They’re flying me to Guam! Where’s Guam?
     Typhoid shot left arm.
     Tomorrow Marine Transport Lines will put me on a 9 p.m. Pan Am flight to the Pacific where I will board a tanker that will hop around the Far East.

25 December 77 Port of Guam

     The other two seamen and I have been treated okay. Upon arriving, a driver met us at the airport and took us to this hotel, private rooms, bath, radio playing Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, a view of sea cliffs, coconut trees, and a Shakey’s pizza parlor. American cars everywhere. The sun was strong at 8 a.m. A predominantly American atmosphere exists on this tiny island due north of Australia, due east of the Philippines, in the South Pacific sea.
     Approximately one-fourth of flight 841′s passengers were Guam natives in U.S. military uniforms met at Arrivals by people with “Guam-US” license plates and “Fly Navy” bumper stickers.

26 December 77 Port of Guam

     The ship’s agent, a guy named Sky Lee, called me and the other seamen at the hotel at six in the morning saying the ship got in last night, and the Captain isn’t paying us to hang around in a hotel and will pick us up in 45 minutes. I hadn’t finished writing a couple of letters, including one to Jill and Antonio and Mattia who still think I’m in Berkeley. I rush it off and pack. My duffel bag is packed tight with that coconut from yesterday—I climbed a tree and picked it.

     First impression of the Chief Cook.

     Fred, an ordinary, asked me soon as I climbed the gangway what department I was in. He then said, “Follow me,” and called ahead, “Chief, I got your man here!”
     The Chief Cook looked up at me with his one eye.
     “You’re in here every morning at 6:15,” he said. “You want to work, I got plenty of work for you, plenty of overtime. If you’re too drunk to work I send you up to the Captain. That’s all. That’s it. You come in the morning. I say, ‘Good morning, Clifford.’ That’s all. Maybe a few more words.”
     He’d cooled out a little bit by the end of the day and started telling me about expensive blowjobs in Formosa.
     He’s a big man, maybe six four, and heavy. His name is Al Massey. Gravy stains on the apron, and thickly cropped white hair. He’s got huge hands, and is a fast talker with a power voice. His words come out choppy, the way I imagine he sees things through his one eye; the other eye is closed shut. It is neither repulsive nor is it incongruous with Al as a character. Without being mean I’d have to say that the sealed eye socket somehow seems to fit him well.
     He renders judgments chop-chop. His face has purple blotches, and his big knobby nose seems to crawl away from his face. He sharpens his pencil with a fishing knife, and eats a lot of olives when he’s working. And talks a lot.
     “I don’t let nobody in my family know about my finances. My brother-in-law once got a job in the bank I had my account, and I immediately switched my account to another bank in Portland (Texas). I don’t let nobody know how much I’m makin’. My daughter don’t know. My son-in-law don’t know. My brother don’t even know. My wife knows, you know. There was a time when I beat my daughter’s behind—the only time I ever did that—when she sneaked into my bedroom and read my will. I whooped her. She couldn’t sit down. I told her, ‘That damn thing is to be read by a lawyer only.’ It’s my business what I got and where it’s going.”
     He’s just as obstinate when offering favors as denying them. If you allow him to log your work hours including overtime, you’ll make $5,000 a month more than if you did it yourself.

     We’re in a storm right now at the edge of a typhoon. The ship is tossing, and loose chains are clanging on deck. When the bad weather reports were picked up, the Captain immediately alerted all hands to prepare for undocking and set the ship seaward. The Chief Cook was running around the galley like an oversized chicken screaming, “Secure everything that can be secured down!” I asked him why go out to sea if there’s a storm, aren’t we safer being tied up in port? He answered that if the ship busted loose from its rigging we’d crash into another docked ship whereas out at sea we have more room to maneuver “out of the storm or else with it.”

30 December 77 Guam

     Letter to Mom and Barney:
          I spoke to one Guamanian dockworker regarding the American dominance of the island. He was glad to have the money rolling in yet wistful that the ‘Robinson Crusoe days of the island ended thirty years ago.’
          The old pirate traditions aren’t over yet by a long shot. Most of the crew has tattoos and gray whiskers. My boss, Al Massey, I call him either “Chief” or “Steward,” and he calls me, “Son,” has tattoos of “Darling” on his right arm and an anchor on his left arm, one eye, a fist eight inches wide, close to three hundred pounds, a gravel voice. He tells stories of how when guys talk back to him, he knocks them out with one punch, sometimes gladly fracturing his hand in the process. I don’t mess with him. He’s pretty friendly with everyone in the steward’s department. We’re his chillun (children) and he’s pleased to “finally have a Jewish boy aboard. I’m gonna hav’ta whoop up some bagels and lox!”

31 December 77 at Sea

     “Ain’t no booze aboard this tanker except the eighteen cases hauled in yesterday for the Captain,” Fred the ordinary said.

7 January 78 at sea

     Since Paul, the gray-bearded ex-navy man, galleyman, strained his back lugging a crate of onions, I’ve been working two jobs. The work is not too difficult, it simply means I have no time to kill, and I must run up and down the ship making beds on the fourth deck and cleaning dishes in the galley.
     Randy Iona, the portly pumpman from Hawaii, said, “Look at the bright side. You’ll be making double money.”
     I’ve been getting into such a flow that laboring ten or twelve hours a day is sometimes easy.

     The Chief Cook comes from a rural Georgia background where he followed his older brothers through military high school training. He says the South is the best place in the world, but “It don’t matter if you are a Jew, Wop or Mexican. If you are born in this country you are AMERICAN.”
     In the 1930s he joined the C.C.C., Civilian Conservation Corps, and learned to drive a tractor, bulldozer, and fourteen-wheel trucks paving highways, sidewalks, and building national parks in Arizona.
     “There was no easy welfare system like there is today,” Al said, “people had to work for their money.”
     When WWII hit, he joined the merchant marines. He’d been a high school history teacher and football coach until then. He thought of going back to the field of education when the field of battle ended, but he hung on one more year, and one more year…. He had risen to the position of cook, accidentally. The money was good so he kept staying on. That was 30 years ago.

10 January 78 at sea

     The days are passing quickly. I’ve been absorbed in my work making the officers’ beds, cleaning pots and pans, and book reading, the Divine Comedy and Camus’ The Stranger. Almost two weeks here, and it hardly seems like more than three or four days. I’ve adjusted to the work schedule—I have no choice. In Berkeley I’d quit a job after I had two or three months worth of money. When I am free I stroll on deck awed, truly, by the immensity of endless sea meeting endless sky. One domain seems to penetrate forever downward, the other forever upwards.
     We’ve got orders to go to Honolulu after Kaohsiung, but as the Captain says, “When you get on one of these gray ships you never know where you are going to go next.”
     The bosun describes how our schedule is determined by closing his eyes and imitating a dart thrower.
     The bosun is a brawny guy with thick skin. Tall, muscular, tree stump legs, shaved skull, the biggest ears you’ve ever seen, radiant blue eyes. He has a deep voice and a smile he assigns to certain people. He is polite to everybody but particularly courteous to those who are on duty, he respects the work ethic. His life revolves around hard work. His name is George Niderost.
     “Without mazel, you’ll never attain nirvana,” he said. His mother was Jewish, his father Swedish. At a young age he went to sea. In the Far East he met an Oriental Buddhist woman and took up her religion.
     I sat down beside him in the mess hall. “How long did it take you to learn to speak Japanese so well?” I opened the conversation.
     “Not too long,” he said. “I learned Japanese at Hayward High.”
     Hayward is a middle class sprawl south of Berkeley, near Oakland. He joined the merchant marines and spent many years in it before he moved to Japan for 12 years. His wife was Asian, or Croatian, George said, it was almost impossible to delineate exactly. They gave their son an Asian first name. George pronounced it musically. “He will be 9 years old this month.” When his cabin door is open I see him sitting meditation in the lotus position in the dark hours of the morning.
     “You can meditate in lots of different ways,” he said. “You can meditate during the day with whatever you’re doing. When I’m doing a certain job, I can get locked into it.” He talked admiringly about Asian culture. “They’ve been civilized a lot longer than we have.”
     Bosun described the ship as a “tramp” ship. He said, “We go anywhere in the world at anytime shipping oil for the Navy to ports that don’t always welcome us. You get into port, start to throw your lines, and they tell you, ‘Go away. We never sent for you.’ And you got to turn right back around and head to where you came from.”

     For the past two days there are gaseous fumes throughout the ship. The deck and engine departments are “butterworthing” the oil tanks. The empty tanks are being cleaned by having the gas sucked out by huge pumps. Randy the pumpman is running around sweating and wishing the Sealift Pacific had push button mechanics. The notice boards in both the officers’ and crew’s mess halls warn “DON’T SMOKE ON DECK!” It’s very dangerous to smoke on deck at this time, Al King repeated, puffing on a More cigarette in the mess hall. He says that if someone should light a match out there now, the spark would follow the path down into the tanks, set off a firecracker chain reaction, and we’d all be blown to Kingdom Come.
     I try not to think about such a thing.
     Paul, who smokes all over the damn boat and whom I hope is asleep for the next three days, says that it don’t matter what you do, you’ll go when He decides.

11 January 78 Kaohsiung, Taiwan

     I got picked up by a girl in one of the local bars near the port, and we spent some of the night together in a hotel.
     Later, I was meandering through a plaza crowded with colorful fruit stands and sharp voices that were inseparable. Small children began gathering around me. We walked together and soon they began to lead me to a hall where incense was burning a purple ribbon of smoke before a shrine. Music could be heard at a distance. I followed the sound of symbols down a narrow corridor where the floor was in the process of being uplifted. Beneath the emptiness of a high ceiling, aged women tribed around a drum. The drum beat was deep like a maroon sob. An expressionless woman beat a gong. When they saw me the worshipers smiled and said Come in in Chinese, and they handed me a hollow wooden object and rubber stick with which to keep time. A little boy looked on from outside with one shy hand in the doorway. I offered him half my seat, he accepted with a smile after shaking his head once. After a while I forgot I was alone, the surge of voices together kept rising like wind up a tall tree. When the drumstick bop…bop…stopped, the voices stood still and I woke up like when you’re asleep riding all night in a car and then the car stops. They played more songs. Eventually, I stood up, bowed holding my hands in a pyramid close to my heart, stepped backwards out of the room.
     I found myself at the foot of a shrine, and again children gathered around my legs. We went into the plaza. I sensed that I was late. I hailed a cab who didn’t honk, I went whoosh-whoosh a fleeing motion with my hands telling the driver to hurry. The number of fruit stands diminished until we were in a dusty industrial area with sharp turns and cobblestone roads studded with railroad tracks. I showed the guard at the gate my papers, and I arrived at the pier and saw a young boy making a whooshing motion with his hands to indicate my launch had just left. I kicked the bow of a small fishing boat in frustration which gave me the idea of sleeping in it. I bedded down for the night wrapped up in a net stuffed with newspapers used during the day to wrap fish. The waves rose and ebbed. I thought of the women humming to the maroon drum. I fell asleep, and soon I dreamed of my first lover, of carrying her in the rain. It felt so good, so close, so much in one place, all her weight on me.

     I reached the ship the next morning.
     The Chief Cook stuck his fisted face through the doorway as I was vacuuming the Captain’s quarter.
     “Where were you this morning?” He demanded.
     “Here,” I said, playing dumb, or trying to.
     “You wasn’t here at 6:15, the time you have to be at work according to the contract. I saw you come in on the 7:30 launch.”
     I told him I’d arrived at the pier last night in a taxi five minutes after the launch left, but he didn’t care for excuses. He knew I’d been with a girl on the town for two nights, and one night should’ve been enough for the lowest man on the ladder, in his book.
     I tried to be cool, hoping that would calm him. But it was no use.
     “This afternoon I take you up to the Captain, and he’ll put you in the log book,” the Chief said.
     I stared at him silently while he was expecting me to protest. My reticence seemed to unnerve him, and he repeated the threat, louder.
     “He’ll put you in the LOG BOOK with a warning, and next time you’ll get logged,” meaning kicked off the ship.

11 Jan 78 2200 hours

     Chief Cook: “I’ve got an 8” scar right here from a pipe my old man laid across my forehead when I thought I could whoop his ass. My father said when I was on the ground, ‘If you get up, I’m going to lay you down again.’ And I said, ‘I can’t get up.’ He said, ‘Okay, then. I’ll take you to the doctor.’ The family doctor asked me how I got it and I was too embarrassed to say I took on my old man and lost, so I told him I fell in the doorway, and he said, ‘That must’ve been the goddamn hardest doorway you ever passed through!’ He knew I’d taken a whoopin’. After he fixed it up, he said, ‘You can stay here the night or hit the road,’ so I let my father take me home.
     “My son’s the toughest son-of-a-bitch you ever saw. I don’t give a good goddman how anybody wears their hair as long as they keep it clean. He costs me a fortune in gas and water bills washing his hair three, sometimes four time a day.
     “I was telling my son a story about a son who took some drug, went berserk and chased after his parents with a meat cleaver. The father had to kill his son to restrain him. I read it in the Reader’s Digest. The man, before he buried his son, cut off all the boy’s hair and put a neck tie on him and a suit. My son said, ‘Dad. If I go, if I get killed or overdose or whatever promise me one thing?’ I said, ‘What is it, son?’ He said, ‘Dad, promise me you won’t cut my hair.’ I said, ‘If you want to get packed way with your hair down to here, ass naked, in a hole straight up—that’s how I’ll slide you down.’”

11 January at sea

     Sparky is the nickname for the radio officer. His real name is William Seaman.
     He asked me, “How old are you? 23. It’s a good life for two or three years, see the world, make some money. If you stay out here long enough you’ll wind up looking like the guys who have been out here many years—don’t think it won’t happen to you. It will. You live an abnormal life. Little things happen on a ship, daily, that don’t happen on shore. When you go home, things have been going on there when you were away, and you don’t fit in anymore. Your friends don’t believe the things you’ve done, even when what you’re telling them is completely true. You’re making a lot of money. They become jealous. They condemn you for what you’re doing yet they wish they were doing it. They get off hearing about your travels, then ask you why are you so lonely. Life on a ship is different, and when you get off you can’t work on land anymore.
     “I’ve quit the sea several times. I worked as a truck driver, radio announcer, radio instructor, driving instructor, pilot. I’d like being a pilot again except there’s no money in it. This ship had it made. For years we only went coast-wise. Every ten days we were home for four days. Then somebody messed up. On a ship you can mess up just so much, then you got to get off. Lots of guys are always messing up, but this is their life, so they just change ships. All the crews of all the ships all over the world keep rotating. It gets lonely. I smoke too many cigarettes.
     “People on board are free from the social order on land, from marriages, traffic signs, and general confinement. Out here they have union stipulations. They do their jobs according to the contract, and focus on minute details of official agreements because it’s one of the few social orders available in the limited confines of a ship.
     “I’ve known guys who have gone to the merchant seamen school, shipped for three or five years and quit with enough money to set themselves up in something else on land. But after five years it’s a trap. You can’t get off and you can’t go back.
     “I first sailed for adventure, romance and travel. Romance, adventure and travel.
     “Everybody has his way of getting by on the job. The guy who had your job drank one bottle of whiskey a day.”

13 January 78 Friday at sea

     Chief Cook prides himself on getting to work early. Yesterday he arrived exactly on time and was apologetic.
     “Sorry, boys, I done slep’ in,” he said.
     He lives by the book. What book it is, I’m not exactly sure.
     He feels he can rectify any confusion by reverting to a law. He does what is right, always, and is his own man thereafter. He had a beef a while back with a captain. The captain said he would fire Al. Al said, “Fine with me, Captain. You’ll have to explain it to the labor relations board why you fired me, and before I leave I want the reason in writing. Here’s a pad and pencil. And just one thing, Captain. You are the Master of this ship, I’ll not refuse any order you give me. But nowhere does it say not in any union book or company contract that I have to like you. And I hate your fuckin’ guts.”

