Alex Luft

About the author:

Alex Luft is pursuing an M.A. in English at the University of Missouri, where he earned a B.J. in magazine writing in 2009. His forthcoming fiction publications will appear in the Barely South Review and Word Riot, and his journalistic work has been featured by multiple news outfits.

This apartment isn’t much. Just a place to stack the boxes I’ll never open, and the couch and the channel changer. It’s got a porch. And I sit out on the porch most nights. Look at the sky and watch the moon. And this is where my friend Kathleen Quigley comes to see me, after the bar is closed. Late at night is when she is wound up, ready to talk. She knows that she will find me there and that I will want to hear it, late at night, the two of us leaning into each other. Kathleen Quigley was a poet once and she could be again if there was anything to write about. Kathleen is supposed to get married in her lover’s grandmother’s wedding dress. Her lover is a man named Rip—it could be Buzz or anything sporty, but it’s Rip. His grandmother’s a large woman with large shoulders and a back like furniture. Kathleen will never fit that wedding dress. Kathleen is small with childish hips. She daydreams Emily Dickinson and talks to herself. But she loves her lover’s grandmother. The way that woman storms around her apartment, hating the world and shouting at the cat, strangling the dirty dishes in the sink. Kathleen understands the significance of the gift of the wedding dress, given to her by her lover’s grandmother on the fourth or fifth visit. It’s a huge dress, old European silk and lace with a six-foot train. The grandmother gives it to her in a shopping bag. Kathleen takes the shopping bag home and she shoves it into the closet, but it bulges the closet door so much that it bangs into Kathleen’s knee every time she walks by it.

Kathleen is thirty-eight and she’s been married before, to a man who was so bland that when he moved into Kathleen’s apartment the paint on the walls complained. This muttering sound that followed that whole marriage. Kathleen drives an expensive car, something low and sleek. She wears fitted suits and tight black skirts. She works for the American Medical Association where she takes men apart in board meetings daily. And she has no feelings about any of this. But when she comes home, it’s to the neighbourhood—Western Avenue—where Kathleen lives in a cheap apartment above an abandoned storefront piled high with somebody else’s furniture. The floorboards are warping and going in every different direction, and the windows don’t really fit the sills. It’s always cold in there. Kathleen has these two old dogs, dogs that love her. They can’t really make the park anymore, but the apartment has a yard, so that’s good.

Kathleen does her drinking at this bar around the corner. Good bar. No one watches television, good jukebox. Kathleen likes her vodka cold and that’s the way they serve it there. Kathleen and her first husband would sit in the window seat and Kathleen would draw these horrid little scenes from her childhood on bar napkins. One night Rip sits down next to her and he runs his finger up her thigh. She doesn’t notice. But when he follows her to the bathroom and hangs around waiting like he knows her, she takes him home. She forgets all about the first husband.

At first it was really good. Kathleen and Rip stay up all night telling each other stories, walking under the sky. Rip gets those two old dogs running like they’re puppies. Rip likes to shoot cocaine and Kathleen tries it. But she has migraines and it’s a bad mix. Their dates often end with Kathleen lying on the floor, overwhelmed with vertigo. And Rip is fuck-compulsive, a thing Kathleen hasn’t had a lot of—just going and going and going. Rip gets bored and starts twisting and turning her into positions she doesn’t like, fucking her up the ass, whether she wants it or not. He even tells Kathleen about the other women. Their names, their preferences. He lets her know that this will be part of their marriage.

Kathleen works on the wedding dress. Cutting, sewing. She puts it on at night and she stands in front of the mirror with the train draped over her arm. And she looks good.

One night Kathleen gets in the car and drives around the neighbourhood looking for Rip who hasn’t come home, and she finds him leaning against a dumpster with his pants down around his ankles. And she waits. She invites the prostitute to breakfast, offering to pay for her time. There’s not much to talk about. The prostitute is young, she has a cold. She’ll have the chicken soup, please. The weather is changing, men are bad and getting worse. Kathleen and Rip start to fight. Late at night. They don’t say much; just break the plates and the crockery. This frightens the dogs and they run up and down the hallway, pissing in the corners.

On the night before my friend Kathleen is to be married, Rip doesn’t come home again. Kathleen gets the grocery bag out of the closet and lays the dress out on the couch. In the morning, she puts on her sunglasses and her blue jeans. She shoves the dress back into the bag and shoves the bag back into the closet, and she walks over to the church. She doesn’t go in. She sits on the bus stop bench watching her friends arrive, Rip’s friends, her family, and finally her lover’s grandmother. That grandmother doesn’t go in either, she stands on the top step, looking at the sky. She knows her grandson, what a bad husband he’d be. And then that grandmother goes home.

Kathleen sells her car for a lot less than it’s worth. She gets a high school kid to take care of the dogs. She feels things crack around her, the sounds of things tearing as her world reshapes. She gets a room in a hotel in the Loop. She answers an ad for a carriage driver. She gets the job. She looks good in the uniform: top hat, tails, little whip. And she drives around, talking to the horses. After a few weeks, Kathleen forgets her name, where she lives. She senses something missing, like a tooth uprooted from the gum that left a twitching nerve hole. A hole she no longer wants to feel or remember. She had loved Rip but now, his face turning to mud in her memory, Kathleen wants none of him. She leans into the animal smell of the horse, the wind cold against her face.

The old dogs get lonely for her. They open the closet and pull the shopping bag out. They tear the dress to pieces. My friend Kathleen has seen crazy before; she knows that in most of us, crazy passes. She waits for this to happen and, when it does, she comes back home.

About the author:

Beau O’Reilly is a noted Chicago playwright, actor and director. He is co-founder of the Curious Theatre Branch, now in it’s 23rd year. Mr O’Reilly curates the Rhinocerous Theatre Festival, an annual festival of new work and is an adj.ass.professor at the School of the Art Institute Of Chicago, in the mfa writing program. In addition to having written over a hundred plays for the theater, Beau O’Reilly is a regular contributor to This American Life on National Public Radio. Mr O’Reilly sings and writes songs with the Crooked Mouth and led the seminal rock & roll cabaret band Maestro Subgum And The Whole during its twenty year run.

Tuesday night means we’re eating dinner at the kitchen table. Dad and I sit across from each other, an empty wooden chair on either side of us. I blow the steam off a bowl of mushroom soup while Dad dips celery sticks into a jar of Nutella. He chews with his mouth open. Nutella stains on his teeth make it look like he’s eating shit. ‘You still seeing that feisty redhead?’ he asks.
    ‘Don’t say feisty.’
    ‘So still seeing her?’
    ‘Yes. I’m seeing her.’
    ‘Kids your age don’t realize, but it’s possible to get a disease just by receiving head.’
    ‘I don’t want to talk about this.’
    ‘Herpes. Syphilis. Gonorrhea. Type them words into Google Images, and then come roll your eyes at me.’
    ‘Jesus, Dad. Okay.’
    ‘Being fifteen doesn’t make you invincible.’
    ‘I’m trying to eat.’
    He licks Nutella off the tip of a celery stick. Eyes shut; he moans in satisfaction. It feels like I’m watching disturbing fetish porn. He washes the Nutella down with a swig of beer.
    ‘How come you never bring the redhead over here anymore?’
    Because I hate it here. The air in our house smells like a rank armpit. There are Nutella stains on the doorknobs and couch cushions, and the downstairs washroom is a mess of mould, mildew, and pubic hairs. Plus, you embarrass me. You’ve gone batshit crazy, and I’m ashamed of you.
    ‘No reason,’ I say.

The redhead is Tess Gardener. Hair the colour of rust, freckles, pierced septum, sundresses in the spring. We do things with each other, but nothing too intense or sexy. It’s not like we’ve seen each other’s genitals or buttholes. We do take off our shirts though. Sometimes I’ll stick an ice cube in my mouth, and then I’ll suck and bite and taste her nipples. She likes when I do this, and always breathes hard, and makes sounds that remind me of goats. Afterwards we’ll kiss, sometimes for hours. She says my face is always bright red and shiny by the end of it. Then Tess will lick the sweat off my forehead and along the sides of my nose. It tickles, and leaves my face smelling like salty peppermint.
    I told her I loved her once. It was over the phone, but that still counts. She was telling me a story about this Goth girl at school who likes to cut her own thighs, and I was listening, trying my best to hold onto the words, but they still came out.
    ‘Tess,’ I said, ‘I love you.’
    She didn’t say anything at first. I listened to her breathe for a few seconds. ‘No you don’t,’ she said.
    ‘I think I do,’ I said.
    ‘No,’ she said.
    We hold hands and walk down the halls at school. I squeeze her hand too hard. She tells me I’m crushing her fingers. I squeeze even harder for some reason. She punches me in the bicep. ‘Dick,’ she says. I want to break her arms and legs. I want to push her around in a wheelchair, and kiss the top of her head, and tell her dark, twisted secrets that’ll make her think I’m interesting.

Casey Lynch is in my gym class. Today he’s wearing shorts directly beneath his pants. That way he won’t have to change in front of anyone. Guys have been making fun of a birthmark he’s got on the inside of his left thigh. The birthmark is big and brown, and my friend Max said it looked like diarrhea running down Casey’s leg. We thought Casey was going to start crying, because his lip trembled, so everyone started laughing and calling him a shit-legged faggot. It was really funny, and really sad.
    We’re lined up along one end of the gym. CPR tests. Casey goes first. He drops to his knees, seats himself on the backs of his heels. He turns his head to the side. His ear is an inch away from the mannequin’s mouth. He positions his hands, one on top of the other, starts pressing them into the mannequin’s chest. The foam pecks squish in and out. Casey pinches the mannequin’s nose, tilts its head back, wraps his lips around the mannequin’s mouth. Casey’s cheeks are pink and puffy. He blows.

I wake up to the sound of giggles: deep, demented giggles. It’s eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning. I walk downstairs. The floor smells like a portal potty. The giggling is coming from the living room. Dad’s lying on the floor, in his boxer shorts, with about a half a dozen bunny rabbits crawling all over him.
    ‘Dad,’ I say.
    ‘Look,’ he says.
    ‘They’re shitting everywhere,’ I tell him.
    ‘Language,’ he says.
    ‘They’re shitting all over you, Dad.’
    ‘Naw,’ he says. ‘It’s fine.’
    ‘Where’d you get all these?’
    ‘Down the street. A lady was giving them away for free. Can you believe it? Their feet will bring us good luck.’
    He rolls back and forth across the floor; his naked body squashes turds. He lifts the bunnies over his head, and rubs his face into their crotches. But it gets even more fucked. There’s a tripod set up in the corner of the room, and he’s recording it all on a digital camera.
    ‘What the hell?’ I say. I turn off the camera.
    ‘So cute,’ he says.
    ‘Make sure you clean up all of this shit,’ I tell him.

Tess says I need to start talking more, specifically to her parents. ‘My mom and dad think you’re retarded,’ she says. ‘You never say anything to them.’
    ‘What am I supposed to say?’
    ‘Anything. Literally anything is better than nothing.’
    ‘I try.’
    ‘Try harder, because they think you’re weird, and I can’t have my parents thinking I’m dating a weirdo. So if they’re talking about the weather, say something about the weather. If they’re talking about a television show, say something about television. If my mom gets a new haircut, compliment her fucking hair. Okay? It’s not that hard. Seriously.’
    I’m invited to the Gardeners’ for dinner. The food is served in small portions. A slice of chicken breast, some string beans, half a baked potato. Drink options include water or milk. I am almost positive they will serve a bowl of fruit for dessert.
    Tess is wearing a purple sweater and a black skirt. She’s sitting beside her kid sister Macy on the opposite side of the table. Macy is a tomboy. Cute kid. The same red hair and green eyes as Tess. It makes me wish I’d known Tess when she was just a little kid. I imagine us on a playground, throwing sand at each other and not caring.
    Mr. Gardener is seated to my left, Mrs. Gardener to my right. My palms are sweaty. I feel intimidated by Mr. Gardener’s moustache and Mrs. Gardener’s eyebrows. They pray before they eat. Amen. I’m about to put a string bean in my mouth when Mr. Gardener begins telling a story about a coworker of his who recently gave him several jars of homemade jam.
    ‘That’s lovely,’ says Mrs. Gardener. ‘I’ve actually given a lot of thought to doing that myself, producing homemade jams and all. The idea intrigues me.’
    ‘I tried some of Bob’s jam during lunch break,’ says Mr. Gardener. ‘Orange jam. Just delicious. Spread it across a toasted biscuit.’
    Tess kicks me beneath the table and I try to think of something to say. Options include a) My favorite kind of jam is raspberry jam, b) Do you guys prefer it when jam is chunky or smooth? c) Peanut butter and jam sandwiches are good, or d) Jam spelled backwards is maj.
    ‘Maj?’ says Mr. Gardener. ‘What exactly is maj?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I say.
    Mrs. Gardener looks at Tess. Tess looks at me. I look at my plate.
    Later I’m sitting on the back porch with Tess’s sister Macy. She’s showing me a Tupperware container filled with dirt and worms. There’s a kettle of steaming water in Macy’s hands, and she’s pouring the water onto the worms. They burn and bleed and die. Macy is laughing, and maybe I’m laughing too. Tess opens the sliding glass door and tells us dessert is ready.

