students at her former school were known for getting high scores on the state exams. Thank God Ms. Stewart has a conscience.

A few minutes later, the teachers’ union representative came in. I’ve known her for over fifteen years, when she was the union rep at my former school. Not only is she an excellent teacher and highly trustworthy, but she’s got a big heart, and advocates for the teachers and aides. She looked at me from behind her round tortoiseshell glasses, and I could tell from her facial expression that she was concerned about what she had to say. I watched her sit down in the chair in the corner, lean her head back and rest it against the wall.

“Ms. Stewart,” she said, “just told me what happened in her classroom during the math test. Wanted to know if she is going to be in trouble for reporting the incident to you. She’s worried about retaliation from the principal. I tried to reassure her that she did absolutely nothing wrong. Told her she followed protocol. You’re her assistant principal.”

“Well, we know Mr. Antonio’s going to be outraged that his name and school will now be under investigation,” I said.

“Since none of us are on the in with him, when he finds out we’re not letting this cheating allegation go away, I’m sure he’ll try to make our lives difficult,” the rep said. She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a bottle of water, unscrewed the cap and took a few sips. “I just got off the phone with the teachers’ union district representative. Said she’d inform the superintendent. He’s probably spoken to Mr. Antonio by now.”

No more Mr. Golden Boy

“Now what?” the rep asked.

“I’ll report the incident to the testing coordinator at the district. She’ll either tell Mr. Antonio to do an internal investigation, or she’ll report the incident to the Office of Special Investigations at the Department of Education, and they’ll investigate. But first, I must inform the principal. I’m going to his office now.”

As I walked down the stairs, Mr. Antonio came charging up with Ms. Raymond behind him. We nearly collided.

“Let’s go to my office, Ms. Zimmerman,” he said, turning around and touching Ms. Raymond on her forearm. “I’ll catch up with you later,” he said and continued down the stairs with me following close behind.

When we entered his office, Mr. Antonio firmly slammed the door behind me as if he were closing the cell door on a prisoner. He removed his grey suit jacket, loosened his tie, and rolled up his shirt sleeves. Then he sat down behind his desk and motioned for me to take a seat. He looked into my eyes, hard and cold.

“I heard you and Ms. Stewart spoke,” he said. “I talked to her, too. The incident ends here. Are we clear?”

“You know I’m obligated to inform the district testing coordinator of any alleged improprieties.”

Mr. Antonio sat up tall, elbows on his desk, hands clasped together hiding his mouth, and glared at me. “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time? I am the principal. I said, do not call the district. Ms. Raymond said she didn’t tell the students to change their answers, and she doesn’t know why they made up those lies.” He stood up, walked around his desk to the door and opened it. “We’re done.”

When I returned to my office, I put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on my door. Then I sat in my chair and closed my eyes. This is huge. Why did the superintendent bring Mr. Antonio to this district? He has no experience in administration and only one year of teaching kindergarten. Wants Pebble Elementary to become a showcase school but has no idea how to make this happen, except through unethical means. Does the superintendent know this? Is he planning to coach him in every aspect of running a school?

A few minutes later, I got up, walked to the bookcase at the back of my office anddistractedly rearranged the framed pictures of my husband and children. Mr. Antonio’s only been at Pebble Elementary for four months and he’s already ingratiated himself with various groups from the school body. Got a lot of people to like him. Probably thinks if they like him, they’ll do whatever he wants. They don’t know what really goes on here. Have no idea how he’s segregated the staff and the administration into the “in” and “out” groups. Ugh.”

~

Later that afternoon, after dismissal, Ms. Stewart and the teachers’ union rep returned to my office to report that Mr. Antonio had spoken to Ms. Stewart’s class. “He told them he heard about what they said happened during the math exam,” Ms. Stewart said, reaching for the squishy ball on my desk. She squeezed it a few times. “He told them that sometimes people make up stories to get others in trouble because they’re mad at them for something. Reminded my students that Ms. Raymond recently gave many of them detention, and she had spoken to some of their parents because of the fights and bullying during recess. Told them that the things they said about Ms. Raymond could get her into serious trouble.” Ms. Stewart took a deep breath and continued: “He tried to suggest that the students didn’t really see what they claimed they saw.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Mr. Antonio said he thinks it’s likely that Ms. Raymond pointed to their answers because she was trying to let them know that they skipped a question or bubbled in two answer choices for the same question.” She paused. “Of course, he shouldn’t have done that, either.”

At that moment, the rep stood up and hit the dome-shaped gadget on my desk. The robotic voice blurted out, ‘that was stupid.’ She hit it again. Ms. Stewart and I laughed, and Ms.Stewart continued: “Mr. Antonio told the students he knows that no one wants to see Ms. Raymond lose her job. Asked them to rewrite their statements and make sure to write the truth.” Ms. Stewart got up and started pacing. “It infuriates me how he tried to blame my students, to make them feel guilty for being responsible.”

“I understand completely,” I said, feeling sick at the wrongness of this. “I shouldn’t be saying this to either of you about a fellow administrator,” I said, looking first to Ms. Stewart and then to the rep, “but what he did was inappropriate, totally unethical. I’m sure he and Ms. Raymond discussed that if he put her in your classroom, allegedly to oversee the test-taking, she could give students the correct answers. Figured if she could get a whole class of high scores, the percentage of top scores for the fourth grade would increase and his school would look good.”

“I’m thinking the same thing,” the rep said. “Afterall, the state looks at the fourth-grade scores to determine a school’s status.” She stood up, took a cup, and helped herself to some water from my cooler. “I wish this was stronger,” she laughed. When she sat down again, she asked, “What did the teacher’s aide say?”

“Claims she saw nothing unusual. Said Ms. Raymond was walking around and making sure the students weren’t looking at each other’s papers. The aide did admit that she dozed off for a bit.”

“You know the teacher’s aide is one of his people, right?” the rep asked, pushing up her glasses.

“Of course. She was on the committee that interviewed him for his position,” I said. “She was very pro Mr. Antonio. And I think I remember that she also came from his old school.”

“He came to us with a lot of baggage,” the rep said. “The teachers tell me that the three teachers he brought with him can’t teach, and our teachers are afraid to speak up during teacher or staff development meetings because they think his teachers are Mr. Antonio’s eyes and ears. Everything goes back to him,” she said, fondling her wedding ring.

“I feel the same way about Ms. Raymond,” Ms. Stewart said. “She’s always in his office. I’m afraid to say anything to her myself because I worry she’ll distort what I say.”

“He’s duplicitous,” the rep said, then turned to Ms. Stewart, cocked her head, and suddenly became very animated. “You should call the district testing coordinator. Tell her you reported the incident to the assistant principal in charge of testing at your school, but you thought you should inform her, too. Can you do that?”

“I don’t want to get fired,” Ms. Stewart said, clicking her pen. “Mr. Antonio intimidates me.” She was quiet. Then, “I’ll do it. I must. Afterall, Ms. Raymond wanted my kids to cheat on a state test.”

The rep got up and hit the gadget again, trying to reduce the tension in my office. ‘That was stupid.’ We all laughed

“What Ms. Raymond did goes against everything I’ve been teaching my students this year about being honest and taking responsibility for their actions. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t do what I tell them to do.” She clicked her pen again.

“Thank you,” the rep and I said, in unison.

“By the way, what did the district testing coordinator tell you to do?” the rep asked.

I looked straight into the rep’s hazel eyes. “Mr. Antonio forbade me to call her. Said he’d take care of everything.”

~

The next day, during her preparation period, Ms. Stewart entered my office and sunk into my couch.

“Mr. Antonio got to them,” she said, her head down so all I could see was her hair. “My students changed their statements. All but six.”

“Are those the statements?” I asked, gesturing to the papers in her lap. “May I see them?”

Ms. Stewart stood up and handed them to me.

“The six are on the bottom.” she said.

I flipped through the students’ testimonies. “I didn’t see anything,” one student wrote. Another: “I am telling the truth. I didn’t see anything.” “Some kids said Ms. Raymond told them the answers, but they just want to get her in trouble. I didn’t see her do nothing bad,” wrote another. I read aloud a portion of Miguel’s statement: “During the math test, Ms. Raymond told me to change some of my answers, but I didn’t. I knew mine were correct. I tried to explain to her how I got the answer to a question, but she told me to be quiet. I’m surprised she doesn’t remember you gotta solve what’s in the parentheses first, when doing order of operations. That’s why she got the wrong answer.”

I read aloud a portion of Samantha’s statement: “Ms. Raymond stood between mine and Miguel’s desks during the math test. She told us to change some answers. I rechecked the ones she pointed to on my answer sheet, but I didn’t change them because I knew I chose the right answers.”

I started to laugh. “Ms. Raymond wanted to give the students the correct answers, but she actually pointed to the wrong ones, and she didn’t even know it.”

“She’s not too bright. Mr. Antonio brought her from their previous school,” Ms. Stewart said.

I shook my head. “The dumb and dumber duo.”

~

The following morning after the Pledge of Allegiance and the announcements, the math and literacy coaches, the grade leaders--teachers representing each grade from kindergarten through fifth—and I assembled in Mr. Antonio’s office for a meeting. He sat down behind his desk and stared ahead, a despondent look on his face. He was wearing the same white shirt and gray slacks he wore yesterday and had not shaved.

I have some very disturbing news,” Mr. Antonio said, running his hands through his greasy spiked black hair. “The superintendent called me early this morning. The Office of Special Investigations will conduct a thorough investigation of the cheating allegation. Many staff members will likely be called in for questioning. Unfortunately, Ms. Raymond has been reassigned to the district office for the duration of the investigation. Until further notice, I will supervise the teachers of upper grades. Ms. Zimmerman will be responsible for kindergarten through second grade

At that moment, surprised by the news, the teachers whom I supervise turned to look at me questioningly.

Mr. Antonio looked past me with that same despondent stare. “Ms. Zimmerman’s office will be across the yard in the mini-building with the kindergarten classes,” he said.

I briefly caught his eyes, glared at him, and shook my head, as if to say, what gives? The teachers and I now understood what was happening. Retaliation. Not only am I being isolated from the school community, but I now need to run back and forth between two buildings to service the grades I supervise.

~

I heard Mr. Antonio stayed in his office for several hours that afternoon. Maybe he was strategizing. If Ms. Raymond was removed from her administrative position and assigned to the district office so quickly, certainly he knows he is next in line. Even though he initially had the support of the superintendent, I’m sure the superintendent told Mr. Antonio he couldn’t risk losing his own job. I know Mr. Antonio has a wife, young children, and a house on Long Island. Surely, he’s worried about losing his job and license. He should be.”

At the end of the day, Mr. Antonio sent home a letter to the parents informing them of the alleged testing improprieties, assuring them that the allegations against Ms. Raymond are false, and telling them that this incident will not affect their children’s high-quality education.

~

I settled into my new office and soon acquired respect for the kindergarten teachers’ pedagogical skills. Although I didn’t know the curriculum for kindergarten, I quickly familiarized myself with the state learning expectations for the grade. I purchased a few stuffed animals so that the children who were brought to my office would feel comfortable.

The atmosphere in the main building at Pebble Elementary was very tense during the next week. Whenever I went there to visit my first and second grade classes and passed Mr. Antonio in the halls, he lowered his head. He excluded me from staff meetings, but Ms. Stewart and the rep visited me during their lunch periods and kept me abreast of everything.

“Everyone’s so on edge in the main building!” they’d exclaim whenever they came over.

“The teachers’ patience has become short, and they’re snapping at their students,” the rep said. “The dean’s office is filled with students whom the teachers would ordinarily not send to him.”

Ms. Stewart added, “Cliques are springing up everywhere, and no one talks in the hallways, anymore. Mr. Antonio comes to my classroom every day, stays nearly thirty minutes, and is always taking notes.”

“Does he discuss with you what he observes?” I asked, trying to determine if he was rating her teaching ability.

“Nope. Doesn’t talk to my students, either. Just plops down in a seat in the back and writes. It’s nerve-wracking.”

“I’m sure that’s his intention,” I said. “Retaliation.”

~

In the coming weeks, all of the staff members and students involved in the investigation and I were assigned attorneys and our statements taken. The rep told me everyone was nervous and fearful about what to expect at the hearing. She also said Mr. Antonio told her to inform the staff that he continues to believe in Ms. Raymond’s innocence and vowed to stick up for her in court.

On the day of the hearing, the courtroom was filled with students and parents, district personnel, and Pebble Elementary School staff eager to hear the outcome of the charges against Ms. Raymond. The Office of Special Investigations found the students’ testimonies credible, and the judge deemed Ms. Raymond’s actions egregious. During the cross-examination, the teacher’s aide who was in the classroom with Ms. Raymond admitted that she napped on and off, and the few character witnesses who testified on Ms. Raymond’s behalf could not provide substantive testimony. Ms. Raymond lost her administrative license and was banned from ever again working for the New York City Department of Education.

To everyone’s surprise, Mr. Antonio was nowhere to be seen, and a few days later, the superintendent reported that Mr. Antonio had resigned from the New York City Department of Education. I was not surprised when I encountered one of his friends at a meeting, and he informed me that Mr. Antonio had taken a job as principal at a Long Island school. It seemed to me that Mr. Antonio knew what was in store for him and decided to bolt before the probe began. The Office of Special Investigations cited Mr. Antonio’s resignation in its written decision and noted that he, too, is banned from ever again working for the New York City Department of Education.

With the support of the superintendent, I accepted the principalship at Pebble Elementary, and Ms. Stewart became my assistant principal. Mr. Antonio’s three teachers and the math coach transferred to different schools, and Ms. Stewart and I worked hard to rebuild and raise the school morale. Together, we analyzed the results of the state reading and math scores and devised ways to address the students’ deficiencies. Within three years, Pebble Elementary became a showcase school and we were proud of it.

To Deserve

If you were to step inside Mary’s home, you would think to yourself that she is a person broken. Not that it was disorderly, not that it reeked of non-maintenance, not that there was rotting food and unclean clothes—but there might as well have been. No furniture in Mary’s house looked to be non-store-bought, no carpet made of non-synthetic fibers, no room any less than a perfect square. If you were to step inside Mary’s house, you would be dizzied by how geometrical it felt—every room the inside of a perfect box, edges sharp and defined. Each stair on the steps seemed capable of cutting cloth at its lip. The walls were decorated with paints and textures which seemed to come from an anonymous, clean factory somewhere far away. She couldn’t save herself from occasionally hearing the floorboards creak, a fact which infuriated her, but in all other measures, her house was made as if from a perfect plastic mold.

Mary once read somewhere that her developer had built hundreds of homes across the country with an identical frame and floor plan as this one. But out of all those hundreds of copies, Mary told herself that hers must be the most appealing. She lived in a neighborhood somewhere in the middle of Illinois whose name was decided upon by a marketing company, and somewhere hidden away upon each decorative item in her house, you’d find a serial number.

Mary worked at a health insurance firm and lived alone. She watched TV dramas about police officers while tucked beneath bedsheets she had ordered from a magazine delivered in the mail. Her brother was a police officer in the city, and she worried about him. That added to the thrill of her shows, in a way: that trace of something real. Every morning, she went to a gym whose CEO lived somewhere in Texas—not that she knew that or even knew his face or name. She did Pilates there and bought smoothies with appealing names like Berry Blast.

When she watched her crime shows and grew fearful, she’d remember the shotgun in her safe, given to her by her grandfather when she turned 15. She once read a story online about protests happening in the city, and she took it out just to feel safer. You could see the twisting fibers of a once-growing tree in its wooden frame, smell a liquor on it which her grandfather used to drink, which to this day she isn’t able to identify. He’d sit on a leather recliner called Grandpa’s Chair after Thanksgiving dinner, sipping it as he grumbled curses at the news.

This very house would become the scene of a crime—or, at the least, she called it a crime because it was the exact sort of thing they talked about on the news. Here, there would be a robbery.

Maggie Orlin was a 23-year-old gambling addict who lived in the city. Maggie owed $5,000 to a woman who lived a couple floors above her, a woman who usually wouldn’t demand it back if it wasn’t for the fact her daughter had to stay overnight at the hospital after an unexpected bee sting revealed a serious allergy. Ms. Taylor was now in debt herself and demanded the money back from Maggie.

Maggie once stole from a boy she was dating.

When the fight reached that fragile, unspeakable line of a breakup, she had bravely said, “I can’t date you right now because I’m not a good person. I lie, I steal, I will cheat on you. I will be a good person one day, but I can’t be one now. It’s not worth it to date me, but one day it will be.”

He accused her of throwing herself a pity party and left. This was three weeks before.

But she did mean it. She would be a good person. She would quit and never steal another dollar again. While taking exit 76, turning onto a road that would eventually reach a suburb, she wrung the steering wheel in her hands passionately, as she listened to songs from a playlist she entitled Crying Music.

She couldn’t steal from anyone she knew. Her first step on a long moral path would be doing the risky and more just thing: taking from someone far away instead, someone who could afford it. She was willing to risk her safety—in truth, her very life—to save those who might be most devastatingly hurt by her actions, by this disease she had been given. She thought it a small moral victory, and when the quiet, tinny music played from her phone, banked within the car console’s stained cup holder, she let herself think for a moment with a rage that this boy would miss her and regret the breakup once he saw how much she had changed.

The neighborhood was called Pleasant Prairies, and only a house or two had been constructed along its singular road. The developer seemed to have only recently cleared out the land to make a residential area. Maggie was looking for a place like this—expensive, but where people would be isolated from one another in case this robbery was to end poorly. This was her third time breaking into a place where people lived, but her first time breaking into a house. She didn’t feel guilty about stealing the money, but she confessed that she hated the possibility that she might cause even a single nightmare in another human being.

Oh well, she said to herself. I will be a shocking story for them, told at dinner parties.

She drove around at two in the morning in search of a house in Pleasant Prairies that looked like it didn’t have children within it. Out here where no crimes could ever happen, where no morsel of land is untouched by funding of one kind or another, people park their cars in their driveways, out in the open next to a white garage door. She thought she could tell something about these people within the great houses made of cream-colored wood based on their cars. From her perch parked down the street, she saw a pink punch buggy parked in a driveway with concrete that looked designer-made. The squares of concrete in the driveway had subtle, curved bezels and a smooth texture. Out here, it was still 1991, so she knew this had to be a woman’s car based on its color. If this woman had parked out in the driveway, then certainly any husband would have as well. But no other car was in sight. This, she thought, is how she would pay Ms. Taylor back.

There was a soccer field’s length of earth between this house and the second nearest, bulldozed to make preparations for houses yet to be built so that the grass had died and left a muddy heap stretching in all directions once the smooth grass of the lawn reached an edge. Maggie knew about the people out here. They wouldn’t traverse that mud unless absolutely necessary, even if things did go poorly, and even if they heard anything from that distance.

Before entering the home, she couldn’t resist giving three gentle knocks to the white wood on the outside, just to see if she was right. She felt like a woodpecker or a squirrel.

“How about that,” she whispered. The wood was fake.

She took some electronics, some trinkets, things that seemed expensive but non-sentimental. She carried a backpack that once went with her every day to high school, which now held pink and white decorative cutlery, a painting of a sunflower, a hair dryer that seemed expensive, some door knobs, a signed poster of a movie about Italian gangsters—odds and ends. She would only have about a thousand dollars total at this rate, and her bag was beginning to grow full.

She had three choices. A jewelry box with but two or three diamonds could lightly and quickly put her over the edge—but certainly such a prize rested in the master bedroom, where the owner of the house slept. Her second choice was to leave and steal again from someone else, but her conscience couldn’t cut it.

If you’re serious about quitting, she told herself, this has to be the last time, and this way, only one person will face any consequences.

That left option number three: the car. This would mean stealing the keys which hung on a key rack in the first-floor kitchen, driving the car away to someplace safe, walking back to where she had parked her own car, leaving, then Ubering back to the hidden pink car to bring it someplace where she could sell it for, easily, five-thousand dollars or more. No car alarm would go off, no sentimental thing would be stolen, and Ms. Taylor would no longer be in debt because of Maggie.

She held the key in her hand. The smell of dinner still lingered in the dark air, olive oil and garlic. There in the pitch-black kitchen, she felt, for the first time, perverse. The key was attached to a small, black plastic square that was lukewarm to touch, whose lock button had been smoothed and left paintless by someone else’s finger. A thing like a car key—a thing which this person carried with her in her pocket every day—had too much of another person’s life on it to steal.

~

Mary had often thought about what it would one day feel like to point a gun at another human being. She had, almost as if by accident, seen this moment so many times in her head that, when the fantasy finally came true, she was surprised at how non-glorious it felt to order this intruder to stand absolutely still.