15 Jan 78 at sea

     The Chief: “I don’t want to be 80. Hell, I should be gone within eight years. Another year or two out here for me and then it’s going to be fouled anchor.”
     “Filed what?” Henry, the engine room mechanic.
     “Fouled anchor,” the Chief repeated.
     “Felled anchor?” Henry asked.
     “FOULED, FOULED. When your anchor’s all twisted up. When your anchor’s fouled, you’re on the beach. You ain’t goin’ nowhere. I’ll have the wife close down her 7-11 outlet and travel around in our trailer home. I’ve got a picture of what it look like under the glass on my desk. A 30-footer. I’ll come back to Portland and tend my bar. Bartending’s a good line, at least it used to be.
     “I was a bouncer for a long time in Portland, and I had some pretty mean characters come through. One feller came in twenty minutes before closing time. I said, ‘Sorry, friend, we’re closing up at midnight, town law.’ He said he didn’t make the laws, and he wasn’t going to live by them. ‘Where’s the bouncer?’ he asked. I said, ‘You’re looking at him.’ He said, ‘I want to beat the sense out of you.’ His eyes were protruding, stone solid. I said, ‘Wait a second, pal. We’re closing up soon but sit down anyway and have a quick drink.’ ‘I don’t want no drink,’ he said, ‘I want the bouncer.’ The son of a bitch is running around wanting only to kick some bouncer’s ass, and out of all the bars in Portland he chanced in on us. I was edging my way out from behind the bar so’s I’d have some room to maneuver, you see. Behind me was glass. I went whack up side his head. He didn’t even flinch. He grabbed me by the collar and threw me around before I knew it. If I’d get him in a half-Nelson, he’d break it. If I’d get him in a full-Nelson, he’d break it. I could hardly fit my arms around him. Finally, I grabbed a bottle of gin off one of the tables and cracked it over his head. That quieted him down. We dragged him onto the sidewalk and closed up shop. I was madder than a bull. He’d tore the collar clean off my brand new double-knit, two-button custom made Sears Roebuck suit.”

     *

     The Chief, while cooking soup, sings, “I’d do it all over again.”
     *

     The Chief was sitting in the mess hall, and something reminded him of the German Bohemian communities in Texas—Lockhardt, Weimar, Logan—who own the richest soil, “black as them there coffee grounds. They pass the land on from father to son, this girl’s parents match her up with those peoples’ son, each family throws in 40 acres, they build the children a house, and there they live the rest of their lives, German town. People scrub the streets every morning with hot water.”

     *

     “If you’re going to be a big fucker—be a fucker to the end!” —Chief Cook.

     *

     “You’re keeping a log? Put this in your log. ‘Wednesday, January 18, 1978. The Chief chewed my ass out for making messy beds.’”

19 January 78 at sea

     I saw my first gooney bird today. It was close behind us. The ship churns up water bringing fish to the surface. Gooney birds can fly across the whole ocean, they don’t need to land, in fact, they are awful at landing on stationary objects—that’s why they call them “gooney.” They always make a crash landing. They make a smoother touch upon water. We’re in for a treat. These albatross fly to Midway, where we are heading now, to lay their eggs.

21 January at sea

     It’s insane how much food gets wasted every day on a ship. The amount of food the Chief Cook is obligated to prepare is always way beyond the amount of food consumed. Two-thirds of most items on the menu are not eaten, the food remains on the stove top till it’s “let go.” It eventually gets spooned down the hole of a rubber-lipped garbage disposal. The Chief knows before he starts that he’ll be cooking too much. Each dish cooked and served must be enough to feed 27 people. It’s in the union contract. To eat all the food it would take 27 people to each order a meal that included roast beef, veal cutlet, red snapper, broiled steak, mashed potatoes, beans, rice, string beans, beets, candied yams and gravy.

22 January Midway

     Midway is the first piece of land we’ve seen in ten days. White beaches. No surf. It’s placid as a lake, turquoise colored. The lava albatross have a sanctuary here.
     “You may go your whole life at sea and never see an island like this,” Sparky says.
     I walked close to the gooneys, and they didn’t run. Nobody bothers them here. There were a lot of them mating on a golf course, nesting in the sand traps, on the fairways. Their bodies appeared yielding, fleshy breasts, soft curves, feathers, the plumpness of a duck, everything was soft but their eyes were hard. They were outlined by what looked like black mascara, intense eyes I got close trying to photograph with the Yashica camera I bought while we were docked in a bay outside of Sasebo, Japan.
     The gooneys were all over the place, couples squaring off, speaking beak to beak, clacking their beaks together, tilting their heads and sliding their opened beaks as far in towards the other’s tongue as possible. Withdrawing and nipping at the beak tips, bobbing, howling, squealing, and singing a shrill music, webbed toes well planted, raising their voices to the sky. Hundreds of birds did this all around. They’d join up and break apart rather easily. Sometimes two birds got into it pretty deeply and then other birds sensed that and left the lovers to their own embraces. One tired bird squatted while the other energetic one nudged him/her to get up, and it did, and they embraced.
     That night after dinner on the ship, I strolled around the island again. A breeze was blowing. The evening sky was soft blue. I was sitting under a tree writing my brother Barney a letter when the old 2nd Engineer, a Jewish guy from Alaska, came over to talk. We walked on grassy knolls, the albatross lulled around. Over the soft curve of the land, a full moon rose. We walked down a fairway. I lit up a joint, and for the first time in his life the engineer took a hit but he said he couldn’t tell if he were getting off on it or not. The stuff was potent, laid on me six weeks ago, while hitch-hiking a few miles from Berkeley.

24 January at sea

     I’ve been coming to an understanding of myself since being on this ship. There’s a calm within my sexuality unlike the spinning issue it rose to in Berkeley.

     *

     I choose to explore areas of society that are generally condemned and repressed.

     *

     In nine days we’ll be in San Francisco.

25 January Hawaii

     The Chief went on a rampage this evening.
     “Where the Hell’s my crew?” He cried. Who knew where Paul was? Later Hector told me he was on the ledge outside. He had the China Sickness, meaning he was homesick.
     “This is no vacation! You’re here to work,” the Chief said.
     I went inside and was ordered to carry glasses from the dishwasher to the rack in the mess hall, Paul’s job. The Chief hadn’t chewed me out in five days, and maybe he feared his authority was slipping. A large part of his anger was due to having to serve two lunches today, a late dinner and a midnight special for the guys working overtime on the tanks.
     “If these messmen don’t snap to there’s going to be some replacements between here and Frisco!” He bellowed.
     I remain silent when he blows his stack. The less I say, the sooner he cools off. Paul usually chides him, they have exchanges. They are both from Texas and need to lock horns.
     How can we be replaced between Honolulu and San Francisco when there isn’t land for anyone to stand on?

     *

     The Chief Cook never liked to drink water from a glass.
     Some years ago, every few hours the Chief needed to take a pill for his heart. He was in the galley working, felt his heart thumping extra heavily and would reach for the water he drank from a can. Then he’d put the can of water back on the shelf until he needed it a few hours later. In that time, along came another worker in the galley who was cleaning ovens with a poisonous liquid kept in a can identical to the Chief Cook’s, and he placed this second can on the shelf alongside the first. When the time came, the Chief reached for the wrong can. With the second gulp his throat immediately puffed up to the point where he could hardly breath. He poured cold water into his mouth and rushed to a doctor. His lips quickly blistered and peeled. After a few months of drinking soup through a straw, the Chief Cook was back to eating normally.
     And drinking water from a can.

30 January at sea

     I felt two enormous hands slap me on the back. They could only belong to the bosun.
     “Shalom! Shalom!” He said.
     We took seats at the same empty table in the mess hall. I could tell immediately George had something to drink. It made his face red, particularly his eyes. He spoke with the same clarity as when he was sober, but the alcohol increased the strength and intensity of his words, and he kept looking straight into my eyes.
     “There’s something about you that I liked when I first saw you. You have peace. There’s something about you. You have good parents. But they don’t understand you. Go see them. See your father. I wouldn’t have survived if it weren’t for my father. He is always with you wherever you go.
     “You’re going to be smart someday. I can tell by your eyebrows. They’re the same as mine. You’ll live to be an old man. And be smart; you’re not smart now. You have depth, you see things deeply. You and I have that in common. You see the whole truth of things. Without young people like you, I wouldn’t have any hope. Life is with you, carry on! Without young people, the rest of us are lost. Lost!”
     “Aren’t we all lost?” I asked. “Aren’t we all going to die?”
     “The body dies.” The bosun pinched his chest. “It must die. It’s nature’s way of recycling people. What’s inside of you will never die.”
     He gripped my hand, and I felt his strength go all the way up my arm. As we shook, he pounded our hands against the table.
     “You’re a good man,” he said, lowering his head, aiming his third eye at me.
     He stood up, slammed the wall in a flurry of karate chops, smiled broadly, bowed religiously, and exited.

About the author:

Cliff Fyman lives in the East Village and attends weekly readings at The Poetry Project. More of his writing can be read at Napalm Health Spa.

In 1966 the Italian director Michaelangelo Antonioni made the film Blow-Up, about a photographer’s accidental involvement with a gun murder. In one scene David Hemmings is driving his open-top Rolls Royce along a street in which all the buildings are painted red. This is the Stockwell Road, and the buildings were the premises of the motorcycle dealers Pride & Clarke.

The Brixton Academy used to be The Astoria cinema. I once saw an Andy Warhol film there – Lonesome Cowboys. I remember thinking how funny it was and wondering how much of the film was Warhol’s and how much Paul Morrissey’s. But I don’t remember much else about it – the plot or any of the scenes – except someone shooting, or threatening to shoot, Taylor Mead.

Violette Bushell was a pupil at the school in Stockwell Road and as a teenager went dancing at The Swan. In 1940 she married Etienne Szabo, a captain in the Free French Army. After he was killed at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942, she joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and became a secret agent in occupied France. In 1944 she was captured and tortured by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp where she was shot in January 1945.

I usually get my hair cut at a barber’s a few doors away from the Academy. The barber is a Greek Cypriot with a strange haircut – a darkish crop except for a big white fringe in the front. When he’s cutting my hair I can feel his stomach pressing into my shoulder. You don’t hear too much about Cyprus these days – when I was a child the news was always full of stories about EOKA shooting British soldiers.

The J-Bar was a nightclub in Stockwell Road. A detached, squarish building painted blue and yellow; it was closed down in October 2006 after a police raid in which drugs and two loaded handguns were found hidden in loudspeakers. That was the latest in a series of incidents at the J-Bar, which included reports of gunshots and on another occasion a large mob throwing bottles and stones at a person who was trying to leave the club.

There’s a small hole in the window of the William Hill betting shop. I guess it must be a bullet hole from a couple of days ago, when those kids shot the little girl at the shop next door.

On 21 March 2005, at the Brixton Academy in Stockwell Road, gunfire halted a concert by the American rapper Nas. 20 minutes into his show a gun went off at the back of the stalls, then there was a second round of shots which caused pandemonium in the auditorium and a rush for the doors, causing a bottleneck. 30 police, many of them armed, arrived within half an hour, by which time most concertgoers had been evacuated. There were questions as to how a gun could have been smuggled past the security cordon of a bag search and a handheld metal detector.

I stop to buy a paper in the Stockwell Convenience Store. Whenever I’ve gone in there the African guy behind the counter is having a mobile phone conversation – I don’t think I’ve ever heard him speak directly to a customer. I glance through the paper as I walk up the road: ‘Two Britons shot dead during Florida holiday’, ‘Rebel fighters have been found shot in the head’, ‘Syrian forces shoot dead eight protestors’.

All Bout Money (ABM) are a gang located on and around the Stockwell Park Estate. ABM and the Lambeth-based 031 gang fell out over a minor issue in 2006-07 and have been in conflict ever since. On 29 March 2011, three 031 members riding bicycles chased two ABM members into the Stockwell Food and Wine Shop on Stockwell Road and fired shots into the shop. They missed the two youths, but bystanders Thusha Kamaleswaran, aged five, was hit in the chest and Roshan Selvakumar, 35, suffered a head wound.

A youth wearing a black t-shirt with ‘Son of a Gun’ printed across it pushes a woman in a wheelchair along the pavement, forcing me to step into the road. The woman’s also dressed in black and inhaling rapid, exaggerated puffs of her cigarette. She starts thumping her chest and shouts, ‘I’m expecting a shitload!’ ‘You’re paranoid,’ says the boy.

In the 18th century tea was highly taxed and the smuggling of tea into the country was big business. Much of it came from Holland and was distributed from the south coast of England along a network of secret routes to the main market in London, the centre of the official tea trade. The dealers often met with the smugglers at The Swan in the Stockwell Road, near the warehouses, owned or leased by the smuggling gangs, where the tea was stored. The smugglers’ route to Stockwell ran across Clapham Common and, one night in 1743, Custom and Excise officers were tipped off about a gang that would be crossing the common with horses loaded with tea. The armed revenue men lay in wait to ambush the gang. The smugglers – said to number more than twenty – arrived and stood their ground when confronted. Outnumbered, the officers retreated as the smugglers fired their guns and moved on with their contraband, cheering as they went.

I pass by the Spiritualist Church. My Aunt Elsie was a spiritualist medium. Her sister, my grandmother, said that she became a spiritualist after my father was killed in the Second World War, shot at the Battle of the Reichswald in February 1945.

On 27 December 1994, Wayne Hutchinson, recently released from a psychiatric hospital, went to Mixes club in Stockwell Road and shot the doorman twice at point-blank range, fatally injuring him. The previous day he had blasted the windows of a house on the Stockwell Park Estate with the same sawn-off shotgun. On December 31 he stabbed a man, who happened to be walking along the Stockwell Road, in the chest. The next day he stabbed a man and a woman in a shop in Landor Road, killing the woman. He later told police that he had a gift of knowing when people were ‘taking the piss’ and that all those people he had attacked over the Christmas period ‘deserved what happened’.

I go into a Portuguese café to buy a loaf of bread. There are a lot of Portuguese cafés along this bit of the road and there are always customers in them, drinking coffee and watching football on TV. It wasn’t that long ago that Portugal had a full-scale revolution and hardly anyone was killed, just four demonstrators shot by the secret police.

On 22 July 2005 Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician, took the no.2 bus from Brixton, up Stockwell Road and got off outside The Swan. He crossed over Clapham Road, entered the Tube station, walked down the escalator and boarded a train. Three specialist firearms police officers followed him into the carriage and shot him seven times in the head. He died at the scene.

I look in the window of Brixton Cycles, opposite the school. I don’t want to buy anything; I just like looking at the bikes and the skateboards. I notice that one of the BMX bikes is called a Bombshell and another a Roadkill.

On 3 May 1922 a war memorial was unveiled on the triangle of common land at the top of Stockwell Road to commemorate the deaths of 574 local men in the First World War. Five of them once lived in Stockwell Road. The architect Frank Twydals Dear designed the memorial, a clock tower built of Portland stone.

The Swan seems to specialize in tribute bands. When I walk past I often note their names on the posters outside, like Wham!Duran and Guns N Maiden. When Frankie Goes to Hollywood were popular in the 1980s, a band called Paddy Goes to Holyhead played there, which I remember made me laugh.

Tony Rickaby

Tony Rickaby studied at St. Martin’s School of Art and his conceptual works, installations and paintings have been shown throughout Europe and the US. His current practice concerns historical and autobiographical reflections on parts of South London, where he lives. He has written for Aspidistra, Athregeum, Streetcake and Young, Fresh & Relevant and produced animations and visual poems for Drunken Boat, Locus Novus, Otholiths and Suss. www.tonyrickaby.co.uk

The man is a white horse, a tiger, a dragon. I want him the same way I want that cigarette I’m not supposed to smoke. If he was around, I’d sneak out to the porch and light him on fire.

He invades me nightly. Then he’s on the outskirts of my brain all day, spying, following me to fold laundry and wash dishes, trickling through my earbuds while I walk for miles in the same place at the gym, his essence infiltrating Kristin Hersh’s vitriol, every song about him anyway, the two of them merging in my undistracted mind.

Some days, I want to carve his name into my arm with a mercilessly cold straight razor, but there are too many letters. Or maybe get a “property of” tattoo on my back in gothic 60-pt font.

It’s been a year and a half. He is now engaged to someone who is bizarrely attached to adverbs.

An adverb is a word
That modifies a verb
Or modifies an adjective
Or else another adverb
And so you see that it’s absolutely
Very, very necessary.

When I cook, I remember him cooking for me: heart-attack surprise, breakfast burritos as big as my head, plates and plates of food. I eat small handfuls of fruit now, strawberries, green grapes, banana halves, chew, chew, chew.

I get urges to call him or write, to demand that he leave my brain at once, skedaddle, vamoose, get, get, get! I think he might hang up on me. Or really, I don’t think that, but I think he’d tell the harbinger of adverbs, and that is a humiliation I cannot bear.

I’ve even started to miss him spitting in my mouth.

I layer my coat in various perfume samples my mother put in my xmas stocking. Gwen Stefani’s airy and substanceless L blends with Kenzo’s dark and spiced Amour: both are smothered by Ferragamo’s prickly, citrus Dream.

I microwave a can of sweet peas for lunch. The mush is choked down with gulps of Brita water from a Solo cup.

You’re going to need them if you write or read or even think about it!

I moved again. Left the east coast for the west, avoiding the middle region where he resides. It is not enough. I crouch above his home territory, and it haunts me that he could be below me on the map somewhere right now, that they could be in Riverside, holding hands, chatting with the family, unwrapping xmas presents, using adverbs, spitting in each others’ mouths.