I’m partnered with Casey Lynch in gym class. We toss a medicine ball back and forth. I can tell he’s gay by the way he throws it. His wrists are thin and flimsy. I can see the foot of his birthmark poking out the bottom of his shorts. His hair is long and blonde and feathery, and he keeps curling it behind his ears. I throw the ball to him. It slips through his hands. He has a difficult time picking it back up. I watch him bend over. He looks like a flat-chested girl.
    ‘Are you okay?’ I say.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘I feel a bit distracted.’
    ‘How come?’
    He tries rolling the medicine ball to me. It only moves a couple of feet. We let it rest between us.
    ‘I got fired from my job last night. My dad’s going to be really upset.’
    ‘I didn’t know you had a job.’
    ‘How would you?’
    ‘Where did you work?’
    ‘Canadian Tire.’
    ‘Why’d you get fired?’
    He looks at me. His eyes are blue and pretty. ‘Your friend Maxwell is a prick,’ he says.
    ‘Max is mentally challenged,’ I say. ‘How come you got fired?’
    ‘Do you ever do things that don’t make any sense?’ he asks.
    ‘No,’ I say.
    ‘Sometimes I close my eyes and run.’
    ‘Run where?’
    ‘Nowhere. I close my eyes, and run, run fast, run until I run into something. It gives me a rush, I guess.’
    ‘Why’d you get fired?’ I ask for the billionth time.
    ‘I did it at work. I was mopping detergent off the floor in one of the aisles. I don’t know why I did it, but I dropped the mop, shut my eyes, and started running. I sprinted into a display of vacuum cleaners and broke a ton of them.’
    I walk forward and pick up the medicine ball.
    ‘Do you think that’s weird?’ he asks.
    ‘Who knows?’ I say.

Dad complains his back is sore. Kidney stones. He’s been pissing them out for a week now. Worst part about it is he collects the stones. Dips his fingers into the bloody toilet water and picks them out. He saves them in a Ziploc bag. The bag is smeared with watery dick blood. The stones look like brown poppy seeds.

I call my mom on her birthday.
    ‘It’s me.’
    ‘Sweetie! How are you?’
    ‘Happy birthday.’
    ‘Aw. Thank you. Your mother’s getting up there, isn’t she?’
    ‘Big plans?’
    ‘Nothing too exciting. Steve’s taking me to a club tonight. Can you imagine? Your mother dancing at a club? Hilarious.’
    ‘How are Steve’s kids and all?’
    ‘Good. Everyone’s great. The twins are good. Little Zachary’s smoking cigarettes now. Steve’s not too happy about that, but what can you do, right? Boys will be boys.’
    ‘Isn’t Zach twelve?’
    ‘Turning thirteen in a couple of months. You believe it? Life is short, goes by like a bullet. You kids grow up too fast. Seems like yesterday you were popping out my –’
    ‘Jesus, Mom.’
    ‘Blasphemy, Sweetie. Try to watch that. Now tell me. How’s Jerry doing?’
    ‘Dad’s fine.’
    ‘He’s been feeding you?’
    ‘I’m fifteen. I can feed myself.’
    ‘An apple a day keeps the cancer at bay, Sweetie.’
    ‘Yeah. I know.’
    ‘Now listen. Your father’s been emailing me some very peculiar videos. You know what I mean?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Him playing with bunnies in his underwear? Very unsettling. I’d like you to ask him to please stop sending me them. I will no longer watch them. Will you tell him that for me?’
    ‘Sure.’
    ‘Thanks, Hon. Now I really should get back to work. Thank you so much for remembering to call me. Such a good boy. I love you.’

It’s late. I walk past dad’s bedroom. The TV is still on. An infomercial for an exercise machine. Dad is sleeping. The lights are turned off. Dad’s round face is washed in an orange glare from the television. The nightstand is a clutter of empty brown bottles. There’s a pillow beside Dad’s head, the Ziploc bag of kidney stones rested atop it as though The Kidney Stone Fairy might come exchange it for money. I walk into the room and turn off the TV. I steal the bag of kidney stones and replace it with a five-dollar bill.

I tell Tess about my father. We used to go camping at Port Woodlot when I was just a little kid. We’d fish and hike and swim in the lake, and my dad used to be really interested in photography, so he’d always be taking pictures of the trees and the water and the animals. Snakes. Lizards. Squirrels. Raccoons. I remember one time he took this picture of a toad. A humungous toad. It was on the white rocks near the shoreline, just sitting there, totally relaxed. I was obsessed with the picture of that toad, so Dad got it developed for me, black and white, and he put it in a thin wooden frame. He hung it up in my bedroom. It’s still there, above my computer desk.
    I don’t think Tess is listening to me. She starts talking about her own father all of a sudden. She says Mr. Gardener molested her when she was six. She woke up in a bathtub one morning, and her pussy hurt, and there was blood in the water, and Mr. Gardener was sitting outside the tub, naked, and smoking a cigarette.
    ‘Jesus,’ I say. ‘Tess.’
    She starts laughing. ‘Naw,’ she says. ‘I’m just shitting you.’
    a) That’s horrible! How could you joke about something like that?
    b) Ha-ha-ha. Aw, Tess. You crack me up sometimes.
     c)Wait. I’m confused. So you didn’t get raped? That was an awfully detailed lie.
     d)‘…’
    I turn my head to the sky, to hundreds of stars. All of them are white, and bland. I’m not familiar with any constellations. I wish I knew how to talk to Tess, but I don’t. I feel small, insignificant when I’m with her, like a slug crawling beneath a butterfly. I keep hoping her fingers will close on my hand. I want to feel them press between my knuckles, fit inside the grooves.

Casey invites me over to his house after school. He lives on Spruce Avenue, only a few blocks away from my street. His home is a lot smaller though. A square bungalow. The inside smells like dogs and lemons. The walls and the carpets are all different shades of yellow or brown.
    He introduces me to his mom. Her name is Edna. She’s nice, but dumb. She keeps asking me questions without even listening to any of the answers. Her voice is mousy and her skin is chalky. She pours us each a glass of milk. She bakes us cookies. She burns them. The kitchen fills with gray smoke. She hands us each a butter knife to scrape off the burnt bottoms.
    Casey’s bedroom is in the basement. Small, just like the rest of the house. Walls are the colour of honey mustard. There’s a bed, a computer, a stack of skateboarding magazines, dirty socks, a volleyball, a flare gun, a reading lamp, a bag of pills, and a construction helmet.
    We sit on his bed for a while, listening to music and eating the burnt cookies. Then Casey turns on his computer. ‘Come here,’ he says. I walk up behind him. He’s wearing a white t-shirt and tight navy jeans. There’s a picture of Bruce Lee as his desktop background. He clicks on a folder labeled Geography Notes and there are several video files inside. ‘You want to see something really disturbing?’ he asks me.
    ‘Okay,’ I say.
    ‘This actually happened,’ he says.
    A man is on his knees, hands tied behind his back. There are four other men standing behind him. They have turbans wrapped around their faces. Three of them hold guns; one of them carries a chainsaw. The man on his knees is crying. He says the date. One of the other men holds a newspaper in front of the crying man’s face, and the crying man reads a few of the headlines. Then they cut off the crying man’s head with the chainsaw and hold it in front of the camera.
    ‘Did you hear the gargling?’ Casey asks me.
    ‘Yeah,’ I say.
    ‘You think it’s disturbing?’
    ‘Why’d you show me that?’
    Casey goes upstairs to get a pizza his mom made us. I sit at the computer and play Tetris. He comes back a few minutes later, carrying the smell of burnt crust and cheese down with him. He puts the pizza on the bed. He stands behind me, watching me play the game. ‘You’re good,’ he says. I get game over. Casey asks if he can show me something on the computer. He reaches one arm over my right shoulder and begins handling the mouse, then reaches his other arm over my left shoulder and starts working the keyboard. He’s practically hugging me. I can feel his lips pressed against the back of my head. He’s kissing me, and his mouth keeps opening, and I can feel him eating my hair. Then his face lowers, and he’s kissing the back of my neck.
    ‘What are you doing?’ I ask him.
    He pushes away. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Can you leave now? I’m not feeling well. I want you to leave now.’

The recycling bin is full of bottles. I think Dad might be getting normal again. I’m not sure what did it. Maybe someone threatened to fire him at work, because he’s back to wearing daytime clothes, and bathing. Plus, he gave away most of the bunnies. Only kept two of them: Chubby and Skyler.
    ‘You going shopping this weekend?’ I ask him.
    ‘What do you need?’
    ‘I need someone to Febreze the hell out of this place, because it stinks in here.’
    ‘I can do that,’ he says.
    ‘Thanks.’
    We’re eating dinner in front of the television. Margarine on bagels, sliced cucumbers, fries. Dad also lets me drink as many beers as I want. By now the room is starting to spin and everything seems funnier than it is.
    ‘I talked to your mother,’ he says.
    ‘Really?’ I say.
    ‘Well, sort of. She emailed me. She saw something that reminded her of me and she wanted to tell me about it.’
    ‘What was it?’ I ask him.
    ‘What was what?’
    ‘What did she see?’ I ask him.
    ‘Nothing you’d understand,’ he says.
    I feel tipsy, lightheaded. My fries are cold. There wasn’t any ketchup left, so the taste is plain. Dad uses mayonnaise. I watch him pour soy sauce onto his cucumbers. Drenches them in it. The green turns golden brown.
    ‘You want to hear a story?’ he asks.
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘I found a wallet on the backend of a toilet a few days ago.’
    ‘A toilet?’
    ‘At a gas station.’
    ‘Was there money in it?’
    ‘A lot.’
    ‘How much?’
    ‘A helluva lot.’
    ‘What did you do?’
    ‘There was a driver’s license, so I looked up whose it was. Found him in the phone book, called him, and met him. I returned his property.’
    ‘Was he thankful?’
    ‘Of course. He was real happy. Even offered to buy me a drink, but I didn’t have time. Appreciated the offer though. Made me feel appreciated. I’m glad I was the one that found the wallet, because I suspect a lot of other people would’ve just kept it for themselves.’
    ‘Probably. How much money was in it?’
    He dabs the mayonnaise off his lips with a crumpled napkin.
    ‘It’s important to be good to people,’ he says.
    ‘I know.’
    He doesn’t look at me.
    ‘You’re my boy,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to be one of the good ones.’ His face is cracking. There are lines I’ve never noticed. I finally see how tired he is.
    ‘I’ve had a rough year,’ he says.
    ‘I know, Dad.’
    ‘It feels good to know my boy’s one of the good ones.’

I’m on top of Tess. My waist between her thighs, she’s biting my shoulders. The couch in her basement is a gray futon. It feels like we’re dry humping on a patch of stormy clouds. She’s wearing a Metallica tank top, gray sweatpants, and her hair is so red and pretty it burns everything inside of me when I look at it. I pull on the collar of her shirt, stretch it out, pull on her bra, start putting her boobs in my mouth. She smells like cherry candy. My guts twist like pretzels. I start to cry.
    ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘What’s the deal?’
    I’m pressing my face into her stomach so she won’t see me. The tears soak into her shirt. She tells me to take off her pants and underwear. I do it, and I’m crying, and she has more pubes than I expected. Legs spread apart. Her pussy looks like a Venus flytrap.
    ‘Talk dirty,’ she says.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Call me something awful.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Do it.’
    ‘I don’t want to.’
    ‘Quit crying.’
    ‘You’re a bitch.’
    ‘Is that all?’
    ‘Bitch-cunt. You’re a cunt. I’ll bunt you in the fucking cunt.’
    ‘You’ll bunt me?’
    ‘With a bat.’
    We don’t have sex because I can’t stop crying. I just love her so much it makes me feel completely crazy and incredibly sad, especially since she won’t love me back. I try to hug her but she pushes away. We sit up on opposite sides of the couch. I try to say something important. I need her to know I’m not as simple as she thinks. I ask her if she believes in God. She laughs and tells me not to be a fag.

