Real Change

My cousin told me he found
Jesus, which was the easy part
since he couldn’t find his way
out of Brooklyn. Then this morning
it was so quiet you could hear
a cat walking. By noon the wind
kicked in making the trees swing
like Count Basie and the traffic
sounded like his horn section.
There is a mystery in all of this
I could never understand even if
I took it all apart, examined it
and put it back together, replacing
Brooklyn with Queens, put tap
shoes on cats paws and took Basie’s
horns away and replaced them with
strings. Sometimes it’s best just to let
them burn like my friend’s cigarettes
he kept smoking as he sat in his dark
kitchen after losing another job.
When he inhaled, the tip
of his Marlboro turned orange
like the moon in the window behind him.
The next month the surgeon removed
most of midnight from his lung.
The next year will mean a lot more
than the last 45 ever did. I wished
he had read the article I did that
said real change starts as soon as
you find yourself. I wasted no time.
That same night I took a red eye, then
an Amtrak to find where I am now.
It took awhile but it was worth the trip.

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.

• • •

Pea Notes

Hey, fancy this: Clyde Barrow had a thing
for sweet peas (creamed) and Buck’s wife
Blanche did shampoos and perms and cuts 
at The Cinderella Beauty Shoppe in Denton. 
In Blanche’s My Life with Bonnie & Clyde, 
written in prison, the juice is in the sides. 

This morning, I saw Upstairs LeeAnn off 
to Germany. (There’s a Downstairs one, too.)
Upstairs LeeAnn, the way she looks (auburn)
and cooks (cakes) and trails a heavenly scent:
Yum. No, scent is too strong. When she’s near, 
you know and feel warm. In Blanche Barrow’s 

autobio, there’s a lot of crooning over husband 
Buck (honestly, gets to be a bit much). But the
editor’s notes (hot chocolate) and flourishes (with
marshmallows) swoon me. End of the day, it’s
the tiny treats I keep. Seeing Loretta Lynn live 

in Honolulu and, back in high school, friend
Mike and I chirping, “I’m raising black-eyed peas 
and blue-eyed babies . . . prayin’ for weather” 
down in the rec room on Rainbow View Drive. 
(Mike’s dead before I catch the sweet irony 

of his growing up on a rainbow.) Mike, 
his parental units, and dog Ginger. Tupperware 
soaking in the sink for hours. Dad working at the P.O., 
packing Mike’s peanut butter and jellies. If bibles 
have a smell, there’s that mixed in as well. 

And somewhere the secret sadnesses 
absorbed in green shag carpet, parents who dote 
on their only child (the idea of him) though 
they never really see him. Whole. 

When Mike’s grown, out of the closet,  
his mom once impulsively asked, 
“Are you ever tempted to cut it right off?” 
(A lot to unpack, huh . . . ) 

After that, he stayed away for a while. 
But all our lives, Mike and me, we’re full 
of guffaws and squelched guffaws 
that happen when you should absolutely NOT
guffaw. Sitting shiva for his partner Paul, to
name one. Good God, the rabbi’s high strung 

“May the Hebrews gather . . .” before heading 
full-tilt nasal into the Kaddish. Horrified, we
bit our cheeks, eyes spilled water, mouths 
contorted with explosive snorts. Oh well, it’s
the flamingoes that open the dance, 

right? Did I mention: Mr. Clyde also liked French 
fries? (peas, no peas—who knows). BTW, Mike 
would love both my LeeAnns. (There’s always 
room for more.) Tonight I munch perfect
strawberries Upstairs gifted me before a white Uber 
whisked her and her three black suitcases away.

Ode to Grief Bacon

Weeks after the pills folded
my grief like an omelet,
I opened a cookbook to taste  

the hollandaise sauce, buttery
and beaming from a spoon
and asked Alexa to turn

the volume up so Sam Cooke
could croon against the cast-irons,
and for the first time

in months, I whisked
three eggs while shuffling
in my socks. I hummed “A Change

Is Gonna Come,” while considering
the elegance of toast,
how the char makes even

the stalest wheat dissolve
on our tongues
in a quick burst of caramel.

Then I opened the package
of thick-cut bacon
as if it were a letter written

in sodium and fatback,
its cursive sizzling in strips
and sopping in grease

that bubbled against my knuckles
which, friends, was a pain
I too toasted into joy—and harried

by heat, I remembered the Germans
have a word for eating
out of despair: kummerspeck,

meaning “grief bacon,” so I sliced
the entire package and watched
the porky sadness shrink

until Sam’s voice grew heavy
with salt, the strips splitting
and spitting and saying only

kummerspeck, kummerspeck,
which is another way
of saying I glided

with a wooden spoon,
dripping yolk across
the canvas of the floor.