Here was a girl who hadn’t showered in at least a week, with tattoos and piercings and all of these other things Mary had always expected a criminal to have. Held up against her cheek, she smelled the gun in her hands and thought of how proud people would be of her for this. Mary had often imagined—with an embarrassing kind of excitement—that in this moment the criminal would try to run, lunge at her, pull out a gun or a knife, and that she would be forced, tragically, to fire. But Maggie did no such thing. Instead, she tried to explain herself.

“I don’t have a weapon. Please lower it,” Maggie said. “Please. I’ll drop everything and leave. This is the last time I’ll ever try to steal. I don’t need this money for me. Someone I know, their kid got sick, and they couldn’t afford it.”

Mary wondered if she should still fire, since it was legal to do so—she wouldn’t need to feel any guilt—but she had no desire to kill anything. It’s just that she imagined this moment feeling different, and she wondered if firing the gun would fix that. She always imagined that she would be forced to fire, and a harrowing scene would follow as she wept for having taken a life lost. But still, how proud her coworkers would be when they heard, how thrilled her family would be, how wide the smile of her grandfather shining down on her from heaven. But she had always imagined that she, herself, would feel pride too during this moment—that she would be able to feel all the strength and justice she’d wanted to see in the world manifest in the texture of that hair trigger. But she felt no such thing. Something about this intrusion needed to be fixed.

“Drop the bag and turn your pockets inside out,” Mary said.

Maggie complied, petrified. Maggie’s cell phone screen turned on when it hit the floor, dully illuminating the room. This woman pointing a gun at her should be trembling too, flushed with adrenaline and emotion, but she seemed to have the distant and intellectual look of a person solving a puzzle.

Mary was embarrassed—the weight of the gun was beginning to fatigue the muscles in her shoulder. It hurt, and that frustrated her. But she had to keep the criminal still until the police came. She knew that if she lowered her gun to pull out her phone and call 911, this girl would take her chance while the gun was lowered and lunge at her. But she wasn’t strong enough to hold this twenty-pound gun with one hand—and if any injustice did happen, Mary wouldn’t have been able to bear it.

“I have an attic,” Mary said. “With one of those swing-down ladders from the ceiling. It’s at the top of the stairs. You’ll walk up there with me behind you the whole time. Then I’ll close you up there, and then I’ll call the police. You’ll stay up there until they arrive.”

Maggie was in tears but nodded and stayed silent. There was no escape now.

She had always imagined building a relationship with someone she loved during her twenties. She thought about characters in TV shows with lives like the one this woman lived; how they talked about being anxious about letting even one year slip by in which life wasn’t lived to the fullest. She knew a couple people in prisons, but no one close to her, so that when they went, they vanished to Maggie, plucked from the face of the earth as if they were figments of her imagination who never truly existed at all.

Once locked in the attic, she swallowed a horrible thought. Maggie wanted to hate something, but she couldn’t bring herself to hate this woman. Maggie let herself hate her parents, her high school, her boss, but more than anything she wanted to hate this woman and yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Envious and desperate, she couldn’t let herself hate this woman because all the stories she had ever heard told her that she was utterly guilty and deserved this fate.

Mary locked the attic and let her arms rest. She sat crisscrossed on the carpeted ground of the second floor like a child as she stared up at the attic door. And when she looked down at her brother’s contact information on her phone—the policeman—she realized that calling him would feel wrong. The police escorting this girl out of her house, dispassionately delving out justice on her behalf, would feel wrong. The image of this girl somewhere in some jail petrified Mary. The idea that she would wake up every day wondering about where the girl was, what she was doing, eating, what conversations she was having, love she was building, letters writing, lies telling: and Mary would know none of it.

Now, Mary cried. Crisscrossed on the carpet, she shook and put down her phone, ran her hands across her shotgun like she was petting an animal, as the uncertainty weighed heavy against her spine. She didn’t know what this girl was doing up there in her attic, and it terrified her. Mary was a person broken, every muscle of her body seeming to grow rigid and immovable as she looked up at the attic door on the ceiling. Face red, she could hardly remember to breathe.

Mary looked up the average sentence for a home burglary. Depending, it could be anywhere between one year and thirty.

~

At first, Mary said she would only keep this girl up in her attic for as long as it would take for her to find an answer that felt right. She read blog posts about people who were victims of home invasion like her, about how they felt when the criminal was caught and locked away. She would consider calling her brother every day, but upon each attempt, a brief and sharp pain that lasted no more than a handful of seconds prevented her from making the call. Mary spent hours upon hours of hard labor preparing to transform the attic with Maggie inside, and despite how much energy was expended in keeping her, none of the energy stung sharply like calling the police would.

It first started the day after the burglary, when Maggie saw a piece of notebook paper wiggle its way between the attic door’s cracks. In letters which looped and swirled.

Do you have any dietary restrictions?

Maggie was starved. She had fallen asleep in the attic expecting the police to wake her up. In their place, she received this message.

The thought was too horrible. It had to be that the police were delayed. It had to be that not as much time had passed as Maggie had thought. It had to be something else.

Later that day, Mary came up with the gun and put Maggie in handcuffs. Maggie watched as Mary, first, brought up an elegant plate of food—which Maggie ate. Next, a small bed that could be wiggled through the attic’s door piece-by-piece. Then a television, for entertainment. She brought up plants to filter the air, lighting to make the space sparkle, books, a carpet, an air freshener, toiletries and sanitation products, a large litter box, a notebook, packs and packs of bottled water, shampoo, soap, and conditioner, sound-proofing tiles, art supplies, and a chair. By the end of it, after a process of multiple weeks of renovations, the room was truly beautiful: walls painted, well-decorated, and adorned with as many pass-times as could be included, given that they wouldn’t make it possible for Maggie to escape. After a distraught first week in which Maggie lived in decent but less-than-ideal conditions—a necessary road bump which nevertheless upset Mary—Maggie’s room looked, in one word, expensive. Maggie remained bound when Mary was transforming the attic, but before and after this, Maggie moved as she pleased. Whenever Mary entered the attic to perform maintenance, she would bring her grandfather’s shotgun.

Mary never interacted with Maggie. She was left to her own devices. The two never made contact with one another, spoke, exchanged pleasantries, nor did they discuss their lives. After a month, Mary realized that, although she had asked for Maggie’s name, Mary had never shared her own. She thought that this wasn’t something to fret over.

Mary felt so safe once Maggie was secured in her attic, aware via the creaking of the ceiling above of every movement she made. It wasn’t perfect, but it was closer to perfect than calling her brother.

Even so, although she found the arrangement just, Mary didn’t find it fair that Maggie couldn’t speak to her family or loved ones, if she had such things. As such, after a month, Mary spoke with Maggie for the first time since her capture.

“I’ve come up with a system,” Mary said, annunciating. “No, please don’t try to speak to me. Just let me explain. Please let me explain. Please don’t try to speak to me. Maggie, you will want to hear what I have to say. Yes. I wanted to tell you that I’ve come up with a system. It isn’t fair that you’re unable to communicate with the outside world. If you write messages on this notebook paper, I’ll review them to ensure they’re appropriate, and send them to wherever you’d like. I’ve chosen the return address, and it isn’t this residence, of course, but I’ll check that return address in case you get any messages in the mail. I’m sorry for not allowing you to make contact with the outside world—that was unfair of me.”

Maggie felt ill at the suggestion. To write such a letter would feel like submitting to this woman’s depravity. If it truly did upset Mary that she wasn’t able to communicate with the outside world, perhaps she could refuse to write any letters in protest.

Maggie came up with a plan. She would write letters detailing the genuine and chasmic pain she felt as a result of being separated from those she loved, but she would fail to include an address for it to be sent off to. Mary might read it and somehow remember what she was doing to Maggie.

Mary prepared the first couple of paragraphs of the letter, detailing a false story about running away to a commune somewhere in rural Nebraska. Mary was preparing Maggie’s dinner upon a speckled, black-granite countertop as she read the letter. She purchased organic food and experimented with new recipes weekly. As opposed to a passive chore, she saw preparing Maggie’s meals as an activity that required utter concentration and craftsmanship. Plates would be decorated, spices measured, broths sampled, meats temperature-checked, fruits and vegetables locally sourced, menus designed with care; and calories would never be counted, as Mary was certain that no girl in all of Illinois ate as fully and as well as Maggie.

In the spiced, warm clouds of dinner preparation, there on the granite countertop, Mary sipped broth, stirred a gravy, and licked her fingers in between reading paragraphs of Maggie’s writing.

Dear Mom and Dad,

It’s been a couple of years since we’ve spoken. I wish my apology didn’t have to take this form. I wish I didn’t have to send it under these conditions. I should be saying these words to you, out loud, in our kitchen. You should hear these words and we should make dinner afterward and watch Star Trek together like we did a million years ago together. I wish I could explain more of my situation, but while I’m in it, I know that you reading these words, even if the circumstances are so far from ideal, is better than me having never written them.

Dad, you got addicted. Maybe you still are. And then slowly but surely, I did too, but in a different way. And Mom, you had to live with us and love us. Every day I think about how you never deserved any of this, Mom. You don’t deserve to have a daughter who doesn’t speak to you. You didn’t deserve to live in a house with the two of us. I’ve heard you say a million times how you wanted better for me than what I got. But you deserve someone who tells you: I wanted better for you. I want better for you every day.

Dad, I’ve never had a teacher, coach, or boss talk to me one-on-one if they weren’t telling me how I’m failing at something. I’m so angry at you for everything you did. I don’t even know if you’re sorry, but I’m writing this because the older I get the more I’m realizing that I’m not like Mom. I’m like you. I’ve fought with you so many times in my head. And when I did, I couldn’t admit it to myself, but I knew the parts of you I would fight with—the parts of you I hated the most—are the same parts you passed down to me. I feel awful for everything I’ve done, and if I’m really like you, you do too. The older I get the more I realize that everyone around you would rather see you die than fail, because you could be replaced, but a failure can’t be undone. You weren’t measured by who you were but by your distance from failure. And then you failed. I know it might be hard to believe, but I know a shred of how awful that feels. I need forgiveness so badly. So please let me tell you: no matter what happens, I forgive you.

We didn’t deserve this. We don’t deserve this. We deserved to talk to one another every day. We deserved to build a life together. We deserved to go out to dinners together, talk about who I’m dating, invite friends over during Thanksgiving. Neither of you deserved this. I will always miss you.

I love you, Maggie.

Mary had to read the letter over to ensure it was safe to send, but she was not inhuman. She felt feelings, which were real, when she read it. She served Maggie dinner that day, and for the second time, she spoke to her. Maggie hadn’t included a delivery address, and if it wasn’t for that, Mary wouldn’t have opened her mouth as she set the steaming plate down with one hand, shotgun in the other.

Mary said, “That was a nice note. Put the delivery address on it, and I’ll send it out.”

This time, as she closed the attic door, more softly, behind her, Mary heard the voice of a child screaming, as if from another world, I don’t deserve this. Maggie demanded the voice to be quiet, and silence did follow, but afterward, she was petrified by a new uncertainty. She wasn’t sure if the sound of that voice truly came from the attic.

~

One day, Mary received a call from her brother Mike, the police officer. He asked if he could stop by her house for dinner.

“No,” Mary said, “I’d like to go out to eat tonight. It’s been too long. I’d like to see you too, but we should go out to eat elsewhere.”

“Last year we would talk to one another almost every day. I miss that.”

“I miss it too.”

“And your cooking is second to none, Mary. It’s been ages since I’ve visited. I like to see where you’re living, how things are going—and all.”

“I have no groceries,” she said. “It might be a hassle to prepare it all.”

“I’ll just order whatever you need ahead of time, that’s no worry.”

She thought that it was so silly that if she were to be caught, she would go to jail. But then again, her brother was always so much like Mary herself. Maybe he would understand.

“Okay,” Mary said. “Sure, stop by. How about this, I’ll go grab groceries now, and then I’ll pick you up from the jail on my way back. You have to go back there tonight, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll pick you up, we’ll have dinner, and then I’ll drop you back off at the jail.”

“Perfect,” he said.

“Can I come in?”

“Into the jail?”

“I’ve never seen where you work before,” Mary said. “I visited a jail once when I was a child. It’s been ages. I like to see where you’re working.”

“Sure, come take a peek,” he said. “It’s interesting.”

~

She was escorted in by her brother and another officer. She touched her hands to the bulletproof glass of Mike’s office, entranced by her view of the jail. The glass was warm and plasticky. As Mike changed into civilian clothing, stored away his gun, hung up his baton, took off his badge, Mary gazed at the rows and rows of identical cells. She looked at a four-story, cavernous expanse of white bars and concrete floors, patrolled by watchful guardians that looked to her like angels circling the mouth of the inferno. She wanted to hold a baton. She wanted to orbit the cages, like these angels circling these halls of just consequence. She didn’t know who among them, but she knew that someone in her field of view, someone in one of these cells, had certainly broken into a home before. She felt something perfect, blissful, the closest she’s ever felt to being in love, when she realized that everyone in here deserves this. She loved this place, just like her brother.

Reparated Tombstone

♱

GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN

• • •

A tombstone is heavier than one might think.

Turning right on Broadus Coker Street—the sunglint blindness splays across the windshield—casting a sightless void into which shadowed recollections of his past begin to purge. It comes to him stealthily, no, sneakily, no, cunningly.

Weathered Army-store combat boots charging into the oblique night. Blind hands drag the monument loose off its footing, with a dull grind of stone on stone. Then the heaving. Fingers tucking under into the paste of dew and milled granite. The slab’s wet pressure on the chest. Those first feeling steps forward into the gloom.

Only in this part of Livingston, seldom-visited and Georgia-clay poor, may this long-interred memory be brought to light, a memory elsewhere ever unremembered. He can’t think it away, for undoubtedly he will be nearing Superba Street . . . and the house . . . the one he abandoned it in.

His mind’s eye blurs into myriad questions: Was it a prank? An excuse to indulge in the taboo? Or was it just random evil? Sin as if by chance might’ve beckoned to him, like a long unseen ex-lover calling up unexpectedly and asking for a place to stay; first the kittenish coyness, then the stray’s intimacy. Despite this interrogative ambiguity, these declaratives are clear: He wasn’t dared or goaded. It wasn’t planned. It was as compulsive as compulsory. It came to him on such a ruinous whim, and he’s borne the deadweight of ever-unremembrance over this past quarter century. Why did he have to see this through?

♱

IN LOVING MEMORY

• • •

Summer 1994. He was living in the dank basement of his drummer’s house, a then necrose Craftsman built in the twenties on what would become the further ungentrified Superba Street; a place he ingeniously fled to from his middle-class upbringing in the suburbia of Northridge Estates. The basement in which he stayed stood partially finished, or somewhat less than partially, as did most of the rest of the house. His only source of electricity was from a plug in a light-socket adapter; the shower was made from painted roofing tin; mushrooms grew out of the carpet. But he didn’t care because he lived unsupervised for the first time, which gave way to his sense of right and wrong, or rather, the amorality of youth.

Despite his unreconstructed side of town feeling so hazardous that he kept a shotgun tucked in the rafters above the couch he made his bed, he decided that the ideal graveyard for possible larceny was in the even more dangerous segment, Rock Black Bottom. For Rock Black Bottom residents, he surmised, wouldn’t be so civic-minded as to watch over the yard of the last plots of land one owns, making the stealing of a headstone go likely unnoticed or even disregarded. With a plan hatched, his drummer drove them out in his pickup, he did the deed, and they hauled it, all 120 pounds of it, back home.

Surreal is the only way to describe the scene of a fourteen-year-old girl’s headstone sitting on a living room floor. The fact that this basement living room doubles as a bedroom and kitchen only enhances the stark uncanniness. There—among the band equipment, the couch/makeshift bed, the antique microwave, the mandatory empty liquor bottle collection, the clock stopped at 4:20, and the stacks of Ramen noodles—it lay with a combination of eeriness yet attraction, like a cursed artifact to a skeptic, totemistic yet a mere object. Alva Freeman was her name. She died in 1901. He had no sense at the time of the significance of that last name, of what he had done.

♱

A LIFE MEASURED IN MEMORIES

• • •

Continuing down Broadus Coker, he passes through the intersection of Flannery Street, the reflection of his 7-Series glides down the windowed wall of Sporty’s Barber Shop. It's there the nausea of it all hits. In the unmoored morals of youth, such an event as grave robbery is almost trivial, and though he has since skirted the line that divides sin from sainthood several times under the pressure of getting ahead, he has found himself to be an overall decent middle-aged man. Not quite righteous but definitely not base. Educated. Successful. Accomplished. Married with children with an American-Dream home. It sickens him to think about what he did that night. The middle-aged perspective indeed damns what were mere follies of youth. But, worst of all, there is . . . how he simply abandoned that girl's headstone to that condemned house on Superba . . . in hopes his acts would be forgotten and discarded . . . carted off with the trash.

Stopping his sedan at the five points with the Hop ‘N Shop, he seizes up. Being late, he has chosen this rarely-taken shortcut, all while knowing that from the five points, right and two streets up, lies Superba Street. Go left at the five points . . . down Myrtle . . . take the quick cutoff to the boulevard and his errand at Ledbetter’s Jewelry . . . he won’t even have to see the Superba street sign. But he is drawn to the right of the five points, to Superba. Something wants to at least glance down Superba. The turn signal signals, the car turns, slows, stops at the old address. It still stands.

He blushes red from white guilt as he peers out of his BMW at the elderly black man on the porch swing and at a home that he expected to be a vacant lot. Pansies grow in window boxes, and the palette of the shutters and trim goes well with the siding. This man has resurrected the domicile from doom. As he focuses from the broad tableau back to the man’s face, the man looks at him with only slightly squinted eyes, an expression akin to half-recognizing an old acquaintance, or clandestinely noting the presence of a potential enemy. Hidden inside the dark tint of the Beemer’s window, he cringes into his seat from envisioning the scene of what he is about to do, of what he feels compelled to do. How does one begin to ask about such a thing?

Deep breaths breathed deeply. Deep breaths breathed deeply. The mantra repeats and repeats. Calmer, he finds the resolve to ask after the whereabouts of the tombstone.

The man from the porch swing meets him at the fence gate and with a broad hand on an outstretched arm greets him.

“Reverend Luther Pines, but people call me ‘Pine Box,’ for I’ve laid so many down low,” the preacher calls to him.

When he responds with his name said aloud, it sounds impotent in comparison. After the handshake, his gaze adverts down to his shuffling shoes, noticing the four matching brogues of his and those of the preacher’s steady shoes; then, his gaze returns to the preacher in time for him to say. And there really is no way to say what he must say next. But he’ll say it nonetheless.

“Is there a tombstone in your basement?”

A cycle of expressions courses through the preacher’s face: the church-door smile solidifies into funeral solemnity; then, with a cock and upward tilt of the head that makes the eyes look on askance, the expression morphs to one judicial but piteous. Finally, with eyebrows rising and with a slap of his thigh, the preacher bellows joyfully up into the air.

“I knew you’d one day come! I knew a man wouldn’t live his whole life long having done what you did and not seek penance! Holy is the rod and the staff!”

The preacher runs his thumbs under his suspenders and leans back, his tie bowing around a heaving chest, as if he is about to announce an altar call, right here at thefence line. Will anyone answer it? Instead, he says rather softly as his head levels and his eyebrows lower to a concerned ridge:

“Come with me.”

The gate is opened for him. Must he go to the pastor’s study for a devotional?

♱

UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN . . .

• • •

The basement is not the same; he is not the same. The tombstone is the same. Its permanence equal to its heft, immutable among the many seasons. The two stand before it.

“I can’t believe you kept it so long.”

The pastor looks up to the ceiling. “Let’s just say that I prophesied that someone would return. I knew someone would have to want to make this right again.” He turns abruptly. “But, tell me, why did you steal it?”

Shrug. “I don’t know. I’ve never been able to tell.” Shrug.

“Hm-mm. It is a question that I have pondered for some time.”

He nods his head, as a child eager to learn the Sunday school lesson.

“In my line of work, I often think of things in terms of how they affect others,” interlacing his fingers, “for don’t we all wish so badly for neighbors to treat neighbors as themselves?” The hands spread apart as if to embrace.

Another childishly eager nod.

“When you did it, how did you think it would affect others?”

“I didn’t care about others. It was all . . . internal . . . I guess . . . I wanted to rebel . . . Rebel, against myself in a way.”

Nearing him, “But nonetheless, how did it affect others?”

“I mean, it didn’t really affect anyone.”  He raises his hand in a sign of surrender and innocence. “The graveyard was overgrown; the church was shuttered long ago.”

Bowing his head slightly, as if to equalize the difference in height, “Would you say, then, that you thought no one would care?”

Nod.

More softly spoken, “After all these years, did you prove it to yourself . . . that no one cared?”

Nod. Tear.

Hand-on-shoulder, “Now, that’s how you treated your neighbor. Did you treat yourself that way . . . feel that no one cared about you?”

Nod. Tears.