Have I mentioned that I am not alone here, halfway across the country again?

An adverb is a word
That modifies a verb
Or modifies an adjective
Or else another adverb
And so you see that it’s absolutely
Very, very necessary.

My rational mind is not bitter, and my logic tells me the reason for this haunting, his constant blurring on the edges of conscious thought, his outright violation of my subconscious, is that addictions are hard to kick, and they will use any means necessary to reinstate themselves.

I wake with that School House Rock song stuck in my head. Parts of it loop and loop, bumping into his hiding places.

If I were alone, I wouldn’t have to sneak around for contraband cigarettes. I could wake up in the morning and cry. I could get through the shakes. But I am not alone.

I send text messages to people all over the country about the nutritional content of peas, I walk three miles for a pack of cigarettes, I blister my thumb trying to ignite a wet lighter, none of this is enough.

You’re going to need them if you write or read or even think about it!

I once put a cigarette out in my palm for a man. I won’t do that again.

I am here with his good twin, vanilla, no resemblance to an animal, something I could quit anytime. The doppelganger tries to addict me to fresh air, hard work. Tries to cut me off from longing.

I sneak the butts inside, put them in the empty pea can in the trash, press the jagged circular end down to cover the contents.

How, when, or where? Obsession or reason? The answer is adverbs?

Vanilla was here this whole time. You wonder where this story exists. Mostly, it exists in dreams and the subconscious, but it also exists in this room I call my own in the basement where he was sleeping as I started typing these words, the faint click click clicking of keys making a staccato rhythm in his dreams. When he wakes, I pull up a web browser page, something of no interest to him, and leave that displayed until he goes. Then I dance on the back porch to the rhythm of Lally’s adverbs, smoke enveloping me like a fog in the damp Oregon air, mixing with the perfumes rising from my coat. I try to remember to wash my hands, but sometimes, I click click click nicotine onto his keys.

Ferragamo’s Dream burns my nose. I try to cover it up with Escada’s Moon Sparkle when I reenter this room, but the glitter smell of Moon Sparkle cannot erode the harsh sting of Dream.

I cannot be myself with craving. That was always the problem. I got lost in the smell of his shirt, in oranges cut into quarters the way I like, in a haze of degradation. I expanded on tuna coated in cheese and bacon bursting from the confines of toasted wheat bread, forgot how to say no, learned to clean my plate, how to cling.

I was always at his disposal.

How, when, or where? Obsession or reason? The answer is adverbs! And so you see that it’s absolutely, very, very necessary!

I quit him many times. Pictured myself at the bottom of a well, he’d block the sun, crying, and I’d return. I’d return. I traveled halfway across the country, found a hole, hid in it. When I resurfaced, he had everything he wanted and I was bloated and empty, craving.

I wanted to win. I wanted to say, you may have a black-haired adverb who smokes with her dark core, but I found a wealthy man who is more Asian than you, who really really likes me. Who actually worships me. Who incidentally treats me like a princess. I’ve finally moved to the West Coast and am blissfully blissful without you.

Of course, it’s hard to accept vanilla when you’re accustomed to spit and blood and smoke, and I don’t speak to him much except in dreams. He finds it hard to speak to me, and I know it’s because he still gets the urge to spit in my mouth and cram bacon down my throat, even though he’s so blissfully blissful now.

I rattle the bars of my cage. I breathe smoke. I scream adverbs derived from my favorite four letter words. There is no one to hear any of this. There is no way for either of them to peer inside my mind and see the needle skipping, the blood flecked gears jamming. No one to lube them with spit.

I cannot see the end to this story. I cannot cut the adverbs out.

Harmony Neal

Harmony Neal is the 2011-2013 fiction Fellow at Emory University. She’s been published in recent issues of New Letters, Hobart web, Cold Mountain Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Storyglossia, and decomP magazine. She spends her spare time playing with her dog, Milkshake, and growing poets in her apartment.

Wax Statues #1

BRIAN OLIU
RIGHTFIELD⎟ READINGTON JUNIOR BASEBALL

The hat, a light blue one year, a maroon the next, a yellow the last, remains on. The bill of the cap was bent in an arc: God knows that no child keeps things flat—it lets the sun sit above your eyes and earns a punch to the arm. The hat, light blue, then maroon, then yellow has the player’s name written on the inside of it—it is his and will always be his: the mesh wire, the plastic teeth. The ink leaves a blue smudge across his forehead—his name printed in reverse in skin and sweat. After games this would be the only mark made: the black cleats remained clean from kicking dew off outfield grass, the blue, the maroon, the yellow pants with no dirt at the knees, no evidence of hustle. Yet the blue above the eyes would only come off with scrubbing: saliva and thumb, soap and rag on the skin until the face turned red—the unceremonious removal of ashes.

Background

YEAR: 1990
HT: 5’1”      WT: 120
THROWS: LEFT      BATS: RIGHT
BORN: 11-22-1982, NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ      HOME: READINGTON, NJ

The sound of the ball hitting the bat is replaced with the sound of the ball hitting the back: crowding the plate, sure, but it is because Oliu knew no better—did not know the proper place to stand, did not know how far back his bat should be held. The ball: slow, high, inside, strikes the right-fielder square between the shoulders, a place he could not touch if he tried, even if he bent his elbow and dipped his shoulder just so. Other times, the ball would hit him in the meat of his arm and drop to the dirt without ceremony, like another dead bird into a window, like a stubbed toe. He would drop the bat and begin to make the shortened walk to first base as all of the parents clapped in unison, hands against hands with a tinge of sympathy, the occasional shout to hustle, to shake it off, to pretend it never happened.

Wax Statues #2

KATIE STORLIE

It’s not the girl that matters but the poplar branch, which came down in an ordinary summer storm. Poplars root readily from clippings or from broken limbs that litter the ground, so some boughs will bloom where they fall. When does a branch become a new tree? When is a seed no longer a seed? It’s so hard to tell when one body becomes another.

Background

YEAR: 1992
HT: 4’11”      WT: 81
THROWS: RIGHT      BATS: RIGHT
BORN: 08-09-79, MINNEAPOLIS, MN      HOME: MINNEAPOLIS, MN

There was a bat, sure, a peeled length of poplar she pulled from the woodpile at the edge of the backyard. She touched it to her nose because it was November, she had her mittens on, and she wanted to feel the touch of it somewhere on her skin. She swung at the flakes that had just begun to fall, that were falling now so separately, that were melting before they even settled into snow. She swung the bat and heard the wind’s slight hiss. She swung the bat and heard a cardinal abandon a branch. She swung the bat and heard the breath of a window being shut in the bedroom where her grandmother lay. She swung the bat and heard a train the moment it enters a tunnel, and she thought of all those boxcars with their hidden cargo, not circus animals like she once thought (giraffes nuzzled up against each other in the lullaby of the engine’s jounce), not heaps of grain, but cold containers jammed with scrap, with fist-sized hunks of coal. She swung the bat and thought of train cars stamped with Burlington Northern Santa Fe, which she began to chant into the stadiums of dusk that were now assembling out of air—Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Burlington Northern Santa Fe—so that the words, as if struck, sailed westward over the treetops and across the grasses of the Great Plains.

Wax Statues #3

BJ HOLLARS

The dugout has been dugout by grounders, a long tradition of boys closing their eyes and praying to God that they would not be struck. But once, this kid Hollars forgot to pray and ran the bases backward, starting with the pitcher’s mound and heading to third, to second—forget about first—homerun! The crowd went wild, and so did the umpire, who didn’t know what to call him. And once, this kid Hollars forgot to pray again and his dog died. He’d rather not get into it. He was stirruped and baseball-hatted, only he was no base stealer—not quick enough—and the oncoming car was a fastball. A line drive, a well struck hit centered in the sweet spot. Blood on his batter’s gloves, blood on his cleats. He would not forget to pray again.

Mid-game, the coach called, “Somebody get this kid an RC Cola. Somebody get him some Big League Chew.” A taffy, a licorice whip—anything to get him through the inning.

Background

YEAR: 1994
HT: 4’8″ (SLOUCHING)      WT: 100
THROWS: RIGHT      BATS: RIGHT
BORN: 5-25-1984      HOME: FORT WAYNE, IN
RELIGION: CHRISTIAN/JEWISH/BASEBALL/AGNOSTIC

Wax Statues #4

ROBBY STAPLETON
PITCHER/1B ⎟ RED SOX

A skinny blond kid is on the mound. He’s wearing a Red Sox jersey, which is really an iron-on t-shirt, and a red hat with a felt white B. His body is post-windup, approaching his arm’s release point. His mouth and cheeks are contorted, a sideslip into a kind of horror, as if Godzilla just swallowed the original batter and is now wigwagging the bat. There is a reason for this: the moment a pitch is discharged at maximum velocity (the other second-graders are convinced that our pitcher can throw harder than anyone, but in a few years this will toy with Robby’s psyche until he realizes—much, much later—that he was simply taller and closer to the catcher’s mitt than the other seven year-olds) is an emotional crank lever. Composure disintegrates. The pitcher, like a parent, learns to manifest and release their love, and prepare for its demise.

Background

YEAR: 1976
HT: 4’3”      WT: 49
THROWS: RIGHT      BATS: RIGHT
BORN: 11-15-69, BREA, CA      HOME: BREA, CA

As Captain of the Red Sox, Robby led his squad to the Brea Little League Single-A Championship Game. Some attribute his role as Captain and cleanup hitter to the team’s head coach, his father, but that debate has no place here. Robby’s crowning moment was knocking a three-run shot in the final inning to defeat the Astros in the semis, even if you do put stock in the fact that poor Tim Scaffidi should have never been placed in left field at the end of a crucial contest, or that the round-tripper was not a moon shot, but a luckily-placed grounder that squirted through Scaffidi’s legs and, once retrieved, took Scaffidi two throws to get back to the infield. Of course, by then our hero had touched ‘em all, and the Red Sox side of the field fell into jubilant mayhem, Robby embracing the celebration as a promise, the unveiling of fate’s grace. Coach Stapleton piled the entire roster into his pickup bed, drove to the corner 7-11 while laying on the horn, and bought Cherry Slurpees for everyone. As for the title game against the Yanks, or fate’s betrayal, this is also not the forum for those discussions.

Wax Statues
Infamy Insert #1

THE SNACK BAR

Just a big plywood box with a silver lock and sloping roof, a silent clunky jungle gym to climb and stand on most days, but as the bleacher seats begin to fill the hinged window lifts and locks to become a sunshade awning and inside are moms clad in team colors, eye-candy displays in this Cabinet of Wonder, actresses seen only from the waist up like on the new family RCA color TV (with spinning concentric dials your dad won’t let you touch). Inside is a World of Color—unlike the muted neighborhood Helms Bakery Truck displays, smooth sliding drawers of brown and white iced donuts and loaves of bread smelling like manna at the cul-de-sac curb—though these treasures were just as magical, just as anticipated by you and your friends, bouncing in place there, wishing for time to move faster. Then, at last, the communal breaking of ABBA-ZABA bars, the sharing of licorice whips and sunflower seeds poured into upturned palms, even into hands of friends of friends that you never really talked to except here, but it was here that you knew you were part of the tribe, the adolescent church social, a cathedral of chain link casting checked shadows across windbreakers and banana seats on stingrays. Here behind the field of play on Sunday afternoons, relatives long dead now sat and enjoyed the sunlight on their shoulders as if soaking in every detail. Strange treats you would never again know. Sugar dots stuck on paper strips, in rainbow order, sold by the inch. Tiny wax bottles of red nectar, licked out in drips, the empties suctioned to tongue tip and waggled back and forth at that girl you wanted to kiss but could only make laugh at your foolishness. And so she remains there in your memory, forever turning away to watch her brother’s at bat, and you chewing the blank wax like flavorless gum, staring across the park, the school playground beyond, the flagpole pinging.

THE END

City maintenance workers razed the Snack Bar on a fall morning while you were thinking of something else. Had you been there, you might have protested, or maybe just asked to climb on top of it one last time and carefully rise to stand, on tip-toes, straining to see something more in the distance. And even as you remember it now it is better in your head than it really was, the paint flakes forgotten, the termite sand accumulating around the studs you never even saw, the facade changing like the faces of all of those friends, those whose names you forget more than recall. Sonny became a car mechanic, but you wouldn’t know that. Dennis’s sister drowned in a pool. Brad became an alcoholic who recycles forklift flats, and you passed him one day when you were at the mall but you didn’t recognize him. They are gone from your life now, like the great monuments of the sport you still study and love more than most people do their religion. Sure, Fenway and Wrigley still remain, and Vin Scully’s voice from a radio speaker each Spring you no longer take for granted, embracing its presence as you do your old dog, trying to remember the details, this beauty here all around you now: Remember this now. It is through the arc of your love affair with the game that you have come to understand the importance of commemoration, the error of sentimentality. History flattens all, one dimension at a time. Team pictures remain in a drawer, but no photos of the Snack Bar, just an imagined outline in the space it once was, like the ghost of Ebbets Field in the minds of another generation still, still floating between apartment towers like a fog. The studs and backstop yanked from their moorings, the diamond paved over to become something else, changed by the world again and again, but sometimes, just before falling asleep, you can still see a detail, catch a glimpse of left field between shadows—just as the billboards and light towers of Tiger Stadium no longer rise, yet flat patches of grass and clay can be found right there where they have always been, waiting like a patient dog to be noticed.

About the author:

BRIAN OLIU is originally from New Jersey and currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His work is featured in Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review, Sonora Review, WebConjunctions, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. KATHARINE RAUK’s poetry chapbook, Basil, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. She lives and teaches in Minneapolis. B.J. HOLLARS, former first basemen for Farm Bureau Insurance, is currently an instructor at the University of Alabama. ROBERT STAPLETON is the Editor of Booth and teaches at Butler Univeristy. GRANT HIER is Professor of English and Chair of Liberal Arts at Laguna College of Art and Design. A few years ago Vin Scully invited Grant up to his announcer’s booth after reading mention of himself in Grant’s poem, “Untended Garden”—that was a good day.

     We have spent days wandering through cities. We have dodged ceaseless traffic. We have moved south through industrial towns and hiked along highways, breathing dust and exhaust. We have explored busy neighborhoods and empty neighborhoods, been watched from doorways and windows. Haggling has plagued every meal; every ride has been a swindle. No transaction, no destination, has ever been certain. But she has always been there.

     She is not there. Short facts repeat in my mind. She is not behind me. I cannot see her. I cling to the seat and face forward, just believing that at any moment the other motorcycle will swerve into view, and I’ll shrug and smile as she does the same.
     I turn to look again. A thick tower of smoke rises from a burning pile in the road. She is not there.
     Trying to think of something else, I look to the landscape. It’s ingrained, from schoolbooks and Hollywood – stock footage of bomber jets littering tumbling explosives, people in cone hats running through the fields, dense green forests full of unseen assailants. A helicopter could rise up over the hills and it would make sense; twirling blades could belong to this place as much as a palm branch.

     There is no sign of her for what must be a half an hour. We have passed through villages, through jungle; I am miles from the place I last saw her, and this idea settles into my mind with stunning frankness. The driver glances back occasionally as well. As he has done twice already now, he slows the bike to cruise so that the trees along the road are focused, definite; but eventually he shrugs and accelerates back to his preferred speed. The roadside greenery returns to a blur.
     There have been times of uncertainty. There have been times when it all seemed foolish. Feeling the wheels of a bus slide from the road in the night; young boys with guns and leering eyes; taxis in unknown places taking too many turns. There have been times that have made me doubt the value of all this – moving between towns and through strange countries, entrusting her and myself to boats and vans and buses protected by dashboard idols and swinging charms. But nothing has prepared me for the sense of absolute error that has come from simply not knowing where she is. We never needed to come to this place, I think. It is an awakening panic.
     The imagination surprises with its thoroughness and freedom, the way it moves so easily through the possibilities. A young woman on a stranger’s motorcycle. An empty road. An abandoned building, striking pink paint peeling off the cement. Old, understandable grudges. Even shaken free of human cruelty, the imagination quickly leaps to other paths: mechanical failure; a sharp turn and a wayward cow; an overturned truck.
     My eyes are draining down my cheeks, the droplets pushed by the wind. It has occurred to me, to my own surprise, to pound upon the back of the driver and demand that he turns around. My hands remain where they are.
     Straw-topped huts and hammocks appear ahead. The motorcycle slows to a halt. I slide off and remove my helmet, keep my eyes on the one incoming road. My driver picks up a banana, spots an acquaintance, and sits.
     I pace along the low huts, ignoring the vendors’ invitations for fruit. I can only think of the mistakes I’ve made. A motorcycle arrives. Just a driver, a man in sandals, slacks and a long button down shirt. I begin to rule out options, transforming doubt into dangerous certainty. I want to cry. I want to hurl my helmet and take the driver by the shirt and fill the air with intelligible rants. I want to believe that nothing is wrong. But I pace in quiet, eyes trained to the road. Another bike appears with a rider. Buy some fruit? No. Banana? No! I watch the one who brought me here, swinging now in a hammock. I am going to talk to him. I am going to command him to take me back, to call his friend, to search every village. Off into unknown places, knocking on doors. I am going. I am going when a red metal frame and gleaming red helmet appears, and I see her blinking with relief as the wind dies, eyebrows telling she’ll be happy to step onto solid ground, telling me it was not the best but it was also not the worst. Here we are – our quiet place.