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.

Coming Full Circle

Imagine the magic a circle holds, its infinite points—dotted or passing through. Imagine my Tagalog and accent erased, so that I could pass.

I uncovered my mother’s dictionaries in the towel cabinet, her scribbles: proof of definition and memorization. Perfecting English helped her pass.

For the sixth-grade spelling bee, I studied intensely, circling only unfamiliar words, burning them into my brain. My mother, orbiting me. And I passed.

Imagine the power of a trophy or a medal, to a child, the rounded
glory beaming from the walls. My wild and free daughter, wanting to pass.

Is she yours? people say to me. Is that your mom? children ask her, studying her coils and caramel skin. From my womb, you grew. Through my body, you passed.

My anxiety rises like a rocket flare, brief but real, being in a fully
Filipino space. Even in a white space. Oh, but you’ll be fine. You pass.

Pass me courage, make us all balls of limitless love and identity. Here is the open field. Pull back, do a double roulette, and pass.

Have we come full circle? Are we still fishing out words and phrases from the stream, afraid to awake the sleeping eye and ashamed of the past?

There is a description for identity confusion, this lostness: Ang Pilipinong nawawala sa sarili. To not always belong or pass.

---

This poem—a loose ghazal—echoes concepts and Tagalog phrases from Leny Mendoza Strobel’s book Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans (2nd edition). The “sleeping eye” references page 6 where Strobel discusses the Filipino American community’s “identity crisis,” traditional Filipino values versus modern American values,” and the “invisible minority and the sleeping giant.” The loss of language guilt and shame is further contextualized on page 130 (“Why didn’t you maintain the language? Why didn’t you teach me?”).

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.

Faster

What if you were the boy
who gave me his gym shorts all those years ago

that time my best friend wanted to go skinny dipping
with a bunch of strange guys from a band

and i said are you crazy?
and we jumped in the black 

Atlantic fully dressed
and later, watching us drip

head to toe across his (your?) pale 
linoleum, offered to throw

our clothes in the dryer while we listened 
to (his?) your unplugged version of Kryptonite

that still plucks goosebumps when 
it comes up in my running playlist

// what if your grin 
is a secret handshake remembering 

the hungry tone of those
apartment walls & the comforting

smell of the dryer 
underneath the pulse

of the drums // what if 
the cling of my ocean-soaked dress

sometimes 
wakes you up at night— 

what if you grew up, too, with a fist 
full of regrets only answerable

in the next mile, the next doubtful
song you fall in love with?

Another Evening Lowdown

Dangling between Mom and Dad, a rip fig ready to drop, we walked from ride to ride at Clementon Park:

Tea Cups, the Tilt-a-whirl— roller coaster snaking toward blue blank space. From fear to joy and back. What else to know but this?

Ars Poetica

Black pepper lathered
into brisket, lines like bark—
charred, hickory ripe.

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. 

From the Collected Poems of Kermit the Frog

Once there were stars,
strings to dangle them,
an unseen hand disappearing
into the moon’s waxing
ass. It’s all hanged,
you see. My tongue
no longer flicks to the quick
of your hearts. You,
who once flocked weekly
to my swamp, come
no more. I rage
to no one,
not even dear Piggy,
who karate chopped me
so often
with her love.
Oh, these piggy thoughts.
I never laid
my stuffing bare to her. So many
canceled seasons ago,
we lay watching birds
out a window—not
the Sam and Betsy sort,
but ones with
bona fides.
I’m talking plover, cardinal,
and wren—sky-glazed
and singing, but Big Apple
bustle gobbled
them up. I almost
told her I wanted
to spring
into water, plunge to find
bottom, maybe a tadpole
or two. Now this pond resembles
what the mind wants
heaven to be—not a simple
infinity but a closet
that stores all we’ve missed until
it’s needed. Piggy,
wherever you are, does
a hot spotlight still warm
your loneliness? Are you also
haunted by capers lost?  
And have you heard about
poor Nanny, left to a single
paragraph
on the back page of a paper
no one reads anymore? All I can
remember of her now is a song
whispered from a doorway
just before I sink
into dreams.

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.