Eye-to-eye, “You proved that as little as you mattered, so did this awful act.”

Nod. Tears. The first gasp of a sob; then, the onrush of a bawl. “I’ve been.” Gasp. “I’ve been looking for an answer for so long.” Gasp. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

A moment for composure is allowed. Then the hand on the shoulder. He clenches. “But . . .”

“But what?”

The clench releases. Stepping away, beginning to pace, “But what you must realize is that this little teenage prank mattered. It had a larger impact in a larger system. It’s not just about you and your own self-forgiveness. It’s about your neighbor’s forgiveness.”

“But . . . but I didn’t harm anyone.”

“No one? Let me ask you this: why did you choose this graveyard, among these neighbors?”

“I . . . I . . . I don’t know. Because it was the roughest part of town. I thought no one would care.” As he says the words while standing in such a part of town, the irony of his flippancy begins to creep in. Sucking up a sniffle, “Listen, I know where you're going with this. It's . . . it's not what you think." The childish nod becomes an indignant shake.

Turning to face him and standing erect, “It’s not about just you or what you’ve personally experienced. It’s about how it affects others too. Others you don’t even know. The church shuttering, the overgrowth of the graves, the plight of the neighborhood—those were the actions of a system. A system you supported with this deed.”

Waving off the implications with his hands, “I wasn’t thinking like that at all. I wasn’t even thinking at all. I’m not a racist.” His face hardens. “I’m not a racist.”

The baritone resonates, elbows cross, “You have to be honest. We’re in the small-town South. You chose the blackest part of town. In doing so, you chose to steal the only marker of this Freeman girl. Free-man: the first free-born daughter of a freed slave from the oldest black church in the county. Not only is our history condemned; it is literally taken piece by piece. You erased the only memory of her. You contributed heftily to—" The preacher catches himself, realizing he is beginning to sermonize.

The head shake ceased, he gives only a glare.

A tone bittersweet with resignation, arms by his side, “Look, whether you believe this personal or systemic, spiritual or moral, a penance or a pardon, there’s nothing you can say, but there’s what you can do, my neighbor.” A breezy sigh with relaxed shoulders, “Let’s pray over it first.” In the dimming sunset streaming through the hopper window, the whispered words echo with quick decay on the basement blocks.

♱

BELOVED FATHER AND HUSBAND

• • •

DISPATCH: 371, we have multiple reports of suspicious activity in Freedom Memorial Church Graveyard. Gray, late model, BMW, parked with driver out of car.

Car 371: 10-4. That’s that restored church on Pennington?

DISPATCH: 10-4

Car 371: En route.

♱

REST IN PEACE

• • •

The trunk of a 7-series could easily fit several tombstones, and it pops from a button on the fob. The figure of his cemetery streetlamp shadow looks surrealistic with a rectangle in place of the normal tubby torso, like a phantasmagoric sketch in dark charcoal. The stone feels parched from its years kept unweathered, and an eerie chill pervades its surface.

Just as he begins to lumber, the silhouette of his labor in the yellow glow of the streetlamp is abruptly scattered by brightly flashing blue. The sound of two car doors opening. Footsteps. How to explain this inexplicable act?

The blue strobing leaves traces of images in the intermittent dimness, traces of the figures before him, traces of the object in his hands. These glimmers of the outward world shuffle to an array of inner ones, a slideshow terrible and ominous: BLUE FLASH. BLUE FLASH.—The degrading mugshot—Blue Flash. Blue Flash.—The licensure board meeting—Blue flash. Blue flash.—The last time locking the practice—Blue flash. Blue flash.— Gale packing—Blue flash. Blue flash.—Grocery store—Blue Flash. Blue Flash.—ALONE.—Blue Flash.— PORCH.—Blue—BOTTLE.—Flash.

Pistols pointed at him. “Put down the headstone and show me your hands! Do it now! Do it now!”

Utterly entranced now by the strobe, he teeters, trembling. He’s never fallen as an adult.

No slips, trips, or trust falls. The strange sensations of a backward collapse. The smack of pavement. The slab’s smoosh. Crushing rib cage on compressing heart. The forced expiration of final breath with the shock of intense weight. The flickers of blue swelling to flickers of white, interposing on the blackness, he sees himself from the outside for the first and final time. The tombstone is still heavier than one might think.

♱

HIS DUTY DONE, HIS HONOR WON.

• • •

Banished

Whigham, GA, August 3, 1907

I looked up at Nettie. Studied her sharply angled face, her high cheekbones, those autumn brown, almond-shaped eyes. Her dark skin glistened in the heat as we walked. She stared straight ahead, her eyes focused on some point far down the dusty dirt road.

Noah was with us. Distracted by everything he saw, stumbling because he wanted to stop and examine things, anything. But Nettie kept dragging him along. It felt like she was in a hurry to get me to Olive’s house. I didn’t understand why. Maybe Noah felt it too. Maybe his antics were his way of trying to slow us down.

I was on Nettie’s right side, Noah on her left. We were all holding hands. I was carrying a small burlap sack that contained everything I could call mine. We were walking away from our cabin. The only place I knew to call home.

Yesterday, Nettie asked me to come and sit on the front porch steps with her. After we sat down, she announced that she was going to take me to live with my grandmother Olive.

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, the other day, I ran into your Grandma Olive in front of Chapman’s store. She told me that she wants you to start school in the fall. She wants you to move in with her before it starts. I’m taking you to her tomorrow.”

The school was just across the street from Chapman’s Dry Goods. When we went for groceries, Noah and I stood along the side of the building and looked across the street at children playing in the yard. There were two swings under a big oak in the middle of the school yard. I always wanted to try swinging on one. Nettie wouldn’t ever let us do it, even when the kids weren’t there. Going to school sounded like an adventure, but I couldn’t see what it had to do with moving to Olive’s house. “School sounds okay. I want to go to school, but I don’t need to live with Olive. I’ll stay here. That way Noah and I can walk to school together.”

Nettie shook her head. “You ever see colored children at the school Roy? Noah won’t be going with you. School is for white children. Colored children aren’t allowed.”

White, colored, what did that have to do with going to school? We had a small mirror in our cabin. Nettie used it from time to time, but Noah and I weren’t supposed to mess with it. Nettie worried we might break it. Awhile back, she left it out when she went to the privy. I found it and held it up to my face. I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what I saw. My face was so white, and there were little brown dots all over it. I was ugly. I didn’t look anything like Noah or Nettie. When she came back in, I showed her, and she explained that I was white, and she and Noah were brown. “What white folks in town call colored,” she said. 

I stared at her face. She was beautiful, even with sad eyes. “That doesn’t make sense. It can’t be true.”

She put her arm around me and pulled me close. “Roy, I’ve known this day was coming since Olive brought you to me. I done told you part of this story plenty of times. When you was just two days old, your mama died and you was starving to death. Olive, well she begged me to take you in, feed you—so I did. Early on, all I could think was, soon as you was off the breast, I’d send you back. And I meant to, but the longer I had you, the more that thought faded. I started thinking of you as mine, you was such a precious thing.” She squeezed me. “You still is. But I knew I couldn’t keep you. I kept telling myself I needed to tell you, so that when the time came, you’d be ready. I’m sorry Roy, so sorry. I just couldn’t never do it. We’ve been so happy together and I guess I just pretended if I didn’t tell you, then we could stay happy longer. But the time has come, and you must go.”

“But why Nettie, why can’t I stay here?”

She sighed. “The real world doesn’t allow for white boys to live in a colored home to be raised by a colored woman. Now with you growing up, folks are already starting to talk. I hear it behind our backs. Lately, I’ve been leaving you and Noah at home when I go to town because it could cause trouble. White folk and colored folk just don’t mingle. I even think there may be some laws against it.”

I didn’t understand. It made no sense. I kept asking why and Nettie kept trying to explain it. No matter what she said, or how hard I tried to grasp what she was saying, I couldn’t. 

After a hundred whys, Nettie finally gave up in exasperation and told me to hush, but I wouldn’t. I told her that I didn’t want to go and live with Olive. I didn’t want to be away from Noah. I was terrified at the thought of leaving my home, of leaving her.

The more I begged, the more I pleaded, the more resolute she became. Finally, when she couldn’t bear it any longer, she yelled. She said things that I knew were true, but I could not accept. “Roy, stop being such a pest! You aren’t my child. I didn’t adopt you, and I was never meant to raise you! You don’t belong here. I’m not your mother, and Noah is not your brother!”

Her words made me cry—loud, uncontrollable wailing with rivers of tears streaming down my face. Nettie had always been there to console me, to hug me, to dry my eyes and reassure me that I was going to be ok. But this time, she didn’t. She grabbed a laundry basket and went out the back door. She began gathering clothes from the clothesline. Noah came out onto the porch and sat beside me.

I don’t know how long I cried. I got so tired that I stopped for a little while, but then I looked at Noah and he looked at me and I started crying again. Noah joined in. We hugged and rocked back and forth. It was almost as good as a hug from Nettie. We finally quit crying and just sat there until the sun went down.

Later, when we went to bed, Nettie wrapped her arms around me and whispered in my ear. She told me over and over that everything was going to be fine. Grandma Olive and Uncle Thomas were family. They’d take care of me. I’d be happy there. Starting school next fall would open a whole new world for me. After what seemed like forever, she fell asleep. But I didn’t.

I lay in bed with Nettie breathing softly next to me. Noah was on her other side, sleeping soundly. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine that it was going to be fine. I belonged with Nettie and Noah. I had shared a bed with them my whole life. When it was cold, we would huddle together in a tight knot. I liked being in the middle, but so did Noah. Noah was a heavy sleeper, so I’d let him have the middle and then lay awake until he was very still, and his breathing was deep and slow. That’s when I’d make my move, tunneling under the quilt and squirming in between him and Nettie. I’d fall asleep in seconds. In the morning, Noah would profess outrage at having been displaced. The confrontation usually ended with a wrestling match until Nettie lost her patience and threw us both out of the bed.

I tried to imagine what it would be like at Olive’s. Where would I sleep? Who would I sleep with? Noah and I were afraid to go to the privy at night. So, if one of us had to go, we both went. Would I have to go by myself now? Would Noah have to go alone as well? In my heart, I knew that Nettie would go with him.

There was so much to figure out, and I didn’t want to have to do that. Maybe when we got there, we would all sit around a table at Olive’s and talk it through. Nettie could explain everything. Once she finished telling Olive and Thomas what I would need, well, maybe everyone would decide that it was best if I just stayed with her. Or maybe Olive and Thomas would be so happy to see me, they would fall all over themselves trying to make everything just right. We’d even work out a plan where I could spend lots of time with Noah.

The heat and a long stretch of road with no shade pulled me back to the moment. It was a dry, hot August. Cornfields stretched out on either side. The leaves were drooping and the tassels on husks were withered. I could see a line of trees in the distance. I knew we were getting close.

When we reached Olive’s cabin, we were drenched in sweat. We approached just close enough to stand under an enormous live oak that stretched across the yard. The shade was a relief. Nettie stopped unexpectedly and still holding hands, Noah and I were jolted to a stop. I looked up at her and followed her gaze to Olive’s cabin. It looked about the same as ours, except it was rundown and ill kept. Nettie was obsessed with keeping our place spotless. In the spring, she’d spend hours pulling weeds and grass from the yard, all the way to the road. Once the ground was naked, she’d regularly sweep it. A few years ago, she hired a man to repair the siding and put a new metal roof on. She’d been painstakingly saving for years, and it had taken every penny we had.

Olive’s yard was deep in weeds and bushes. To see the whole cabin, you had to stand right where we were, on the narrow path that led from the road to the porch. The siding was gray and weathered. The roof was rusty. I watched Nettie scan her surroundings. I could sense her thoughts. She wanted to get on her hands and knees and start pulling weeds. I half expected her to do it and enlist us to help. That’s when Olive came out the front door.

Nettie locked her eyes on Olive. She placed her hand between my shoulder blades and gave me a gentle push. When I resisted, she moved her hand to my chin and turned my face toward hers. “It’s time to go Roy. You got family waiting. Don’t make your grandmother have to stand out in this heat. Go on now.”

I had never seen Nettie cry, and I wasn’t sure she was crying now. But her eyes seemed like deep pools, and she was blinking faster than seemed normal. I wrapped my arms around her leg.

Olive was squinting at us. “Roy, come on up now. I’m sure Miss Nettie has other business to attend to.” She gave a nod toward Nettie, but Nettie didn’t respond. 

That’s when Thomas limped out of the house. He was dirty and disheveled. He had a long gray beard that was stained at the corners of his mouth. Despite the heat, he wore a long-sleeved, heavy cotton shirt. He was skinny, and his threadbare pants were held up by thick suspenders. He offered a toothless grin. “Why howdy Miss Nettie. Ain’t you just looking fine! Why I know it’s been years since we last saw each other and yet you ain’t changed one bit. Say, you ever find yourself another man after that fella of yours up and left you? Willie was his name as I recall.”

A look came over Nettie’s face that I had never seen before. Without looking away from Olive and Thomas, she pulled me off her leg and put her hand back between my shoulder blades. But this time she shoved me, hard. I stumbled forward, and before I could recover, Nettie yanked Noah around and hurried away without a word. I wanted to run after them, get away from this place, but I knew I couldn’t. Nettie would just drag me back.

Bewildered, I looked back at the porch. Olive was motioning to me. “Come on child, get on up here and let me take a closer look at you. I haven’t seen you in what seems like forever, and I think you must be a foot taller than that last time; don’t you think so Thomas?”

Thomas leaned forward on his cane so that his head was just beyond the edge of the porch. He cleared his throat and spit. Brown spittle spiraled through the air. Some of it caught in his beard. He leered. “What are you now boy, five, six maybe? You a stunted little thing even for that age. I reckon you’ll be a dwarf your whole life—taking after your mother I suppose. Why, a stiff wind coulda blowed her all the way to the Carolinas.” His eyes brightened. “Or maybe you never got enough to eat, that Nettie making sure she and her boy always got their fill before you got any. That could explain it—or you need wormin', maybe both.”

Olive scowled. “You leave the boy alone Thomas and stop saying such awful things. Go on and get yourself back inside.” Thomas glared at Olive without moving. She stepped closer. “Do as I say or so help me, I’m gonna shove you off this porch and if the fall don’t kill you, I’ll come down and finish the job.”

Thomas turned and dragged himself toward the door. “No need to get all upset Olive. I’m just funnin’ with the boy. He got to be some use.”

I was paralyzed. I had no idea what was happening. Without speaking, Olive came down from the porch and ushered me into the cabin, my new home.

There was a front door and a back door. Both were open and a gentle breeze ran through the house. There were no windows. A canopy of live oaks sent branches above the roof that blocked out most of the sunlight. Even though it was only mid-afternoon, inside it felt like the sun was about to set.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Thomas was sitting in a chair near the back door. There was a cast iron stove five feet from him. Its chimney barely cleared the top of the stove before turning ninety degrees and passing through the wall.

Olive took me to the stove and pointed to a pile of neatly folded quilts lying on the floor behind it. “This is where you’ll sleep Roy. We don’t light the stove much in the summer, but we try to keep it going all the time when the weather starts turning cold. It’ll be a blessing if you could see to it that the fire stays lit when we need it. We keep a stack of wood just outside the back door there. Its right hard on us if we have to get up at night to tend it.”

Thomas turned in his chair and glared. “What Olive is saying boy, if you’re going to live in this house, sleep here, eat our food, why then we expect you to earn it. You turn out to be a slackard, or you get contrary about what we tell you to do, then you’ll end up sleeping on the bare floor.”

I crouched under the stovepipe and crawled to my new bed. The quilts were old and worn, but clean. I ran my hand over the topmost. It was soft and thick.

“I sewed those quilts from flour sacks.” Olive announced from behind me. “Not much to look at and they surely wouldn’t win a prize at the fair, but they’ll keep you warm, even in February.” 

I turned and looked at her. “Miss Olive, will I be sleeping here all by myself?”

She must have seen the desperate look on my face. Her eyes widened and a tender smile crossed her lips. “I never knew until just this moment how much you look like your daddy. We call him Little John, even nowadays when he’s all grown up. When he was a babe, he had trouble with the ‘M’ sound, so when I tried to teach him to say mama, it always came out nana.” She shrugged her shoulders. “The name just stuck. Why don’t you call me Nana too?” She pointed to a narrow bed pushed against the far wall. “I sleep over there, it’s too narrow for two. Thomas sleeps in his chair. Besides, we’re way too old and stiff to be climbing down there with you. This can be your special place.”

Without another word, Olive walked to the table and started shelling peas. Thomas began snoring. I felt the sudden urge to pee, so I went out the backdoor looking for the privy. A narrow path from the cabin led to it. It seemed a long way off. I’d have to make sure I never needed to go there after dark.

Further on from the privy, there was a chicken coop with a run. Half a dozen hungry looking hens scratched in the bare earth. Not far from the coop, was a smoke house. I peaked in. It was empty. Behind the smoke house, was an area with large, blackened timbers jutting up at odd angles. Kicking through the debris, I found a rusted hay fork and some enormous hinges. There must have been a barn that burned down.

The path ended at a tiny stream. The water was clear and cool. As I walked along the edge, I spooked a frog that was sunning on a log. It arced through the air and splashed into the water. A few minnows darted around the commotion. At Nettie’s, we got our water from a tiny brook that fed the Sweetwater Branch. With the path coming back this far, I figured this is where Olive and Thomas got their water.

Dinner was a meager affair. The food was alright, but the portions were small, half an ear of boiled corn, a few chunks of new potato, a tiny slice of some sort of potted meat. No one spoke as we ate. Dinner with Nettie and Noah could be raucous. Noah and I were always in competition, vying for the most elaborate adventure story of the day. Nettie would listen attentively and always laugh when something was supposed to be funny.

I helped Olive wash the dishes and put them away. Thomas returned to his roost. There was a stool with a big pillow on it in front of the chair.  I watched as he struggled to get his left leg up onto it. When he saw me staring, he frowned. “I shouldn’t have to say something boy. Get over here and help me.”

While I helped Thomas get comfortable, Olive sat back down at the table. She lit a candle and pulled some knitting needles out of a bag at her side. She examined the results of her previous effort, then she began knitting. Without looking up, she announced, “I’m making a sweater for you Roy. It’s likely to take me a month or two. It should be ready by the time you need it.”

I watched, transfixed, as her plump, gnarled fingers effortlessly guided the needles around the thread. The hypnotic movement cast a spell on me, and in a few moments, I felt my eyelids getting heavy. A yawn escaped my lips.

“It’s been a long day Roy, why don’t you go crawl into your new bed?” Olive said without looking up from her work.

I nodded and crawled under the stovepipe. It was too warm to get under the quilts, so I laid on top. I rolled onto my back and stared at the rafters. A second ago, I was falling asleep standing up, and now, lying here, I was suddenly wide awake.

I tried to understand the day. It was impossible. Perhaps in the morning I would ask Olive what the trouble was between them and Nettie. It sure seemed to me that something had happened that caused a divide. But then I thought better of it. It might make Olive mad. She wasn’t anything like Nettie, but she seemed nice enough. She was kind when she talked to me and now, she was making a sweater for me. If I got the chance, I could share stories about what it was like being with Nettie and Noah. Once she got a better picture, she’d have to like them. Then they would become friends.

Thomas was different. Always seemed angry. Maybe it was his leg. Maybe it pained him so much that it colored his whole world, made him angry with everything and everyone. That had to be it. I can work on that. Make sure he has as little discomfort as possible. Do what I can to soothe his misery.

I rolled onto my side and wiggled into the quilts. I tossed and turned. I tried leaning against the wall, but it was hard and straight. I started to cry. Just tears at first, then sniffles, then long soft wails punctuated with sobs.

I heard Thomas shift in his chair. Then his voice rang out. “I expect you to quit that caterwauling right now. We won’t have it. Quit it now or I’ll take my cane to you.”

I rolled onto my hands and knees. I crawled under the stovepipe and scurried to the front door. It was still open. There was a halfmoon that made the yard brighter than the dark cabin. I ran down the path and onto the road.

An hour later, exhausted, I stumbled into our yard and called out to Nettie. Sleepy-eyed, she met me on the porch dressed in her nightgown. Noah was standing behind her. He was holding onto Nettie’s gown. His eyes were wide and there was a faint smile on his face. He looked happy to see me.

“What on earth you doing back here, Roy?”

I hadn’t planned on having to explain it. She had to know. I looked down at the floor. Nettie’s bare feet peaked out from under her gown. Her toes were curled like she was trying to hold on. I looked back up, trying to read her face in the darkness. “They made me sleep by myself on the floor. I don’t like it there. Please let me stay, please.”

Nettie’s shoulders slumped. She reached out, put her hand behind my head, and pulled me to her. I grabbed her leg and put an arm around Noah. We stood like that for a while, Nettie softly running her fingers through my hair.