About the author:

Owen Tucker is originally from Washington State. He graduated from Whitman College with a degree in Philosophy. He has lived and taught English in various parts of China for over two years. He is a writer and illustrator for thisridiculousworld.com, a China-focused blog.

The snow had finally melted, though the lake was still too cold for swimming. For the first time in six months, cars rumbled down the dirt road leading to Lake Winona.

These cars—mostly SUV’s and family wagons with Massachusetts plates—brought handsome bespectacled fathers and tired pretty mothers with vague hangovers; teenage sons wearing headphones and teenage daughters waiting to burst out of their bathing suits. They brought canoes strapped to roofs and canisters of propane; grocery bags full of frozen meat and fresh produce. They brought beer, bottles of wine, and fireworks bought off the interstate.

Jay and I bought an eight-ball and a bottle of Jim Beam. We blasted Black Sabbath from Diane’s stereo and shot at squirrels with a .22. Bug-eyed and unshaven, we winked at the teenage girls wrapped in towels.

Unclear where the sanctity and insanity of our winter had gone, we wiped our bloody noses on our sleeves and made plans to get the hell out of Dodge, to get in Jay’s truck and drive and drive like sons of a bitches until we hit the Pacific Ocean. Jess and Diane and Sara said we were crazy, urged us to sleep, but we snapped more lines and gritted our ground-out teeth and told them to let us be.

We were leaving, man. Sayonara, motherfucker, and if any of those tight pieces of teenage tail are looking to piss-off daddy and want a ride, I’ll push aside, and we’ll make room—vroom, baby, vroom.

Nathan Graziano

Nathan Graziano lives in Manchester, New Hampshire with his wife and two children. A high school English teacher, he recently completed his MFA at The University of New Hampshire. He is the author of After the Honeymoon (sunnyoutside, 2009), Teaching Metaphors (sunnyoutside, 2007), Not So Profound (Green Bean Press, 2004), Frostbite (GBP, 2002) and seven chapbooks of poetry and fiction. His work has appeared in Rattle, Night Train, Freight Stories, The Coe Review, The Owen Wister Review, and others. For more information, visit his website: www.nathangraziano.com.

About the author:

Abby Rotstein teaches English in Las Vegas, Nevada. She has had work published in The Battered Suitcase, The Legendary, and Foliate Oak.

It was early and Cheetahs was dead but we had to be dressed and on the floor by seven. Dressed. Meaning, in our underwear. A leggy suicide girl with a Mohawk got up from her card game and pressed her cheek against our floor manager’s hairy chest.
     “We’re starving, Vinny. At least get us a pizza.” He mumbled something about piranhas and walked away. Her desperation cracked the veneer of her tight Hollywood smile and she clung to her Hello Kitty purse where there was nothing but lint.
     Cheetahs reflected my ugly loneliness back to me and I couldn’t stay away from it. I was motherless and a new knot rattled inside my ribcage. It was loudest when I dialed mom’s number to hear her voice that was still on the answering machine six months after the last cancer. She would never answer the phone again, but her voice was still there and it looped around my mind, while I panhandled in my underwear at Cheetahs.
     Hollywood is no San Francisco. Years ago, before the economy tanked, I’d sold lap dances for sixty bucks a song and stacked enough dough to finance Hawaiian vacations and Beverly Hills boobs-and support boyfriends- but Recession guys are reluctant to part with their hard-earned bread.
     At Cheetahs, I’d say anything for twenty-five bucks. Instead of selling a dance, I sold loneliness; got them smitten. Made empty promises, gave them my phone number, told them I’d meet them for dinner, play tennis with them, go to Vegas, Mexico, “I’ll kill you if you don’t marry me,” One guy said. I told him I would.
     Stripping wasn’t always this emotionally complicated.
     Part of the problem in LA is the rules that separate booze from touching. Local and state laws change every few years regarding nudity and physical contact in the clubs. Adults are treated like sex offenders in LA, punished for their desire to grope naked chicks. Where there’s alcohol, there’s no contact. When Willy Brown was mayor in SF the 90′s, full contact lap dancing was legal, we paid a stage fee, and Dot Com money flowed. Here in LA, topless clubs aren’t even topless anymore. Dancers can’t show any nipple and there’s no touching, which is why I got called into the manager’s office:
     “Why do you let them touch you?” Vinny asked.
     My knee rubbed a customer’s inner thigh. I let him grab my hips. My hair poured into his face. My lips touched his neck. Vinny showed me on the monitor. I got a text from a friend who was working in New Orleans:

     “The weather’s ninety degrees with ninety percent humidity,” the stewardess announces on the plane. People moan but I’m ready to be wrapped in southern steam. Out of the airport, I’m hit by heat. New Orleans is a sweaty pussy that sticks to your face, soaks into your skin and stays the night. “Visions,” I say. Like hairdressers and other keepers of the occult codes in New Orleans, the cab driver knows where to go.
Visions is twenty minutes from the airport, nowhere near the frenzy of Bourbon Street. The only thing that far off Downman is some railroad tracks, a Dominoes pizza and a condemned liquor store. There are no billboards advertising Visions, just a sign on the black building that reads, “Visions: where the locals go.”
     From the outside, Visions looks like a gutted Denny’s. A wire fence holds back weeds and ivy but the vines punch through the fence and crash to their suicide on the gravel below. There’s a truck parked in the lot with a bumper sticker: “Nawlins. Proud to swim home.”
     I step out of the cab with my rolling suitcase, duffle bag and computer, sticky from the air. Live oaks reach across the sky and dangle curvy shadows across the street. The rain shoots down then stops and the sun sears through the mist. I walk up cement stairs and Inside Visions, which is dark as hell: a smoky dungeon promising spiders, tits and beer.
     “I’m here to see Rick, to audition,” I say to a thin pale guy with a big head and a limp. He crosses his arms and eyeballs my suitcase.
     “He’s not here. It’s Friday night so you can’t get on the schedule.”
     I won’t get hired: I’m too fat, I’m too old, I’m too tattooed. I think.
     “You can wait at the bar.” I roll my luggage to a stool and watch the dayshift girls change into the nightshift.
      In the dark heat, I know this is my world: a smoky place where the lonely hide and tough girls jiggle their butts and make serious cash. I dial my mom’s number for luck but its too loud and I can barely hear her cheery hello. The topless girls dance on the bar in g-strings that are more like strategically placed threads. Meaty thighs wiggle to the rhythm of Jimmie Vaughan’s “Can’t Say No.” The rule is that guys have to tip if they sit at the bar, and they have to be drinking or they’re asked to leave. A recorded male voice says so every few minutes to remind customers and discourage squatters.
     I’m relieved to see the range of body types and the signature dead gaze girls toss my direction while floating on plastic heels. They’re not all Vegas’ed out. They’re real girls with stretch marks and round hips, crooked smiles and their garters hold stacks of green. They’re making money. Maybe I can too.
     The limper paces the club with his smirk. Guys like him have the power to reject beautiful girls they couldn’t touch in high school. My friend Christina works here but not tonight, so I have no pull. She’d said, “Talk to the night manager, Rick. He’s the nice guy.”
     An hour passes. I’m tired from the flight. My outfit isn’t sexy and I have nowhere to stay tonight. Managers of strip clubs are always cartoon versions of themselves, and I’m a faded, tired version of me.
     Rick shows after all. I know he’s the night manager by his important walk and business casual dress shirt. He’s a fat guy who drinks beer then chases it with lines of coke at 3AM. He has the bleakness that only guys whose days begin and end in strip clubs understand. He ended up here and stayed. He waves me into an office the size of a bathtub where both managers stand in the dark.
     “How’d you find out about this place?” Rick asks. There’s a cash machine counting bills. It stops at a hundred. It’s loud as a hair dryer.
     “Christina told me.”
     “Show me your body.” I lift up my shirt and remove my bra; pull down my pants to my knees. He runs one hand over his silver greasy hair, and with the other he grabs my ass and holds it, sampling the flab there, which I have in ample supply.
     This is the same treatment I got from the Persian mafia at the Market Street Cinema in San Francisco in ’96.
     “Are there any more tattoos or just your arms?”
     “Just my arms.”
     “You need day girls?” Rick asks the limper.
     “Naaah.” The limper shuffles papers. His eyes glow in the shadows. The cash machine spits out bills. Red lights show digital numbers and there’s a click click click of plastic heels announcing a blonde stripper who puffs a cigarette. My eyes burn.
     “Go downtown. Try Bourbon,” he says. They are in love with this hazing routine, delighted to reject me. Nice guy Rick sticks a rubber band over a wad of cash. I push my boob job together and tilt my head to the side, begging. I have to convince them of my earning abilities. I need one nightshift to prove myself, but they don’t care if I came from sucking Hugh Hefner’s dick at the Playboy Mansion, they don’t want me working at Visions. I pull up my jeans and fasten my bra. The limper laughs and shakes his head. Rick checks his watch.
     My audition is over.
     “Stick around for an hour and if I need girls, you can stay,” he says. I roll my suitcase into the dressing room where naked girls talk loudly on cell phones, slam metal lockers, apply mascara and smoke cigarettes. A drunk girl with black Cleopatra bangs collapses on the floor. Her eyeballs roll back in her head.
     “My brother’s dead. Is my brother dead?” she says. A tiny redhead in a plaid skirt holds her by the waist. She reminds me of the suicide girls I left at Cheetahs.
     “You’ve got to go home sweetie,” she says to the drunk girl.
      Rick appears in the dressing room and walks over to the drunk girl who tries to stand, but slides back down to the floor instead.
     “Get dressed. You’re going home.” He reaches in his back pocket for bolt cutters and opens her locker.
     “My brother. Is he dead?” She sticks to the wall and doesn’t let go.
     The plaid skirt girl looks at me.
     “Hand me her stuff.” I reach up to locker number 29 and grab her clothes.
     There’s an unspoken bond among strippers. No matter what happened, if a dancer’s in trouble, the girls help, or mind their own business out of respect-whichever is needed. We dress her and call her a cab. The other strippers continue their voodoo that involves glitter, body spray and lip-gloss. I shove my luggage into locker 29 and know I’ve found my tribe: a pirate society that’s understood and cohesive. We’re there for a singular purpose. If pressed, it’s us against the world. After the drunk girl is gone, Rick turns to me.
     “Welcome to Visions.”

About the author:

Antonia Crane is a freelance journalist, editor and sex worker from Humboldt County. After graduating from Mills College in 2002, Antonia moved to Los Angeles to pursue HIV/STI counseling for the porn industry at Aim Health Care. She has been an activist for sex workers in San Francisco and Los Angeles and was behind the unionization effort in 1996 for Lusty Lady Theatre: SEIU Local 790: The Exotic Dancers Alliance.

She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, edits “The Citron Review” and is a columnist for “The Rumpus” (http://therumpus.net/). Her interviews have appeared in Splinter Generation and The Rumpus. Excerpts from her memoir “Stripped: Tales of a Sexual Outlaw” have appeared in Black Clock Journal, Sexology.lit, Word Riot, Pocket Smut and the Coachella Review. She has received scholarships from College of the Redwoods, Mills College, Antioch University and The Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She can be spotted hanging upside-down from stripper poles in Los Angeles and New Orleans. For the wild at heart: http://blog.antoniacrane.com/

I am not a taxi driver, Nazaret said. I am a famous poet in Armenia. I write great poems about love. He pulled over.

Listen to why I am famous, he said, into the rear-view. He took a yellowed notebook from the glove, cleared his throat and read, To be in love is to be hungry. Not to be in love is to be hollow.

He turned off the meter and performed more poems. They were nice, but trite. Most about love and flowers. Something about a hyacinth. I don’t remember much but I do remember the breath of his taxi, garlic and lamb, and the musky smell of a man. I remember how his chest hair sprouted from his shirt like a bouquet.

Nazaret reminded me of the dirty old man who used to be my boss at the Harris Poll. Behind a desk, he would touch himself as he listened to me conduct surveys about politics, education, and the Gulf War. He too had chest hair. It was his job to check if I was reading the survey exactly as scripted. I remember repeating, do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree so many times that my tongue was tumbleweed. It was one of my first jobs and I was just discovering the power between my loins. Everything got me hot, even a dirty old eavesdropping man. There was something in knowing my voice was the object of his perversion that made me wet. Then, after a year, his attention turned to a new girl whose name I don’t remember.

She was an Asian girl with porn star curves. Her long black silken hair would whip around like a mermaid as she walked up and down the aisle from her telephone station to the reception area to gather the next batch of leads to call. She always wore snug red dresses, so short that they looked like shirts. She was like a single red rose, the kind you find in cheap plastic tubes that old Chinese ladies sell to romantic boyfriends inside Lower East Side restaurants. The rose once told me how she rubbed a drop of cum on her neck to snag men with pheromones. I might have missed something. I tried; it didn’t work.

I remembered all this while listening to Nazaret’s poems and thinking how late I was going to be.

Do you want to see a picture of my beautiful wife? Nazaret asked, then passed back the picture and said, look how beautiful. Yes, she is beautiful, I said. The photo was old, scotch-taped together and color enhanced like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. She does not look like this now, he said, shaking his head.

What is your name?

Annie.

Annie, do you have love?

No.

Why not? Does not matter. He pulled out a pen, twisted back and took my hand. I give you my number, Nazaret said. He pointed to his heart and said, I feel hungry. Hollow. You are woman. I am man. I feel hungry. You understand?

Aren’t you married? I said, wondering why had I let this man write on my hand. A familiar ache moved inside me.

No matter. He flapped his hand in the air as if to kill a pesky mosquito.

What if your wife made love to another man?

He hit my hand with the pen. I would kill her, he said, and sucked his teeth. Annie! Annie! She is mother of my children. I give her all my money. Of course you do not understand. I am man. You are woman.

I guess I didn’t understand. Still …

Then he showed me another picture, this one of his girlfriend. She gives me best sex. Beautiful Croatian woman. Every man should try Croatian woman. They are best.

I definitely didn’t understand. He had my hand again, stroked it. I was confused.

But Annie, I have never been with oriental woman. I am oriental virgin. You would be first. Come sit here, he said, unlocking the door and patting the broken leather seat beside him.

About the author:

Lisa Lim is a writer and cartoonist who lives in Brooklyn. Her work can be found at chineseladybug.carbonmade.com.

What a different Chicago it must have been back then—no search warrants, no self-defense pleas; you just staked out your criminal while he was out at the movies with two girls, and when he emerged from the theater, immersed in the dream world of the film, you pumped him full bullets on a crowded street. Dillinger was sharp enough to sense what was happening, so he actually had time to draw his gun and retreat for the alley, but after years of provoking and humiliating the police, July 22, 1934 marked the day that his number was finally up. See, Dillinger wasn’t just a robber. He was also a cop killer. And some of those cops he’d killed had been friends of my great-great uncle’s, and so when they arrived at the Biograph that night—a steamy, muggy Chicago summer evening—they waited for the sign from the Romanian escort girl in the orange dress not just to carry out their duty, but also to carry out vengeance.

Family lore paints a picture of Uncle Tim as a simple guy; a lifelong bachelor who was devoted to his mother. He never married or had children, and was especially fond of his niece, Eileen; my grandmother. Tim didn’t have very many material possessions, but when he died, he left my grandmother the few items that he felt were worth something—specifically, the Colt Army Special revolver that discharged the bullets that killed the most famous criminal of the Gangster Age. He also left her yellowed newspaper clippings and his letter of congratulations, signed by J. Edgar Hoover himself.

Seventy five years is a long time, and by the time my mom and her two sisters decided to bring the gun to auction, all the players in this tale: Hoover, Dillinger, my uncle, and my grandmother, had all been buried. For years after my grandma’s death the gun was passed from family basement to family basement, no one really quite sure what to do with it, and everyone uncomfortably aware that possession of a handgun in the city of Chicago is illegal.

Then came the day when one of the sisters must have said, “Ya know, that thing is probably worth some money.”