To be a man

don’t sob at the sight of your grandfather’s ashes stored in a mausoleum for war veterans and husks of grandfathers that once loved but have since formed their hands into oysters. He powdered the pearls. South of the Greyhound station, you once ate biscuits, drank orange juice against the violet dayglow of the morning. You try

to recall what stories he said back then, but no amount of trying unbuilds the mausoleum that houses how you see him now—ashes long since cooled, knuckles long since calloused. Look at the oranging picture they set beside his wrinkled lilies, the one where he held the husks of three doves lined in a row, bellies slipping out of slits. In the South, a man is nothing more than the pain he could inflict. You can form

anything into a marriage of shame and silence. Pick a wife with a curved form and lips of sweet meringue, whose dreams are just as soft and shallow. If you try to leave your birthright, remember your stepfather whose crew in southern Vietnam traded Polaroids of heads and ragged entrails as currency—ashy cheeks, eyes somehow always looking up. They were just carrion, husks. Look at your stepfather now—a man who holds more pride in Agent Orange

than in birthing two daughters—and how he once spat clustered bombs of orange napalm on weeping village wives. He goes to sleep so easy, like forming a fist. You must be like him, like your grandfather, like the carob husks of Morocco whose purpose is to wrinkle and burn and become powder. Try once more to leave your birthright, to never become deciduous. Even the ash that holds the Nine Worlds in its womb, even the palo verde of Southern

California that dances like fireworks or arteries, even you, one day, south of heaven, will become a mausoleum. Think of your mother, her orange blossom tea and her lacy summer dresses and how she made the world her ash—tray after her lips deflated and her skin leathered and she couldn’t terraform her womb to support two daughters. Your stepfather did his best. He tried to be good. You must empathize since you too feel that gravity (the need to husk

something from its shell, like the wives and daughters who strip husks of rice with warm hands and leathered feet, who live in huts in southern Bangladesh with hopes of never seeing a single plane in the sky). Try to remember how easy it can be to leave, to smoke a carton of orange Pall Malls in a rusting cerulean pickup like your birth father did, forming fingers into snakes or oysters or carob pods still hooked to the tree. You can ash

that cigarette anytime. Try as you might to escape your birthright, husks of doves and daughters are expected so that your own ashes can rest, south of heaven, where oranges will blossom, where a mausoleum will form.

Ghazal for the Cast Iron

Because I haven’t taken the bristle pad’s sudsy scraping grace
to scour this pan as I do all others, erasing the grease

of bacon and garlic, because in coarse salt and shortening
and three wadded up paper towels I trust, I grace

this pan with butter, the slick black metal muting
turmeric’s threadbare screams. So little of what we make we grace

with time’s peppered gristle. Even rot’s scrubbed clean by rain and soil.
But this held my grandmother’s hashbrown casserole, saving grace

of red potatoes. This my grandfather’s good eye, goose-white
and gleaming as he sizzled the hams of West Virginia, graced

his knotted stomach with the dinner he’d scarf beneath
the nightshift’s ochre light, a piece of himself saying grace

with each raised fork. When my mother died on a street smooth
as a skillet, my father cooked himself through grief. Tonight, no grace

of rain on bloody asphalt, but short rib seared until meat falls
from bone, the once-translucent onion darkening in a wine-swilled grace,

and I hold this grease-hiss of family with a singed oven mitt,
oil bursts saying: Josh, even from burning comes a little grace.

The Fish

At first,

the bags of water
walked:

through red deserts,
through green forests,
through gray cities.

And then,

the bags of water
talked:

about race,
about gender,
about equity.

And then,

the bags of water
balked:

over history,
over liberty,
over private property.

And then,

the bags of water
stalked:

demanding homogeneity,
demanding retribution,
demanding silence.

And then, 

the bags
of water became unstopped:

drowning libraries,
drowning classrooms,
drowning cattle, chickens, and pigs.

And when
the bags of water
were empty,

they danced in a circle,
and prayed for a river.

The dark sky answered
and afterwards,
it just

rained
and reined
and reigned:

soaking our yards,
soaking our bread,
soaking our shirts,
soaking our shoes,
soaking our soil,

until all that was left were the fish.

Brett Stout

Midnight Confessions of an Empire

Photography/Acrylic Paint/Staples - 11"x14" - 2023

The Violent Nothing

Photography/Watercolor Paint/Staples/Book Clippings - 12x18" - 2023

Van Gogh Never Did This

Photography/Acrylic Paint/Watercolor Paint/Staples/Film Negative - 11x14" - 2023

The art that I’m submitting has the basic overall theme of “creative destruction.” I’ve taken my own photographs that I mainly take while walking the streets of my town, while on vacation, or riding my bicycle late at night. Then, I get prints of my photographs made, and I take the original prints of various sizes and defile and deform them into something different. I almost exclusively do this with an assortment of random and common household items and products, as varied as drywall screws, nails, cleaning bleach, staples, watercolor paint, duct tape, etc. I transform and make new art from already existing photographic art. Nothing I make will be perfect when partaking in the chaotic creative process, nor is it meant to be. I don’t go into making this kind of abstract art with a plan or any sort of idea of how the finished product will truly look. The new art could come out in the end as anything. It truly is random and sporadic chaos, which adds to the appeal and originality of it.

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.