Maxwell Mior and Ollie Burns and Jim Danko and I are all standing along the front of Casey Lynch’s driveway. It’s two o’clock in the morning. We’re dressed in all black; shirts, pants, ski masks. I feel like a ninja. Each of us is holding onto our own carton of eggs. Max points to a window next to the garage and asks if that’s where Casey sleeps. ‘No,’ I say. ‘His room is in the basement. Just aim wherever.’
    Max counts us down.
    Three…two…one…
    Forty-eight eggs lasts us about ten to fifteen seconds.
    After that we’re running down the street as fast as we can. I’m the only one who keeps his ski mask on. It’s difficult to breathe inside of it, but I don’t care. It feels like my face is on fire and I like it. I run faster. My muscles burn. I feel completely fucking reckless right now. I sprint. My legs are unable to keep up with me. I stumble to the ground, scrape my arms against the pavement. Gravel sticks to the blood. I start screaming. Not because I’m hurt, but because I can I can I can. Screaming, and soon the other guys are screaming with me. It’s like we’re the only four people left on earth, and we scream out for help, to God, or to aliens, or to whatever else assholes believe in.
    Lights turn on in some of the houses. We stop screaming and continue to run.

The phone rings on a Sunday morning.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Hey. I need to talk to you.’
    ‘Tess.’
    ‘I need to talk to you right now, in person. You dressed?’
    Her voice is cold and I shiver. It feels like spiders are on the back of my neck, slowly creeping down my spine. I look at a picture of Tess I’ve got on my nightstand. She’s wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and big purple sunglasses. Her tongue is stuck out and she’s flipping the bird.
    ‘Do you need to tell me something bad?’ I ask.
    ‘Yeah.’
    I keep looking at the picture as if it’s what I’m talking to. I love you, Tess. Quit flipping me off. I want to break your fucking fingers. I want to hold you beneath blankets and fall asleep forever.
    ‘Tell me now.’
    ‘I really think we should meet in person.’
    ‘No. Just tell me.’
    She says she doesn’t know how to say it. Then she says it. ‘I cheated on you.’
    My eyes hurt. It’s hard to keep them open. I feel something blocking my voice, like wet packs of sand clogging my throat. Inhale. My stomach feels like I’m about to shit it out of me. Exhale.
    ‘Did you have sex with him?’
    ‘No. We only made out.’
    ‘For how long?’
    ‘What does it matter?’
    ‘How long?’
    ‘I don’t know. A long time, maybe. An hour?’
    I hang up the phone. It feels like my lungs are collapsing into my guts, so I sit on the edge of my bed and search for air. Breathe. Just breathe. I stand up, run toward the wall, smash my forehead into it. My neck hurts. I start punching the wall until my fist breaks through it. There are cuts on my knuckles but I can’t feel them.
    I call Tess back.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Yeah. Maybe we should meet up.’
    ‘Okay. Can you come here though? I can’t leave my house right now.’
    ‘Are your parents home?’
    ‘No. Only Macy. That’s why I can’t leave.’
    ‘Okay. Be there in fifteen minutes.’

The air smells like barbeque smoke. No clouds. Grass in front of houses is parched, brown and yellow. I walk. I breathe. I daydream. I think about my mom for some reason. I remember when I was just a little kid; she used to wear her hair up in a blonde beehive. It reminded me of yellow cotton candy. I’d pick at it, stab my fingers into the tresses. She told me my hands better be clean.I also remember waking up in the middle of the night with growing pains. My legs would throb, and I’d call out for help. They took turns coming to see me, sometimes Mom, other times Dad. I preferred it when my mom came though. She would rub my legs and sing ‘Rainbow Connection’ and sit beside me until the pain disappeared. And the pain always did disappear, because Mom was magic.
    Dad wasn’t magic. His hands were so big and rough and warm, they made my legs feel like they hurt even more. I’d have to pretend to fall back asleep so he’d go away.

I arrive at Tess’s house. I knock on the door. There are cuts on my hand and a bruise on my forehead, but the only thing that hurts is my stomach. She opens the door and steps outside. We’re standing on the front patio. Her arms are wrapped around herself, like she’s cold, but it’s hot out.
    ‘Hi,’ she says.
    I don’t say anything.
    Her hair is dry and flat and I prefer it this way. She’s wearing a white tank top and torn jeans. There are fluffy pink slippers on her feet. If I wanted to kiss her she’d let me.
    ‘Who did you cheat on me with?’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Ryan James.’
    ‘Who the hell is that?’
    ‘He’s in my Media Studies class. He’s older.’
    I try to imagine what he looks like but all I can picture is an anus.
    ‘I don’t even like him,’ she says. ‘And we were high, if that makes any difference. I know it doesn’t though. There are no excuses.’
    Children play road hockey in the street in front of the house. Their rollerblades purr against the cement. It reminds me of being young and dumb and oblivious, back when I drank chocolate milk and it was easy to fall asleep at night.
    Tess can’t even look at me.
    ‘Look at me!’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You’re a miserable cunt. A slut. A fucking germ farm. And you were never nice to me. Go choke on a dick and die and get raped by a million dicks in hell you bitch.’
    I turn and start walking down the steps of the porch. The front door slams behind me. Then I hear the scream. It’s sharp enough to cut into my skin, echo through my veins. I run back up the steps, start pounding on the door. ‘Tess!’ I yell.
    The door opens a few inches.
    ‘Tess. What the hell was that? Are you okay?’
    ‘I just had to let something out of me,’ she says.
    ‘Open the door.’
    It opens. Her skin is white and she’s shaking. She starts crying.
    ‘Tess,’ I say.
    ‘What do you want?’ she says.
    ‘Don’t cry.’
    ‘What do you care? Just go.’
    ‘I can’t leave you crying.’
    ‘I always fuck everything up,’ she says.
    ‘Me too,’ I say.
    She walks into my chest and waits for me to wrap my arms around her, which I do. I hold her until her body stops trembling. She dries her eyes on my neck. I tell her I’m sorry for what I said. She tells me to never let go of her, but I do. I let go. Her body doesn’t smell good to me anymore. She enters the house and I walk back home.

A pink glow wraps around the sun. Dad is grilling sausages on the barbeque. He’s wearing work pants and a golf shirt and he shaved off his beard recently, so he looks about ten years younger.
    ‘You look good, Dad,’ I tell him.
    ‘You think?’
    ‘Yeah. You actually look a lot like me now.’
    ‘Your mother used to say we make the same expressions.’
    The bunnies are playing on the grass. I wonder if they’ll screw and make more bunnies eventually. Dad walks over to them and starts picking them up.
    I’m sitting on the steps of the deck. Ants crawl across the wood. I’m wearing shorts and the sun feels good against my legs. I wonder what Tess is eating for dinner.
    Dad calls me over. ‘Come see this,’ he says. He’s standing beside the garden next to the chain link fence. I take off my socks and walk over to him. The grass feels warm and prickly. ‘Look,’ he says, pointing at the soil. An anthill sticks out from the ground like a bruise.
    ‘Aren’t you supposed to spray them with something?’ I ask.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘They’ll kill the grass.’
    Dad smiles. He unbuckles his belt.
    ‘What are you doing?’
    He unzips his pants, pulls out his dick and starts pissing on the ants.
    ‘Dad,’ I say.
    No response. His piss smells like coffee. I check to see if the neighbors are watching. Then I walk back to the deck and check on the food. The meat looks ready. I call Dad. ‘One minute,’ he says. He’s putting himself back inside his pants. I sit back down on the porch. There’s a splinter of wood peeling off one of the steps. I press my hand against it. There’s blood on my palm now. I pick up a bunny and have him nibble it off for me.

‘Hey.’
    ‘Hi.’
    ‘I egged your house.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘Did it take long to clean?’
    ‘Not really.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    …
    ‘Do you hate me?’
    …
    ‘Casey?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘You’re a loser. Everyone who goes to this school is a loser.’
    ‘Do you hate me?’
    …
    ‘Do you want to hang out after school?’
    …
    ‘Casey.’
    ‘I do hate you.’
    ‘Do you want to hang after school? I’m sorry.’
    …
    …
    ‘Fine.’

It’s late, or early. Two o’clock in the morning. I’m standing in the middle of the street outside Tess’s house. The light in her bedroom is off. The blue curtains are black. I shut my eyes. I start walking. My heart rate quickens until it feels like a drum roll. I run. My eyes are shut and I’m running. Sneakers slapping against the pavement. The air is either cool or warm, but it smells like nothing. I will run until something stops me, blocks me, stands in my way. The sound of a car in the distance. A dog barking. A garage door closing. My mouth stretches until I’m smiling, breathing fast and loud. I will run forever, if that’s how long it takes to get to where I’m going.

Mark Jordan Manner

Mark Jordan Manner is currently a student at York University where he received the 2011 President’s Prize for Fiction. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ricepaper Magazine, Bartleby Snopes, Untoward Magazine, Red Lightbulbs, among others, and his story ‘Poem About Writing A Poem’ recently earned 1st place in Bartleby Snopes Third Annual Dialogue Competition. His writing lives here: markjordanmanner.blogspot.com. His music lives here: meandtheinfinitelovely.bandcamp.com.

It was my fault the wall fell on Jimmy. I had tripped on the support stud and tore it free of its base, all two hundred-sixty pounds of me windmilling off the foundation just in time. The fall to earth played hell on my elbow, but I didn’t worry about it as I helped lift Jimmy’s limp body off the cement and carry him to Steve’s pickup. Jimmy and I had been good friends since the sixth grade and I sincerely hoped I hadn’t killed him.

I hadn’t. The doctor at the emergency room came out and told us there was some minor bleeding on the brain and they were going to keep him overnight as a precaution. I asked about the lip chewing and tottering and the doctor patted my shoulder and said it wasn’t uncommon for a concussed individual to exhibit signs of disorientation, and that everything should be fine and that I should go on home and get some sleep.

I didn’t sleep much. My elbow hurt. Plus I worried about Jimmy. His parents died when he was a teenager and his wife left him for a chemical engineer and he didn’t have anyone to be at his bedside. In the morning I went to the hospital and was told Jimmy was in good condition and would be released in a matter of hours.

Jimmy was awake and watching television. His nose was roughed up but otherwise he looked fine. He saw me and smiled on one side of his face, like normal.

“Hey, Al, what’s up.”

“You are, pretty soon,” I said. “They’re letting you go, buddy.”

“Cool beans,” he said. Again, perfectly normal: Jimmy was the master of the outdated comeback.

I sat in the chair next to his bed and watched sports replays. An orderly came in to collect Jimmy’s breakfast tray. He was a tall, skinny kid with an exaggerated strut and pants down around his hips.

“What goes on,” said the orderly, and I nodded. He collected the tray and turned to leave.

“You need to pull your pants up,” said Jimmy. “No one wants to look at your drawers. You’re embarrassing yourself and most likely your family.”

He said this all very matter-of-factly, as if simply reciting facts, which I guess he was. But this wasn’t Jimmy. The Jimmy I knew was exceedingly polite, a mind-his-own-business type of guy.

The orderly reversed course and said, with considerable attitude, “Say that again?”

“I said you need to pull your pants up,” Jimmy repeated, still without inflection. “No one wants to look at your—” At this point I rose from my chair and waved him off.

“Thanks for the tray,” I said, filling the kid’s sightline with my bulk. “We’ll call if we need anything else.”

After, I expected Jimmy to acknowledge the confrontation, perhaps even deliver a punch line, but instead he returned his attention to the sports replays. Then he pulled a bloody cotton plug from a nostril and held it up for observation.

“About the size of your dick, hey Jimmy?” said Steve, entering the room with Garth in tow. Steve was the clown of our crew and especially enjoyed ribbing Jimmy, seeing as how Jimmy embarrassed easily.

But not this time.