There was the obligatory discussion of keeping the gun and the papers and the letter for nostalgic reasons. But my grandma had been a product of the Great Depression—someone whose practical beliefs and habits might be considered by some today as quaint and curious as a phonograph. I never once saw her wear jeans, and when it rained, she wore a plastic kerchief that tied in a bow beneath her chin. She drank highballs and distrusted banks. She certainly never went on nice vacations, and her only nice possession was a ratty looking fur coat (that she’d bought, unknowingly, at a time when the most gauche item you could buy was real fur). Her daughters knew that she would have supported the sale. I pictured her showing up at auction, red hair carefully hot-rolled, wearing her best brooch, and warily clutching her plastic purse to her chest.

When my family learned that the 75th anniversary of Dillinger’s death was being marked by the release of Public Enemies, the big budget Hollywood film about his life, we knew it was time to act. A River North auction house jumped at the chance to sell the gun, insinuating exclusive access to wealthy memorabilia collectors and thousands and thousands of dollars. My mom and her sisters put the gun in a small metal lockbox, locked it in the trunk, and drove it over to the auction house, fearing the whole time that they would be pulled over and arrested for transporting contraband. They carried their treasure inside, their eyes cutting from side to side at potential thieves or police who might try to steal it from them. This was Chicago, after all, a city they knew as intimately as Dillinger once did, and they understood that when someone in this city was on the brink of a windfall, the people on the streets could smell it.

The gun was photographed and examined and given a glossy spread on the cover of the bidding catalogue. They left the auction house feeling exhilarated and smug. For once in their lives, the Brennan family was at the cusp of an opportunity to cash in without ever having to work for it. As the summer went by, we privately dared to hope, our dreams running wild, jackpots whirring behind our eyes and landing in a row on lucky number sevens. In the weeks leading up the auction, it felt like barely a day went by without some mention of Dillinger on the radio, television, or in the newspaper. The auction house had sent out a deluge of press releases, and buzz about our gun—our gun!— was percolating throughout the city. The closer the auction got, the wider the arcs of my mother’s emotions began to swing. Giddy, rapturous excitement was followed by a cynical low-balling of figures, replaced again with timid hope. We waited.

“I’m going to buy a new mattress and a washer and drier,” my Aunt Patsy declared, never once doubting that she’d be able to buy all of that and then some. And she wasn’t alone. This was no longer about a gun. Maybe it never really was about the gun. It was homage to my ancestors, who never quite seemed to be able to catch a break. The more money we got for the gun, the more all the hard lives of grandma, and Tim O’Neil, and all the rest of them, would begin to make sense. The gun would be like putting a wreath—a really, really expensive wreath—on the graves of all the dead Brennans and O’Neils buried at Calvary Cemetery.

Yes, the gun would make up for many things, and none of them had anything to do with John Dillinger.

When the big day arrived and we filed into our seats in the back row the auction house, our faces were grim. We knew that we were hoping for too much, that the stakes were high, that crushing disappointment was probable. Sitting there, waiting for the sale to begin, the sisters wrangled down each other’s hopes.

“Eight thousand dollars is a lot of money, and that’s probably the most we’ll get.”

“Eight thousand if we’re lucky.”

“And keep in mind, we have to split it between the three of us, and the auction house gets ten percent, and Uncle Sam gets his share. If we walk outta this thing with five hundred bucks apiece, I’ll consider it a success.”

Of course, we didn’t believe any of that.

All around the perimeter of the room were velvet covered tables that displayed artifacts to be auctioned—old fashioned art deco jewelry, obscure hand-drawn maps, rows and rows of grainy photographs, Tiffany’s cuff links and large, jewel-studded earrings. These were all beautiful and interesting, but they weren’t the main draw. The Dillinger memorabilia was featured prominently in the front of the room, and you had to walk past it to get to your seat. There was a letter Dillinger wrote to his niece from prison, some black and white portraits of his bullet-riddled body laid out on a morgue slab; Great Uncle Tim’s handiwork. There was even a plaster death mask that was taken of Dillinger’s face for purposes that were unclear—voyeuristic or medical, or perhaps both. The mask was white and clayish, the mouth gaped open, two open holes where the unseeing eyes had been.

But even these had not generated news coverage. Ours, and ours alone, was the big-ticket item. Because of the handgun ban, a photograph of the Colt Revolver was projected onto the wall. Even though no one there knew who we were, I still felt like we were the most important people in a room. I’d never felt that before—I doubt any of us had—and we fanned ourselves calmly with our bid numbers, pretending that this was just another day at the auction house for regulars like us, trying to project the confident sense of ennui that we imagined rich people exuded.

We eyed and appraised the people around us, trying to gauge by their clothes and their mannerisms just how wealthy they were. I have to admit, we weren’t too impressed. There were a few clumps of sharply dressed buyers, but most were dressed so casually it bordered on schlubbish—t-shirts, jeans, scuffed gym shoes. We reassured each other that the ultra rich are the type of people who don’t need to display their wealth. At all times we were aware of the presence of Loreen, the owner of the auction house. She was a blonde woman in her mid-fifties; chic, urban, cosmopolitan and self-assured, wearing a black suit and big, chunky jewelry that jingled when she walked. She was a presence, flitting around from group to group, waving her arms and telling bawdy jokes—she seemed to know everyone.
Right as people began to take their places, she sidled up to my mom and nudged her with a familiar elbow.

“Word is, we got a buyer from Northern California,” she hissed. “Private collector. Real rich.”

“Is he here?” My mom looked around, extracting a balled up tissue from her pocket.

“He’s going to be phoning in his bid,” she advised, “so watch the phones.” She pointed at the line of black-clad employees who were filing in behind a table full of telephones, hooking Blue Tooths around their ears and nervously clearing their throats. Then, she flitted away, having elevated our hopes even higher, sending our dreams for the gun into the stratosphere.

The auction began with smaller ticket items—old city maps, photographs, and postcards. Loreen would call a price, and someone in the audience would raise his bid card, which looked just like a cardboard fan you might see in a Southern Gospel church. Biding starts at 100 dollars one hundred do I hear 150 –then another bidder would nod slightly—one fifty do I hear 200—another nod—250—a slightly raised fan—three hundred do I hear 350? She’d look hopefully at the other bidder, who would shake his head once, stoically, and the gavel would come down—bang! Sold! To bidder 576 for three hundred dollars. Call it.

Our gun was the twelfth item to be auctioned, and as we listened to the gavel bang down on the other items, my heart began to rise into my throat; my palms were purple, clammy, shaking. Each time Loreen banged the gavel I winced, and so did my dad and sister, who were seated, fans trembling in their laps, on either side of me. Behind us, my mom and aunts were utterly still.

Item number 12, I heard Loreen say, Colt Army Revolver used to slay John Dillinger outside the Biograph Theater, Chicago, Illinois, 1934, with related papers by J. Edgar Hoover and other memorabilia.

Behind me, I felt them stiffen. I prayed—was it wrong to pray for money? But it wasn’t for the money alone that I prayed, but for my mom, my aunts, my whole family; but especially my mom, who could let disappointment crush her, and for whom the gun, this dream, meant so much. I looked around and saw that no one in the audience was poised to raise their fans, but the moment Loreen said, bidding opens at $5,000, the phones against the wall began ringing off the hook; jangling, old-fashioned rings that drowned out the excited whispering that was spreading through the room. I turned behind me and looked at my mom, who was wound tight as a spring, eyes round and shining with nerves.

Five thousand do I hear $5,500? One of the Blue-Toothed employees, murmuring into her phone, raised a pointer finger in the air and nodded—$5,500 do I hear $6,000—down the table another finger was raised. My heart slammed. Back and forth the two bidders jousted via telephone; I imagined them bent over mahogany desks somewhere in California, phones cradled against their ears, their broad, oak panelled windows looking out over rolling vineyards, their walls decorated with displays of rare coins. 6,000. 6,500. 7,000. Up and up the bidding went, and the fingers of the employees kept jabbing the air.

I grabbed my sister’s hand when the bidding reached $15,000. $16,000. $18,000.

At $20,000, the bidding began to lose momentum. The two employees were slower to raise their fingers—first, they would engage in a hushed, prolonged conversation with the buyer while everyone looked on and we strained to listen. It appeared that the buyers had reached their reservation price, and each bid increase had to be cajoled, teased out of them.

At exactly $30,000, when Loreen asked, do I hear 35,000? We trained our eyes on the woman on the phone and she looked up at Loreen with regret, and shook her head once. Loreen asked it again: Do I hear $35,000? The edge of hope in her voice mirrored our own—after all, there was her commission to think about. The buyer murmured some more into the phone, a last attempt, but finally set her mouth in a tight line and shook her head again.

The gavel came down.

It was a good price, and yet I didn’t even have to turn around to know that Mom and aunts were disappointed. We all were. And it was hard to explain why. Maybe it was because the price of my ancestors’ memory had been bought by a faceless stranger from California. And it had been he, not us, who had dictated the final value. Maybe it was because of my mom’s dreams, or Aunt Patsy’s reckless hoping. Maybe it was because Dillinger’s letter to his niece, which was not expected to sell for more than a few hundred bucks, went for over fifty grand. “I guess people care more about the living Dillinger than the dead one,” my sister observed, and for the first time since this whole process began, I thought about the living Uncle Tim. I thought about how, like Dillinger, he must have told his tale of glory to his own beloved niece, perhaps sitting around a table in some north side two-flat kitchen nook, his elbows resting on the table and my grandmother’s pale little Irish feet swinging beneath her chair. I thought about how her pale blue eyes must have widened, thinking about the girl in the orange dress, and how proud she must have felt for being part of a family like that. And I knew that my sister was right—it’s the stories of living that we cling to, not of dying, and that is the way it should be.

Thirty thousand dollars is a year’s salary, and yet when we left the auction, staggering out into the bright sun, it didn’t feel like we’d won anything. We went to a fancy Randolph street restaurant to celebrate, but we picked at our food. My dad complained about how expensive the drinks were. We kept asking my mom how she could be upset about winning thirty grand, but our questions were just as directed at ourselves as they were at her. It seemed ridiculous of us, greedy.

Two weeks later, we got a call from the auction house. Our California buyer had bailed. He made up some excuse that he no longer believed the gun was authentic. He reneged. Loreen told us that to sue him would cost almost as much, in the long run, as the gun itself, and there was always the chance that we wouldn’t win. So he walked away from the deal without any repercussions, while Loreen scrambled around and found a second-tier buyer who purchased it for much less than the original bid. After taxes, commission, and splitting the rest, my mom and her two sisters got a couple grand each.

Aunt Patsy bought a new mattress.

The washer and drier would have to wait.

About the author:

Jessie Morrison is a high school English teacher and student in the MFA program, Fiction Writing, at Columbia College Chicago. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Flash Me Magazine, Ghostfactory Magazine, The Parlor, and the Columbia Storyweek Reader 2009 and 2010. She is a Chicago native.

***

    Telling this story now implies that I’m beyond it all—it’s me, yes, but it’s an earlier version. I suppose that’s true. I’m on the other side of a First Book; I’ve got a Real Job in Academia now. Statistically speaking, this must put me in the thin upper reaches of the bell curve for my graduate school class. Statistically speaking, in this profession I went to great lengths to choose, that’s more success than I had any right to expect. But you can be sure it’s not nearly as much as I hoped. It’s safe to say that I wouldn’t rush headlong into that Yes! now, that I’d find out just what the world was asking of me first. There’s not a paragraph here that doesn’t make me cringe now. At the time, however, I couldn’t look too closely, because I didn’t want the responsibility of what I might see. I didn’t want to know that I wasn’t qualified, or that Jacqueline didn’t want to sleep with me, or conversely, that I was prepared to cheat on my future wife. I had an awful lot of identity tied up in being a Lifelong High Achiever, and I didn’t want to fully consider what exactly I’d traded a career in medicine for.
    But the truth is I’m struck by how much I empathize with—and even admire and envy—that younger version of myself, his egotism and raging hormones notwithstanding. To believe so fully in the value of my own words—perhaps the only thing more intoxicating was believing in what those words would bring me. I’m struck, too, by how much I could use those same blinders to reality every time I sit down in front of a blank page today, and how I should be prepared to walk out in front of you, naked and winging it, every time I fill that page up.

About the author:

I’m the author of a collection of short stories, The Middle of the Night (Picador 2003). My fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in a number of publications including Utne Reader, Virginia Quarterly Review, DoubleTake, Bomb, North American Review, Chicago Tribune and St. Louis Post Dispatch. I have been the recipient of a Lyndhurst Young Career Prize and an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship and a Finalist for the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. I am an Assistant Professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago.

There’s a voiceless organ in my grandmother’s house that I’ve only ever known for a place to put framed photos of the dead. Aunts and uncles whose names I confuse sit on that grayed, oaken organ, propped up like tombstones, as if there were something other than quiet keys buried below. Whenever I walk by the organ I hold my breath, a habit from when I was a boy, in the backseats of cars passing cemeteries.

I had an Uncle Derek who died when he was seventeen, long before I was born. He was two years older than my mother, and the only time she mentions him to me is if Piano Man starts up on the radio. Whenever it does, she looks blankly out of the windshield, changes lanes and tells me, this song was my brother’s favorite. I don’t know much else about him. I know that a few years back, my Grandma received a letter on his birthday from an old friend of his telling how she still thinks back to whatever it was he made her feel that can stay with a person thirty years. I never read it but I’ve named her Kristen. He’s sometimes mentioned in the talks that pass on after dinner, at my grandmother’s house while she makes coffee, and his name is followed by a subtle silence that leaves me alone as they pause to remember.

When I was younger and living with my grandmother, I would invent things about Derek, using the only pieces I knew about him, a song and a photo. The photo is formal, a portrait of my uncle wearing a tuxedo, his senior picture, taken a few months before he died. It’s sort of fuzzy with age, the photo, and it almost looks as if dust has settled into the lines of his smile, blurring his ageless eyes. Because of the portrait’s blur, and I think because I’ve never actually seen another version of him, I can’t tell for certain whether it really is a photo or just a commissioned painting, something that’s never troubled me, I don’t know why.

I used to lie in bed in Derek’s old room, in his mother’s house, and try to imagine who he was. I invented baseball games he had, bottom of the ninth, down two, striking out. I invented my grandfather laughing with him afterward, smiling that his son knew what it meant to swing and to miss. I invented best friends, promises kept, proms danced, cigarettes smoked out of my mother’s room’s window, his younger sister holding a hand over her heart and swearing secrecy.

I invented girls for him. Girls he brought to the Friendly’s down the street for strawberry milkshakes, Kristen’s favorite. I wondered, late into school nights in my still-seventeen year-old uncle’s room, whether he ever had sex. I decided he had. He would know what it was to swing and not miss. He would know girls whose faces I stole from my own classmates, girls I would never touch the way he did.

Derek went away to a boarding school his senior year. I’m told he offered to leave after three years of crimes I can only see in the dark, looking up at the same ceiling he used to watch. I saw him once steal out of his window, my window, and walk seven blocks down Poplar to sit under a nightblue tree with a girl whose hair shone black in a streetlight. She was crying, wronged somehow terribly, and he only set down with her and touched her hair, whispering things I’d forget by morning. When he got home, my grandmother was sitting by the door, rocking, wrapped in yellow lamplight and a red blanket she’d knitted herself. She cursed him for keeping her up, on a Wednesday, asked was he crazy, what the hell was he doing all night, it was three in the morning, did he know? He couldn’t tell her. She wept. It happened again and again, as many times as I had nights to wait up and make it so.

His grades were poor. My grandfather spoke to him softly after dinners about tolls taken on his mother and what it is to own up to mistakes. They were talks of the future set carefully with smiles. One evening, he knocked and stepped slowly into his parents bedroom and asked permission to own up, to leave and to make things right.

He was diagnosed with Leukemia while away at boarding school. I can’t remember learning this, the specific time and place, just having learnt it somehow and knowing it was real and not mine, the way it was with the girls he had. My grandmother lashed out at whatever doctor told her Derek would die, flung the phone at the receiver and bit venom into herself for letting her only son leave home to school, to die; this is mine.

It’s a strange thing to look at my uncle’s portrait, feeling he’s older, as I’ve always felt, knowing he’s younger. He is still seventeen. I’ve had more girls than he has. I’ve known his mother and sisters longer than he ever did, something I never meant to happen.

His portrait is still on my grandmother’s gray organ, an organ whose quiet keys he once coaxed carnivals from on sunny afternoons, under the meandering dust caught in a window’s sunbeams, in the dark of my long, adolescent school-nights. As I look at his portrait, his confident smile, tragic bowtie, I still can’t tell if the picture was taken or painted, and the uncertainty gives me a peace I cannot understand.

Inevitably, I invented his funeral. It’s in December, and the snow falls fiercely in white, taut wheels. Kristen Pincciotti is there, her black hair flecked with snowflakes, crying over Derek’s casket, her first, thirty years before I would hold her hand after a junior prom. My grandfather doesn’t cry. He looks up into the falling, blowing white and squints. He presses my grandmother’s hand. Tolls are taken. She loses her faith for months or more.