“You can stay the night. But in the morning, you’re going back and this time you’re staying.” We went into the house and climbed into bed. Curled up beside Nettie and Noah, I was asleep in seconds.

Nettie was all business in the morning. We had a hasty breakfast and then she grabbed my hand and pulled me out the door. Noah started to follow, but Nettie shook her head. “You stay inside ‘til I get back Noah. I won’t be gone long.”

It was early, and the air wasn’t hot yet. Nettie walked so fast that I almost had to run to keep up with her. If I fell behind, she pulled on my arm. We got to the corn fields, and I could see the tree line that was just before Olive’s cabin. Nettie stopped and kneeled so that we were eye to eye. Her face was stern. “This is a far as I’m going Roy. I’m going back. You’re going on to Olive’s, and you’re going to stay. I’m done fighting with you. I got better things to do. If you come back to my house, why I’ll get Sheriff Martin to arrest you for trespass. You ain’t welcome anymore.” She stood up. Now get on, get out of my sight.”

She pushed me toward Olive’s. I stumbled a few steps, stopped and looked back. Nettie was standing with her hands on her hips. She looked angry, but tears were running down her cheeks. She whispered goodbye, turned, and started back down the road as fast as she could go.

Where the Wild Goose Goes

As soon as he heard the first cool breezes of autumn rustling through the dry leaves, Philip Ryan imagined himself flying point in one of those southbound Vs of Canadians he’d seen moving across the sky. The sight of those flawless formations always excited him so much that he’d feel like answering their distant call with a good honk or two of his own. The feeling was so strong that sometimes he wondered if he’d been one of those soaring birds in a past life and had been reincarnated into his flightless form by some horrible mistake.

He figured he might not be able to fly like a goose, but he damned sure knew where the highway was. And one morning he would look over at the aging woman sleeping beside him and slip from her bed as quiet as a cat burglar. He’d pack his duffle, he’d take all the cash in the house, and he’d be down the road by sunrise, looking for something better, or at least something different, leaving nothing of himself behind save a few stray hairs and the imprint of his head on the pillow.

But this stay had been so long he felt like one of those fat geese whose wild spirit has been drained by the lush grazing around lakes and farm ponds. Instead of a pond, he found his easy pickings in a McMansion that sprawled across a tiny suburban lot south of Birmingham. By his standards, the place was luxurious. But he had grown weary of hearing how Carol’s ex had paid for it.

"Made the son-of-a-bitch pay through the nose," she would say after too many glasses of Chablis, pointing to what Philip thought was her best feature, her little button of a nose. "Through the fucking nose."

Tough talk, he thought. And about as much at home on her tongue as a ring would be through that cute nose.

She often came home from her job as the district sales manager for Wilmot Pharmaceuticals, packing some kind of bauble for his pleasure. She’d bought him more clothes than he would ever wear and a membership to Gold's Gym so he could keep his long, lean body tight and fit. And she bought a new car, a blue BMW Z4 convertible, for him to drive all the time as long as he promised to cruise by her ex-husband's place every day or so.

"Remind that cheating son-of-a-bitch that I don’t need him or his fucking money anymore," she said, a weak snarl masking the cracking of her voice and the tears welling in her eyes every time she mentioned her ex.

On a scale of looks, Philip thought she had probably always been several notches down from pretty. But with that button nose and those soft lips, she could’ve been recognized at one time as cute. He imagined her in high school as a perky cheerleader with her cheeks firm and dimpled, her brown hair long and ponytailed. She had never told him how old she was, but she now looked to be in her late forties, knocking hard on fifty. He could see a double chin collecting around her neck like slowly rising bread dough, with gravity doing its treacherous thing to the skin around her eyes. A shiver trickled up his spine as he thought, time is damn sure hell on the cute and perky.

He hadn’t thought of his own age since his birthday back in May. He remembered how old he was and bit his tongue before the dreaded number could pass through his lips. He walked over to the dresser mirror, stroked his blond hair that grew in a riot of curly tangles.

“Hell, kid, you don’t look a day over twenty-five.” He shrugged. “Eh, maybe twenty-six.” But he could do the math. Twelve autumns had blown by since that had been the correct answer.

That morning, as Carol scrambled around the house getting ready for work, he leaned back into the pillows bunched behind him on the headboard and sipped the coffee she brought him, wiping sleep from his eyes and thinking he had to get the hell out of there pretty soon. He could feel his wildness draining from him amid all that freedom-sucking domesticity.

“Would you mind taking a damp mop and going over these floors today?" she called from somewhere down the hall.

Instead of answering he stared at the door, telling himself to just walk through it as he had all the others. She could boss those toads at work around all she wanted, but he wasn't a man who took orders. He had no intention of mopping a damn floor. What bothered him was she suddenly dared to ask him. She had become too comfortable with him, leading her to talk about him to some of her girlfriends. He was sure those bitches had put her up to asking him to do fucking housework.

"And the kitchen," she said, now standing in the door. "I don't mind cooking when I come in. Really, I don't. I love to cook. But it would help me a lot if you'd have everything kind of cleaned up and ready. If you could do that, it'd really be great, baby."

She walked over to the bed, bent over and tagged his cheek with a quick peck. "Gotta go," she said, glancing at her watch.

As she walked away, he thought that if he left today, the swell of her hips in that tweedy brown suit would be his last sight of her. He listened to the familiar sound of her heels punishing the hardwood in the hallway, the front door opening and closing, the growl of her Mercedes' diesel turning over in the garage. By the time the scent of her hairspray and cologne faded from the bedroom, his coffee had grown cold.

Before her, all the older women he had lived with had at first been satisfied with having a young man sleeping in their beds. But they eventually wanted more, and it was this more thing that always scared the hell out of him. Their mores—usually: get a job, meet her family, go back to school, or some shit. It had never taken much of this to get him packed and down the road. But this was his second autumn in Birmingham, and Carol had already dumped a truckload of mores on him.

His experience led him to understand the unhealed wound of a broken marriage at this stage in a woman’s life, all those dreams and expectations crushed by an egomaniacal husband's need for something younger, leaving her to feel like a formerly cute puppy, grown into a fat, ugly mutt. That wound was his stock-in-trade, and he understood that he would have to listen to them lashing out at their exes. He knew he would have to hold them and make them believe his imaginary bond with them would get them through another night.

But with Carol, it wasn't just her ex-husband. It was her weight, her job, her intelligence, or lack of it as she sometimes thought. To him, her job sounded like a total train wreck. The night before, she spent hours glued to her computer and yakking on the phone, suddenly pushing herself away, shouting to the ceiling, "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing."

Listening to this kind of shit was the last thing he ever wanted to do. But the strong impulse he felt to leave at the sound of it was soon overcome by the horror of crawling on another Greyhound bus.

"Baby, you sure look like you know what you're doing," he said, moving in behind her, rubbing her shoulders, feeling her taut muscles melt under his fingertips.

"I don't, though," she whined, giving in to his ministrations.

"Of course you do, and you know it. Hell, you're the smartest woman I've ever known."

It was easy to compliment her because she really was smart. But she didn't always believe it. She curled up in his arms, content after his reassurances, but he knew she would be good only till the next office crisis, the next dip in her confidence which could be set off by anything, especially her weekly telephone call to her mother. Then she would look as if she'd been kicked in the gut by an NFL punter.

"That bitch," she said, pointing at the phone one day as if the old lady were curled up in it. "How did she get to be a mother, anyway?”

He’d had enough of her emotional meltdowns. He sprang from the bed and found his canvas duffle in the corner of the closet, crumpled under the parade of shirts, pants, and sport coats, all cleaned and lined up in neat rows. He pulled the frayed old bag out, brushed a couple of dust balls from its stiff folds, and watched them float to the floor. The thing wouldn't hold a fraction of the stuff Carol had bought him. Before he split, he'd have to get a suitcase or something.

He ran his finger across the rod that held his shirts, contemplating his choices, caressing the hanger hooks as if he were strumming harp strings, already missing the things he would have to leave behind. Then he thought the whole thing was too much of a decision to make before breakfast.

~

Phillip headed out to Joe Bean's Coffee shop. Remembering the fifteen hundred bucks he'd squirreled away, he figured it might be a good time to get out while he was ahead. As he gripped the wheel, he envisioned how good it would feel to have the highway crushing under his tires with trees and cities whizzing by his windows. But as he pulled into the coffee shop's lot, he released his grip with a sigh. He’d been spending Carol's money these days and doubted how long fifteen hundred dollars would stay in his pocket. Besides, the damned car was in her name. He knew he couldn't take it. With all the vindictiveness she targeted toward her ex-husband, he knew if he pissed her off by leaving in the Beemer, he'd be swimming in cops before he hit the county line. That meant he would be back on the Greyhound like the old days, and as he leaned back into the firm leather, he could almost hear the lonesome moan of the bus's engine, the hiss of its brake, the pungent scent of diesel, and the usual unwashed passenger sitting beside him, giving him a gap-toothed grin before taking a ragged pull from a half pint of cheap whiskey.

He sat in the coffee shop parking lot while everything he had come to know moved farther and farther away from him. His daily excursions here to the coffee shop, the gym, the track, the mall, and the TV shows he watched on the sixty-five incher in Carol's den every night. He shuddered at some of the things he'd done to get where he was now and wondered if he would ever have another set-up like this again.

Even before he climbed out of the car, he knew the blonde barista would greet him with a toothy smile, her face all scrunched up as if she were trying to beam at him.  She always giggled at everything he said and caressed the hair on the back of his hand after she handed him his coffee. When no one was looking, she would refill his cup and slip him some of the pastries she was supposed to chop up for customer samples.

She saw him coming and cooed. "Philip. Grande house blend.”

He reached for it. "Something extra for you,” she whispered. “Our new pumpkin coffee cake."

"Thanks," he whispered back. "You know. I'm going to have to do something nice for you one of these days."

"Yes, you are," she said.

He snatched a newspaper from the rack, and wended his way through a gauntlet of lattes and laptops, laying claim to an empty table next to one of the east-facing windows. Some classical piece seeped from the speakers hanging from the walls, soft violins and cellos, mingling with the gurgling cappuccino machine and the hum of conversation. 

He'd never given the barista a second thought, but as he sipped his coffee and rustled through the newspaper, he thought of her tits peeking at him under her short black apron. Carol's tits on the other hand—well, Carol's tits were fast surrendering to the law of gravity. They’d done all the peeking they were ever going to do. Those nights when she wasn't harried by work, depressed over her failed marriage, or inflamed by some backhand comment her mother made, he managed to talk her into making love. He often thought it was a mistake because they always ended up with her lying under him like a lump, breathlessly whispering for him to slow down. Slow down? He was already moving so slowly, like one of those shapeless globs wiggling in her stupid lava lamp in the den.

The barista surprised him, refilling his coffee and plopping another slice of cake on the table.

"Nice day, huh?" she said.

"Nice day?" he said, lowering the paper and looking out the window as if seeing the October sunshine for the first time. "Yeah," he said. "Damn, I think you're right. Kinda crisp or something like that. You know what I'm saying?"

"Crisp?" she said with a little giggle in her voice. "Yeah, I think I do."

"Hey, how long have I been coming in here?"

"I don't know," she said. "I've been here a little over four months. You've been in every day I've been here."

"That's what I'm getting at. You got my name when I ordered coffee on the first day. But I don't know yours."

"No. I don't guess you do, do you?"

"Oh, you're not going to tell me?"

"I don't know," she said. "Maybe I will."

"Well, whoever you are, you know what we ought to do on this nice, crisp day?"

"What?"

"Go on a picnic."

"A picnic? You mean like, together?"

"No, we should go on two separate picnics. Of course, together. I could jam some sandwiches into a cooler, grab a bottle of wine . . . Hey, I may have to check your ID."

"I'll show you my mine if you show me yours," she said.

"Got yourself a deal," he said. "What time you get off?"

"I get off at one today. But I'm supposed to go to the dentist."

"Blow it off. Let's go out to the park, have lunch by the lake, and, you know, chill with Mother Nature for a while."

"For real?" she said, cocking her eyebrow, a smile trickling across her lips.

"I’m always for real, baby," he said, pushing up from the table. "You up for some picnic or what?"

"I don't know. I guess.” A haze of doubt before her face broke into that beaming smile.

"See you out front at one.”

~

After driving back to Carol's, he nestled into his favorite spot on the couch for a little TV. Judge Judy talked him into a deep sleep, and when he woke it was a little past noon. Excited by the thought of getting his hands on someone young and firm with her full allotment of estrogen, he packed up a blanket, the cooler, and a couple of Carol’s fancy wine glasses along with the Chablis she had cooling in the fridge. He stopped by the local deli for a couple of roasted chicken sandwiches and got back to the coffee shop to find the barista standing at the curb, her black apron tossed over her shoulder, checking out her phone.

He screeched to a halt in front of her.

"I didn't know if you'd actually come or not," she said.

"You kidding? Who in his right mind would ever stand you up?"

"Well, I wasn't really sure about all that ‘right mind’ stuff.” She opened the door. "Nice car."

He wheeled up on the interstate with the wind whipping through his hair. "Let's get some tunes going up in here.” He cued the Foo Fighter's CD with Grohl belting out "The Pretender."

"You like this?" he asked over the roaring wind, the moaning traffic, and the driving guitars.

She looked up from her phone and shouted back, "It's okay. I kinda like old music sometimes."

"Yeah, me too.”

~

There were only a few cars scattered around the lake. He parked the Beemer, got out, and snatched up the cooler and the blanket. "This way."

The tall grass slapping against their legs. "You come out here a lot?" she asked.

"Not a lot," he said. Carol brought him out here once with the intention of picnicking. She had wept like a bereaved widow when she told him that it had been her favorite place to go with her ex.

He spread the blanket in the shade of a sycamore and motioned for the barista to sit. He dropped down beside her, opening the wine and filled the glasses.

"Wow," she said, looking at him with one eye through the pale liquid. "This is so cool. I feel like a girl in a TV commercial or something."

"You look like a girl in a TV commercial.” He raised his glass." Bottoms up." Drained it.

She followed his lead and swallowed her wine. She came up gasping, giggling, and dribbling wine down her chin.

"One more time," he said.

"I thought you were supposed to sip this stuff with your pinkie finger poked out," she said.

"We'll pinkie the shit out of it after we get us a little buzz going," he said, refilling her glass.

By the time he gulped down a second glass, the alcohol had him floating. He poured them another glass, and they sat sipping it without talking, the air nutty and sweet smelling. Across the lake, the hardwoods on the mountain shimmered red, gold, and purple among the green pines.

“So, what is your name?"

"Kirsten," she said. "My friends call me Kirsty."

"Want to hear a secret, Kirsty?"

"I totally want to hear a secret."

"I've been wanting to kiss you since the first time I saw you."

She smirked and shook her head. "You must not have wanted to very bad."

"Why do you say that?"

 She shrugged. "Took you four months to ask me out."

"My life's been kinda complicated.”.

"You probably stay all jammed up with a lot of women and all."

 "Well, not so many. I'm mostly jammed up with work."

"Work?" she said. "You mean you work somewhere?"

"What do you think I am, some kind of bum?"

"No," she said. "I just thought you were rich or something. You know, you drive a cool car, and you have a buncha time to hang around the coffee shop in the morning."

"I wouldn't say I'm rich, but I do all right.”

"Who do you work for?"

 "Actually, I'm self-employed,” he said. “You might say, I'm sort of a consultant."

"I guess you have to be really smart to do that kind of stuff, huh."

"Oh, not so smart," he said. "But you have to do a lot of listening. I mean a lot of goddamn listening."

"Well?" she said, scooting closer to him.

"Well, what?"

"You going to kiss me or not?"

"Yes," he said, slowly leaning into her. "Yes I am."

 He didn't see her toss her glass, but he heard it shatter on a rock. Her breasts crushing against him, tipping his own glass over, wine splashing on his blazer and spilling across his lap.

It didn't take him long to forget about Carol's blanket, her fancy glasses, his blazer, and even his wet jeans because Kirstin's hair smelled like sweet coffee, and her lips surrendered to his as they lay facing each other while his hand roamed from her breasts down her back to the curve of her ass.

Her breathing was so heavy, he wondered for a second if she were having an asthma attack. She sucked in a deep breath and rolled on top of him, clinging to him like a wrestler trying to pin an opponent to the mat. Her mouth moving down his face like some wet little animal. What would Carol would say if she saw a hickey the size of a drink coaster on his neck?

Her hand snaked down to his crotch, and he worried that there was nothing much going on down there. This had happened to him a few times with Carol in the past several months. She had held him and told him not to worry, to take his time, and he always recovered.

He untangled himself and sat up, gasping. "Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Goddamn! Slow down!" Kirsty tumbled back on the blanket, looking at him like he’d slapped her.

"Look," he said. "This may not be such a good idea."

"Not a good idea?" she said, blinking her eyes as if she were coming out of a trance.

"No, I mean. I just got to thinking. You're kinda young and all . . ."

"I'm twenty-two," she said.

"Well, see . . . that's a little . . . and I'm . . ."

"Whatever," she said, and for a moment she looked at him as if he were a birthday present she hadn't really wanted in the first place.

"Hey. I was just thinking it'd be better if we had some lunch first," he said, fumbling in the cooler. "I got these great sandwiches."

"I don't want any great sandwiches," she grumbled. By the time he raised up, sandwiches in his hand, she was already standing, staring down at her phone. She was just going to stand there, flipping her finger across the phone’s screen.

"You want some more wine?" he asked.

"I hate wine," she snapped without looking at him. "Shit. I missed my dental appointment."

~

He left Kirsty at the curb in front of the coffee shop, watching in his rearview mirror as she thumbed messages into her phone as if she were keying in a code that would delete the whole miserable afternoon from her life. He might have disappointed a few women in his time, but this had to be the first time he'd made one long for the medieval torture of a dentist's drill.

The barista had surprised him with that tsunami of passion. It wasn’t just surprise, he admitted to himself.  She’d scared the shit out of him. No wonder. He'd been hustling aging divorcees for so long his days had become nothing but a constant parade of the moods, fragrances, and special lubricants of menopausal women.

He drove for hours, thinking how he needed to move out and start dating young women. Of course, he would have to pick up on some other hustle. He didn’t think that would be any problem. He'd been such a wiz at pimping timeshares down in that Orlando the owner had begged him to go over and help him unload some properties in Boca. That was back when he’d latched onto that chunky red-head divorcee from Tallahassee. And here he was, eight years later, cruising around Birmingham watching the sun leave a pink stain in the western sky. 

He trembled with the thought of getting a job and going through an episode like this afternoon again. He'd always been able to talk any self-doubt away by giving himself a little pep talk. He drove into a Shell convenience store and pulled down the visor to look at himself in the vanity mirror.  If he ever wondered where those eight years since Tallahassee had gone, he'd just found them on his face. There was no use telling this reflection that it was the sun lightening his hair. The gray mingled in made it more taupe than blond, and it looked as if it were eroding into a peninsula in front. 

~

"Where have you been?" Carol asked when he walked in the back door, her voice so desperate she sounded as if she'd just organized a search party.

"Oh, you expect me to account for every second I'm out of your sight?" he snapped.

"No. You didn't answer your phone. I was worried."

"The battery on that new iPhone won't stay charged," he said.

"I'll see about it tomorrow," she said. "You hungry? I thought we'd have the leftover roast."

"Aww," he whined, deciding to see if he was still the leader in this little dance. "I don't want any old leftover roast."

"What if I fixed you an omelet," she said. "The way you like it. With ham and peppers."

That might make him feel a little better. He decided to raise the stakes. "Could we have those spicy potatoes you make along with it?"

"Whatever you want," she said. 

"And biscuits," he said, upping the ante. "We could have biscuits, couldn't we?"

"Of course, baby," she said. "And you can sit in the kitchen while I cook and tell you about my day."

While she baked the biscuits and sautéed the onions and peppers, he sat and listened.

"Mother called," she said with a groan. "That woman won't just come out and tell me I'm fat. Oh! Hell no. She sneaks it into a conversation like someone slipping poison in your drink. She knows weight's my sore spot because she made it sore when I was a girl. And she never misses a chance to peel the scab off. She just told me she hoped I was staying away from Twinkies. Then she chuckled like we were sharing a fond memory of my high school days or something. I swear, I've eaten only two Twinkies in my entire life. In the eleventh grade, she had me on nothing but carrot sticks and lettuce so I'd be thin and popular. I didn't have enough energy for cheer practice, so I ate everything in sight when she wasn't looking. I got those damn Twinkies from a friend. Mom found the wrappers in my room and made fun of me, pointing out that I had sucked all the sticky white stuff off the cellophane like a drug addict."

Without even thinking about it, he knew what to do because he'd done it at least a hundred times before. He held her and reminded her how smart and beautiful she was.