“Wrong,” said Jimmy. “It’s roughly twice that, like so.” He held his index finger and thumb about three inches apart, no irony in his expression whatsoever.

To which Steve and Garth looked at each other wide-eyed and broke out laughing.

“Don’t tell me Jimmy woke up with a sense of humor,” said Steve.

“Jimmy woke up jonesin’ for a cigarette,” said Jimmy, and I thought: Well, he still smokes.

We small-talked for a bit until Garth, the foreman, said they had to get back to work. I told him I’d be back after getting Jimmy settled at his apartment. Both men shook hands with Jimmy, but then the nurse came in and Garth and Steve decided to stay put. She was a tall brunette with an easy way about her.

“How you fellas doing today?” she said, and we told her. The nurse went about checking Jimmy’s vitals and unhooking his IV, at one point dropping a roll of tape and bending over in front of Jimmy to retrieve it.

“You have shapely breasts,” he said. “My wife was a double-A cup. And her pussy was always dry.”

The silence was epic; even Steve was speechless. The nurse stood and glared at Jimmy, but his face was blank, as if he were back in geometry class.

The nurse flipped the tape in the air. “You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” she said, and stormed out, offering more choice words along the way.

Steve was talk-laughing into his hands, scrubbing them up and down crazily. Garth leaned close and whispered in my ear.

“He’s not right.”

“What do you think?”

“It’s like he can’t do the bullshit. Lost his filter or something.”

“What are you whispering about?” said Jimmy.

“Your wife’s cooch,” lied Garth, and Jimmy laughed like he always laughed and said, “That’s the funniest thing you’ve said in the four years I’ve known you.”

We bantered some more, and then Garth and Steve left, and another nurse came in, a beefy, square-jawed specimen who glared as if daring Jimmy to make another smart-ass comment. I got him checked out, filled his scripts in the first-floor pharmacy and drove him home. On the way I searched the radio for the country-western songs he favored, but Jimmy told me to stop on Aretha Franklin.

He sang without reservation. “What you want, baby I got it …” Jimmy had a high-pitched voice and I had never heard him sing before, at least like this. He was really into it, making elaborate hand motions and bobbing his head and whatnot, and pretty soon I had joined in with the backup vocals (“sock it to me sock it to me sock it to me …”). When it was over Jimmy lit a cigarette and said that was one of the five best songs of the twentieth century, and I found myself agreeing despite my heavy metal leanings.

I hit the drive-thru for lunch. “How about some real food?” I said, but Jimmy just wanted coffee. I ordered enough for two and dug into my first bacon cheeseburger, complementing it with mouthfuls of fries and gulps of cherry cola. It was a beautiful summer day and Jimmy sipped his coffee and smoked his cigarette and sang along to the Commodores as he stared out the open window.

I was unwrapping my second burger when Jimmy turned down the radio. “Your eating’s out of control,” he said flatly. “You’re a prime candidate for cardiac arrest: obesity, family history, sedentary life style.”

I decided to test him. “And those cigarettes you smoke? Each one takes, what, seven minutes off your life?”

“Is that what it is?” he said. “Seems high.” Nonetheless, he crumpled the cigarette pack. “Quitting’s a bitch, isn’t it Al?”

I agreed it was and dropped the burger in the bag. We were a half-mile from Jimmy’s apartment. An old Michael Jackson song came on and Jimmy cranked it up and went into his routine. His moves were fluid, actually quite impressive, yet watching him I couldn’t help but remember how we used to ridicule this stuff as a group of adrenaline-charged jocks.

As he swiveled his hips, Jimmy grimaced and put a hand on his crotch.

“Rubbed myself raw last night,” he said. “All those drugs, it took hours.”

It was hard not to smile. “What about the nurses?”

“What about them?” he said, and looked at me with genuine curiosity. I shrugged as if to say, stupid question.

“I masturbate to your sister,” said Jimmy. “Every night. I’ve had a thing for her since my freshman year.”

I pressed a knuckle into my forehead and pulled into Jimmy’s parking lot. Cheryl was three years older than us. She used to prance around in her bikini with her cheerleader friends as Jimmy and I shot hoops in the driveway. I guess I should have seen this coming.

“I called her from the hospital room,” Jimmy said. “I’m taking her out this weekend.”

I thought of the grownup Cheryl, divorced, two kids, the way she would talk about Mr. Right coming along. I wondered how she’d feel about Mr. No Bullshit.

“Listen, Jimmy,” I said. “When the wall hit you … you know, I’m just thinking you should give this thing some time.”

“There’s no time like now,” he said, and smiled on one side of his face, the way he did.

I looked out the window and thought about that.

“She likes shrimp and Corona,” I said. “And you gotta love kids. Good luck, buddy.”

Andy Henion

Andy Henion grew up in the swamps of northern lower Michigan, along the beautiful Ausable River, and read lots of Stephen King and J.D. Salinger when he wasn’t chasing balls around a field. He now lives a few hours south and writes nonfiction for a living and fiction for fun (and sanity). More than 100 of his short stories have been published online and in print, and he’s been nominated for a Pushcart. This is his fourth appearance in Word Riot.

Jennifer Dickinson

Jennifer Dickinson received her BA from Hollins University. Her work has appeared in Blackbird and Other Voices, and she is the recipient of a Hedgebrook residency and a grant from the Money For Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She lives in Los Angeles where she works as a casting director for reality television.

Mary Kate thinks, so this is death, like letting go the wooden raft at the lake and swimming through minnow schools and green tendrils catching at the ankles, at first roiling the black water, then becoming part of it. A soul swept into the current. She feels her phantom daughter as surely as when she had weight. Delivered to her despite not having enough time in her womb. Despite being pushed with the heel of Alberta Ford’s hand through the layers of skin and uterus and out through the kitchen knife incision, but not through the loop of umbilical cord around her neck.

“Tabby kittens in need of loving home.” This is the ad that Alberta reads, recognizing Mary Kate’s name and address, and takes it as a sign that this, finally, is her opportunity. She’s been waiting and watching them for months, women big with the babies that should have been hers, going in and out of doctors’ offices and about their daily business, without knowing how many details they let slip.

Dying, Mary Kate remembers the cats and thinks, “I’m sorry,” though neither she nor the cats are to blame. Long before the baby, she and Ted had cats, calico and tabby cats, usually no more than two, three at the most. They got them from the county humane society and were good about getting them neutered and spayed, but there was one cat, Marbles, who had a litter of five. As beautiful as they were with their tortoiseshell patches and necklace stripes, both Mary Kate and Ted knew they couldn’t keep them.

Alberta never did take a pregnancy test. At least she hadn’t for fifteen years. She just decided, spur of the moment, to tell Anthony on the way to the Paradise in Ocean City, and so she did. Alexandra and Bethany had been jammed into the back of the S10 for five hours, their long legs like squid in a sink, except for one stop at Stuckey’s to pee and buy candy. For about two of those hours, the girls had bickered, and it was probably Alberta’s fault, really, for making them play car games the girls had long outgrown, and making them talk about school and what they wanted to do when they grew up, and then the Rt. 50 bingo game that the toll booth operator had handed them. Put an X over the cow, the red barn, the cornfield, a windmill, the one-room schoolhouse, some other things, until you got five in a row up or down or diagonally. The girls got as far as the cow and the red bar before Bethany started howling about how it was all so unfair, that Alexandra had watched Bethany to see where she looked and could see when her eyes landed on the one-room schoolhouse. Bethany had seen it first, and Alexandra was a big fat cheat.
     Anthony said, “Jesus,” leaned over Alberta toward the glove compartment to yank out the iPods she had confiscated, and tossed them back. The truck swerved over the yellow line and then back into the lane, and they were shaken into silence.
     She would not remember much of the ride, but she would remember Alexandra’s and Bethany’s faces reflected in her vanity mirror, mouths slack and eyes meeting hers, then turning quickly away, toward the cornfields.
     When they reached the Coastal Highway, Alberta twisted in her seat and said, so that she could be heard over the iPods, “Breathe, girls, you can smell the ocean.” Anthony smiled and put on his sunglasses. Alberta could tell he was staring at the girls in bikinis carrying boogie boards on their heads. Men. Alberta pressed her hand to her abdomen and kept it pressed there until she could feel a tingling, as if she could make cells join and divide with the warmth of her palm, as if she could make her body obey.

Mary Kate and Ted were sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday, eating waffles with maple syrup, Mary Kate remembers, when she told him. She had taken the pregnancy test first thing that morning, and kept her secret while showering and dressing, then mixing the buckwheat batter and waiting for the red light to go off on the waffle iron. She thought about the best way to announce her news, since this would come as a surprise to Ted. The pregnancy hadn’t been planned, but they weren’t trying to prevent it, either. They let things happen, and usually those things were good, blessings of one kind or another. Things usually worked out.
     She wanted to remember the exact words she said to him, and how, and to remember the look on his face forever. She wondered, should she tell him before breakfast, or after. Should she hold off until evening? No. She let him take his first sip of coffee then blurted out, “We’re going to have a baby.”
     Ted swallowed and said, “Thank you,” as if she had given him a remarkable gift. Even now, in death, she feels his thoughtfulness.

When Alberta pulled into the Paradise parking lot, she turned to Anthony, then to the girls, and said, “How do you girls feel about a baby brother? Or sister?” Anthony turned toward her so that she could see her lopsided smile in the lenses of his sunglasses. No one spoke. The only sound was the scratching of muffled music through an iPod until, finally, Bethany said, “Cool,” quietly, then untangled her legs, and jumped from the truck.
     Four days later, after their three-night special, they would return home with taffy, T-shirts, and telescope pictures that a college student had taken on the beach. In one of them, Alberta stands on the sand with Anthony, a stucco castle rising behind them in the distance, and a black cover-up sarong knotted over her breasts.

In death, Mary Kate sees Alberta as she did sitting almost knee to knee with her at the kitchen table, an older woman with a thick waist, not fat, but protective of her middle. Her visitor wears an oversized print tunic smock over scrub pants and worn tennis shoes with knotted laces. The shoes look dirtier than what she imagines a nurse would wear. She perks up at the thought that maybe she works for a vet.
     “Iced tea?”
     Bent over the box of kittens, the woman shakes her head. Mary Kate talks to the crooked part in the light brown hair.
     “Do you have other cats?”
     “I had a cat once, but it died.”
     “I’m so sorry. Did it get sick?”
     Alberta pokes a finger at the kittens’ heads. “Got run over in the driveway.”

Alberta bends down further to the box lined with soft towels and says in a pouty voice, “Such beautiful, beautiful kittens. Which one of you will be my own little kitten?”
     One kitten with faint spots rolls toward her, and she picks it up by the scruff of its neck. A mother cat move, Mary Kate knows, but still a hold that never struck her right.
     “We named her Mackerel, because of her markings.”
     Alberta turns the kitten from side to side, tilts her head, then drops it the foot or so back into the box. It seems stunned for a moment, then scrambles back into the litter. Mary Kate thinks she feels the same as Mackerel.
     Alberta looks up quickly at Mary Kate and says, “I think I’ll have that iced tea, after all.”
     Mary Kate stands and turns toward the frosty pitcher on the counter.

The baby is silent and slippery. A girl. Briefly, Alberta feels disappointment. She knows Anthony would have preferred a boy, even though he always said you take whatever God gives you. The baby is also a very dark blue, the color of a cold plum. Alberta slaps its back, and again, but the baby is still quiet. Then she sees the loop of cord at its neck and tries to wiggle it loose. It’s slippery work, without anyone to help her, but she gets it over the head, clamps it in two places and saws her knife between the two clamps. But the baby is still not crying the way it should. She slaps it again. Still, a cold blue plum. She moves Mary Kate’s dishes aside in the sink and washes it with warm water, but it never pinks up. For some time, she remains standing at the sink, the kitchen and everything in it broken into dark shapes, blunt, random, and senseless.
     After changing out of her bloody scrubs, Alberta wraps the baby she had planned to call Jennifer in the yellow receiving blanket she brought with her. For a while, in the sunny kitchen with mewing newborn kittens, none of which she will take back home to Taneytown, she rehearses the story she will tell Anthony, who loves and believes her even in the worst of times. She cries over their terrible loss. She practices, knowing she will have to cry like this over and over again in the coming months.

Mary Kate feels the baby girl cut from her body by Alberta Ford like a phantom limb. In fact, she comes to realize, all her flesh and bones—her fine auburn hair, her white breasts with pale blue veins, the toenails Ted painted pink for her—are phantom parts.