Virginia speaks to her brother in dreams, turns seventeen, is made Homecoming Queen, leaves home for college, is made a wife, a teacher, mother, and one day, as Piano Man’s harmonica sweeps out of the radio, she looks out of the windshield, changes lanes, and doesn’t tell me, this song was my brother’s favorite. I hold my breath until she does, something kept from when I was a boy, in the backseats of cars passing cemeteries.

About the author:

Jack Patrick has lived in Arlington, VA for seven months now. He is once previously published in Penn State’s Literary Magazine, “Kaliope.” He graduated from that same university with a BA in English in 2008. He likes swimming in rivers best.

I haven’t seen Becky in a month. Snowstorms wrack the Northeast as I arrive on a Greyhound bus from Southern California. The boy she is staying with is named Jerry. They met in college, before becoming junkies. Before she met me in a Vermont rehab and I took her with me to San Francisco. We weren’t in SF long before the police came looking for us. We’d been printing phony checks on a computer to support our dope habits. We fled. Becky returned to her family in Vermont. I tried to reunite with my wife in LA. That didn’t work for either of us. So we are back together.
    Jerry lives with his divorced mother in a lovely two-storey Cape Cod in a Burlington suburb, with bushes shaped like elephants, magnificent oak trees, and a pathway to the front door made up of polished stones, which someone has taken the time to shovel. The interior design is strictly New England colonialism—maple railings and mantles, hand-stitched pillows and knitted apples, huge oil paintings of steam-powered catchers and harpoon cannons, with a kitchen bigger than most of my apartments. Jerry’s mom knows all about her son’s drug habit. She says she’d rather have her son shooting his heroin in the house, with clean needles, where she at least knows it is safe, than out on those dirty streets. God bless liberal parenting.
     Becky and I fix and fuck on overdrive, in spare bedrooms and closets, in bathtubs and back seats. I take her from the front, from behind, from on top, bottom, and upside down. My wife is a distant memory.
    I know I am dying. I can see the black edges of my life creeping in, literally see them from the corners of my eyes as they close up around me, waiting to smother me, snuff me out. And I don’t care.
    Becky and I have taken our experience with phony checks back east with us. Making minor amendments to the plan, we are burning through banks at a good clip. We hit them for much less, opening up accounts with stolen checks and making instant withdrawals, $100 at a time. We’ve been cleaning up in this town.

It is 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night. Or maybe it’s Thursday. I’ve been here little over a week. We are still at Jerry’s mom’s house, upstairs in his bedroom, which looks like ten-year-old sleeps here, with its race car bedspread and wrestling posters, video game cartridges and controllers and empty bowls of Lucky Charms littered about. Another girl shows up. We can call her Debra. She is looking for the same thing we are.
    We can’t find any heroin. We have money. But no one seems to be holding. The snow makes it tougher. Burlington is not like San Francisco. There are no houses storing the stuff in bulk. It has to be shipped in from far away, like produce. Snowstorms clog highways; nobody has been making deliveries of late.
    We have a few Oxycontins to stave off the sickness, but since the pharmaceutical industry got wise and started adding gelatin to their pills, it makes breaking down and injecting them next to impossible. Lemon juice and vinegar don’t work, and heating the crushed pills will only turn them into a thick goop you can’t draw up.
    Shooting is its own addiction. There were times in San Francisco when we couldn’t get anything that we would sit around shooting up beer or whiskey dregs, Sprite, milk, Tang, sometimes just plain tap water, anything for a fix. Doesn’t matter what you’re shooting, once that needle pierces the skin, the brain gets fooled into thinking drugs are about to be delivered, so it produces a high, the flip side of phantom pain for an amputee.
    We score some cocaine and it doesn’t take long before the paranoia sets in. Seems Debra has legal issues, a boyfriend who is a big shot dealer, an ex-gang member, or maybe it’s an ex-boyfriend who’s still a gang member. I don’t know. But the cops are after him, or her, or somebody, and she won’t shut up about it. I’ve been around this shit since I started doing drugs and it still drives me nuts.
    Soon Debra and Jerry are at the window, and, Look, there’s a van across the street that looks suspicious! “Could be the DEA,” Debra says. I want to reply that the DEA has better things to do than chase four inconsequential losers around the Vermont suburbs, but I am the new guy and want them to like me. I already feel self-conscious about my age. After me, Becky is next oldest, but she’s still in her mid-20s; the other two are babies.
    Debra opens her purse. There is a lot of money is there. Debra says the DEA wants it. We have to run.

We’ve snuck out the back of the house and are weaving beneath the elephant bushes. It is much colder than I remember New England ever getting. Of course, we are almost in Canada. We’re trying to run but the snow has a slick layer of ice on it, which makes us lose our footing, before the crust cracks and traps our feet. The cocaine was very potent and the ringing in my ears will not stop. Debra tells us to be quiet. No one is talking. She points between two houses. There is that van again.
    It is clearly not the same van, but I don’t want her upset with me. I’ve seen how much money is in that purse. I am sticking by her side. If I can get my hands on that money, Becky and I can take a break from this bank business, which will not end well, no matter what lies I tell myself.
    We make it out of the suburbs by sticking along the woods that line Burlington, following the light of the moon through a shopping center. Now we are downtown, which in Burlington isn’t that impressive.
    At the Holiday Inn, Debra plunks down the cash for a room.
    We are all out of breath. Everyone lights a cigarette and inhales hard through the wheeze. We are going to hole up in this room, it is decided, until the DEA goes away or we can get some heroin.
    I hate admitting how silly this all feels, especially at my age, these cloak and dagger shenanigans. Nobody gives a shit about us, and certainly not the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, which I’m guessing has bigger fish to fry. Guys my age have careers, families; they own homes and drive nice cars. They’re not running through shopping plazas like tweaked-out rejects from the Breakfast Club.
    The paranoia is even getting the best of Becky. I try to calm them down. Relax, have a seat, turn on the TV. But Debra has already cracked the blinds, and sure enough, there’s that van again. I say it is a different van; it is a different make, model, and color.
    “They changed drivers, and they changed cars, but they’re still following me!”
    Debra, Jerry, and even my Becky are certain the DEA is going to break down the door any minute. I promise myself that I will never do cocaine again.
    Debra and Jerry say they are leaving. Becky says she is too. I finally put my foot down. That’s it. I am not running around bumfuck Burlington playing cops and robbers anymore. I tell Becky that when she comes to her senses I’ll be here in this nice warm room, watching TV and waiting.
    They leave. I lie on the bed and reach for the remote to turn on the TV and knock it to the floor. It lands next to the purse full of money Debra has forgotten.
    I count the money. There is over $1,500. That could keep Becky and me rolling for at least a week. I start to put the money in my pocket, and then realize the problems it would cause. Purse missing money. One guy in the room. So I just take a fifty and stuff it in my pocket. But there is so much money, all those crisp green twenties, fifties, and hundreds staring back at me, so inviting. I am about to take another fifty when there is a knock at the door, and I am glad I at least got the fifty stashed in my pocket before Debra realized she forgot her purse. Fifty bucks is better than nothing.
    I open the door. It is the DEA.
    Badges are flashed, instructions given. There are five of them. One of them is even wearing sunglasses despite its closing in on midnight. They all have on black windbreakers with the big block letters on back. They ask where Debra is. They’ve got her boyfriend, they saw her come in. No use denying it, kid. Give it to them straight if I know what’s good for me.
    Talk about a mindfuck. I can’t even answer. Do they have any idea how much this is screwing with my head?
    The DEA finds the purse. They take all the money but leave the purse. They say to tell Debra if she wants her money back, she knows where to find them.
    Then they walk out and leave me there. They never even ask my name.

Everyone thinks I stole the money. Debra has big shot friends and that money was theirs. It is not safe for me in Burlington anymore. Becky meets me at the depot and we use the $50 to get out of town and back down to Rutland, where we rent a room in a roadside motel. There are only a handful of banks in Rutland. We hit them all. The money goes fast.
    We are running out of time.
    Slate skies hang low over one-lane roads packed with dirty sludge and snow as one storm blends into the next.
    We know how this scene plays out.
    We pay for the night with the last of our money, shoot up everything we’ve got, and fuck our way through dawn until we are empty. Now it is morning. Check out time is 11:00 a.m. The sickness will be coming soon, and I know that despite our promises to stay together I am losing her.
    Becky has fallen asleep on her stomach. I sit naked on the floor and watch her, the New England light graying her skin, wishing I could stop time, find a way to place us both in a box for all eternity, because nothing good is going to be happening to either one of us for a very long time.
    The clock reads 10:46. I know because I am looking at it when they come.
    When the police come for you, it is pretty much like in the movies. They bang loudly, but before you can answer, the door is kicked in, and you are spread eagle on the floor, hands cuffed behind your back, and ordered not to talk or they’ll shoot.
    And that is the last moment I have with Becky as she is taken away from me in the back of a squad car.
    I know not to turn around. I know doing so will be a mistake. But I do it anyway. As the taillights recede into the gusting Vermont snow, I catch that sad, lonesome wave goodbye from the rear window. And I am alone again, scared, looking up at a mountain I am too tired to climb.
    When you say goodbye to someone at an airport or a bus station (or from the back of a police car), do not turn around. If you do, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.

About the author:

Joe’s work has appeared in Bathhouse, Big Bridge, Bryant Literary Review, the Connecticut Review, Dark Sky, decomP, Dos Passos Review, Fringe, Gloom Cupboard, Hobart, Opium, and Thuglit, among others. The 2004 recipient of the Connecticut Review’s Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize, Joe was also that year’s representative on the CT Poetry Circuit. Most recently, Joe served as editor-in-chief of Gulf Stream magazine, and as co-producer of Lip Service, a spoken word event in Miami, which was featured on NPR.

Perhaps my doctor didn’t try to get me pregnant, but he did ask when I wanted to have a baby.  He was insistent, not because I was getting old (I’m 32), but because my ovaries have problems.  I have polycystic ovarian syndrome, which sounds scary until you talk to your girlfriends and find out (most) everyone has it – your cousin, your aunt, Mother Teresa – everyone, at least, with a vagina.  Generally people with PCOS tend to be fat, hairy and acne prone.  I am not. Those are only the most common symptoms.  I have others, including ovulation problems that make it hard to get pregnant.  Not that I was trying.

There was a time, a few years ago, when I didn’t have a period for nine months.  I was at my skinniest then, and my doctor insisted I take a pregnancy test.  “But I’m not pregnant,” I said, patting my belly.

“Still, it’s protocol,” he said.

I looked from the doctor to my flat belly.  I pointed at it.

“It’s protocol,” he said.

“I’m gay,” I said.

“Still.”

So I did the pee test, mainly because they were also testing for other things – hormone levels, ingrown toenails, a vestigial tail.  Negative all around, except for PCOS.

So I’m gay and have screwed up ovaries and am in my thirties.  This convergence of issues makes it imperative that my doctor ask—every time I see him—if I want to get pregnant.  There’s something in the way he says, “Do you want to have a baby?” that sounds very unlike an invitation. I wonder what would happen if I asked him to be the sperm donor.

Unlike many lesbians—TV lesbians anyhow—I didn’t think I wanted children.  Typical TV lesbians are tall and pretty, have good jobs and like to have sex in front of men. When the network wants to flesh them out, they give them the let’s-have-children storyline.  Because lesbians can’t do anything else.  Because a lesbian who doesn’t want children (or to have sex in front of men) just isn’t a lesbian.  None of these lesbians are fat, hairy or acne prone.  They don’t have PCOS.  But they do have cats. I have two, one of which has a shrunken head, which I’m pretty sure is my fault.  I didn’t hex her or anything, but sometimes I forget to feed her, which, I think, contributed.

As much as I liked perfect lesbian-TV-mom hair, I was perfectly content to live without their storyline.  I did not want kids.  For most of my life I could see a baby and not coo.  I preferred cats. I couldn’t raise them worth a damn, but I preferred them.  And then my sister got pregnant.

I don’t believe in a biological imperative to have children.  Nor do I believe that if you don’t want children you’re somehow less of a woman.  And—belief number three—there isn’t a magical switch that flips and your desire for children is ignited, forcing you to see the faces of children everywhere and hear the sound of a clock ticking in your uterus.

A friend told me she always knew I’d want children.  I just had to wait—as if this desire were imprinted on my soul.  Too much mysticism; I didn’t believe.

But, also, I didn’t want to be a cliché.  I was already a lesbian with cats.  Add to that a desire for children and you get: token sitcom lesbian.  The producers might need laughs, and trot me and my very pregnant belly out to say things like, “I’m so horny I could sleep with a man.”

When my sister told me she was pregnant my voice rose octaves but all I could say was wow.  In hindsight, maybe a mystical transference of estrogen seeped down the phone line. Turn wow upside down and you get mom.

There was nausea and pickles, ice cream and back pain, but mostly the pregnancy went smoothly – until my niece went on a mission to be born early.  My sister was checked into the hospital, and put on all sorts of medication to stop the contractions.  My family prayed.

When I called, there was a vigorous thumping in the background and that could only mean one thing.  “Is that the baby?” I said, my eyes welling up.  My sister said Yes.  She was hooked to the fetal monitor and the sound I heard was my niece’s heart.  That was the moment, the turning on of the great mystical desire; the switch.

I love to watch my niece, I can stare at her for hours.  I love it when she falls asleep in my arms.  She gets fussy moments before, as if she doesn’t know how to get rid of that tired feeling.  It’s annoying and uncomfortable and her cry says to make it stop.  But then, finally, she falls asleep.  I hold her against me and feel her heart beat.

I’ve decided that if (when) I get pregnant I’m going to milk it for all it’s worth.  At any hour of the day I will bark orders at my family.  Get me an orange.  Get me a potato.  Get me a raspberry.  When they refuse I’ll point to my belly.  I will use my pregnancy to skip ahead in lines.  I’ll make complete strangers perform mundane tasks.  Open the door.  Make me dinner.  Drop and give me twenty.  When they laugh, I’ll say, “This isn’t a sitcom.”

I have yet to tell my gynecologist that I want to have children.  I’m afraid he might do something irrational, like hug and kiss and want to have sex with me.  Or maybe he’ll give me options—lists of sperm banks, fertility doctors, medication to get me ovulating.  All that is entirely too real.  Instead, I’m taking incremental steps.  I feed my cats every day.  I remember to brush my teeth.  I fold my laundry.

About the author:

I graduated from UC Davis’ writing program a few years back and am now living an absurdly normal life in Las Vegas. Very soon I’ll have an essay published at FreshYarn.com. More of my work can be seen at abbyasks.com

There are two doctors standing over me. They look the way people look in distant memories—hazy at the center, sharp and bright at the edges. They have auras. I know they are cutting into me; there is nothing else for them to be doing. The scalpel is curving along the skin of my chest, slowly, like a pencil in the hands of someone just learning cursive. I suppose there is blood. That is what happens when you break the skin.

(Several weeks from now, when I remove the bandage and see the stitches and scar for the first time, my face will go pale and I’ll have to sit down. “I look like Franken-nipple,” I’ll say.)

I keep pushing my tongue against the tube. I think of trees with rough bark: tulip, green ash, cottonwood, wild pear. I don’t know if I am breathing or if a machine is breathing for me. It’s hard to remember how old I am. I remember I had put the hospital gown on the wrong way, with the clasps at the front. The nurse laughed at me—not meanly—and told me what to do. But it still makes no sense that the clasps go in the back. Why make everything so hard to reach?

I know that I was eight years old when my grandmother died. My parents bought me khakis for the funeral, and a button-down. I was accustomed to jeans and oversized t-shirts, and so the finer clothes felt alien against my body, like the first night sleeping with new sheets. The funeral was a strange place for a child. Everyone seemed capable of such greater depths of sadness than I was, and I wondered if I was too young to understand or if I just wasn’t a very good person, if there was a piece of me missing. I remember my parents saying my grandmother would live on in our memories; they said the same thing about Susie, our Russian wolfhound who had to be put down after she turned violent and bit my cousin. But I could hardly remember Susie anymore.

I think of trees like I’m quizzing myself for a test. Basswood, sugar maple, black walnut, butternut—all with rough bark, good for climbing, good for getting purchase.

When I was a boy, gypsy moths infested the forests around my neighborhood. When we’d see the larvae climbing low on the pines and oaks, we’d kick at them until their little heads went squish. But there were so many of them shitting from up high in the branches that it sounded like rain twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes fisher cats would wander in from the deeper woods and hunt for a few days in our backyard. At night they made a sound like a child screaming.

It’s taking too long. I don’t know what they’re doing, but if I’m waking up it must be taking too long. I listen for the beep of a heart monitor—I watched the first five seasons of ER, and that’s how I’ll know if I’m living. They are leaning over my chest, squinting with their faces close like they’ve lost a contact lens. They must be cutting into me. Or perhaps they’re peeling back the skin and rooting around in there for whatever it is they’ve lost. OK, I want to say, time out. Let’s close up and finish tomorrow. It can’t be this important.