“Your mama?” he said. “Just a cranky old voice from a long time ago. This is what's happening now. You and me."

After eating, instead of taking up his station in front of the TV, he handed her the plates and glasses while she loaded the dishwasher.

“You want to listen to some music or something?” he asked when they finished.

“Who are you?” she said. “And what did you do with my boyfriend?”

In bed that night, she took him inside her, and he fell right into that dreamy rhythm she favored as if he'd mastered a dance he'd been practicing for a long time.  It may have been a far cry from the heat and passion of the barista, but it had been worth enduring once it was over and she held him in her arms with his face nestled in the hollow of her breasts. And sleep came easy to him there in all that warmth, smelling the damp, grassy scent of her skin and feeling the gentle thumping of her heart. He knew that if he ever did leave, he would miss this most of all.

Black Light

When she got home from the movie and her daddy hit her, Ivy’s feelings for him broke into a thousand pieces—like a souvenir that fell from its special place high on a shelf where she had been saving it to take down one day and cherish. He made clear he had washed his hands of her. She was not so lucky with Mama.

In the morning, she woke to the smell of fried eggs and bacon grease. Mama was on her way to the cotton mill. They would talk when she got home. Ivy was not to set foot outside the house. She spent the rest of her Saturday morning in bed staring up at the black-light poster on her wall—the wormhole hidden inside the ringed planet. All this time she had imagined Barry’s gift to be a doorway to another dimension, when, in fact, it was no better than all the junk she had hoarded from the flea market.

Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina let themselves in. Ivy peeked through her door at them sitting at the kitchen table, drinking sweet tea and filling the air with smoke. Then Mama came home and, still in her mill uniform, busied herself with refilling their glasses.

Ivy stepped out to face them, and Mee-Maw just stared, letting the smoke seep out of her lips and up into her nostrils. They were all dressed up, like they wanted you to think they had come from church. But it was Saturday. And Tina’s miniskirt was too short for church.

“I blame Hollywood,” said Mee-Maw. She adjusted her brassiere. It was evidently aggravating her eczema. Mama pressed her lips together and sat up straight in her chair. Ivy braced herself. If Mama cried, it always made Ivy’s tears come, too.

“She is just going through a phase,” Mama said and reached for the cigarettes. “Some boy has paid her attention, and she’s intrigued, I guess.”

“Are you intrigued?” asked Mee-Maw.

Ivy shrugged. That’s all they’d get out of her. Here in front of them, she did not even want to let herself remember the feel of his pleather jacket smooth against her cheek, his strong shoulder underneath.

“What is it you find so fascinating?” asked Tina. “I’m curious. I want to try to understand.”

“He’s nice,” Ivy said. “And smart.”

Mee-Maw sipped her tea and said how she knew when they integrated the schools, this was where they’d end up. When children started riding the bus together, it was only one little step further to hopping in a car and riding off to the movies. And now, she said, they had these Moonies everywhere, in their silk robes, with their Chinaman messiah and their gospel of interracial marriage. Mee-Maw asked Ivy if she had been approached by any Moonies. But, so far as Ivy knew, Moonies existed only on TV and in all of their minds.

“There won’t be a white boy to go out with you now,” said Aunt Tina, a note of triumph in her voice. “Or, if he does, he’ll expect you to put out.” Tina tugged at her miniskirt, but her panties still showed.

Mama went to the sink and reached up high to the cupboard, opening the door hanging by a single hinge. She took down a packet of aspirin powders and mixed them in her tea.

“I have tried and tried to tell her,” Mama said, “how hard it is to be a girl growing up in this neighborhood.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Tina, sucking her cigarette down to the filter.

“And I just cannot believe,” said Mama, “that she is so determined to make it impossible.” 

~

She had met Barry and his sister on the bus a month earlier, her first week at the consolidated high school. Consolidation was a four-letter word in her home. The preacher at the Pentecostal church her Mama’s family attended had been run off because he supported consolidation, just like the preacher who had been run off a decade earlier for supporting desegregation. Hailey Creek High School had joined with Crawford High, which was halfway to Charlotte and a lot more “urban.” Ivy had looked forward to the consolidated high school. New people. But the new people were harder to meet than she’d expected. Most of the kids clumped together with the same old friends. On her school bus, nothing had changed. Whites claimed the back, and the dozen or so kids from Double Springs sat up front. Usually two or three empty seats in between. But instead of riding the mile to the school in Hailey Creek, they all rode segregated together past seven miles of kudzu to the consolidated high school.

It turned out there were two new kids from Double Springs: a cute boy and a girl who looked a lot like him except half a head taller and no trace of a smile. The girl clearly did not want to be on this bus. Brother and sister sat together in one of the empty seats near the center. Ivy picked up her backpack and moved to the seat behind them. She saw the book the boy was reading, 2001: A Space Odyssey. She leaned forward and said she had tried to read that book but hadn’t gotten far before she had to give it back to the library. The boy smiled. The sister made a point of staring straight ahead.

After that first week, the sister moved up front with a friend. Barry and Ivy kept occupying two seats near the center. And every day he would give her an update on the novel, which was about a man trapped on board a spaceship with a paranoid computer. Barry got around to explaining how his family had moved to Hailey Creek to take care of his grandmama, after the death of his granddaddy earlier that summer. Maybe Ivy had heard of his granddaddy? No? He had served as the principal of the Double Springs School for three whole decades, until desegregation. “Ask your parents about him,” the boy said, but of course, Ivy was not about to do that.

~

While the church was looking for a new minister, men from the congregation took turns in the pulpit. Mr. Breedlove acted like he was a real preacher. Red in the face, battling the fires of hell. Pacing back and forth in front of the altar, he sounded like he had a fishbone stuck in his throat and he was trying to cough it up.

“Satan has been turned aloose in this community, A-ha! I say we need a Savior to protect us from Satan’s dark power! A-ha-ha!”

She was pouring sweat, smothered by Mee-Maw’s flesh on the one side and poked and prodded by Aunt Tina’s raw bones on the other.

At the end of the sermon, Mr. Breedlove launched into his altar call, pleading with sinners to step forward and be washed in the blood of the Lamb. She had sat through altar calls her whole life, terrified to step down that aisle alone and finally discover whether she was worthy of salvation.

When she slid out of the pew, the sweaty jeans stuck to her thighs. If Mama had been home instead of work, she would have made Ivy put on a dress. At the altar, the preacher knelt with her on velvet cushions. He laid one hand on her shoulder while he prayed into a microphone. She closed her eyes and waited for the magic, tried to make herself believe it was Jesus himself with his hand on her shoulder, his hand strong from years of gripping a hammer, a hand that wanted nothing but her wellbeing.

 ~

On the way home, Mee-Maw and Tina lit up, and Ivy had to breathe their smoke. Mee-Maw talked on and on about how she had never been prouder. You would have thought Ivy had won the spelling bee.

“It’s such a shame your mama couldn’t be there,” Tina said.

Ivy rolled down her window for air. At the edge of town, they passed the old Double Springs School, where Barry’s grandfather had served as principal for three decades. The windows were covered in plywood, and spray-painted onto the boards were some cuss words and a Confederate flag.

“Honey, you ain’t said a word.” Mee-Maw pulled off onto the gravel road that led to her house. She glanced back at Ivy. “I been running my mouth and ain’t give you a chance to tell us what it felt like?”

“What what felt like?”

“Why, being filled with the Spirit of God! I still remember being saved like it was yesterday. When the shackles of sin fell away, I could hear them crash.”

“It was a physical sensation,” Tina agreed. “The nearest I can describe it is being covered in filth from the swamp and then being hosed down with cold water. I get goosepimples still today just remembering.”

Ivy pushed her head out the window to breathe, but her chest still hurt. She wondered if her daddy was awake yet.

“Are you going to talk to us?” Mee-Maw said.

“I didn’t feel nothing,” Ivy shouted, as if the lack of sensation was their fault. “No magic. Not a thing. I guess I must be going to hell, after all!”

~

At home, Mama and Daddy were arguing again about rumors that the mill was due to close. Mama paced the room, while Daddy sat at the table in his plaid pajamas.

He said if they wanted his job that bad in Mexico, they could have it. He had about decided he wasn’t cut out for the regimentation of factory life.

Ivy stepped by them to her bedroom, but before she could close and lock the door, her mother was there asking about church.

“I don’t have to work next Sunday,” Mama said, “We’ll be done with this inventory. And maybe after church, we can stop by Tastee Freez.”

“I’m not going next Sunday. In fact, yeah, I’m not going ever again.”

“What!”

“I found out today what I needed to know. Like Aunt Tina is always saying, there’s only two kinds of people in the world. Well, I found out which kind I am.”

When her mama finally left her alone, she unscrewed the white light from the desk lamp and replaced it with the black one from her desk drawer. She pulled the window curtains closed and then twisted the knob. A faint purple light shined out from the lamp. Well, that was disappointing. She held the light right up against the new poster on her wall, but you could hardly tell. Too much sunlight came pouring through the window. If there was a wormhole in the center of the planet like Barry had said, she couldn’t see it. She felt just as trapped in her life as ever. Maybe later, after dark, she could try again.

In the kitchen, she heard her name. Daddy was taking her side. He said she was old enough to decide whether or not she wanted to attend church.

“She’s beyond the age of accountability,” said Mama, dead serious. “And she ain’t never been saved. If something was to happen . . .None of us knows about the Rapture. It could come tomorrow, like a thief in the night.”

“Shit fire,” said Daddy, “Ivy’s just like me, too ornery for the Devil to handle.”

 ~

The following Sunday morning it was a knock-down-drag-out, but Ivy had made up her mind she was not going. After the service, Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina came over for lunch. They had banana pudding for dessert, and then when they started smoking, Ivy asked to be excused and locked herself in her bedroom. She knew they were talking about her, so she cracked the door to hear.

Mama said it was a rebellion that most girls went through.

Mee-Maw said maybe Ivy was too young to properly feel the conviction of sin.

Aunt Tina said, “Not so. I got saved right after I had my first period.”

Ivy laced up her sneakers and, without making eye contact, stepped through the kitchen choked with cigarette fumes. She walked around to the backyard where Daddy was busy with his bees.  He had the hive torn apart and he was working the bellows on his smoker to calm the bees. Daddy was still wearing his plaid pajamas, but he had on his bonnet to protect his face. He always said he didn’t mind if he got stung on the hands, but he believed in protecting his face. Mama didn’t like him to work the bees on Sundays. He said it was his way of worshipping Nature, which was his God. Ivy figured a man who could look into a hive crawling with thousands of bees and not be afraid could also make up his mind not to fear hellfire. Daddy said to rob that sweet honey, he had to put every worry out of his mind. Bees could smell fear.

Ivy walked to the other side of the house and removed the hatch to the crawl space. She stepped down into the dark and musty air and moved across the mud on all fours until she came to Daddy’s stash of homebrew and behind that his stash of honey. Through the floorboards above her, she could hear the murmur of her Mama and Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina. She pulled a quart out of the box and then moved back to the rectangle of daylight. She stuck her head outside to make sure nobody was coming. With the jar of honey hidden inside her T-shirt, she stepped across the yard to the driveway and on down the gravel road until she came to the woods and the trail that led to the creek.

The current was running fast and high. The water splashed against her shins and soaked her jeans clear to her thighs. Kids from her neighborhood had claimed the creek as their own, but they hardly ever climbed this bank on the far side. Holding tight to the honey, she dug her free hand into red clay. She reached for an exposed root and pulled herself up and rolled over onto a carpet of brown leaves that crunched beneath her. These leaves belonged to Double Springs, a place she was strictly forbidden to go. She looked back across the water toward home, feeling like she had traveled through a wormhole to some distant part of the galaxy.

She didn’t have to walk far before she could see the backs of old houses, most of them needing a coat of paint as bad as hers. But there were a couple of brick homes and on top of the hill one two-story sparkling white with a veranda that wrapped all the way around and a million flowers in tended beds. On the bus, Barry had told her how his grandmama was obsessed with flowers. Ivy waded through broom straw until she came to the edge of the yard. Nearby, there was a fence with chickens inside. Up on the hill, all the windows in the house were dark, and she didn’t want to trespass.

She lay down in the soft broom straw that smelled so clean baking in the sun. Overhead, a jet plane crept tiny and slow, leaving two thin trails of vapor. To be so far away, the plane’s roar shook the heavens. It would be a day like this, a clear sky, when the Rapture came. Supposedly all she had to do to be saved was invite Jesus into her heart. She focused on the fleck of light way up there and thought about the spaceship in Barry’s book, what it would feel like to be trapped alone in outer space. She was just about to give up and walk home when she heard the rooster crow.

She rolled over onto her elbows and looked up from the broom straw. There was Barry, carrying a pail. Inside the fence, orange chickens pecked the dirt. Barry unlatched the gate, and the rooster crowed again, flapped its wings.

Ivy raised a hand to wave, but Barry didn’t see. He upended the pail, dumped scraps for the birds. The rooster charged him, and Barry jumped back and latched the gate. When he turned, Ivy saw the tie strung around his neck. His white collar looked starched, and his slacks were stylish and new. Church clothes. For the first time, she felt ashamed that she had stayed home today, ashamed of the mud on her knees. It was almost enough to make her sink down in the broom straw and hide. But there was the honey in her hand.

“Hola!” she shouted and stepped out of the field and across the yard. “Cómo estás?”

“Huh?” He looked as shocked to see her as she felt to be here.

“My daddy says if we all learn to talk like Mexicans, then maybe we can fool the boss into believing he already moved to Mexico, and the mill won’t close.” 

“Okay?” He laughed.

She passed him the honey and told him how she had tacked up the poster on the wall by her bed and how she planned to try the black light again tonight when it got dark enough. She asked if he had ever found any arrowheads down by the creek. She had two in her rock collection and plenty of rosy quartz. She could show him the best places to look.

He glanced over his shoulder toward the house. There on the veranda stood the sister in a white dress. A hundred feet away, and Ivy could feel her judgment.

“I’ll have to take a rain check,” he said. “We got family visiting.”

 ~

Back at the creek, she found a better place to cross, where the water was wide and shallow, with stones flat and dry. She didn’t see the man until she had crossed back over. He squatted in the water upstream. His hair and clothes were soaked. He dipped his hands into the water and brought them to his face. When he looked up, fear surged through her like an electric current. The man’s face was swollen with pink whelps that ran from his hairline down his jaw and neck. His lips and nose were lopsided. He looked like a monster, like a demon set loose from hell. The man stared hard at her. She wanted to run, to look away, but there was something familiar about him that scared her and that held her gaze, and then she recognized the plaid pattern of her daddy’s pajamas.

He explained that the bees had gotten into his bonnet and he had panicked. Then he’d bumped the bee box and the whole hive swarmed him. She dipped her hands into the creek and poured water onto his bald spot, covered in knots. The swollen scalp and the way his hands trembled made her ashamed she had stolen his honey. Corpses of bees eddied around him, and live ones crawled on the netting of the bonnet on shore. She stayed with him there at the creek until the light in the woods changed and he said he was ready to go home and face her mama. She reached a hand to help him up, and he turned his swollen face on her. His puffy eyes narrowed, and he stared at her like she was the stranger in the woods. In a tone of voice she had not heard in a long time, he asked her what she had been doing across the creek in Double Springs. Except he didn’t say Double Springs. He used the word he always used, the word everybody in her family and on her street used. The word she often heard at school and at church. A word she herself had sometimes used until only recently, when she had met Barry.

Ivy didn’t like to lie, but there was no way she could tell Daddy she had taken a quart of his honey to her friend in Double Springs. It was easier to say she was chasing a baby deer.

 ~

In the days to come, she and Barry would agree to meet by the creek, on his side. They hunted for quartz and skipped rocks on still water. They raced sticks at the stretch of rapids she called the racetrack. They stood together in the treehouse his granddaddy had built for him when Barry was still a child. She wondered if he might try to kiss her. She had never kissed a boy. She had spent a lot of years ashamed of wanting to be kissed, but now she told herself she was not ashamed, and whatever that said about her, she didn’t care. 

Every morning on the bus, Barry told her what was happening in his novel, which kept getting weirder and weirder. The spaceman had been transported to a far corner of the galaxy, where he had a vision of ancient civilizations populated by alien beings. Barry said one thing he was looking forward to about living out here in the country was learning the constellations.

“When you learn them,” she said, “maybe you’ll teach me.”

~ 

Ivy had grown up playing in the woods, and after she finished her homework, Mama didn’t mind her spending time down by the creek. No need to mention Barry. Daddy was still on second shift, so at supper, it was just her and Mama. One night, when the two of them fixed Ivy’s favorites, barbecued chicken and baked beans, Mama said she wanted Ivy to consider coming back to church. They had a new minister now, and she wanted Ivy to give him a try.

She shook her head, and when Mama pressed her case, Ivy dropped the half-eaten drumstick onto the plate and went to her room. She lay on her bed and thought about the new minister. She knew everything he would say without having to hear a single word. She turned on the black light and tried to relax in a purple room, concentrate on her poster of the ringed planet and its portal to an alternate universe. She tried to make the wormhole open and suck her through. But the doorway was shut. And, as she always did while lying in bed, she got to dividing everybody she knew into two groups, the wheat and the chaff, those who would be taken up with the Rapture and those who would be left behind with her while evil conquered and ruled a lonely planet. Seven years of Tribulation. Plagues. War. Daddy would be there, too. Neither of them had been saved. But Daddy was already so distant, so what help could he give her to resist the mark of the Beast?

 ~

Ivy saw the movie advertisement in the Gastonia Gazette and couldn’t wait to tell Barry. 2001: A Space Odyssey had been re-released and was playing at the Webb Theatre. She was speaking her fantasy. She would never have dreamed of asking either of her parents for a ride, even if Mama hadn’t already been moved back to second shift. 

“My sister can drive,” Barry said and, the next day, confirmed the date. Friday night. Ivy offered to meet him at his grandmama’s. It would be easier for her to walk through the woods, she said, than for his sister to have to find her house.

She arrived just before dusk, picking beggar’s lice from her jeans. It was clear in an instant his sister had not been expecting her. Barry tried to smooth things over. The sister shook her head.

“You said a friend. I thought you meant Boone or Jomo.”

“Well. You should have asked.”

Ivy did not get much out of the movie. From that opening scene with the apes and the bone they tossed into the air that turned into a spinning spaceship, she knew her mama would find the story somehow blasphemous. The movie was slow, not much action, but her mind was not on the movie. With his sister sitting on the other side, Barry reached out and took Ivy’s hand, their fingers slick with butter from the popcorn.

Back in Hailey Creek, Barry’s sister was not about to let Ivy walk through the woods, even with a flashlight. When they pulled into Ivy’s driveway, a fire in the backyard burn barrel was pumping out black smoke, chased by a whole galaxy of sparks. From the way it stank, plastic. Her daddy, who was supposed to be at work, came out onto the porch barefooted, without a shirt. He shouted her name and stepped down the cinder blocks. Backlit by the bare porch light, he marched directly toward the car.

~

The morning after the movie, she woke and rubbed her sore jaw where Daddy had smacked her. Mama made her leave her bedroom and come eat breakfast. Daddy woke early and went out to work his bees. He didn’t even glance in her direction. Mama was on her way to the mill. Ivy had never understood why Mama had to work Saturday mornings and Daddy didn’t.

Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina arrived and filled the kitchen with cigarette smoke. After Mama got home, Ivy left her bedroom to face their interrogation. The movie. Her friendship with Barry. Mee-Maw pulled a fine-toothed comb through her hair, checking for lice. Aunt Tina insisted that Ivy open herself to salvation.

“You need to get this done,” said Tina. “You’re very clearly beyond the age of accountability. I understand you might think it exciting to live dangerously—”

“She’s playing with fire,” said Mee-Maw.

“Like playing Russian roulette with her soul,” said Tina.

“You never know what tomorrow will bring,” said Mee-Maw.

“If not the Rapture,” said Tina, “then maybe a fatal car crash.”

“Your appendix could burst,” said Mee-Maw.

“You could contract some exotic, incurable illness,” said Tina.

“Maybe you already have it,” said Mee-Maw. “Some people are born with the thing that will kill them.”

“And then, like that,” Tina said, snapping her fingers, “your soul will be cast into hellfire for all of eternity.”

“Why risk it?” said Mee-Maw.

“She likes living dangerously.” Tina took the cigarettes from her purse and thumped them against her palm. She luxuriated in the ritual of lighting the cigarette and taking that long first drag.

 ~

The next morning was Sunday. Ivy woke while it was still dark. She turned on her bedside lamp and tried to read the novel she had borrowed from Barry. They both figured that after hearing him summarize, chapter by chapter, the entire space odyssey, it would be easier.  But the sentences still resisted her. The book made her feel defeated and dumb. She tossed it to the floor and flopped back on her bed. Still another two hours until it grew light. And then she would have to dress for church. She turned off the lamp and lay still, imagining herself the prisoner of a computer in a spaceship—in suspended animation.