Over and over, as if through a porthole in the steel hull of a sunken ship, Alberta Ford will see everyone leave her, and be caught in a moment of endless drowning, an icy hand holding her phantom heart. Through the fogged glass, she will see, first, Anthony dive into the surf, the soles of his feet swallowed. Then Bethany and Alexandra will walk away from the blanket and soft sand to the hard-packed shore, each leaning toward the other and holding the hands of an infant white as a shell. The three of them walk into the waves, and the two older children lift the infant above each wave, so that the baby swings and kicks, catching just the tips of the white caps with her toes. They walk further and further out into the ocean until they become pinpoints, then disappear. Alberta cries out for help, but there are no lifeguards, no brightly colored umbrellas, no castles, no boats. The tide recedes, leaving the sea’s dead. Over and over, she will follow the children into a rip current that sweeps her seaward in foam and debris, until she knows she is sunken and drowned.

The last thing Mary Kate feels before letting go, after loosening her fingers from the ligature, her blood dammed, is not the weight of Alberta on her chest, but her newborn daughter kicking off against the wall of her womb, as if she could swim out into an ocean. She can feel her fighting to stay above the slapping waves. There is no final swell of anger or wash of sadness, only vestiges, like the darting of silverfish into darker water.
     Mary Kate feels her baby caught in that moment of kicking off the wall to swim in deep water, needing to be coaxed and needing to let go. She lets go her body and feels her baby grown to a child in a bright yellow swimsuit, running off the end of a dock with one hand in the air and the other pinching her nose. She catches her.

About the author:

Barbara Westwood Diehl is founding editor of the Baltimore Review and a Master of Arts in Writing student at Johns Hopkins University. She works at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Her short stories and poems have been published or accepted for publication in a variety of publications, including MacGuffin, Confrontation, Rosebud, Thema, JMWW, Potomac Review, American Poetry Journal, Measure, Little Patuxent Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Caper Literary Journal, Gargoyle, Superstition Review, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

My mom and I lived alone with her swirling brain for ten years. Ten years of late night chats and long bouts of silence. Ten years and then I got that assignment in school. My mom called.
     “Hi honey, I won’t be home tonight.”
     I heard pop music in the background.
     “Again?” I posed with a hand on my hip, the phone be-tween my cheek and shoulder.
     “Well is there any-thing-”
     “Yeah I need an egg. I need you to bring me eggs.”
     “Eggs? You hate eggs.”
     “It’s not to eat. It’s for school.”
     This was going to be complicated. Not sharing anything about myself or my schoolwork was my secret punishment for my mother. But she was going to have questions.
     “Are you cooking?”
     “No, they don’t do that anymore. I have to have a baby.”
     “Is this a joke?”
     “No, not for real, for class.”
     “Oh, well why don’t you just use something else? A potato.”
     I flopped my arms at my sides.
     “You don’t have to use an egg. Did they say it had to be an egg?”
     “Fine. I’ll use a potato.”
     I was in one of those life lessons classes where you’re paired off with a mate to simulate married life. Sometimes the play cou-plings became real couples so I was relieved to find my partner was Marcel Chatman. He had a cute teddy bear face and despite his extra weight he was equally if not more popu-lar than me because his big cousin was tight with Snoop Doggy Dogg. More importantly, I didn’t have to worry about him complicating the project by actually participating. Whenever called on in class, he would stand up, smack a desk and exclaim, “Fuck this shit!” and stomp out. These outbursts were often dedicated to someone, earmarked by one of Marcel’s winks.
     Marcel and I were to care for a child for 6 weeks. We discovered this on drawing a scrap of paper from a worn pillow-case. In the game Marcel was a used car salesman and I was a secretary. In real life Mar-cel was a drug dealer and I worked at the Penguins Frozen Yogurt shop. The fortune cookie slip of paper I pulled read, “Congratulations, it’s a boy!”
     The Life Sciences teacher glared at us, “Well it looks like you two have your work cut out for you.”
     Marcel jumped up and yelled, “Maaaan, FUCK this shit!”, and threw me a wink that fluttered my heart, then left. Looked like I was going to be a single mother, raising my child on a sec-retary’s salary. In that brief moment I had in fact become my mother.
     Marcel was sitting across from me when I pulled the po-tato out of my backpack. It was small, brown, round; I tried to pick one that didn’t look old or make me look poor. A classless potato.
     “What’s that?”
     “Ummm, it’s a potato.”
     “Aren’t we supposed to have an egg?”
     “Yeah but all I had were potatoes. Whatever, it’s not like you’re gonna do the assignment anyway.”
     Marcel bent in closer, “Yeah. Hey, you ever been pregnant?”
     “Nah.”
     “My girl got pregnant once.” Wag wag went his finger.
     Aside from the time Marcel asked me if I’d ever made out with a girl this was the most we had ever spoken.
     “Well what happened?”
     “It died. She had a miscarry.”
     “I guess it’s better that way.”
     He looked confused and angry.
     “I just meant maybe her body made a decision for her that she couldn’t make. Maybe she wasn’t ready.”
     His face softened. “Yeah, I guess, but I was gonna hook him up though. I would’a bought him all the new fly Air Jordans and lil baby Dockers and all that. I would’a…” He broke off, misty eyed. I would have liked for him to have his dream, but truth was pre-vailing all around us. Truth was we couldn’t even show up to class six weeks straight with the proper produce. Truth was I had already had sex and knew it wasn’t beautiful. Truth was even if Marcel’s big cousin was good homies with Snoop Dogg, he was over-weight, smoked too much of his own stash, and laid around playing video games and eat-ing flaming hot Cheetos all day. Truth was my mom was out with some nasty V-05-wearing guy every night, while I worked at Penguins and snuck cigarettes on our bal-cony. Truth was, dreams were happening to other people.
     “Yeah, sorry.”
     I was caressing the potato’s head.
     “So what are we gonna name this little fellow?” he held his arms out in bewilderment.
     “I dunno.”
     “Idaho?” He looked up in contemplation. I could picture the name rolling around in his mind.
     I smiled. “You da ho?”
     “No Idaho.”
     “Yeah you da ho.”
     That went on a while.
     We grew more fond of each other and Idaho. I guess we were like one of those play couples that became real couples. Except we never acknowl-edged it. The day we did it, I was wearing one of my grandmother’s floral dresses, black fishnet stockings, monkey boots, and heavy black eyeliner. I drank a 40 oz. bottle of Old English 800, which my friends and I referred to as “Old E 8 ball. I went to the bathroom to throw up. When I got out Marcel was sitting on the floor opposite the door, to make sure I was okay. He looked sweet and vulnerable, escorted me to his bedroom where he gently lifted up the skirt of my dress and pulled my fishnets down to my calves. His hands were soft and awkward. I did not wonder how attractive my body or my vagina presented. I did not wonder if I looked fat or under-shaven. Instead I just wondered what would happen next and how long this would take. He then left the room to place a con-dom under the running faucet to ensure there were no holes in it. I sat exactly where he left me, looking at the room. The walls were painted blue and decorated with photo-graphs. Baby pictures of him. I sat in the silence that was only pierced by our friends’ drinking and laughing in the other room. When he came back we kissed and at some point he replaced his fingers with his penis. He laid on top of me like this, naked from the waist down and then a short while later said, “How long should we do this for?”
     I’d been wondering exactly the same thing. I felt his pe-nis shrink and the condom sticking to the walls of my vagina. I thought there might have been more movement than this.
     “I don’t know.”
     We laid still a little longer, me looking at the ceiling, his face buried beside my neck.
     “Let’s stop.”
     “Okay.”
     He rolled off of me.
     “Let’s not do that anymore.”
     “Yeah, that was stupid.”
     We got dressed and went outside and smoked a cigarette. He stroked my hair and asked me questions: how it is to be so light skinned, to have “good hair.” What it is to have a mom that’s crazy and sexy and swears. I asked him about Snoop.

     I start to push and I start to hum. My fat cat makes her way into the bathroom. I tell her to leave, knowing she does not respond to commands. She sits, looks, watches.
     And there it is. I feel the weight of it creeping forward. My muscles contracted, like throwing up a tampon.
     A splash. I sit longer than I need to. I do not want to see it. I do not want it to look like that stupid picture. I do not want to know. I do not know what to do next. It should be sad. I should be sadder than this, I think. I try to cry. I look around for something sad. I plunk Idaho into the toilet. All blood and guts and fake babies and real baby parts all mixed together. The hardest flush.

Melissa Ann Chadburn

After studying law Melissa Chadburn obtained an MFA from Antioch University. She is a lover and a fighter, a union rep, a social arsonist, a writer, a lesbian, of color, smart, edgy and fun. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Guernica, PANK Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Splinter Generation, Northville Review and elsewhere. She is of African, Asian, Hispanic, Filipina, and Irish descent, and was raised by Dutch/Indonesian and British foster parents. Her mixed background has made her aware of racial and cultural differences and similarities which influence her writing. She loves pit bulls and cheese. Reach her at fictiongrrrl(at) gmail.com or follow her on twitter http://twitter.com/melissachadburn or get ripped open at http://betteranever.blogspot.com/ xoxo She loves you very very much.

About the author:

Michael Cooper is book review editor at The Southeast Review. His most recent work has appeared in Denver Syntax, Prick of the Spindle, and SmokeLong Quarterly. Stories are forthcoming in Night Train, Used Furniture Review, and Fugue.

Those two linger in the sun. Her head is cradled in his lap; his head is tilted back. Eyes closed, they doze. She dreams; he snores. Her mouth is open, saliva gathers, spills over, a rivulet down her chin. They don’t notice me, walking by, my arms full of flowers.
     The roses nod, heavy with the dew. A cat hisses, arches up, claws the air.
     There it is again, that sound. Whack! Whack!
     I don’t remember these two. What are they doing here, in my house?
     She says his name, leans in closer to him. She hooks her hair behind an ear. She rubs his shoulders. He closes his eyes.

Charles was thundering but little William wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t help it. His breath was hitched with sobs.
     The most terrible thing. I had the roses in my arms. Glass, like ice, glinting in the pile of the carpeting by the door.
     He was only trying to help. I told Charles, “He was trying to be good. Come now.”
     I pulled William away. There were bruises blooming thumbprints on his arms. Charles stepped in the glass on the floor, and it sliced through the bottom of his shoe, into the heel of his foot. He left behind a trail of blood that followed him through the house, up the stairs, down the hall, like the slime of a snail, like bread crumbs in the forest, footprints in the snow.
     When asked about the blood, I told our guests that Charles had cut his foot.
     This woman is in my kitchen now; she’s standing at the sink with her hands in soapy water. She leans on the counter; she watches the window; she looks out at the sky.
     “I heard her again last night,” she tells him. She doesn’t look over her shoulder, but I notice that he rolls his eyes. He looks at his hands and shakes his head. He thinks, sometimes, she’s crazy, though to her face and to her friends he is always careful to say high-strung.
     He’s wondering whether it’s going to rain.
     The roses in the crystal basket nod.
     William!? Where did he go? He can be naughty; sometimes he hides.
     He went down for his nap, and never got up. The bruises left tracks across his back. The blood on his temple was slimy and warm; it bloomed on the pillowcase like roses on snow.
     Wee William is sleeping in. His blood like a finger painting on the sheets.
     “This house is haunted,” the woman says. She shivers in his arms.
     I am arranging the roses in the crystal basket on the table near the door. I am humming. It’s hot. We’ll have tarragon chicken and cold strawberry soup. Charles stands on the balcony and watches for the storm.
     The thunder, he says, has a way of making the company come late.

Susan Taylor Chehak

Susan Taylor Chehak is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and the author of five novels, including Smithereens, The Story of Annie D., and Harmony. Her short stories have appeared in Coe Review, Guernica Magazine, L.A. Under The Influence, Sisters in Crime 5, and The Chariton Review. She teaches fiction writing in the low residency MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, as well as in The UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and the Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa. Susan grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, spends as much time as possible in Colorado, and at present divides her time between Los Angeles and Toronto.