I was in a doctor’s office once. It was a few months ago, but I was a little boy. They’re cutting into my chest, so I had to go to a breast doctor. The waiting room was filled with old women with huge, sagging breasts and huge, sagging purses. Some had their old husbands with them. It was all dry skin and wrinkles. They were a million years older than me. Two million. Three.

And that’s when I realize that all saplings have smooth bark. Norway maple, chestnut oak, sassafras—all start smooth. The rough stuff comes later, if they survive the gypsy moths.

About the author:

Jake Wolff is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has appeared or is upcoming in Redivider, Fiction Weekly, Sou’Wester, and elsewhere.

My uncle squinted at the windshield. When he drinks, he reenacts this blind drive, squinting, tilting up his scarred chin, pretending not to see my mother, my cousins, or me sitting around the kitchen table, the milk crates on the porch. He leans close to his invisible wheel, his horned elbows butt my face, and I always laugh. My father sipped his beer and leaned out the window, navigating loudly—left left—watching for ruts, for dark things that could tuck under their wheels and upturn them. If the van began to roll, it would continue, the brothers folded inside, through the blue fog and down the mountain. “Who says things like that?” my uncle opens his black eyes wide to ask his audience, to prod my father’s shoulder. My father shrugs, rejoins “Who was right?” He smiles, closelipped, ashamed of his teeth. My father thought of this often, he thought of it now as a branch snapped under the tires and the van skidded. Foam splashed his wrist. Splinters struck his arms. His dogtags chimed. When the tires settled, he sucked his wrist and eyed his younger brother. “Learn to drive.” My father smiled, he smiles, his teeth dim in his beard.

The fire at the camp was fatter and longer-limbed than when they left. These are my father’s words, fatter, longer-limbed. His voice is gentle in his throat, cradled, so that I sometimes lean in to hear. I imagine his blaze in its flesh, its orange, its beckoning. Even my mother, who is a practical woman, tries to conjure the flames as she tells it. The campfire sits in my brain, and maybe in hers, as The Fire—none other as hot, as wild, as brightly burning. When my seventh grade boyfriend burns me with a lighter’s unimpressive tongue, I tell him this. He blushes, he walks across the football field and back to the school alone. The group of teenagers had swollen, too—at least a dozen clustered on tattered blankets, on the dirt. They weren’t surprised. Since the morning Mona caught Tom taking his bath in the lake, each night more appeared. Mona and Juan at first, then others whose names they didn’t learn. They had money—enough—from their month in Texas dust pumping gas and eating tinned beans, so they kept buying beer and the kids kept coming, and nobody from town asked them leave.

A tall boy broke from the trees with an armful of wood. He fed it to the fire piece by piece. The kids scattered, dancing back from the bright spray. My father’s pupils pinned their fleeing brown backs, the fluttering beneath their necks. He leveled his flat pink finger. Tom let the van coast to a stop. My father aimed and whispered a shot. Thirteen times. The dry pop of his lips, the glottal rush of breath. He crouched behind the window, steadying the fourteenth—the tall boy dusting his palms— in his sight.

He doesn’t say this, no one does, it sneaks through the story, heavyfooted; I don’t have to ask. My cousins climb over one another when he aims at us. Through lawn chair slats, beneath the tabletop, he chases us slippery and screaming to the edge of the pond, to the edge but never in, never where the bottom is muddy and the water is dark and children could lose themselves, their toes, to the rock-and-leather snappers. My father is bare-chested and enormous and he gathers us three under his humid arms, carries us back to our dinners. Just before my tenth birthday my mother, who’s never liked the game, clasps his finger midcock.

Six months later, Christmas, we watch a fifties Western in our pajamas while my mother’s at Mass; some dusty hatted anti-hero in a dark saloon peers over his whiskey, hand twitching at his holster, watching the world go by one body at a time.  “That’s how it is,” he says, his own hand pink and bloated at the knuckles. His candy cane’s reddened tip bobs at the screen. He’s excited, leaning over his knees, nodding rapidly. “That’s exactly how it is.” He turns to me, laughing, his hard palm warm on my head.

When he was finished, he swung a case of beer above his head and waved, relieved. The teenagers cheered.

Two boys and Juan trotted to the van. They grinned at my father and convened around my uncle, chattering as they helped him unload. Tom knew the same spattering of Spanish my father did: what they learned from the Mexican drifter they taxied across the river, from the toothy, bickering sisters who ran the registers at the Amoco.  But the teenagers had decided that he—darker and habitually silent—could be talked to. Tom stood in the back of the van, rooting quietly through the cooler, distributing Budweiser and hard packs of hotdogs to the boys below and nodding intermittently.

My father passed between them, shouldering the beer. Mona sat alone on a blanket near the fire. Despite the cold, her legs were bare to her chapped knees. Her tennis shoes cupped one another in the dirt. “Jimmy!” she called—one of the few English words she knew. He doesn’t say, he never says, but in the slow, soft way he says her name I hear how He loved the cinders in her voice, the way each word crawled from her in its own ash carapace. He hesitated, as if he couldn’t see her. He wanted to hear it again. “Jimmy!” She raised her skinny arm.

Mona was not a beautiful girl. Not nearly as pretty as Mommy, he says, and puts his mouth to my hair, whether she’s around or not. His chapped lips scratch my forehead.

His head in Mona’s lap, Tom whispers this, “his head in her lap, like a dog,” when I am seven and he is recovering from a fever  and my mother’s in the kitchen cutting cucumber wedges for snack, “like a dog,” my father reached into the case and tossed beer after beer into the air. The kids dove through the grass—wrestling over the beers. A few cans rolled into the wet-eyed dark; these, the younger ones chased. Mona giggled; muscles spools in her belly wound, unwound, against his ear. Since yesterday, she’d painted her toenails orange. Puckering, sucking on some sour thought, he taps my thumb. “Don’t ever use that. Must be the ugliest color they make.” I steal a bottle of Carrot Dream from the drugstore and sleep with it under my pillow for weeks, until the cheap seal cracks and I wake up tasting varnish. I wrap the bedsheets in two thick plastic bags before I throw them away. My mother asks what happened; I say I wet the bed, I cry. I cry honestly. My father secrets me under his  arm and walks me to the kitchen for breakfast, casting black glances at his wife who stands stiffly in her bathrobe, holding a  sack of trash at arm’s length. I am convinced he knows, that he can smell the orange, and I cannot look up from my milk.

A fat, waxy child folded on Mona’s blanket and sat near my father’s thigh. Wheezing, he studied his salvaged beer. My father watched a wing of ash flit onto his shoulder. It perched. An uncaught can whistled on its way into the fire, then exploded. My cousins demonstrate every summer, again and again. The blue flames—yellow smell. Juan and his friends ran back to the group, whooping. My father tipped his head and laughed. The child, still gulping air, darted after another lost beer, pumping his thick white arms to keep with the others.

Juan squatted next to my uncle, making and unmaking fists as my father kissed the cups of Mona’s collarbones, traced the curled fingers of her ribs, drew rings around her navel through her dress. Sometimes, my father caught Juan watching as she stroked his beard, the tangled hairs beneath his shirt. Her brother? Boyfriend? This, no one seems to know. My father alternates. He gets up from the table if I interrupt, if I ask “but last time…”, and then the rattling forks my mother quiets are all the story left. Brother, lover, it didn’t matter. Juan, like Tom, had a knife—and no gun. He stood a full head above my father, but his tendons strained too taut under his skin. Still an unripe nut. When he grew into a man, Juan would be strong.

Threads of the fog froze and fell. My father sat back as Mona wound her legs, tentacular, around his waist. My father is a shy man, won’t brush his teeth in public, won’t kiss my mother openmouthed if I’m close by. He says: “we sat on the blanket”, but he studies his bitten cuticles, Tom’s eyebrows bump around in his forehead, and my mother looks away. But I imagine. Mona touched the red welts the snapped branch left on his arms. She frowned, making the fretful “o” sounds girls make. I know the noise. I’ve made it myself, sitting on a blanket, undressing, undressed. She bent and kissed the air above the wounds. His fingers searched the scabs on her knees, the fuzz guarding her thighs. The brothers were leaving in the morning, headed someone new. Tonight, then. When the screams began, my father thought someone had thrown another can into the fire—the hiss, the detonation. He grasped the prickled skin on her ass and laughed.

Another scream.

Mona dismounted, clasping her skirt tightly around her. She spun away from the fire—toward the lake, the caves, the tunneled, discharging dark.

Tom’s hand crept to the knife in his pocket. The fire spat. My father rubbed his knuckles—which smelled like Mona— into his beard. He considered his rifle, hidden under a t-shirt in the van.

The brothers looked at one another, each gauging if the other wanted to get involved. They’d had messes like this before, stepping in where they weren’t wanted. They’ve got other stories. About girlfriends, boyfriends, wives in secluded places—the corners of highway rest stops, the midnight parking lots of constructions sites and abandoned buildings, patches of bushes or trees.  At first, they fought. But the Michigan man my father had to shoot in the stomach and the deep purple scar his beaten wife burrowed into Tom’s forearm taught them to be less zealous. So they studied each other in the fickle light. What to do.

Again, closer, the wailing.

The tallowy child began to cry. “Alejo.” Mona’s whisper was fierce. I can hear them both—the whimper, the reprimand. She opened her palms behind her. My father made room on the blanket as Alejo came close. She softened into sibilance and held the child’s hand. She offered her other to my father, and he took it. She felt her bones shift between his fingers, and he loosened his grip, then let go. He had no idea how to manage this hand.

The tall boy, the one who’d fed the fire, sat on his heels next to Juan. The two conferred, their dark heads bobbing. Solemn, they turned toward the crowd. Juan nodded, and the boy announced, “La Llorona.” My father mispronounces her: “Larona” Tom—“Leona”—is worse. They take her “weeping” from her. Mona pulled Alejo under her arm. The small ones crept in. There was suddenly no room on the blanket, and my father stepped out of the hot, whimpering mass.

My father didn’t understand. “Do you know her?” he asked, looking now at Mona (busy petting the children) and now at Juan. Juan studied my father, patient. “Do you know her? If you know her, let’s get her.”  Juan turned to Tom, his black eyebrows flat across his forehead, awaiting translation. Tom stared past them.

My father strode across the grass and towered he does tower, he rises like steel and glass and skin over the squatting boys.  “Do you know her?”

Juan stood. “Do you know her?” he repeated. He cocked his head, puzzled.

My father was abruptly very sure that Juan did understand him. That they all did. That there was some plan at work here—some ruse. He restrained the urge to feel the boy’s face crunch and wet beneath his hands. He retreated to the van. He felt Mona’s warm eyes follow him, he felt the small trembling hoard around her.

Inside, the screams faded. He surveyed their things. He knew precisely where he’d stashed the gun. He’d wrapped in a shirt and stuck it half-under the passenger’s seat. But in the van, the air was cold and clean and he did not feel the need to rush back. He was angry—with them, with her— he felt betrayed—by them, by her— and he needed to wait before facing it all with a firearm. He took a pair of jeans from the hotplate, folded them, and placed in his bulging duffel. He lifted the lid of the cooler and felt immediately satisfied. It was full for the first time in months, since they packed it in the back of this two hundred dollar van. Full, and with luxuries: a package of steaks, milk, a box of butter. They bought the steaks two days ago, but decided they’d wait until they left the mountains. They didn’t mind sharing their food (the Mexican had eaten with them for weeks), but there were too many teenagers. If they fed everyone even with potatoes and canned things, they’d go hungry until they settled long enough again to find jobs. The best they could do was the hotdogs, which Tom had bought by the case, and which my father—disgusted— wouldn’t touch.

The back door opened, and Tom’s sharp, dark face pushed into the van. My father sat on the mat they’d bought to wipe their feet on, but never did. He balanced his shotgun on his legs. He was drinking slowly from the carton of milk. “They’re terrified,” Tom said. “It’s some kind of ghost story.”   My father offered the milk to his brother. Tom drank, then refolded the lips, and tucked it in the cooler. “Some mother drowned her kid. Seems that now she’s looking for it.” Tom smiled. “But she’ll take anyone.”

My father tapped the barrel on his boot. “Did they tell you all this in English?”

“What? No.”

“Then you know a hell of a lot more Spanish than I thought you did.”

My uncle examined my father carefully. I’ve seen this look, this wary watching, as if waiting for something unpleasant to hatch. He watched the gun, the hands with their wiry hairs and their fidgeting fingers. “They acted it out for me.”

This felt plausible, and my father grunted softly.

Tom jingled the keys in his pockets. “They’re afraid to leave. I’m thinking I’ll drive.”

“All of them?”

“Two trips.”

“Let’s do this, first.” My father scooted past Tom and dropped onto the ground through the open door. He grinned. “It’ll be fun.”

The kids had gathered into a single group. My father heard Mona and Juan arguing. Their spindly arms gestured violently toward the van, down the mountain, toward the lake on the far side of camp. He dragged his gun behind him, drawing a trail.

When my mother tells this part, her favorite part, he’s a clown. He performs, for her. He cups his hand around his mouth. I see his lips, the chapped corners pulling. “La-roh-na” he called, singing each syllable. “La-roh-na. I have your ba-by.”

Mona and Juan stopped shouting. Mona broke from the rest. She rushed to him, calling his name, patting his shoulders with hot, frantic hands. “Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy.” She was crying, and strands of hair were caught across her face.

“La-roh-na. I ate your ba-by.” He continued, past the circle of firelight. She followed him, grasping his arms and pulling him back. He tugged her along, as long as she’d keep hold. They were almost to the lakeshore when Juan overtook them and wrenched her away. She struggled against her brother (her lover?), howling in throaty Spanish, her words like live things, leaping, raking. Juan took her hair and her wrist by the fistful, and my father continued toward the wailing caves.

He dug the barrel of his shotgun into the frozen grass. Beneath the ever-loudening Mexican ghost, he could still hear Mona’s susurrant cries. So much noise. He shouted into the blue fog, shouting it all down.

He had half-expected silence when he reached the caves. The ground was mossy, here, and he slipped as he walked down the sloping ground toward the orifice. This close, he could hear how the echoes built the sound, expanded it.

He fired one shot.

He heard the wind a moment before he felt it; he heard it collect in the chamber before it rushed him. He steadied himself. His eyes closed, he thrust his gun into the shrieking onslaught of air. He racked the pump until the gun rasped, emptied.

There was blood when he looked, but not much. This is what he always says—not much—for my sake, I think. My mother makes no similar concession. At his feet and just inside the cave, brown bats lay burst and twitching.  A massacre.  To the left of his foot, a bat spun, one-winged, “in a puddle of its innards”, my mother interrupts. She shows her crooked tooth, smiling. He put the hot metal mouth to his cheek. The caves were quiet. He lowered his foot and let the thing die.

At the camp, Tom stretched out on his sleeping bag, peeling black tinfoil from a potato. When my father slumped beside him, Tom cut it in half.

“You kill anyone?”

My father shrugged. “We’re leaving in the morning, right? So what’s it matter?” The skin of the potato scorched his tongue, but when he bit the center was cold and tasted green.  “You need to drive anyone home?”

“Ran off scared as hell when you started shooting.” Tom swallowed. “Mona chased you again.”

“She all right?”

He shrugged. “Juan doesn’t like to share.”

My father woke before dawn, so the story goes, when Tom touched his shoulder. The fire had burned itself out. A few gray logs slept in the pit, a few cans curled in the ash. The morning was cold, and it stunk.

“They even got my knife.”

“What?” My father propped himself on his elbows and asked it again. “What?”

Tom lifted his pillow and pointed to the empty grass. “Even my knife.”

My father searched the grass for his gun. No gun. He struggled out of his sleeping bag. The van’s back door was already open.  The van looked bigger, so much bigger, drained of their possessions. The cooler, the hotplate, the crate of canned food, their duffels were all gone. They had never lost so much, because they’d never had so much, but it was the not the first time or the last that their food and their supplies would entirely disappear.

My father cuffed his brother’s shoulder. “And how’d you let them get your knife? It was under your fucking head.”

Tom spread his fingers. “Maybe it was the ghost.” He punches my father flatknuckled in the leg and still insists, “the ghost.” My father shrugs his eyebrows. He peeled off his shirt and his pants, and he piled them under his shoes. “Watch these?” Naked, he crunched across the frosty grass toward the lake.

My father dug matches from his pocket, and he started to urge their last fire here to life.

I imagine what happens after, the ragged, unspoken end of the legend. A secret shimmers above me, in the smoke, while they laugh and pass their cigarette, while my uncle prods until my father stands, bellows “La-ro-nah. I ate your ba-by”, while my mother tips the last of her winecooler into our bonfire. My father shakes his head good-naturedly, touches my hair with his heavy hand.