When the bulb had cooled to her touch, she unscrewed it, then replaced it with the black light bulb she kept hidden in her dresser drawer. She removed the lamp shade so the purple light could fill the room. Stretched out on top of her quilt, she stared at the poster on the wall. It was a trick she kept practicing without success. Focus on the tiny pink cubes that made up the ringed planet. Blink and, presto, if the trick ever worked, Barry had explained that the planet was supposed to reveal the eyeball, which then transformed into a 3-D wormhole. Just relax her body, starting down at her toes and moving upward to her knees. Empty her mind. Breathe. When she got to her belly, she felt again the panic that had buzzed through her and that had filled the car, there with Barry in the backseat and his sister up front behind the wheel, when Daddy had stepped out onto the porch and shouted her name. She could not stop smelling the hot smoke from the burn barrel or stop seeing the way Barry’s sister had stared into the back seat, signaling for her to get out. And Barry, how while Daddy moved through the dark, shouting obscenities, hunched forward and carrying what might only have been a rolled-up newspaper, Barry had tried to smile but could not hide the fear on his face. Maybe everything her family said was true, that hell was a real place. Pain and punishment beyond her wildest imagination.

But this morning, she was still free to create the world she wanted to inhabit. Long, slow breaths. She set the lamp on the bed and held it between her knees so that the purple light bathed the poster and the pinks popped from the wall. She stared at that planet and blinked. Stared and blinked again. She could keep doing this as long as it took. Her eyes found the rhythm until she forgot where she was and found herself empty, floating in a trance. And then, blink, yes! There it was! Not a planet but an eyeball, the pupil dilating until it became a wormhole through space, a door to another dimension. And then the door opened and out stepped Barry wearing a shiny blue spaceman suit. His shoes flashed in the light of an alien sun. He paced back and forth across some cratered surface, sliding his feet like he did when they waded the creek and came to the stretch of flat rock covered in slick algae. He held out a hand and fixed her with an unwavering gaze, waiting. All she had to do was take his hand and step through that doorway. But understand, once it closed behind them, there was no coming back to Earth.

Buffalo Plaid

Lucy stubbed out her cigarette on a bench near the portico of the Douglas Memorial emergency room. They wouldn’t think to look for her here. Then she marched to the main entrance and rode to the third floor. The hallway smelled of something strange, maybe sick people. She buried her nose in the day-old bouquet. The florist had given her a break on the price. She thought of last week and the perfume that hung so heavy in the funeral home. She suspected that it covered the smell of dead bodies in the basement. Half of Atwater, which was nearby and not much of a town, had come to church to pay their respects to her mama. Half the men had probably fucked her. Lucy wondered if the funeral guys had left her mama’s heart inside, at least the pieces. That’s what the Egyptians did, she was pretty sure. She thought the Vikings had it right. She was sure there was still some part of her mama they hadn’t buried, something in the house.

She wore the same dress they had given her for the funeral. Maybe it was bad luck to wear it when you visit someone in the hospital. The overheads bathed the hallway in soft light. While everyone spoke in hushed voices, her sneakers kept squawking on the vinyl floor. A man in baby-blue scrubs told her that Mr. Hutchinson was expecting her. He took the bouquet and observed that her backpack looked mighty heavy. She shrugged it away from him. He directed her to Hutchinson’s room. She glanced back and found him staring at her. 

She leaned into the room. A picture of some water lilies hung on the wall. The Cubs were playing somebody on the silent TV. A reading lamp recoiled on its hinge. Hutchinson’s eyes were open. Bandages swaddled much of his head. His right leg and left arm were cased in fiberglass and pulled taut by weights hung from pulleys on a metal frame over the bed. Lucy cleared her throat. She caught the flicker of his near eye. 

“So you’re Janey Walker’s kid,” he said. “Come over here.”

She did, slowly. 

He was sweating. The left side of his face below the eye had caved into a purple hollow. 

“Not much to look at, huh?” His smile dragged the rest of his face with it. 

Her eyes hurt. Her mama had left him lying in a ditch. She put her hand to his cheek. 

He grabbed her wrist with his good hand, hard enough to make her gasp. 

“Don’t do that.” He released her. “They’ll build me a new face when they get around to it.”

“Course they will.” She smiled and nodded.

“I can do without the powdered sugar, thanks. And do your crying somewheres else.” 

She turned her face. 

“Look at you,” he said. “You’re a mess. There’s Kleenex on that table.”

“I’m just sorry what my mama did.” She blew her nose. She focused on her feet and the fading blue diamonds in the floor.

“And that jacket. Thing’s bigger than you are. Anybody tell you it’s still summer?”

“It’s my daddy’s,” she said, pulling it tight. It was red and black, and she wore it all the time.

His voice softened. “How you doing?” 

“Better than you.” She cleared her throat. How did he pee and poop?

“Maybe not,” he said. “When I get out of here, I’ll still have a mama.”

Neither spoke for a while.

“I’m sorry what happened,” Lucy said again.

“I don’t recall you driving,” he said. “Matter of fact, I don’t recall much. I know I bought a chicken from Paul Krieger.” His eyes grew blank. “I guess I didn’t look both ways before crossing.” He grinned and jerked a little. “Can’t laugh much.” His smile faded. “Crawled quite a ways to get back to the road. Your mama must’ve put her foot down.”

“She was upset. She didn’t get a job.”

“I would’ve gladly gave her mine,” he said. He stayed quiet awhile. “I think I worked with your daddy once.” Hutchinson eyed her. “He with the Park Service?”

“Was,” she said. “Been gone a year.” This guy knew more than he let on, she thought.

“Oh? Where to?”

“California. He’s gonna send for us when he gets settled.” 

“Taking his time, is he?” 

“I’m going to find him.”

“What if he doesn’t want to be—”

“—I’ll find him.”

Her daddy’s hair was so blond it looked white in the summer. He was built wide and strong. Head came right out of his shoulders. When she was little, he would pick her up and balance her butt on his hand. He’d walk around with her, all frantic like she was a wobbly stack of plates. “Whoa!” he would say, and he’d stagger around the house like it was all he could do to keep her from falling on her head. “Whoa!”  Of course, he never dropped her. Except this once.

Hutchinson stared at her. “You on your own?”

Lucy glanced at her backpack. “I guess. They put me in a home, but it’s not a home home.”

Hutchinson angled his body toward her with a grunt. “I am sorry about your mama. Folks say she was right on the edge. Must be hell on you.”

She nodded. Hell would be a nice place.

The room grew quiet again. Hutchinson’s head gradually sank forward. His nostrils flared and his forehead shone with sweat. He pushed a button, and a nurse appeared with a needle. His head gradually nested back in the pillow. He closed his eyes for a time. “I’ll be a junkie by the time I get out of here.” He could chuckle now. “Glad it’s the end of the season.”

The attendant appeared with Lucy’s bouquet in a plastic vase. He smiled at her. She pulled the jacket tight.

“Why, thank you,” said Hutchinson.

She nodded. They were the only flowers in the room. She leaned forward a little, widened her eyes, and dropped her jaw just enough to part her lips.

“You carry a gun?” 

He frowned. “What kind of question is that?” 

She shrugged.

“Not when I’m leading a bunch of day-trippers on a nature hike. But I sure do when I’m on patrol.” 

She asked how come. 

“Let’s say you was running a trap line in the Park, maybe doing some shooting too and making good money at it, and I catch you with your side-by-side and a bag of birds again. Now you’re looking at hard time. What would you do? Reach for the sky or leave me in the mud somewheres?” He cocked his head. “Why?”

She didn’t know the why of it yet. “Can I come back and see you some more?”

“Hell,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“You going to come out of this all right?”

“So they say. Might not look as handsome. Once my guts start up and the bones grow together, they’ll move me to some place, teach me how to walk. Sounds like fun.” He eased himself to look at her square. “You’re good to talk to. Kind of sharp. Come back any time.”

She sat on the bench again and watched them unload an ambulance. Everybody looked so serious. A cigarette hung from her lips while she searched for a match. She scratched it with her thumbnail, something her daddy taught her when she was eleven. She smiled. Never got tired of lighting his cigarettes. It was easy to steal smokes because the two of them were always so involved. She remembered the old daydream where they caught her smoking and spanked her and lectured her about the dangers of tobacco and took away her library privileges. She liked the spanking and lecturing parts, but not the library part.

She checked her watch. Minnie’s hand was on four. She rode to the third floor.

Hutchinson looked at her out the corner of his eye. “When I said come back any time, I didn’t mean all the time.”

“I won’t come back,” she said. She spat a shred of tobacco off the tip of her tongue. “Can I ask you some more?”

Hutchinson glanced at the pack. “Shoot.”

She blinked. “You know where my daddy is?”

“Girl, I hardly knew the man. It was years ago.” He ran his hand across his forehead.

“There is something you can tell me about him.” She looked him in the eye. “Tell me.” 

He presented the show side of his face. “I doubt you’d want to know.”

“Go on.”

“I never could understand it. He wasn’t good-looking.”

It stung. She nodded with a smile of pity.

“And to tell you the truth, on the job he was more show than go.” Hutchinson was feeling her out, she thought, trying to figure what she could take. “I picked up a lot of his slack. Quite the ladies’ man, if you know what I mean.” He was still searching. “Do you know what I mean?” 

She sighed. “I’m almost fifteen.”

She would curl up under the covers while they screamed at each other because he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and she was sucking the life out of him and it was her house so he could just leave don’t leave and things would break. It would end in tears and whispers, then soft laughter like they were in cahoots. She could close her eyes when the bed springs started to creak. 

“He’d take a group out on a nature walk, find some girl he liked, and that’d be the last I’d see of him. One day he plain didn’t show up. I can’t say as I missed him.” 

She pulled up some brass and gave him a grin. “I’ll say one thing for him—he sure knows how to disappear.” Then she cleared her throat. She widened her eyes again. 

“How much does a park ranger make?” 

He smiled. “You from the IRS?”

“You make enough to raise kids and all?”

He nodded. His smile went away. “I’d be obliged if they keep paying me.”

She glanced at his ring. “You got kids?”

He hesitated, too long she thought, then said, “No.”

“You ever meet my mama?”

“Not too long ago, they tell me.”

She put on her puzzled look.

“I met her once,” he said. “A real looker. You take after her—looks, I mean.” He squinted. “But you don’t spend much time dolling yourself up.” 

She stiffened. 

His eyes wandered off. “She was kind of loose put together.” 

Her mama had large ice-blue eyes and caramel-colored hair cut short as a farm boy’s. She wore a pink tube top under her jean jacket and white polyester shorts tight enough to follow her creases. She often smelled of sex, more so between jobs, and she had trouble with jobs.

“My daddy left his gun. Why do you suppose he’d do that?”

Hutchinson hesitated. “I’m sure I don’t know. Protection?”

“From poachers.” She stood up. “My mama’s loose put together. So, he takes off and forgets his gun? How stupid is that?”

Her mama had brought a stranger home one night, both of them drunk. Lucy sat with her back braced against her bedroom door, hearing them grunt, then finally crawled into bed when it got quiet. She awoke to find her mama gone and the stranger still there, naked save for her mama’s nightie, scraping his teeth with a fingernail. He smiled and crooked his finger. She pointed her daddy’s gun at him, wobbling in both hands, and when he came at her, she closed her eyes and squeezed. It hurt her ears something terrible. When she opened her eyes, the stranger had vanished. Poof! She found a hole in the ceiling over the kitchen sink. Her mama wouldn’t notice. She pulled the spent shell from the cylinder and replaced it with a new one from the box. Then she fit the casing carefully into the space where the cartridge had been. Her teeth chattered even though it was plenty hot out. She pawed through the closet and found her daddy’s old jacket. Then she wore it to the beach.

Hutchinson was eyeing her backpack. “What all’s in there?”

“Everything.”

“You’re set to go, aren’t you?”

“You going to call them on me?”

“I don’t know who ‘them’ is.” He raised the eyebrow on his good side and lowered his voice just above a whisper. “Why on earth do you want to find that man?”

“He’s alive, isn’t he?”

“Darlin’, he threw you away.” Hutchinson coughed carefully. “Go on back to that home. Stay a few weeks, see what you think. You can run later.” He was sweating again. “You got brains. You read everything you can get hold of. You got looks. Get on with it.”  

“Don’t call me darling,” she said, “I’m not your darling. I’m not anybody’s darling.” She slung the pack over her shoulder. Then she caught herself. “How do you know what I read?”

Hutchinson hit the nurse button like it was a telegraph key.

“You were fucking my mama.” Tears came to her at the worst times.

He opened his mouth, but said nothing.

“You look like a stupid person.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said. "I wasn’t married.”

She slipped past the nurse and heard him say, “I’m not like him.”

~

Hitching to her house, Lucy passed on the first two rides. Then a big woman in overalls picked her up.

“You on the run?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t care, really. I ran away when I was your age. How old are you?”

She said nothing.

“All right,” the woman said. “I don’t need to know. Your folks mean to you?”

“They’re dead.”

“Yeah? I ran a couple of times. They didn’t call the cops, nothing. That cured me.” She laughed. The woman glanced at her. “What’s your name, Hon?”

“Mary.”

“Mary what?”

“Gonzales.” 

The woman let her off where a gravel road climbed the woods to the house. She hadn’t seen it since the day they pulled her out of Algebra to tell her that her mama had fallen ill. Her grandpa had built the house when her mama was a little girl. Why he had built it so far from anywhere, her mama couldn’t say.

The sun had set, and the katydids were revving up. The air was thick. It could rain. She tossed the dress into the bushes and pulled on her jeans. As she walked on, the night chorus grew so loud she couldn’t hear her own footsteps.

A couple weeks ago, her mama had pounded on the front door as though it were locked and said the bastard who promised her a job gave it to some cunt he hardly knew and after she had given him everything. Lucy ushered her to the couch, crooning that everything would be all right. She held her mama to her breast, whispering “Poor Mama,” and stroked her head. Then she pulled her up and walked her to the bedroom where she helped her into her nightie. She tapped out the pill, set it on the tip of her mama’s tongue, and handed her the glass of water. Then she tucked her in. Her mama raised her head. “He’s gone,” she said in the darkness. “I can’t do it anymore.” Lucy mouthed the words along with her. “No father, no mother, no brother, no sister, not even a goddamned cousin. I’m alone.” She kissed her, lifted a couple of cigarettes from her purse, and closed the door. 

Now she wondered, had she listened to her mama instead of making fun of her, if she might still be alive.

The insect noise stopped when she shut the door behind her. She toggled the switch and found the electricity had been turned off again. Whenever the power company turned off their lights, her daddy would play “Haunted House.” He would hide in the darkness—how could a man big as that hide in a house so small?—and when she drew near enough, he would scream “Ghost!” It wasn’t much fun, and she always had to change her underpants. 

She groped for the flashlight under the sink, then checked out the livingroom and kitchen. No ghosts. On the counter sat the last stack of books from the Douglas Public Library. “Lucy’s List.” She swallowed. No matter what shitstorm raged through the house, her mama delivered the books. They were overdue. She ground a knuckle in her eye.

She stood at the door to her mother’s room. She had read you shouldn’t hyperventilate because it only makes things worse. Her lips were growing numb. Ghost. She turned the knob, then lost her nerve and released it. She focused on the patterns in the raw plywood walls, fragments of wood exploding in every direction, frozen like fossils. She shut her eyes and leaned against the door, which gave way. Ghost. She screamed and sprawled into the room, the flashlight rolling before her, lighting up the clumps of dust under her mama's rumpled bed. She pounced on the light and swept the room, but found nothing to be afraid of. 

She gathered the top sheet, lifted it with a snap, and sent it billowing over the mattress. She tucked it in, and covered it with the rose chenille spread, leaving enough slack to fold under the pillow. With both hands, she brushed the bedspread so that the ribbing ran straight from the foot of the bed to the pillow. There.

Then she stared across the hallway at the door to her room. Soon she was panting again but barged in as though it were the last thing in the world that would ever frighten her. The door banged against the wall and swung back toward her. She trained her light on the floor, the ceiling, the walls. The bed.

It was a coagulated pool, as though someone had poured it from a pitcher, dull like dried paint. She sat next to it and folded her hands in her lap. Then she leaned over and sniffed cautiously. It had no smell. She spread her fingers and, as though unsure if a fry pan was still hot, settled her hand on it. In a while, out of some distant curiosity, she began to pick at it until she broke loose a crumb. She tumbled it between her thumb and forefinger. Then she placed it on the tip of her tongue. It tasted of rust and salt. She began to rock, holding it in her mouth until it disintegrated. When she swallowed, everything slowed and she felt awfully tired. She curled on her side—just for a minute, she told herself. 

She awoke hungry. The moon had set and the flashlight beam had faded to yellow. She opened the nightstand drawer to retrieve a half pack of cigarettes, then wandered through the darkness to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator from which rolled a stink that made her gag. She could make out a carton of milk bulging like an ominous football and slammed the door. She cranked open the faucet, but they had turned off the water as well. 

In the cupboard above the sink, she found a dented can of stew, which she opened and wolfed down while she stood. Then she sat on the couch—"Poor Mama”—and cleaned the SpaghettiOs out of a can that was dented as well. They were always dented or their labels torn or the sell-by had passed. Fake Newtons washed down with Flavor Aid. Days-old bread and Velveeta with a rind. Bologna and bologna and bologna. The food at that home was pretty good. So was the lunch program at school until somebody ratted on her daddy for having a job. It was a good job even if he didn’t do a good job. They had the money. She struck a match. No, he had the money. She stared at the flame, then blew it out. “Taking his time, is he?” She bashed the empty can against her forehead and wandered back to her room. 

Her mama put up with anything so long as he didn’t leave. That crybaby. “Loose put together.” That smell. She glanced over her shoulder. “Lucy’s List.” She laid her head on the crusted sheets and cried without a sound, as though the two of them were still brawling in the next room. Then she gathered the bedding into a bundle and set it against the floorboard in the hall.

She heard a distant rumble and wrapped the books in her mother’s old rain shell, tying the sleeves into a grip, and carried them across the road. She hunted in the weeds for the gas can they kept out back and lugged it into the house where she emptied it on the last part of her mother. Then she struck a match and tossed it. That’s what the Vikings did, she was pretty sure. It flickered out. She stepped closer and struck another. It had barely left her fingers when a flash and whump knocked her down. She scrambled out of the house on her hands and knees and sprinted across the road, skidding and falling, running her fingers over her face and hair, patting herself frantically. 

A glow within the house grew brighter until it blazed brilliant yellow, and the flames and black smoke blew out the windows and ate the siding to the roof. Then, above the flashover’s roar, she heard her father’s bullets cook off like popcorn. She stood and brought her hand to her throat. He had given her mama the gun. Maybe he even showed her how to use it. The uprights gave way and the roof collapsed. 

Lucy drifted around the edges of the fire, occasionally startled by a raindrop the size of a dime. The flames cooled to embers that flickered and cracked in the gray dawn. 

She slipped a cigarette into her mouth and patted her pockets for a match, then realized that her pack had gone up with the house. As her shoulders fell, her daddy’s jacket slid to the ground. She slung it into the wreckage where it melted and caught fire. 

Lightning crashed close enough to drop her to her knees. She hung her head and listened to the random puffs of steam that rose from the rubble. Then the rain came hard, and she closed her eyes and lifted her face. She heard a siren in the distance. 

Afterlight

When the telephone rang later than usual, Nora thought it would be her son, Charley. He’d forgotten to take home the extra pizza when he left earlier. Maybe he’d want to come by for it after he finished jogging.

Nora’s husband, Paul, listened to the caller with a blank expression, then let the receiver slide through his fingers and drop to the base with a clack. “I have to go to the police station. Someone was found—a jogger—on the road near Charley’s cottage. Of course, it’s not Charley.” He reached for his corduroy jacket. He slid his arm into one sleeve, but the other arm got caught up and hung halfway. Nora pulled it the rest of the way for him. Paul patted his pocket where the phone was, but he did not call Charley.

“I’m going with you,” Nora said. She got her coat. Paul waited while she buttoned it.

The sheriff had been waiting and asked them to go downstairs to make an identification.

“Downstairs?” Nora asked.

“You stay here. I won’t be long.” Paul cleared his throat, the way he does when thinking things over. But she saw the fear in his eyes, the centers dark like exoplanets.

 When Paul came back, he shook his head. “It’s him. It was Charley.” He stared at the tile beneath them as if looking into a bottomless pit. “Let’s go home. Someone will call tomorrow to make arrangements.”