“Shove ‘em in your pocket,” the skinny one says.
     He does and they continue at their jog for a couple more blocks. The skinny one is tired, and even with his heartbeat kicking at his chest, his eyes want to close. He snaps them open. He knows that he won’t be able to sleep, no matter how tired he is. That always happens when his mind gets racing; he wonders if anyone knows it was them. He’ll make up scenarios throughout the night, each one worse than the other, till finally he’s up and pacing. He imagines them finding him in the hotel, gunning him down.
     Across town, people can’t know what happened yet, but what went down will be discovered soon, and those who care will come looking.

When they see their car, a pair of headlights turns onto the street behind them. They sprint to the car and climb in, start it and drive away. The car continues behind them. The tall one keeps his eyes in the rearview. The car stays a good distance behind, as though there is nothing to follow. The skinny one drives, eyes on the road, speed just a sliver above the limit, as though there’s nothing to race away from. The boys don’t know that the headlights belong to a Mercury Zephyr that belongs to a set of twins who got lost looking for their friend’s mother’s apartment and ended up on this street. To the twins, the car in front of them is just a pair of red lights headed home.
     The boys are sweating, wiping their brows. The skinny one uses his sleeves. The tall one wipes with this shoulder, too afraid to pull his hands out of his pockets. He tells the skinny one to drive faster, says he needs a shower.
     They turn on the ramp and merge on the interstate. The skinny one figures he’ll have to live with his hands as they are for a while. But he’s OK with that. He likes the way passing lights reflect of his skin.

*****

On the interstate, they drive, and there’s barely a car out, except for the semi up ahead. It rounds a curve and disappears behind industrial structures and acres of pipe-yards.

Out past the city lights, where the night is syrup-like, the skinny one has to really concentrate to drive. He struggles to keep his hands firmly on the wheel, struggles to steer accurately—he’s used to steering with purpose—but he refuses to wipe his hands, too afraid to have the same reaction his friend has. The substance has spread from his wrists, up past his forearm, covering the tattoo of a jaguar on a tree branch. If it were alive, it would be drowning.
     “Learn by my example,” the skinny one says and takes his hands off the wheel just long enough to show off both sides, unchanged since the exposure.
     “Easy for you to say, it’s not getting worse for you.”
     “Because I’m not trying to wipe it off.”
     “How do you know that’s the reason?”
     “I don’t. But it’s a decent guess.”
     The tall one stops for second, thinks about it. “How the fuck else am I supposed to get this off? You got a magic wand to wipe this shit away?”
     “Right now, from the looks of it, trying to wipe it only makes things worse. So, stop.” He eases into the next turn, tires bumping the shoulder’s potholes. He takes a deep breath. He needs to focus. “We can call the guy who set this up. Maybe he knows.”
     “How can you stand it?” The tall one’s toeing the line between dealing-with-a-problem and panic. Every time he starts to calm down, he imagines it spreading till he’s covered. “What if it gets worse?”

“It’s getting worse now. Maybe you should try something different.”
     “But—”
     “—Do you know how hard it is to drive like this? Shut the fuck up. Don’t try to wipe it off. And just relax till we can reach a motel worth crashing at.” He’s getting tired of baby-sitting. This job wasn’t even his idea.

*****

They pull into a motel parking lot. The substance has worked its way up and under his short-sleeve, dampening the edge of his shirt.
     “You kept at it, didn’t you?”
     “I did,” the tall one says, kind of defeated, kind of proud, as though he did what had to be done. “No matter what I do, it spreads.”
     “So, stop doing anything.”

Once the skinny one gets a key and they’re in the room, the tall one makes his way for the bathroom. He’s imagining all that shower-water rinsing him free of the substance, the way it’ll feel as it slides off. “I got first shower,” he says.
     The tall one dozes off and an hour later, when he wakes, the shower’s still running. He slides off the bed and pounds on the bathroom door. “If all the hot water’s gone, I swear to God.” There’s no answer. He knocks again. He tries the door. It’s open, so he cracks it. “Hey.”
     The bathroom isn’t steamy or anything. The mirror is clear and the room is cold. He pulls the shower curtain back and there’s the tall one, sitting, leaning head-first against the wall. The purple sheen has covered him over, sealed shut his mouth, his nostrils, eyes.
     He reaches out to grab him, but stops himself. It’s clear his friend isn’t breathing, and the substance has hardened onto his skin. It’s spread like moss from the point where his head meets the wall, and all around the bathroom. The skinny one doesn’t want to touch it. He’s afraid what might happen to him. He wants to show his anger, to say, “I told you to knock it off. I told you to leave it,” but there’s no point. He imagines his friend in the shower trying to scrub the substance away, defeated. He’s shaking, and tries to think about something else, but there’s his friend, dead, reduced to a lump in the shower. He thinks about wrapping him up, taking him to the car, and finding a place to bury him, but instead he turns the shower off without getting his hands wet, pulls the curtain closed, and leaves the bathroom.

Joshua Young

Joshua Young is the author of When the Wolves Quit: A Play-in-Verse forthcoming from Gold Wake Press (2012), as well as three chapbooks and two short novels. He holds an MA in English from Western Washington University and begins an MFA in Poetry at Columbia College Chicago in the fall (2011). He teaches English Composition and is moving to Chicago with this wife, son, and dog. For information about his films, writing, and other projects please visit http://thestorythief.tumblr.com

     A shell screeched across the field, and Farnsworth’s Fatal Charge began. The Union battalion was surrounded. Mounted soldiers, sabers drawn, were shot from their saddles. Horses reared up. Blasts echoed. The performance was precise, each actor hitting his mark to take his bullet. Smoke burst from their costumes. Some grabbed their necks, breaking palmed blood packs. Farnsworth died with his sword raised to the sky, historically inaccurate but a nice touch. Dramatic.
     Before our trip, I had dug out my old history notes from college. The whole thing was desperate and tragic, and I told Ray, “Farnsworth knew there was no chance of winning, but someone called him a coward, so he went through with it.”
     Ray nodded, said he understood. “Guys are like that.”
     “All of them knew they were going to die, but they rode in anyway. That’s kind of honorable, isn’t it? Don’t you think?”
     “I guess.”
     “You know all the soldiers smoked weed, don’t you?” That fact was written in my notes next to a To Do list that included buying an eighth and making a mixed tape.
     We stopped at a souvenir stand where Ray bought a Gettysburg lapel pin and a Union soldier penguin. He was sly about the penguin, and waited till I’d stepped away to buy it, then smothered it in plastic bags. It was sweet that he remembered how I used to collect penguins, and how they all burnt up in a fire.
     The sky crackled and opened, so we took shelter under a tent where we learned to make butter. Ray kissed me and stuck the pin on my shirt. We were official. I slid my fingers between his. The historian at the dash churn, a round, blotchy-faced girl said, “Over-churning the butter, can ruin the taste.” She eyed us like she knew Annalee and was going to rat us out, tell her “Raymond is keeping a mistress.”
     I imagined myself being an actual long term mistress: wearing big sunglasses; rendezvousing at chic hotels; pulling my hair into a French twist after martinis and lovemaking; being kept, like a precious thing in the back of a drawer. He’d love me more—you always love the things you hide.
     And he did love me more. After all, he wasn’t cheating on me.
     I waited to be presented with the penguin. A little lovey I would name and sleep beside and whose daily adventures I would report to Ray; our little one. But he seemed to be saving it. A surprise.
     I led him out into the slowing rain. We peeked into the field hospital where men screamed in pretend agony. It sounded like sex. Ray said, “We have to get home.”
     We stopped holding hands as we walked to my car.
     Ray bounded over a thick, muddy puddle. “That horse was supposed to die. It was Farnsworth’s favorite horse and it got shot. Doesn’t that suck?”
     I didn’t know if Ray was referring to the death of a favorite horse or the error in the reenactment. Either way, it seemed that the undead horse put a damper on his experience, and I felt at fault for not researching the authenticity of those particular facts.
     I said, “Sorry.”
     Ray placed the smothered penguin under the seat, carefully; it wasn’t ours.
     I waited until I pulled onto the highway and then asked about her.
     He told me how he proposed. How he rode on a fire truck to her house.
     “It was a whole big thing.” Apparently, it was in the newspaper.
     He opened his wallet past the picture of himself and his nut-job dad on a merry-go-round and unfolded the article. “See?”
     “I can’t, I’m driving,” and also, I didn’t want to see her. “Are you excited to get married?”
     “I guess.”
     “Why were you on a fire truck?”
     “I’m a volunteer fireman.”
     I cried, just to see what he would do.
     He said, “Don’t.”
     I decided I would send an email to the organizers of the reenactment condemning them for the inaccuracy concerning the horse and, therefore, ruining our time. I would post nasty comments on their social networking pages and write negative reviews online, giving it one, perhaps two out of five stars. I would call the Historical Reenactment Regulation Board and report them. But I knew it wouldn’t do any good. It was an impossibility. I mean, how would they have faked the death of a horse?

Apryl Lee

Apryl Lee lives in New Jersey with her husband, baby son and a bunch of cats. She occasionally blogs at www.apryllee.com and she is thrilled to have this story included in Word Riot. “Flogging a Dead Horse” is part of a larger work of connected stories. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence.

And, strangely, I heard the sand to stir at my back, and
I looked round very quick, and the sand rose upward in
parts, and sifted back, and there came to my sight odd
things that did move and curl about.

Frozen earth. Water tinkling. Wind chimes. Snap of ice. Breathe in. Light out. Watch the boat dragged under smooth and viscous. Within seconds, it’s lost beneath a smudged screen of ice. Castaway. Cast adrift. I hear the ship’s horn seal my exile. A puff of steam. Nothing here. Except the whiteness. Nothing here. Except me. Open bag. Apple. Jerky. Flask of water. Look around. The horizon – an endless line of dark white, a hair on the eyeball, a flaw in the diamond. Shelter. Heat. Food. Scant trees. Box of wet matches. Flesh. Instinct. Logic. I would rather have felt the burn of hemp, a subcutaneous cool liquid death, or the nanosecond of pearlitic steel on minutely vibrating neck hairs. I didn’t ask for it. I was born with it. Hallucinatory migraines that increased in frequency over the years. The unthought known – like a magician palming ping-pong balls from an assistant’s glossy mouth. Like Gremlins splashed with water. Like fucking Tribbles. Exponentially. Here one comes. Mind your head. I hold out my hand as if holding back the crowd. Here it comes. Aura. Been there. Done that. Well, here we go again. Déjà voodoo. Hold on. We may experience some turbulence. For safety and comfort, we should be in good health and free from heart, back or neck problems, motion sickness, or other conditions that could be aggravated by this adventure. Expectant mothers should not ride. Young children should be accompanied by an adult.

The first that I remember – the primal one. Two brothers, jawbone of an ass, wooden club, iron dagger – you choose. The ass’s jawbone being the most poetic. The iron bar being the most pictorial, the most efficient. In junior school, all the children gathered around as I summoned Cimber, Brutus, and the other senators to stab Caesar to death on the steps of the Portakabin classroom, the virtual blood flowing between the dropped packets of Skips and Fruit Pastilles. During a football game against our bitter rivals, the referee blew repeatedly to stop the game, believing the figure bleeding in the six-yard box to be that of our centre forward, not noticing that the doublet, breeches, and ruff did not quite match the blue and white stripe shirt and black shorts of the attacking team, nor had the 12-year-old boy the ability to grow a Van Dyke beard, nor would his breath reek of ale and lark pie. On my 14th birthday, just before my mother served the Arctic Roll, the words HeaLter SkeLTter appeared in what looked like raspberry sauce on the fridge door. My grandmother screaming from the living room, DEATH TO PIGS! We rushed in to see RISE scrawled on the wall in the same syrupy redness; a naked fat man sprawled in the middle of the floor, WAR carved zigzag into his abdomen. The sky, an impossible grey lit with orange light like an old television set shorting out, stretches as far as the I can see. My eye. The sparse vegetation, moss-marbled rocks, the cry of a seabird, a scampering of animal life unseen. The sun sits on the horizon, willing, waiting to drop, an old copper coin in a discarded pair of tweed trousers. I could just sit here wait for the visions to take over – become constant, 24-hour drive-in spectacular. Roll up! Roll up! See the magnificent Selber and his manipulative manifestations of mayhem and murder!