My bedtime is blighted by a creature at the window, tangled curls and gaunt brown face, crouching in my closet, tapping from behind the drywall where she creeps with the small brown mice. I stage my bears like an army at the edges of my quilt and wait. There is rightness in her coming for me. I fall asleep sitting up to her lullaby, and I am surprised each morning when I’m alive. For years, I name her La Llorona.  Then I am sixteen, it is three am, and I am limping upstairs, lying down muddy, refusing to cry because my date, the asshole, isn’t worth it. And when the creature comes, I recognize her. I am her.  And I tell the story again.

Mona said his name. He didn’t turn around. He didn’t trust the noises in these mountains.  She said it again. She stood away from him, hesitating on the path. She was dressed in loose jeans and a long wool sweater. Her hair was pulled back from her face. He could see the bruises, the skin stuffed with blood.  One eye would open only a swollen slit. She held a thermos in her hands.

My father brushed the ash from his pants.

She offered him the coffee. He motioned to the ground, and she placed it where he pointed. He’d never seen her in the daylight.  The small dark hairs on her face.  The fragile ledge of jawbone. He noticed how young she was.  “What did he do to you?” How very young. “Can you understand me, Mona? What did he do to you?” My father did not bend to kiss her forehead, to smell her.

Mona scanned his face. She spoke to him in Spanish and then reached for his beard. Impossibly young. I tell myself that he— the man he was then, the man he is not now, furious and stricken and wild— He pulled away.

My father returned to his task. He struck another match and held it under the pyramid of sticks.  He heard her crying quietly behind him, but he did not turn.  When he was sure she’d left, he retrieved the thermos. The coffee was hot and pale and sweet, and he could not he can not bear it.

About the author:
Addie Hopes lives with her husband, their cats, and untidy stacks of books in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College and her BA from Sarah Lawrence College. She was a recipient of the Himan Brown Fiction Award for two consecutive years, and her most recent story will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Blood Orange Review. She teaches writing at Montclair State University.

December 22^nd I get this proposition. He’s bright, successful, and these days I don’t get propositioned all that…ever. The guy–David Welch–wants me to leave my family, come to NYC with him over Christmas and film him having brain surgery. A retired entrepreneur, David “pitches” the occasion as a cross between a “really cool road trip” and an artistic imperative.

Award-winning wood-engraver Rosemary Covey will be there. After his first surgery, David commissioned Covey to “break through the glass ceiling of words” he kept hitting in his blog. Rosemary’s sharp-cut prints hint at the dangerous pleasures of enmeshment.  She’s an ambitious person who nonetheless builds nests inside her loved ones. Both her themes and her presence strike me deeply. Last year, the artist agreed to let me document her relationships with her models. These are dramatic stories–Rosemary and the sadomasochists; Rosemary and the girl who died suddenly–but they’ve already happened. Rosemary’s relationship with a brain cancer patient doesn’t promise to unite me with my edge, but it’s happening NOW–a point in favor of the trip that David hammers home, “You can get my guts, my gore, shoot me naked. I don’t care.”

I’ve met David several times. He’s a guy who if he likes you he’ll introduce you as Kickass. Kickass artist, kickass Documentary Film Producer. He knows exactly what he wants, which is for everyone to document his brain cancer. David’s single-minded conviction is an antioxidant to my own scattered focus–a condition that’s worsened since I’ve had kids. Independent filmmakers don’t get paid for trips but David tells me this is “a once in a life time opportunity to raise awareness of brain cancer.” I hear “once in a lifetime opportunity to prove I’m a kickass documentarian” and I call my camera guy. When he tells me he has plans, as in Christmas, I begin looking for his substitute.

My husband, patron of my arts, says, “Do what you have to do,” a statement our children interpret as, “you have to stay with us.” Doing my best to be all things, I travel with my family on the 24^th to my mother-in-law’s in Florida. When I explain to “Nanny” that I’ll be leaving our Christmas vacation early, my five year-old pulls out the stops. “Mommy and David sitting in a tree….”; little brother joins her. Watching her grandchildren switch their hips, insinuating, Nanny sadly shakes her head. I won’t be shamed though.  At 4:00 AM on the 26^th, I kiss my little angels without waking them. “Good luck,” my husband whispers. We hug. I’m on my way.

The morning of the 27th, I’m in a tiny prep-room at NYU’s med center where in three hours David will have brain surgery “on an eloquent part of the brain.” Host with the Most David introduces “his” kickass artists to his kickass doctors. He distributes visual opportunities like appetizers. Meanwhile, the guests are documenting. David’s mother, Susan, writes down the doctors’ words. Mark, hired online for $500, is backed against a wall, filming; Rosemary, backed against another wall, sketches. I’m sitting on spare cameras piled on David’s cot–theoretically directing from off-camera. David’s dad, Jim, hides from us.

Between poses for the camera, David obsesses about his cancer blog, 38 lemon. It wins awards …and overwhelms.  David will change a doctor’s appointment without calling anyone. When Jim doesn’t show up to drive him, David calls him. “Come on, Dad, don’t you read my blog?!”

David begins grilling his mother about logging on for him tonight. “Do you know how to access Starbuck’s WiFi? ‘Cuz I’m concerned.” Nighty-clad, cameras sprouting from his head, he’s calling uncles for backup for the blog.

I don’t want my voice on film, but I can’t help observing: “David, I see it FEELS very important to you that your mother log on tonight.”  David stiffens. “It doesn’t FEEL important. It IS important. If I don’t log on they’ll think I’m dead.”

David’s dad sighs sharply. “He’s always crying about me,” David laughs; he identifies more with his mom’s detachment. Now I’m thinking, so, Jim cries? Sure, David’s surgeon, Dr. Kelly, known to be the best, has promised not to compromise David’s quality of life, but no one is denying there are risks. Slowed speech, an awkward gait, may be acceptable in the abstract–but when it’s someone you love–well, who can quantify? Jim is the only one in the room visibly distraught over the fact that his son’s brain will be under the knife at 3:00 PM. He’s got artists sketching, filming, writing down each shade of his fear–but no one here with whom to share it.

Logistics of his blog post aside, David himself is feeling fine. Doing a strip tease into his surgery gown, he jokes with the camera guy, “You getting this?” and with me, “My god, she’s blushing.” But then David’s gone in a flurry of blown kisses and we’re left in the public waiting room, five near strangers. In the absence of David the cheerful, overbearing host, another David looms: David the patient–vulnerable.  His absence and its implications impact each of us. When she isn’t sketching, Rosemary flutters, helplessly worrying about everyone else. Mark, a biting intellectual becomes a nice guy who likes movies. Susan strikes out with anecdotes, almost too witty for the stunned rest of us. Jim fogs over. And I turn heavy, slow.

We were told up front we couldn’t film the surgery. No one argues with this.  I’d acquiesced when they told us to stop filming in the public waiting room, but now Rosemary, Mark, and Susan point out that this is where the doctors announce surgery results.  This announcement will be a quintessential David moment, one he’d expect to see on film. My film is about Rosemary’s relationships, not brain cancer, but with the others’ eyes on me, I need to prove myself. Calling the hospital administrators, I launch a fight for increased clearance, for a “once in a lifetime opportunity to raise awareness of brain cancer!” Inside I’m crumbling; (that, I can’t forget). I tape myself, however, and on tape, I sound authoritative, upbeat. Almost like David.

After all my efforts, Dr. Kelly calls David’s parents to a private meeting to give them the results. They emerge sobered. A new mass lurks, but for now David rests stable. Dr. Kelly isn’t happy though. Susan, David’s mother, slices the air with words for that hospital administrator who called Dr. Kelly during surgery to get extra clearance for my film. For now she checks the anger she likely feels towards me. I’m her son’s guest; his surgery went OK.

But if it hadn’t? Seeing Jim’s sad face, I say, “I feel disgusting.”

I want to tell David’s parents, “I’m a parent too, I understand,” but the truth stops me. If I were David’s parent I wouldn’t want me here.

That night we film as Rosemary, flushing, recounts a tale of sacrifice, valor, and desire: Susan gave up her spot in ICU so Rosemary could photograph David. A nurse tried to throw Rosemary out; the artist prevailed. Meanwhile, David came to consciousness, rasping, “I want photographs.”  Abruptly, I decide this ends my filming here. I pretend I’m being single-minded, focused on my Rosemary-relationships theme. “Let David keep his guts and gore.” But I’m confused.  I look guilty of coercing hospital administrators, but I feel guilty of being coerced. Twins, Ambition and Fear have been driving me. And I’m not even sure they’re all mine.

Next morning, I stop in Recovery to say goodbye to David. He’s spelling his nurses’ last names; he’s still got it. Then he sees me without my camera guy or even Kodak.  Pointing to his catheter, to the tube draining stuff from his brain, he starts shouting, “you’re missing this!”

“David, I say, direct for once, “I’m right here. I see.”

And I do, in David’s eyes. He’s not persuading or flattering anyone, not proving anything. He’s living with brain cancer. This takes everything he’s got.

I cry, while David stares. When did he draw me to him? He smoothes my hair.  I feel tiny bones in his chest.

Those virtual lives that we create through our films, our art, our blogs? They are worth kicking ass for. They spark empathy, share our loss. But here is David’s heartbeat. And I’m sorry, David, I just don’t FEEL it. It’s a fact.

A million blogs, a million cameras won’t hold all there is to lose.

[After this surgery in 2007, David continued to press for documentation. In emails to me, Rosemary, and the dancer Meisha Bosma, he'd announce the discovery of another tumor, only to proclaim, "Let new art begin!" In March 2008, David won the James Elkin Humanitarian award for 38 lemon. By October 2008, however, his entries began fragmenting. In November 2008, David's brother logged on to explain that David had written his final words, "Face reality; confront end." David died in January 2009]

About the author:

Karen Sosnoski is a mother, writer, and documentary filmmaker living in Alexandria, VA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Identity Theory, decomp magazine, The Chaffey Review, Camroc Press Review, Yellow Mama, The LA Times, Poets and Writers, The Washington City Paper, and Bitch, among others. She has written radio stories for This American Life and Studio 360 and her film “Wedding Advice: Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace” is distributed by Berkeley Media. Currently, she is writing a book of narrative nonfiction, When Birdboy Calls, about the psycho-spiritual connection between brain cancer patient David Welch and artist Rosemary Covey.

November 2009
Kickass by Karen Sosnoski

October 2009
The Bright Night Effect by Jon Chopan
Fort Flagler, WA by Ben Loory
Brokedown in Oklahoma by John Washington

August 2009
On Words and Movement by Kara Mae Brown
The Invisible Hand Around Your Child’s Throat by Thomas Sullivan

July 2009
Drafts by Michael Dean Anthony

June 2009
Nixon Does Jiangxi by Christian Ames
Moving the Bed by Shaun El-Ters
Everything’s Relative by Kate Jordan
A Life Spent in What Is Now a Frivolous Profession by Larry McCoy

May 2009
Three Variations on Susan by Kirsty Logan
Late Night Q&A by Patrick O’Neil

April 2009
Ugly Woman as Elixir by Mel Bosworth
A Place Among Strangers by Mary Ann McGuigan
Because Once I Might Have Seemed Wild by Jenny Poore

March 2009
Updike of Ipswich by Andrew Coburn
Panties by Chloe Lunn

January 2009
The What If Drink by Celena Cipriaso
Sundowning by David Licata

November 2008
Chance by Stephanie Williamson

July 2008
Beyond the Amusement Park: Peace Corps Thoughts by Erin Anderson

June 2008
Good Scars by Rheana Murray
The Dream-Swallowed City by Matt Rager
Is writing trying to kill me?
my life before I’m a famous novelist by Charles P. Ries

May 2008
The Road by Gretchen Clark

April 2008
Too Much Wining by Mary Bowers

February 2008
GILLIGAN (A True Enough Story) by Andrew Coburn

January 2008
Looking Forward by Amy Monticello
I Can’t Believe You Don’t Remember That by Janice D. Soderling

November 2007
Sheena by Ryan Michael Commins

October 2007
A Reflection of Anything by Sylvia Shaul

September 2007
The Story in the Shoe Box by Kevin Ó Cuinn
Why the Grass Is Greener in Greenville by Aimee Caruso
A Searching and Fearless Moral Inventory of Apt. No. 704 by Jessica Wheeler

July 2007
Red Hair Day by Julie Stahl

May 2007
Lost in Shit by Noah Cicero

February 2007
Dreaming in Mink by Jane Hammons
Inching Closer by Jeremy Huggins

September 2005
How to Take the Train in Japan by Malon Edwards
How Bridges Span a Life by Jay Mouton
Looking for Home by Kevin Semanick

June 2005
Cesare by Fred Sengmueller
Porchbound by S. D. Stewart
Shooting Nudes by Jon Stone

May 2005
This Is Not My Story by Russell Heller
Scratch One Flattop by J. R. Salling

April 2005
July 24, 2004 by Lou Amodeo
How to Be Unhappy by Alex Keegan
Why I Stole Paperclips by Darby Kathleen Mitchell

March 2005
American Streets by Erin Anderson
How Mamie Till Bradley Showed the World What Mothers Do by Amy L. Hayden
Cells by Brian Hoffmeister
Ski School Dropout by Allison Landa

February 2005
A War Story by H. Palmer Hall
Running Shoes by Dominic Rehayem
Rome by Fred Sengmueller

January 2005
Obsession by Tammy R. Kitchen
Knitting with Grandma by Jenny Rose Ryan

November 2004
Shuffle Up (And Deal) by Susan DiPlacido
East of the Mountains by Camille Toutonghi
Lipstick in Southwest Iowa by Sean Underwood

October 2004
As if No One Were Watching by Zinta Aistars
The Curious Boy Carrying Cheese by Moses Iten
Walking the Dog, Watering the Yard: Doing Time in the New Neighborhood by Phip Ross

September 2004
The First and Last Time I Heard Coin-Music by Deborah Bauer
The Window by John Libertus
Bullshit by Denis Taillefer

August 2004
A Brief Ceremony by Frayn Masters
I Am Now Reduced to Burning Pellets in My Stove by Tom Sheehan

July 2004
The Power of Long Division by Robert Baker
Among the Vanished by G.L. Mind
The Collected Noses of Tycho Brahe by J. R. Salling

May 2004
Voyages by Mona de Vestel
7 Random Snapshots From My Life by Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz
Jail Time by Holly Robinson

April 2004
Yardley’s Brilliantine by Stephen Johnson
When Memories Begin by Charles P. Ries
Flash Fiction Contest by Word Riot
Milan Carl Liskart, Coalman by Tom Sheehan

March 2004
The Man I Killed by Marc B. Adin
You Can Take This Celery, Too by Jenny L. Collins
You say you want a revolution? by Jackie Corley
You Coming? by Sean Underwood

February 2004
One Night at Kinko’s by Andrew Culver
How I Grew Up by Greg Nigh

January 2004
Querida Abuela by Jennifer Filomeno
Kiln by Jeannette Harris
Struck Dumb by Valerie MacEwan
The Second Act by George Sparling

November 2003
A Boy Dies by Chance McLaren

September 2003
Blood by Karen Ashburner

August 2003
The Perfect Girl at the Aragon by Ted Bajek
Coin Free by Maggie Shurtleff
Corporate Zoology by Susan Winters

July 2003
Small Stones at a Window by Marilyn Abildskov
My Mom’s Mom by Tiffany Beveridge
Some Vacation: December 1979 by Michael Graber
Standing Before the Pearly Whites: When God and Dental Hygiene Collide by Rob Hunter
3 Creative Non-Fiction Pieces by John Sheirer

June 2003
Stranger Than Kindness by Lapo Boschi
Give Me Puberty Or Give Me Death by Victoria Bush
The Princess Complex by Linda Lacina
The Spire of St. Pierre by Tobias Seamon

May 2003
Wrangler Summer by Eilene Kuehnle
Taking the Wheel by Brenna McBride
The Seduction of America’s Coffee Culture by Therese Marie Pope

April 2003
Spring Planting by TG Browning
DC Cabs by Stacia J.N. Decker
Dogtown by Rodney Nelson
Moonlight Baths by Julie Wilson

March 2003
2 Creative Non-Fiction Pieces by Anike Robinson

February 2003
This Just In by Steve Almond
Take A Left by TG Browning
How the Internet Saved Short Fiction by M. Flaming

November 2002
Have Mercy on the House of Quek by Brian Ames
Just Before the Drop by David-Matthew Barnes

October 2002
Stumps from Space by TG Browning
Release by Joelle Fraser

September 2002
Caught Dead by TG Browning

July 2002
Coach by TG Browning

June 2002
Reflections on J.G. Ballard by Asim Rizki