But when they arrived home, everything in the house seemed off-kilter—the floor slanted, the walls leaned in. Nora listened for the jiggle of bottles when Charley opened the refrigerator for water, for the thump of his car hitting a bump while pulling out of the driveway. These sounds seemed more possible than the reality that Charley was dead.

She heard Paul brushing his teeth. The bureau drawer squeaked as he opened it for his pajamas. Paul was preparing to go to bed, like any other night.

 Weren’t they going to talk about this? Didn’t his nose feel smacked into—like bumping up against a wall—as he faced the reality head-on? What did he imagine she would do with her grief? Didn’t his heart seize up? What would she do with her grief?

Nora didn’t understand. Paul was processing this occurrence as calmly as if he were viewing one of the faraway galaxies on his telescope. Why didn’t he tell her how he felt, deep and close, like when stepping into one of Charley’s bear hugs?

 If Paul wasn’t going to talk about it, then she wouldn’t either. Nora found herself thinking that, in fact, maybe the accident had not really happened at all. She put the leftover pizza, still on the counter, into the refrigerator.

On the third day, the sheriff’s office called to say that they were ready to release Charley’s personal effects. Nora went to pick them up. She could not wait until Paul returned from work to bring them home.

She received a plastic bag filled with Charley’s billfold and his clothes, no flashlight. His tennis shoes stacked on top. Nora saw dark streaks in the terry cloth fabric at the bridge of one shoe. She touched one of the blood spots through the plastic.

She took the shoes into the laundry room, poured out measurements of soap and bleach and softener, numbly taking each from their places on the shelf. When she submerged the shoes, the dried blood unraveled tiny red ribbons in the water.

 Paul stopped reading his journal and came in to find her loading the wet shoes into the dryer. “Why are you doing this?”

“I have to.”

“Impact with that much force will break the belt,” Paul said. “You’d better turn it off.”

“I want to wait until they are dry.”

“He’s not going to wear them again. You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course, I know that. What a heartless thing to say.”

They were silent, standing face-to-face, locked in a motionless dance to the beat of the rubber soles hitting the drum. They were alone with each other, and each one alone.

Paul turned away. “You should come to bed,” he said, his voice trailing off as he went toward the stairs.

Nora sat down on the floor, let the banging continue on and on into the night. She listened to the sound of the rubber tennis shoes hitting the metal wall of the dryer. Bouncing in a closed place. The repetition lulled her, a clanging thud with every turn, two thuds, actually, because each shoe banged separately from the other. The repetitive bumping of the shoes was in fact soothing, the one predictable thing left.

When she finally did turn off the dryer, the silence in the house made her throat close against her need to scream. She looked out the back window, the yard dark now, and thought of Paul and Charley three days ago, near dusk, cutting the last of the wood from the fallen branches. Charley had come inside to eat pizza with them. He was excited, talking about his plans to return—again this summer—to the Pine Ridge Reservation. He asked if he could bring a stray cat he’d been feeding over to stay while he was gone. Had she hesitated too much in answering yes? Nora wanted to go back to that dusk, the cutting of the wood, the pizza, Paul walking out to the car with Charley. She wanted to start everything over.

Nora had trouble falling asleep when she went to bed. When at last she did doze off, she dreamed the same dream as the previous two nights. It was Charley—she was with him at the base of Brass Town Bald. He came toward her on the stone bed of the access road, a crunching sound. Against the night, the angles of the piled gravel looked like shards of broken tombstones. Charley bid her to follow, but before she could move, she woke.

She sat up, swung her legs around, and planted her feet on the floor beside the bed.

Her movement roused Paul. The bed creaked as he turned. “Can’t sleep?” he asked. “Again?”

“I’d like to go back into my dream,” she said.

“You never can go back into a dream, Nora.” Paul reached out to touch her shoulder, but she pulled away. “You know that, don’t you?”

Nora rose and went into the guest room, opened the window to look out at the stars, but the sky was overcast. Nora listened for the raspy rhythm of a blade sawing wood, for the thunk of a sectioned trunk hitting the ground. She wished she could still smell sawdust in the air.

Nora turned on the light and opened the closet door, pulled out boxes that contained Charley’s possessions she had kept even after he’d moved away. She took out a beaded medallion from camp, a pine box car he and Paul made, a baseball glove from grade school. The inside of the glove felt snug and soft when she put it on her hand and held it out as though ready to catch something. 

~

Nora went looking for the stray cat by Charley’s cottage but never found it. She stopped trying once the “for sale” sign was removed. She could not bear to see someone else living there. Nora gave up her volunteer work at the hospital. She stayed home, cooking more food than they would ever eat and cleaning the house more than was necessary. One day looked very much like the next.

Near the end of the summer, Paul told Nora he was planning a trip to Brass Town Bald to set up his telescope. “It’s the best month to see the third closest spiral galaxy. Remember—we went with Charley last year.”

Nora said she would go with him even though the place he proposed was so far away that they would not return until after midnight. She did not tell him that each night, she went to sleep with the hope that Charley would appear in her dreams. She felt uneasy about being away from home in case Charley came looking for her. 

~

Nora helped carry the heavy tripod to the set-up spot in the deserted parking lot of Brass Town Bald.

Then she held down the styrofoam packing, which screeched as Paul lifted the telescope out. He seated it onto the tripod.

Last year, Charley had tried to persuade Paul to drive up the service road to set up on the observation platform on top of the mountain. But Paul preferred the convenience of unloading in the parking lot.

“The view would be worth the extra trouble. You can see four states,” Charley argued.

“Not at night you can’t.” Paul always found a reason to be right.

Paul angled the scope to the eastern sky. Tonight—like last year—Paul would look in the Triangular Galaxy. “Why did you want to come tonight—on this night in particular?” Nora asked. It had been a year ago, minus one day, that they had come here with Charley.

“The alignment. With a binary star, the orbit has to be just right to see two instead of one.” Paul’s field was stellar astronomy, and Nora knew he’d been observing this specific star for many years.

Paul put his hands on his hips, frowning at the clouds passing in the sky. “Last year was better,” he said.

Of course it was better. Last year we were here with Charley, Nora wanted to say. But Paul would not talk about that. He never would talk about Charley.

Paul looked into the finder trying to bring the galaxy into range. “My star’s there somewhere.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ll find it.”

“You devote a lot of time to finding something that may not even be there,” Nora said.

“We can still learn. Everything we learn about the universe we are learning about ourselves.”

“You sound like you’re lecturing one of your classes,” Nora said.

“You shouldn’t have come if you didn’t want to,” said Paul.

“No, I think it’s good if we do things like this together. We must try harder to do that,” Nora said. She knelt beside the light of the Coleman lantern to untangle the drawstring of the homemade felt bag that held the eyepiece.

Nora heard the whine of the motorized apparatus that synchronized the movement of the scope with the earth’s rotation. Years ago, he’d needed her to help. Now he used a computer program to get a fix on the star.

Paul attached the eyepiece, leaned close to turn the focus knob and sharpen the resolution. He would be completely absorbed in his efforts now, the same as he had been last year. That’s what had given Nora and Charley the chance to climb to the observation deck of the mountain.

 Now Nora regretted that she had decided to come back to this place with Paul. She shivered in the night air. She told Paul she was going to the car to get her jacket. But she walked past the car and went beyond where it was parked. She did not know where she was headed in this world thrown off its axis.

 From the wooded area, Nora heard the call of a night bird. This call—a rapidly repeated single note broken by the entreaty “come-with-meeeeeeee”—was the same as she and Charley heard last year. Nora stopped and looked back. Paul was a street block away. She saw his shape, dark against the sky now that he had extinguished the lantern light. He sat on a small, fold-up stool, leaning into the eyepiece.

Nora heard a twig snap. She heard Charley before she saw him.

“Ah, here you are,” he’d say. A shadow. He was standing in it.

She held her breath. Was this the part of the dream where he would disappear? She reached out to touch his arm. But he had already turned to start the trail.

“Remember the shortcut?” Charley’s raven-black hair was longer now than in the beginning of the summer. He always let it grow to his shoulders when he taught at the reservation.

“It’s only a half mile. But straight up,” he reminded her, ducking under the first branch.

The path was steep. Nora felt like her thighs were gripped in a vise. Was she more out of shape now having given up going to Tai Chi? Nora heard her own labored breathing. The night bird had stopped singing. There was no chirp of crickets, no rustle of a creature deep in the woods.

But soon she heard Charley whistling. He had learned to do that from Paul, through his teeth not his lips. Nora thought of Paul, alone, looking at his faraway galaxy. Did he realize yet that she was gone?

Nora’s feet were heavy and the toe of one shoe scraped the ground. She looked ahead.

Charley carried a flashlight that lit the trail. She followed the beam as it burrowed into the darkness.

Nora wiped the prickly sweat on her forehead with the tip of a paisley bandana she took from around her neck. Bushes at the side seemed dense and flowed like thick velvet curtains across a stage. “I think I see flowers,” Nora said, making out cream-colored appliqués sewn into the night tapestry.

The flowers were Silberlich, “silverlight.” She knew the species. The blossoms—cup-shaped with stiff, waxy petals—would bloom for a long time. Nora ran her finger over an unopened bud, expecting to feel tiny ridges like on the sugar stars with which she decorated birthday cakes. But, instead, what she touched felt like air.

“There it is,” Charley said, aiming the light beam on the bare plateau ahead. “The ‘bald’—did I ever tell you the story?” They stepped from the dirt trail up onto the rock.

“There were so many stories,” Nora said. “Tell me again.”

“I heard this from a Cherokee guy I met, the summer I rewalked the Trail of Tears.”

Nora felt a breeze—more detectable now without the buffer of trees around them. She wished she had brought her jacket from the car.

“Folklore has it that heinous winged beasts—with pointy scales and sharp-toothed mouths—swooped down from the treetops here and gobbled up all the small children.”

Nora felt fearful to be so out in the open. “That’s a terrible story,” she said. “The stories I made up for you as a child had happier endings.”

“So does this. Medicine men summoned good spirits to kill the beasts with fiery thunderbolts. The tribes were so grateful,” Charley continued, “that they vowed to keep this land clear of trees forever.”

“But how could the Cherokee keep that promise? Weren’t they rounded up and forced West?”

“Well, look around.” Charley swept his arm across the bare terrain. “Do you see? One single tree?”

“You got me there,” Nora answered with a ripple of laughter.

When they reached the other side of the plateau, Charley leaped from the rock and helped ease her down. “We’ve arrived.” He crossed the paved path that led to the stone stairway up to the first level of the observatory.

Charley did not hesitate. He climbed straightaway to the first level of a darkened visitor center with fixtures for bolting down telescopes. It was hard for Nora to keep up. Tall and lean like Paul’s side of the family, her long-legged son took one step for each two of hers, even up the dark and narrow steps to the second level—the observation platform and the fire tower.

Nora felt her pulse throb against her fingertips as she made fists, bent forward to gather strength for the final mount. Charley hurried so much that Nora felt alarmed. To her, he seemed reckless—hurrying ahead in this desolate place without worrying if a plank were loose or considering that a fugitive might be hiding out around the corner at the top. Although she felt it was dangerous, she followed him. She would follow as long as she could.

Charley stood at the second landing waiting for her with his arms folded behind him, expectant as though ready to watch her open a present.

Taking a final step onto the deck, she felt she was floating on a wave of starlight, winking overhead, and stretching to the four horizons. And below, throughout the rise and fall of mountain ranges, were more tiny patches of light. Signs of life glowed in white wisps like the Queen Anne’s Lace that grew wild in fields near Charley’s cottage.

“I feel like I am so high up that I’m part of your dad’s sky. I wish he had come.”

“Me too. Let’s see if we can find him. He may be closer than you think.” Charley walked the circular deck until they could see the parking lot—the size of a game board, a bare recessed swath cut into the forest.

“I’m going to signal Dad. Maybe he’ll see us.” He leaned over the rail and shined the light down so it flashed on the tops of trees.

 “The beam won’t carry that far,” Nora said. She knew there was no line of sight to where they stood.

“You never know what’s going to reach someone.” Charley jiggled the light. “Like the shy students I helped at the reservation with remedial math.”

Yes, he was going to tell her another story.

“At first I got no response—the kids are so afraid that they might give the wrong answer. But I noticed that some students had one hand on their desk. So I asked what’s 2 plus 3. ‘That’s right,’ I told them. ‘Five fingers. Five.’ Next thing I knew, students with both hands up pulled one hand off. They wanted to have the right answer too.”

Charley grinned at her triumphantly, shined the light back to glow on his face. “And greatest of all—one kid unclamped the hands folded in his lap and put one hand out on the desk—he wanted to show me the right answer too.”

He then turned the flashlight around so that it splashed on the foliage below like paint poured from a tilted can.

“No, your father won’t see that,” Nora said. “The only thing visible from down there is the top of the tower,” she added, pointing up.

Charley redirected the flashlight so that the beam scampered across the planks and up the clapboard sides of the firetower. The tall windows reflected the light in beacon-like streams.              “Maybe he’ll see this,” Charley said. “I want him to know I’m thinking about him. If he misses it, you tell him. You tell him for me.”

“Is that the reason you’ve come? For your father?” Nora asked.

Charley tilted his head to a lopsided angle and smiled broadly as he walked closer to her. She smelled the familiar acetic scent of his warm body, the same as when he was a boy. Overheated from playing in the summer sun, he would run to her for relief. She wanted to lift a loose strand of hair out of his eye, tuck it behind his outward-slanting ear.

Nora looked down at her fingers, curving as though sand was slipping through them. “Don’t leave.” Nora wasn’t sure if she said it out loud or only in her mind. “Stay longer. You could wait. We could make a deal for you to stay—it could be our very own agreement, between you and me.”

“But we can’t leave out Dad,” Charley said. He paused, maybe to give her time to take in what he had said. “And you know I have to go.”

Charley backed away slowly, looking up at the sky with resignation. His broad shoulders, long legs, lean-forward stance—they all wavered in the light and shadows. He turned. The sole of one shoe creaked and became fainter with each step as he faded into the night’s veil. The beam of his flashlight went black.

Sooner than she wanted, Charley was gone. Gone again. Could she have stopped him? No, she realized that she could not, despite her longing. She might as well have believed the truth of the stories she had told him as a child—how the moon would come and sit in his palm with a warm glow or that one of Paul’s galaxies would sail by and sprinkle a million stars in their hair.

A cold draft blew so hard that Nora had trouble standing. The blustery wind brought her a brutal declaration—no deal. It was the universe taunting her. You are foolish to think you could make a deal. She knew she would not see Charley again.

Clouds covered the moon, and the night became so dark that Nora could hardly see where she was going, could barely see one step in front of the other. She held tightly to the railing and carefully walked down the two flights of stairs to the paved passage below the observatory.

She crossed the blacktop to the mountain’s “bald” plateau. Something seemed to swoop down on her. But no, it was simply the cloud sweeping by and out of the way so that it no longer blocked the moon.

Nora shifted all her weight to her back foot and lifted the other to heft herself up onto the bald. Her grounded foot faltered, and she could not raise it as high. As it landed on a lower stone, the branch of a sapling pine caught the cuff of her pants. She heard the cotton rip as she pulled it loose.

After struggling to get to the top, she sat down on the hard, cold boulder. The moonlight shined down on the smooth surface, giving it the luminosity of an ice-covered pond. But darkness completely bordered the other side. Nora couldn’t imagine how she would find the trail through the woods and get back to the parking lot without a flashlight.

And then Nora saw a faint dot in the blackness. Its sound grew clearer—a sharp hiss, gas seeping from the Coleman lantern. Paul was coming for her. The bright bead burned an arc into the space around it—a pendulum swinging in rhythm to his body.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” she heard him ask as he crossed the bald.

“Why do you have the lantern so bright?” Nora asked. It gave off such a searing light that she could hardly see him walking beside it.

He set the lamp down and, with his left hand, turned the valve wheel to lower the light. His tone was reproachful. “Didn’t you consider that I would worry?” A fretfulness was in his voice. “You go off by yourself.” He stepped closer, trying to see her better.

“And so do you,” Nora said. “The countless hours you spend studying galaxies eons away, your towers of books and your endless calculations.”

Paul didn’t deny it. Silent he reached down to help her up. Nora realized he was using his left hand. “Why?”

“The edge of my finger got pinched. That’s all,” Paul explained. “The tripod collapsed unexpectedly.”

Nora felt a pang of guilt that she had not been there to help him. The steel legs were too heavy for him to hold in place by himself when folding up the tripod.

“I left so I could come up here with Charley,” Nora explained. She looked back at the observation center, at the fire tower, above them now like a diver about to make a plunge. “Did you see the light signal he made to you from up there?”

“He?” Paul paused and turned his face toward her. “You believe that you saw Charley tonight?” Instead of confronting her, Paul took a deep breath and turned away.

Nora reached out and pulled on the yoke of his jacket. “Did you hear what I said?”

He stopped and shifted his shoulder to pull the cloth loose as he looked back out of the corner of his eye.

“Charley was here tonight,” Nora said. She saw him blinking slowly with forced patience. “How could I have gone through the woods in darkness? Charley had the flashlight,” she said to convince him.

“Oh Nora,” he said. He looked up at the tower; he did not say if he had seen the light that Charley had flashed.

“Do you believe me?” Nora asked.

Paul tilted his head to look even higher, turned his attention to the stars overhead. Nora wondered if he was comparing this naked-eye view with the one through his telescope earlier. He said, “The light of stars in deep space glows for millions of lightyears across the universe, even after the star is gone.” He looked back at Nora. “I know you see things that you have to believe.”

“But this wasn’t my imagination. I saw Charley—and he was as real as you are now.” Nora put her hand on his sleeve. “I saw him tonight.”

“No, Nora. I am the last person who saw Charley alive. It was me who saw him last that night.” Paul brought his head and shoulders forward and down, drawing himself close to her. “The last moments. In the yard when he was leaving. After he’d come to help me split wood, after the pizza.”

“I was there too,” Nora said.

 “No, you were in the kitchen later.” Paul pushed his glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose. “I went out to the car with him. I knew he’d still go jogging and I thought he should wear something more reflective—something lighter to show up in the dark.”

“He always wore that gray college shirt, even the mascot was faded,” Nora said.

“Charley brushed me off and I was peeved that he wouldn’t borrow my jacket. This one.” Paul raised his arm. The beige color swept the night air like a light-colored flag. Paul groaned. “I should have insisted.”

“But what happened wasn’t your fault, Paul.” The gas light was faint, and Nora could not see his face well, but she knew what he was feeling. Sensing the heaviness of his presence beside her, she was no longer misled by the mask of restraint he forced himself to wear. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened, Paul.”

Standing on the bald next to Paul, Nora realized that life’s horrors are more cruel than the fanged creatures that swoop over a plateau to devour children, as in Charley’s fable. And they are more devious than a commonplace thing, the ringing of the telephone later than expected on a Tuesday night.

No, the real horror is what happens next—really monstrous things happen—or that don’t happen—between a mother and father of a child who has died.

Nora picked up the lantern. She suspected that the pinch on Paul’s finger was deeper than he was letting on. They walked across the bald and saw the gap in the foliage at the same time. As they stepped down onto the dirt trail, clusters of trees met from each side, forming a loosely-crocheted canopy against the sky. The stars came in and out of view.

“Those snatches of light—they remind me of watching Charley’s home run ball glide above the treetops,” Nora said.

“It was the best hit of his life,” said Paul.

“It soared so high, sailed so long that we couldn’t imagine where it would land,” Nora said.

“Until we heard the glass break in the window of the house near the field,” said Paul.

“Yea, no wonder! He really did wallop it.” They stopped walking now, in the darkness, with the stars elusive behind the branches. “We wouldn’t have changed a thing. It was a great night for Charley.”

“It was also a great night for the glass repair man. I had to pay him double to fix it,” Paul said.

They laughed, the sound echoing back from the soft cover of foliage.

“I kept the ball even after Charley scoffed at me for being too sentimental,” Paul said, “I have it still. In the garage.”

“After all this time?” Nora asked.

“Every now and then, I wipe off the dust,” said Paul.

“You’ll have to show me,” said Nora.

They walked on as the trail tapered in. The span between their hands—like what was once the infinitesimal distance between them—narrowed as the pathway closed in. Nora felt Paul’s hand touch hers. Their fingers interlaced with one another and held tight the rest of the way down the mountain.

52 Pick-Up

This story won the 2023 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.

Dad always said I didn’t have to pay him back for everything, but I knew that was a huge lie, the way that beautiful people wearing long wool coats say, “Sorry, no cash,” when I asked them if they want to see a card trick.

“You haven’t even seen the trick yet,” Dad would protest in Chinese, breaking his cover as an elderly deaf-blind gentleman sitting three seats down the subway car, and I would have to stop shuffling and say, “Shhh, Dad,” except I didn’t want to blow our cover even more, so I would change course mid-word, say, “Shhh, dear sir.” But sometimes he would be so mad and say, “Let’s go, Sammy,” and drag me out of the train car.