Dr. Hildegard Swanepoel: Northfields Psychiatric Institute. Report on Jack Selber, age 38. Reification of Hallucinatory Homicides: The Invocation of Mass Hysteria as a Crime. Mr. Selber has manifested these “hallucinations” since the age of three. His parents believing the “projections” to be from some undefined source. Both parents now deceased. These “hallucinations” are manifestations / reifications of what Christopher Bollas terms “unthought known” – things we know, events that make up our psyche, yet phenomena we cannot know or have known as personal experiences; we cannot put language to them – a form of psychological presque vu, or what Jung termed a “collective unconscious”. The inducer’s visions, these cultural memories of homicide, create in the acceptors (those in the vicinity) a folie à plusieurs. Witnesses attest to the veracity of the projected visions – the dark blue 61 Lincoln Continental Convertible SS-100-X causing quite a stir as it sped through the hospital canteen, the First Lady crawling across the trunk, grabbing for the President’s brain matter. Sedatives do not help in the remission of the visions – the hallucinatory events appear in the room in which the patient lies unconscious. Dr. Raskin is looking into the possible use of electroconvulsive and insulin-coma treatment to prevent or retard the patient’s disruptive and dangerous psychic emissions.

Court Report – 23 January, 2015. The Summing Up of Judge Thomas Berkeley.
(i) The charge concerning the homicidal hallucinations of Mr. Jack Selber.
The Judge stated that there was no dispute that the accused projected hallucinations of (in)famous murders, willfully causing chaos in public places and undermining the police force and laws of the Republic. Secondly, that the accused is cognizant with the pandemonium his “hallucinations” cause in the general public. On May 11, 2012, police found the accused emerging from Westminster Underground station heading towards the House of the Republic, the shadow of a man dressed in early 19th century clothing visibly following him. The police apprehended Mr. Selber but not before a group of Chinese tourists witnessed a muzzle flash and another man fall to the floor crying “Murder!” During their enquiries, the police discovered a diary cataloguing these “manifestations” covering the period from Mr. Selber’s 12th birthday to the present. The court is satisfied that these psychic manifestations may not be under Mr. Selber’s control but it is also convinced that they are a menace to society and, under Paragraph 367, Regulation 115F of the English Republican Charter, which defines this crime as “a violation of an individual’s or a country’s conscious or unconscious liberty,” would ask the jury to return a guilty verdict. (ii) Verdict and sentence: Mr. Jack Selber was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to exile. The sentences were confirmed by the President of the English Republic on 31 January, 2015, and the sentence of exile was put into execution on 1 February, 2015 – Mr. Selber imprisoned on ERS Cromwell sailing for the Republic’s territory of Meta Incognita where he will be exiled for the remainder of his natural life.

Different shades of ice forming patterns. Patterning. They locked me in a room. The visions broke through. Walls daubed with Mary Kelly’s intestines. Windows splashed with Trotsky’s blood. Passersby streaked red with Mishima’s arterial spray. Enough. Close me eyes. Wait for it to come. Nothing. Not even a shadow. Banishment and exile. Even during my trial. Four or five times a day. Shrieks of the witnesses. Screams of the jury. What had I done? What have I done? Prodded and probed. Injected and intubated. Drugged and bugged. I cannot stop it. It cannot stop. Freak show. Gore fest. Claret. Wanted by everybody from MI5 to MIT, from Mossad to the Mafia, from Scientologists to Sony. Night closes in. Temperature drops. Is that even possible? No shelter. Roar of the wind. I hope. Crack and creak of ice. Dig. Dig. Dig. The watch has a blue light. Scoop out snow. Huddle in hollow. No good. Crawl towards the darker shadows. Clumps of vegetation. Howl of the wind. I hope. Cover my shivering body. One night. Maybe two. A long day in-between. But here it comes. Vision blurs. Flock of motes. Swarm of floaters. Flood of adrenalin. The air warms. Perceptibly. The ice recedes leaving patches. Disappears completely. Darkness confined to a constricted space. Stars blink out. Disappear. A voice, “When you go to sleep, my life begins.” My breath. Her breath. His breath. Their breath. Visible. Visible. Naked. Trussed with rope. Brown parcel tape wrapped around skull. Head. Should say. Tube depending from nostril. Smell of sewage seeping up. Walls dripping wet. Light fluttering. “Fuck!” I hear and a clatter of steel. Breathing stops. Her breath. Not his. Not hers. Not theirs. The voice, “All I done was lifted him up and packed her underneath him, and dropped him back on top of her.” Mine catches. Stars blink on. Ice creeps over rocks, over earth. Growl of the wind. No witnesses. No one to stare. No one to see. Alone except for the visions. Alone except for the thing I cannot see.

When I sleep, I do not dream. Not that I remember. When I wake, the dreams begin. How long can I stay aware of my surroundings without hallucinating? How long before they take over? How long before I freeze to death? The sun hangs on the edge of the horizon like a man one-handedly gripping the grassy verge of a cliff, the chalk crumbling, his nails scraping, his tendons burning, his bones breaking. The fall. Darkness. Complete. Even the scribbled branches of the sparse trees blacked out against the night. Moon hidden behind dense cloud. I whisper, hear in return a rumble of laughter far to the south. I shout and the sound ripples in the darkness, spreads out, expires in the air. I scream. I cannot hear my breathing. I stamp my feet, feel but cannot hear the ice splinter. Aura. A lantern beneath lacquer-darkened paint. Barely visible. Stumble. Fall to the floor. See all at once, hundreds of hands reaching out of the blackness, as if a tree had spouted human limbs, and I can see huts burning, children running, animals falling under a hail of bullets, soldiers zipping up, moving on, women bayoneted, men beheaded, an old woman squats sobbing, a soldier wipes tears from his eyes as he fires his machinegun into a hole filled with cowering villagers, and I can see in my mind’s projection a running man, hear the weak throb of someone’s breath, the crunch of ice, the scattering of things before me, the muffled applause of wings.

Steve Finbow

Steve Finbow is the author of Balzac of the Badlands (Future Fiction London – 2009), Tougher Than Anything in the Animal Kingdom (Grievous Jones Press – 2011), CircusCircus (Qol Books – 2011), Allen Ginsberg – Critical Lives (Reaktion Books – 2011), & Grave Desire – a cultural history of necrophilia (Creation/Solar – 2012).

About the author:

Robin Slick is a rock music obsessed writer living in downtown Philadelphia. Visit her on the web at www.robinslick.com.

#*%^ @~# k!ll (Q): Z NZN

About the author:

Lacey Martinez lives in Brooklyn. Her work has been published in Word Riot, PANK, Used Furniture Review, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. Visit her online at www.laceymartinez.net.

I was morbid and full of regret — my drinking had driven them away, no kids in the wake. I decided to visit all of them, in reverse order.

I showed up at Jane’s door on a Monday morning. Luckily her husband still worked.

“What do you want?” She opened the door a crack. Her eye was violet, nestled in fat, moving backwards into her.

“I had a heart attack. A real scare.”

“And you want what?”

“A pie?”

Jane was known for her pies.

“You want me to bake you a pie.”

“A cherry pie.”

She looked me up and down. I was a sight, down to one-thirty. My skin sagged. I looked like a deflated balloon. The doctor said I’d probably live, if I quit smoking and took my medicine. I wasn’t supposed to eat pie. Especially the way Jane made it, with the butter crust that melted in your mouth, filled your veins.

She sighed and said, “Fine. But then you take it and leave, before Bill gets home.”

“Okay.”

She let me sit in the kitchen and watch her. She was the kind to wear aprons all the time. She made her pies here and sent them to a shack on the boardwalk. She had more of the soft white skin on her upper arms that reminded me of dough. I used to tell her she was the softest thing I’d ever held, but people like me, insecure, squeeze things too hard. You find a way to hurt them.

I watched her rolling pin carefully, with a certain dread. It was not the old one, with my blood soaked in.

She had wanted to start her own bakery, but I siphoned the money away. I always thought I could win her more. One good night in Atlantic City and all the pies in the world, her chubby face on a billboard.

She didn’t give me time for the pie to cool. I had to carry it out wearing oven mitts. I recognized them. I’d put them on one night to punch her.

I placed the pie on the passenger seat and headed for Marci’s.

***

Marci was a photographer. She’d had a good business before I met her, at a friend’s wedding. Because I was cleaned up and dressed, I had a certain charm. I had some charm back then, especially after three drinks. After six I’d become an asshole, put out cigarettes in empty glasses, prop my chin on women’s shoulders. Marci was taking the pictures at the reception and kept coming back to me. She said it was a study. She liked my look, like a character in a movie. She captured my decline from charming to derelict, my true self emerging, drunk and tipping over, crawling on hands and knees. She made a coffee table book of me. By then we were living together.

I took the book to a bar and a lonely woman sat next to me and helped me page through it. “Wow,” she said. “Are you some actor? Are these stills from a movie?” A lot of them were black-and-white, and the range of my expressions alarmed me, like I’d never truly seen myself, like I was a big fake, a ghost passing through with little consequence to anyone. I told the woman the movie was about some loser’s life, and she wondered if she could rent it, and I said it never made it past the first couple screenings. Then I went home with her. She said I looked like Bogart.

When I got home, Marci had locked me out. I broke the window to her studio and threw myself in. I turned on all the high powered lamps and sat in the big wing chair with the purple velvet that looked like a throne. I made myself sweat, my pores bleeding gin. I lit a cigarette and burned the place down.

Now I found Marci in a new studio next to her house. I stood on the lawn and called to her.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she said.

And I could have been him, with my withered bones and sandals. “Can you take my picture? I’m probably dying, so this will be the last of the series.”

Like Jane, she did it to get rid of me. She used a black backdrop so my tee shirt looked cleaner, my teeth less yellow. In one I gazed longingly out the window. Another had me lying on the floor in a sunbeam, arms at my sides, eyes closed. I got the cherry pie and ate the whole thing like a pig while she snapped away, circling me. “Make sure you make these black-and-white,” I said, “with just the cherry goop in color.”

“I’ll make them into post cards and send them to you,” she said.

***

Which left me Alison. Dear Alison, the one I truly loved. We were young, with the same yellow hair. Mine was healthy then, not the sickly yellow-gray of now, brittle with nicotine. Hers she wrapped around me. She captured me, like a spider mummifying its prey.

Passion, spontaneity, mischief: those were Alison’s gifts. Our fights were like play, our binges games. Hurt could be healed with soft kisses, marks erased with the caress of a tender thumb. The serious pain was unborn, coiled and waiting, like the worm at the bottom of a bottle.

I pulled off at a rest stop now, on the way to Alison’s house, and put the seat back, lifted my shirt to see the scars, prominent between bulging ribs. They were her grandmother’s knitting needles. I loved her so. I still do. And wasn’t she sending me the same message, with these aching wounds?

But I found her in bad shape, cancer of the pancreas, refusing treatment.

“It kills you anyway,” she said, sitting with me on her porch swing. “I wanted to keep this hair.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“I knew you’d come.”

She wanted me to stay to the end. She wrapped her silver hair around me and hummed our old song. She peeked at me inside the cocoon and said I didn’t look so good. I said I felt fine, better than fine. We were shells of who we used to be. She touched my lips.

“Is that blood?”

“Cherry pie.”

“What? Now I’m hungry, all of a sudden. I haven’t been hungry in a long time.”

She unwound me. She punched my shoulder. “I think I want a pie.” She looked excited. I knew this look. The film on her eyes parted to let a little spark through. “A whole pie, yes. But not just any pie. One from that place at the shore.”

“Now?”

“Take me now, before it’s too late. Take me, take me.” She tried to bounce. She poked my ribs with her sharp bones.

She told me to drive faster, time is short. I got the apple pie, she wanted the cherry. The sun was setting. We sat in the sand and ate with plastic forks. I couldn’t believe I was eating another pie. And I still felt empty, deserted inside like this stretch of beach because she would leave me again and this time for good. She gobbled her pie like she was starving, and said she was full, satisfied that I was back.

“I shouldn’t have left,” I said.

“Didn’t I try to kill you?”

“At least I knew I was alive.”

We left our pie tins to the seagulls and went to the photo-booth on the boardwalk. We kissed with the pie still on our faces. We were a mess. She kissed my face all over. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” she said.

The clouds were moving quickly across the sky. She cried, saying that time was speeding up just for her. “We’ve done the cycle, Ray. Good to bad and back to good.”

“Dying is not good”.

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

The wind picked up. She had trouble standing. I lifted her. She was light, empty. I carried her down the beach, destination unknown. The sand shifted over my footprints.

“We’ll get you help, honey. We will.”