He wore a yellow armband of old caution tape that we’d modified to say “DEAF-BLIND: PLEASE BE PATIENT.” On top of that, he had old drugstore glasses that we’d Sharpied black to look like sunglasses and a beanie pulled down over his ears.

“Why do you have to be deaf and blind?” I asked him every so often.

“That way, there’s no way people would think we’re related,” he said, swinging me onto our kitchen counter so that I could practice pulling cards from behind his ears. “And that’s what you want, right Sammy?”

“Don’t say it like that,” I scolded him. “You know people pay more if they think I’m on my own.”

He still insisted on coming to watch me perform every weekend morning until he needed to leave for work, and people were sometimes alarmed to see a man wearing a DEAF-BLIND: PLEASE BE PATIENT armband spring up at Grand Central to kiss me goodbye and transfer to another train. I always had to switch to another train too, partly because people were staring at me, partly because I was so nervous when he left that I would try to do a thumb fan but my hands would shake all my cards to the ground. I had to walk the whole tunnel to Times Square to calm down.

Dad hated that I did street performances, but he still thought everything I did was amazing; and, I reminded him constantly, I did it for him. I didn’t like it either, but these performances were the only realistic way that I was ever going to earn enough to pay Dad back. If I waited until I was of legal working age I would be indebted beyond recovery. Plus, with my round cheeks and short legs I could shave a few years off when people asked me how old I was, which would almost always make them fork over more.

But I had to be careful of how deeply to discount my age. “Where are your parents?” the tourists would ask when I went too young, reaching into their tight jeans for their phones and dredging up ticket stubs and hop-on hop-off brochures. I would help them collect those scraps, smile my roundest-cheeked smile and say, “Don’t worry, I’m meeting my dad in a few stops.”

“Oh, sorry, I don’t have any cash,” they’d say, meaning, so why doesn’t he take care of you, and I’d hold out my hand with their wallet in it and say, “Credit card is fine too,” meaning, he does, why else would I be here, and by the time they’d realize I was joking and the wallet trick was all part of this show, the whole row of passengers would be staring. And I would have to switch trains then, too.

But it was all worth it when I got home and shoved the bills and coins in an old deli container and stuffed the container in the back of the freezer so that I couldn’t reach it without a stool. I labeled it DAD’S MONEY: DON’T USE. The words had to do. Dad and I had once tried to stop ourselves from spending money by freezing it in a block of ice, but eventually we wanted cheung fen for dinner and instead of waiting for the money to thaw, we’d brought the ice cubes to the cart downstairs. The old lady cooking inside shook her head and put the cubes on the griddle where they hissed until the dollars unfurled. We all looked closely to confirm it wasn’t a trick.

~

I started out just singing on the subway because it was the easiest to practice. We didn’t have a radio but on hot nights the neighbors who loved 92.9 FM Oldies would open their windows, and Dad and I would sit on our fire escape and sing into bowls so the sound would echo toward us. I told Dad he should go inside and relax, but he insisted he needed to be there to cover my ears when there were inappropriate lyrics. I used to sing, Take me down to the paradise city, where the hmm hmm hmm and the girls are pretty, before I realized that Dad didn’t know enough English to properly censor songs. After that, I still let him sit next to me on hot weather music nights, but when he fell asleep mid-chorus I wouldn’t disturb him.

“Sammy, why didn’t you wake me up?” he demanded whenever he woke up on his own, because his legs had gone numb from sitting on the grate or he’d drooled a rope of saliva long enough to lower us to the ground.

“I tried, but you were so tired,” I explained. “And if you help me, it just means I have even more to repay you for.”

“Dummy,” he would chuckle, swatting me upside the head. “You don’t need to repay me.” But I thought about the grass is green and decided he had it wrong.

It was actually my cousin Julia who gave me the idea of switching to card tricks because that’s all we played in her backyard: 52-card pickup. Uncle had so many free decks from visiting Atlantic City all the time, though the cards all had holes punched through or clipped corners. Julia would count down from ten and then toss the desk up into the air, and we would both try to collect the most.  Back then I sang so much, both practicing and performing, that my diet was just Halls lozenges that Dad swiped from streetside stands for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and my cheeks were constantly chipmunked with one lozenge on each side. It meant that Julia and I had very boring conversations.

“Do you want to play this game my dad taught me?” she asked, and I nodded because I would have leaked Halls syrup if I opened my mouth.

“Do you like it?” she asked me after we played a few times, and I shook my head.

“Do you know any other games?” she asked. Here, too, I shook my head, sucking hard on the lozenges, so she threw the cards again.

Dad and I visited every few months because Uncle didn’t know how to care for Julia as Dad did for me. Instead, Uncle had a lot of women visitors who would help take care of him and Julia until they realized Uncle wasn’t going anywhere, in the worst way, and they would abandon him in disgust. Uncle made Julia help prolong the relationships by pretending to be very precocious, but even that didn’t keep them around. She was like that the first time I met her, when we rang the doorbell of their apartment and she opened the door with glasses on and a very yellowed copy of The Prince in her hand.

“Oh, right,” she said when she saw us. She replaced the book on the milk crate that they used as a shoe rack, and took off the glasses, rubbing her temples.

“Brother, come in,” called Uncle from inside the house, and Dad went into the kitchen, leaving me with Julia. The house smelled like cigarette smoke and grass clippings. She eyed the notebooks and pencil case that I was carrying and came closer, hungrily.

“Can I see?” she said, already reaching out.

Dad got the money for my school supplies that year by making his hands a gun and sticking up the bodega down the street. They didn’t give him any money but they did call some hotline that summoned two counselors who escorted him back to our apartment. When I opened the door for him he produced a wad of wrinkled twenties and a Starbucks gift card. “The counselors linked arms with me as we came back, one on each side,” he said. “Left counselor had dirtier pockets but more money.” I was so proud of him, but mentally wrote it down as another entry in my checkbook, which brought me to sixty-four more weekends of singing on the train. When we went into the kitchen Dad was already explaining this all to Uncle.

“You just need to commit,” Dad explained to Uncle, smacking his palm with the back of his other hand. Uncle, who looked like a faded, oily version of Dad, paled even more at the thought, but still set down his cigarette to try it.

“Put your hands like this,” said Dad, showing Uncle how to interlace all his fingers except the pointers, and aim them at an imaginary head. “Now say stick them up!” Uncle could do it for a few seconds, but when Julia pretended to be the frightened cashier, he would unlock his hands and wave them in the air, saying, “It’s not real, it’s just a trick.”

“I know,” Julia would say, rolling her eyes and opening the sliding door to the backyard. Uncle’s ashy face froze like a mask, angry red diamonds blooming on both cheeks.

“Pathetic,” she laughed to me later, as she snatched the six of clubs from under my scrabbling fingers. We played in the backyard because Julia hated the smell of smoke. “He’s not even trying.”

“Well,” I said, feeling guilty for some reason, “you aren’t really trying either.”

“At what?” asked Julia.

I told her about singing on the train and the Sharpied sunglasses and PLEASE BE PATIENT. She laughed even more.

“Getting even is for people you’ll never see again,” she said. “I read it in that book.”

“I’m not ‘getting even,’” I said. “What would you know about that anyway?” But it was too late; I was already imagining Dad running out the closing subway doors on his way to work and the train falling off the tracks. I sat there thinking for so long that she eventually waved her hand in front of my face and said, “Hello? Sammy?” She had collected the whole deck on her own. Through the sliding glass door we could see that a small woman with a short perm had joined Dad and Uncle, and I think I saw Julia flinch, but she tossed the cards again and we watched them wag and flutter in the air.

~

It was a good thing I got the idea to switch to cards because my voice had started to sound like a cat’s tongue. We didn’t see a doctor, but we described my symptoms to one of Uncle’s lovers who had health insurance, who went to a doctor complaining of a sore throat, and a few weeks later she said her doctor thought she might have vocal cord nodules. “Stop singing,” she said, in her own raspy voice, fried from too many menthols.

We looked it up. Dad hotspotted our laptop by leaning off of our fire escape with his cellphone in his hand, which would just barely connect to the free city wifi.

“I’m no doctor, but Dad is a genius in other ways,” he had bragged when he figured this out. He was always beet-faced and white-knuckled with his eyes closed and I worried that when all the blood had finally gone to his head he would let go and fall into the street.

Once we learned that singing had knotted the strings in my neck, I snuck a deck of cards from Uncle’s stash and watched instructional videos at double speed and memorized them by repeating the words to myself to relieve him of internet reception duty as quickly as possible. For him, because I didn’t want him to fall into the street, but for me as well, because this was yet another service he provided me. And for the landlord, who would slip threatening notes under our door saying that we had to stop our hazardous behaviors.

“How’s my girl,” said Dad when he came in from the fire escape, and I said, tongue caught between my teeth as I practiced my pinky break over and over, “Very indebted, Dad, very behind on my bills.”

“You’re a child,” Dad laughed. “You have no bills.” As if that wasn’t my exact problem.

I practiced until my wrists were sore and then steamed them over the rice cooker to relax them, but my tricks always felt flat, somehow. I would fan the cards, ask Dad to pick one, take the card back, bring it to the top of the deck. “Is it the eight of clubs?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Dad, solemnly from his chair, as if swearing an oath.

“You don’t seem excited,” I said. “I found your card.”

“I knew you would find it,” he said. “You’re my amazing girl.”

“That’s not the point,” I told him, throwing the deck across the room in frustration, and in a few hours I would find the deck re-stacked, in order, clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. I had explained to him before that I didn’t want the cards ordered, that I would just need to reshuffle them so that people didn’t think I had somehow organized the deck to help me find their card. He’d tapped my forehead and said he wanted to make sure he had picked up every card.

“It’s easy to miscount,” he’d said, “but it’s hard to miss the order of things.”

When I asked Julia about the card pickup game the next time we visited, she laughed in my face. “That’s such kid stuff,” she said, tossing the deck of cards back to me, messily so that I only caught about half and had to scramble for the others.

“Why then?” I asked. But she was already stalking down to the kitchen and asking Uncle where her bookbag had gone.

“I don’t know,” said Uncle, busy stroking his new lady’s hair. She had tattooed eyebrows and very red glasses. Julia stopped short once she saw that they were both smoking indoors. She’d told me that he used to leave the house to smoke to try to protect her baby lungs, and he would walk all the way to the city and back smoking an entire pack. At some point he’d gotten tired of leaving.

“I said I don’t know,” said Uncle, looking up and seeing Julia still there. “What else?”

She just stared, which made Uncle look down at the cigarette in his hand and then wave dismissively at her, but she was already opening the sliding door and disappearing into the backyard. I thought she sounded like she was about to cry, but when I caught up to her she was sucking air like crazy and I realized she’d been holding her breath.

“Want to see a card trick?” I asked after a minute of her gasping, not knowing what else to say.

“What are you talking about?” said Julia in a carefully normal voice, and I started explaining the card tricks and fire escape to Julia, and she narrowed her eyes and snorted.

“You’re still on that?” She left me holding the pack of cards in the middle of the grass and went to sit on the concrete steps by the house. I went back inside.

She did eventually play with me that evening, as the sun started oozing all over the backyard. I found her squatting over a patch of grass, her head almost between her knees, her shadow dribbling long across the grass. When I got closer I saw she was arranging a handful of periwinkle stems and puffball dandelions around a dead bumblebee.

“What,” she said, looking up when my noodle of a shadow licked over her. It was less a question and more a greeting. She glared at me for a second before continuing to knit her daisy chain, which snaked around her feet.

“That’s such kid stuff!” I crowed, towering over her.

“No, it’s not,” said Julia. “I’m decorating his grave.”

“What,” I said, echoing her. I waited for her to explain but she kept arranging her pile of flowers.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s the game?”

“Not a game,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. Then she ordered me to collect more dandelions and more of those weeds that dripped white sap when we broke the stems, which I did because it seemed so important to her. She piled them up until no one would’ve known that there was a bee inside.

“Now we pay our respects to our dearly departed, but we do not cry,” she said in a voice that said she had read more books than me. She squatted down and nudged the back of my knees so that I would do the same. After a minute of squatting my toes were numb and my knees were screaming, but Julia did these deep breaths with her eyes closed. Her exhales ruffled the grass and made the tufted seeds twirl on the dandelion head.

“Hello? Julia?” I said, but she didn’t open her eyes. I knew it was on purpose because she swatted in my direction. “What are you doing?” I asked, louder, but then she just started ignoring me. By the time she was done praying or whatever I was sitting on the grass just studying her legs, which were plumper than mine: the tendons in her ankles ropy, her calves and thighs squeezed tightly against each other like unopened hot dog buns. She stood up and shook her head at me, looming against the sky from my place in the grass.            

“I got tired,” I protested.

“Yeah,” she said, shaking out her legs. “Who’s not trying now.”

~

“How did you get Sammy to fear you?” Uncle asked Dad. A few months later he was smoking indoors again, so Julia was outside even though it was raining. She stood against a section of the under the eaves, but the rain was light enough to blow at a slant, so she was rain-dark all down her front anyway. I was crouching by the open sliding door, nose poked out so I could breathe clean air, too.

“Sammy doesn’t fear me,” Dad said. I heard the clink of a teapot lid and then the hollow knocking that meant Uncle was taking out a new cigarette. “Sammy thinks that she’s indebted to me somehow.”

“Same thing,” said Uncle, coughing lightly. “How do I get Julia to think that?”

Dad was quiet for so long that I thought he’d left somehow without me hearing. “I don’t think you want that,” he said eventually.

“Don’t I?” said Uncle. They were quiet for a few more minutes and I turned Dad’s sentence over in my head. Why wouldn’t Uncle want that? I ran through all the ways in which Julia and Uncle owed each other: Julia, beholden to Uncle for his card packs and tolerance for her sour spells; Uncle, beholden to Julia for making her stay outside all the time and wearing glasses that made her head hurt. They were much closer to even than Dad and I were, I thought, but because neither of them made any attempts to resolve their debts, I would likely repay Dad first.

“Remember when we were young boys, waiting for Ba to come home from work, and you threw a rock into the window trying to hit me?” Dad asked.

“You threw it at me,” said Uncle, and they both laughed. From the sound of it, Dad smacked Uncle across the chest, or maybe the other way around. I had a sudden vision of Dad and Uncle sweaty and skinny in dust-stained shirts, chasing each other around a rock-lined backyard.

“He cleaned up the glass himself,” said Dad. “Straightened up the whole room. Didn’t even say anything to us. And then he slept in the living room because he said the wind would stunt our growth.”

They didn’t say anything for a long time, and my legs started to fall asleep again. I tried to stretch them one at a time but my ankles gave out and I thudded onto my back.

“Sammy,” said Dad, walking around the kitchen island to discover me. “Why are you hiding here?”

“I’m not hiding,” I said, offended that he thought I would trick him, and I slipped outside to stand beside Julia.

Julia and I stood silently until I decided to pick a fight, because I was in a bad mood from listening to Dad and Uncle, and because I was suddenly sick of Julia acting better than me, like she deserved what she had. Of course I started by telling her that she never tried being nice to Uncle, no wonder he hated her, that I would be so angry if I were him.

“I heard him say that he wanted you to be more like me,” I said, leaving out the part where Dad said that Uncle wouldn’t want that.

“At least my Dad doesn’t force me to beg on the subway,” said Julia, barely looking at me. She kept shredding pieces of crabgrass between her fingers, like sticks of string cheese, and the wet strands clung to her fingers.

“I’m not begging,” I said, too late, flabbergasted at how wrong she had it. My mouth flapped for words for so long that I swallowed some rain. “I’m working. I need to be there.”

“Whatever,” said Julia. She made a face and wound her hands around each other a couple times, and then bowed weirdly and looked up at me with puppy eyes. “Let me show you a card trick,” she whined, “don’t you want to see a card trick?” She shook her hands and some grass fell off like confetti. “You think that’s what normal kids do?”

On the bus home, I almost told Dad what Julia said. I always told him everything, to avoid keeping anything from him that would be valuable. But I didn’t want to ask him

“Would you be mad if I stopped doing card tricks,” I whispered in his ear.

“No,” he whispered back. “I would be happy.” At this I rolled my eyes and hummed the paradise city song.

~

A few months later, Dad came back from work and told me the news: Uncle had gone for a walk again, but he hadn’t come back for a week now. We found out because Julia had waited to be picked up from school until it was dark and then slept on one of the couches in the principal’s office. As he told me about Julia, Dad had his bare feet in the dishwasher which had just finished running, so all the steam washed around his heels. He had been laid off last month, so he was temporarily working as a loader at a warehouse, where he said the conveyor belts moved faster than our wifi.

It was my turn to lean off the fire escape so that he could search for jobs. I didn’t realize that the hardest part was locking my feet under a metal bar to make sure I wouldn’t accidentally fall off, how numb his feet must have gotten when I was learning my card tricks. But I got through it just by thinking about how much I still owed him. The time he jumped down into the subway tracks to retrieve the eight of diamonds that I’d accidentally dropped. The time we ran out of hot water so he poured warm water through a colander for my shower. The time he got a plate of free samples, but was turned away because they recognized him, so he used his pocket-knife to hack off half of his hair, got a second plate, and then hacked off the other half for a third. I thought of so much that I often started to cry, big sobs that made my body buck up off the railing. When he finally heard me and came to investigate, he declared that he would stop searching for jobs.

“No, no,” I begged. “Just tell me what you do.”

“I just close my eyes and wait,” he said. That night I recycled another note from the landlord that said that this was our LAST WARNING.

We picked up Julia and on the train I told her that she was going to live with us from now on. She picked at her food at the dinner table and used her phone data, which made me resent her even more. I made room for her in my bed, taking a string and running it down the middle of the mattress. When she saw that she laughed and immediately put her feet over it, and I stormed to the bathroom.

I came back after brushing my teeth with toothpaste that I bought for Dad, and I was running my tongue over my front teeth when I heard her breathing hard under the blanket.

“Julia? What’s wrong?” I asked, burrowing under the blanket to find her curled up facing away from me. Her breath stank, steaming up the whole blanket. It smelled like she hadn’t brushed her teeth in a while.

“What’s wrong?” she shot back, thickly. “Oh, nothing.”

I sat quietly for a few minutes, trying only to breathe when I absolutely had to. I thought about Uncle asking Dad how to get Julia to fear him, and how Dad and Uncle had smashed open a window but Grandpa had cleaned up the glass silently, with Dad and Uncle maybe sheepishly standing in the kitchen with their hands behind their backs, not offering to help but feeling as if they needed to stop what they were doing.

~

When we woke up the next morning Julia was gone, the rumpled dimple next to me barely warm. Dad and I ran outside to try to find her but couldn’t. The cheung fen lady said a girl came to buy a box of zhaliang with freezing cold quarters, and I almost screamed. I ran back up the stairs just to check what I already knew was true: the deli container lid was askew, and the insides were empty as they were when we’d drained it of its original wonton soup.

“Julia is a thief,” I fumed to Dad, and he pinched my ear sharply.

“Julia is your cousin,” he said. He stared at the empty container, and I almost waved my hands, trying to bring him back. But I waited instead, watching his eyes glaze over, the same way he looked at the sky when he was hotspotting me, the same way Julia looked at Uncle when he was smoking. We stood there until his eyes started to water, and then he said, “Oh, Sammy,” like he was choking, and reached out and squeezed my hand.

Julia called from an unknown number a week later. I was filming myself for practice, trying to stop wrinkling my eyebrows and holding my breath whenever I did the double-lift, and when the phone rang I ran outside so that we could call over wifi, another of Dad’s tricks to save on a phone bill. I leaned all the way off the fire escape, which the landlord had blocked off with caution tape a few days before, and turned the phone on speaker so that I could hold it closer to the reception spot.

“Tell your dad that I’m okay,” she said, staticky and faraway, my arm and her voice waggling high above the street. “And also that I borrowed the cash he’s storing in the freezer to print some ‘Reward: Missing Person’ fliers.”

“The cash I’m storing!” I shout into the phone, nearly slipping my foot from the railing. “Where are you going?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, and I could hear the smirk in her voice.               

She said see you later and I was too late to answer because I was trying to remember what she said that one afternoon, how small the bee was in comparison to the pile of flowers, how Julia breathed so hard it started to bald the dandelion puffs that we’d stuck in the roof of the crypt like little fairy globes, how when I looked outside the next morning, the pile was scattered all over the garden like confetti, the bee nowhere to be seen. Julia was already outside with her hands on her hips, like she’d volunteered to clean up a party to which she hadn’t been invited. And I knew, remembering the sturdiness of her legs and the way our whole family spent so much time staring into the distance, that she could be out there waiting for so, so long, just looking at nothing forever.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 1. Click here to explore other stories from this issue.