I walked until my heart skipped. The light disappeared over the horizon and a billion stars exploded.

About the author:

Gary Moshimer has stories in Pank, Monkeybicyle, Storyglossia, Night Train, Wilderness House Literary Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and many other places.

About the author:

Beau O’Reilly is a noted Chicago playwright, actor and director. He is co-founder of the Curious Theatre Branch, now in it’s 23rd year. Mr O’Reilly curates the Rhinocerous Theatre Festival, an annual festival of new work and is an adj.ass.professor at the School of the Art Institute Of Chicago, in the mfa writing program. In addition to having written over a hundred plays for the theater, Beau O’Reilly is a regular contributor to This American Life on National Public Radio. Mr O’Reilly sings and writes songs with the Crooked Mouth and led the seminal rock ‘n’ roll cabaret band Maestro Subgum And The Whole during its twenty year run.

     She said, bereaved, that we should let the damned beaver rot. It had been in her flowerbeds for weeks and she finished it off with a fistful of BBs. A baby. Seventeen to the skull at close range. She used her father’s gun, her childhood gun, lever action and small. Told the children it was a dog instead of what it actually was. It was dangerous enough out there and everyone knew the beasts were worse in the south. There was no benefit in confusing things for a child.
     It was undomesticated death that she didn’t want them to see though. She had already lost one child to it before I came along and she didn’t want to frighten them unnecessarily. But, betraying her design, they were frightened and rigid with nightmares for weeks, peeking out through the blinds in the mornings to see if that lump of damp fur was still there barely covered in pine straw.
     The boy came up to me weeks later and said, Look, we know about the beaver. But don’t tell mom. It’s the way she covers those things up that lets her know that she’s doing her job. But just so you know, we know.

     A year past the beaver and the marriage had just exploded. All of her spare time went to taking the house, so it made sense that I would be the first to notice the boy’s changes.
     To start, he was the very best in heels. He was also pretty conservative with the curling iron, only slightly stinking the bathroom with over-pressed hair when it could have been much worse. Not as much can be said of the dresses he wore though. They trailed him everywhere. All bunched up broken parachute pieces.
     We wrote. First quick little emails, then lengthier ones. Then the letters. There was plenty to be said on the subject of people putting themselves on to one another, but the boy pierced his ears and lay still all night, listening for the faint, dark masculine sounds. He left the safety pins in all night, the blood running down from the punctures toward his pillow, drying behind his neck.
     Soon after she sent me a letter under a lawyer’s letterhead. It was my fault the boy was flummoxing everything. That was the word the lawyer used. He called me once to be emphatic, and I thought about it for a minute and said, What about things ever really changes?
     Nothing, really.
     Then why did you call to tell me this?
     I just wanted to be emphatic, he said.

     Should I tell you about marriage, son? Should I tell you about authority? It’s all there in the Bible. And greater things too. Let’s start from the smallest particle of all: the apology.
     This was my father taking up the answering machine. I called him back and he refused the call. I demanded she put him on.
     Son, your mother and I have discovered the most magnificent syllables. You should really come and listen.
     I don’t know what to say.
     Don’t say anything, son. Just come meet us at the fire. There will be singing and dancing. There will be all of it, everything.

     When I was a kid there was some talk of sending her away after the fire, my sister. But it was decided that we couldn’t pawn her off on someone with no way of ever loving her. The neighborhood thought she was a monster, but she took to punishing herself for setting the blaze by locking herself in her bedroom for hours, revising her manual. Once, I caught her at her bedroom door and asked her, What are you writing all the time?
     She pushed me back into the hallway, and I fell to the ground. She squatted over me and said, How to die properly! Wouldn’t you like to know!
     Then she went into her room, locking the door behind her.

     My father and I built her a workhouse in the backyard near the tree line. When we finished we offered it to her. She didn’t say a word. She only walked in and closed the door.
     She was dark in there for weeks.
     Then the second fire.
     Rummaging the ash pile, my parents found scattered animal bones, small ones. There was a collection of scissors. An axe. Knives. There had been jars of formaldehyde just in case it all came to something.
     One afternoon when the crew came to take away the blackened debris, my father grabbed my wrist and asked, How the hell did she get her hands on formaldehyde? Formaldehyde for Christ’s sake.
     That was the last of it. They sent her off to a school filled with sisters and daughters that knew they were supposed to act some way, but were never sure exactly how. She never came back for a visit. Not even on holidays.

     I would love to tell you how we are doing, son. I really would. But there are other concerns. Other, better obligations. Think of the politics, the history, the logic.
     I don’t know what you’re saying.
     Love, son, the big stuff. Just make certain you show you are excitable. If you can’t do that you’re dead in the water, my boy, dead in the water.

     I left brotherly messages saying they were in hospice. I told her how the doctors said the best case would be that one would go and the pain of loss would send the other along soon after, the heart too frail to keep on.
     I said I didn’t know what to do either.

     Walking home from the bus stop one evening I was jumped, cut, left for dead in a ditch. He took my keys, my rings, my blazer. Said it would look real pretty on his bitch.
     The authorities told me I was lucky and they questioned me. They could canvass the area, find the guy. I told them to leave it alone, that it was all a fugue episode anyway. They looked at me blankly and left, and I pressed the morphine button until sleep.
     I woke up at home in my bed. I didn’t know how I got there. A figure was sitting in front of me. It was her, all the way from Iowa. She spent the entire week. Slept on the couch. A fold-out. She tried not to complain, but she said it did make her shiver a little at night.
     When I asked her why she was there after so long, since we sent her to that school in the first place, she said that the hospital had called saying I had listed her as emergency contact.
     And it was an emergency, she said.

     The answering machine had built up the entire time I was in the hospital. There were twenty-nine messages, each from Dad. They said: From…the…tower…we…can…see…the…ocean…all…spread…out…and…now…we…know…that…the…enemy…is…everywhere…Bivouak…your…household…pets…men…The…enemy…is…everywhere!
     She stood there and deleted each message one by one. When she finished she looked at me, scratching hard at something behind her ear, and said, That’s what he sounds like now?

     It didn’t take her long to go through my finances thoroughly. She asked about receipts. Apologized. Blamed it on her work. She warned me that I was living well beyond my means, that things would be a tight squeeze but that she and Harold, her husband, would do what they could.
     Once I was well enough, we walked to the ditch. She said she wanted to see where it happened. I half expected the blood to have stained the dirt, but it didn’t. She asked if I really thought blood stains dirt.
     I don’t know what blood does, I answered.
     It was a small town, and the sun was starting to set. Cars passed leisurely, and we stood there for a long time. The sun was setting where a skyline should be, mixing the clouds together in reds and blues like candy all over.
     We sat on the couch together that night, laughed, emptied two bottles of wine between us. I said that I wanted to thank her but I couldn’t tell if her being there was charity or something else.

     The day she left we had lunch at a café. We drank beer until we were drunk. She said she missed me, that she felt bad for a lot of things, that she was just so busy trying to put her life back together. She promised she’d keep in touch, bring the kids down next time maybe. Harold, too.
     She said, I don’t know what to say. What should I say?

     The last of father’s calls came early when everything was still blue. There was just his heavy, pointed breath for a while. Then he spoke:
     There is everything to say.
     There is everything to say.
     There is everything to say.

     The on-duty nurse summoned me in vacant, tired, business tones to come visit them while they could still remember home. I took a cab. The nurse stopped me in the hall, just as I entered, and slipped all of the important papers into my back pocket for later.
     I eased my way into mother’s room and watched her there grabbing at my father’s lips, trying to say something. Her hair was all burnt wires, and she was sticking her finger into my father, poking him in his softer parts. He giggled. She started winding her hair with her little finger. They were at the end.
     There I was, easing out of the room I had barely set foot in, the nurse holding my chest from behind. I wish there was a way to say I cared for them better and visited them until the end, but I only turned and walked away.
     It was cold, as it tends to be in those places, and I pretended that I was sad like those times when you press through the rooms of your house, thinking that memories are somehow there, in the paint, in the years.
     So I went outside for the heat and waited for a taxi. The hospice standing tall and well lit behind me, another place on earth:
     My mother, blind, locked in a heated scratching with herself.
     My father picking out the moon and howling.

About the author:
Gary Sheppard lives, works and writes in Oxford, Mississippi. He is a John and Renee Grisham fellow in the M.F.A program at The University of Mississippi. He is also the recipient of a Bondurant Prize in fiction. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Tyrant and The Chiron Review.

     My Uncle Buzz used to play for the Carolina Panthers. Cornerback. Two Pro-Bowls. Led the league in interceptions. Whenever they’d play the Dolphins he’d take Dad and me out to dinner and refuse to let my Dad even see the bill. This was years and years ago. His wife, my Aunt Miranda, is a former foot model. Nowadays she’s a homemaker. I bare strong resemblance to my Uncle Buzz, even more so than I do to Dad or the pictures of Mom. Elder relations like to point this out.
     When Uncle Buzz signed his extension, Dad moved us up to Carolina to live in their pool house until our finances settled. We packed the U-Haul and sang Johnny Cash songs the whole way, our voices dipping in baritone. My throat was rasp for a week. Three games into the season my Uncle Buzz’s neck met with a pylon and from then on he’s been in a wheelchair. I can remember the hospital waiting room. My Dad’s face was stuck flushed and he used the bathroom over and over. Aunt Miranda didn’t say much. She read magazines through the night, picking at her eyelashes and pouting. The doctor slunk out and gave the bad news. In response my Dad covered his eyeballs with his palms and Aunt Miranda made the face of total ruination. We went in and saw Uncle Buzz laid up with tubes. I cried. I was ten. My dad has the game on tape. They make the pylons out of foam now.
     After the accident we moved out of the pool house. To see his indomitable, hulking brother—shoulder blades like manhole covers, hands coarse and veined with struggle—confined to that chair was too much for my Dad. Our new house was a ranch with no fence and over-anxious motion detectors. We still live there. Eventually, Uncle Buzz and Aunt Miranda had to move to our neighborhood, too. The Panthers gave him a position in public relations out of pity or admiration and Uncle Buzz sold the mansion and pool house. I never understood why they had a pool, the whole place was right there on the Atlantic.

     One Saturday I get beer on the bladder and climb through my window to the use the can. I open the door and there’s my Aunt Miranda, on my bathroom counter, long legs akick, smoking a cigarette and smiling dumbly like she never does. We look at each other. Mumbling apologies, I swing the door towards closed but she calls out.
     “Don’t mind me,” she says.
     “It’s all right. I’ll use my Dad’s—”
     “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, boy. Don’t be a baby.” She exhales a cone of smoke at the ceiling and I’m so near-drunk and pee-crazy I stumble in and start pissing into the bathtub, my back to her.
     “Got something against the toilet?” she says, sliding off the counter.
     I hear the tile sucking at her barefoot soles. She’s at my back. I zipper up.
     She says, “Better wash your hands.” Her breath is hot on my neck. I step around her and run water over my hands . Through the door I hear screams, or maybe cheers, there’s no telling. I fix my eyes on the tile and it’s got worms of mold in the grouting. I look at myself in the mirror. In one fluid motion, Aunt Miranda falls against my back, drapes her arms over my shoulders. Her cigarette dangles, hugged weakly by knuckles.
     “You ever smoke before?” She asks.
     “Nope.”
     Aunt Miranda rises onto tippy-toes, stabs her knockers into my back. In my ear she whispers, you’re too old to never have had a smoke. She spins me around so we’re facing. Then my aunt drags long on the cigarette and brings her mouth to mine and breathes out as I breathe in. I feel it in my throat, all through me.
     The sink’s still running.
     “You got a girlfriend?” Aunt Miranda asks. “Something young and pretty?” By now I can see the shards of color in her eyes. I say nothing. I’m latched with want, want for my aunt, which I recognize is crazy, but I tell myself crazy is how you look at it. Then I tell myself that that’s a rationalization and I need out of there bad. I can’t seem to though. I try to move but my blood’s flowing helter-skelter, and every thought is a wailing baby, and the only manageable action I can foster is to reach out and turn off the faucet.
     Once it’s off Aunt Miranda throws her cigarette in the drain and kisses me hard on the mouth. Without thinking, I struggle to breathe and kiss back because, well, because. She makes wild use of her tongue. Her breath is spit and smoke and beer. She guides my hands over her stomach and knockers like I’m blind or never saw loving in the movies. She coos and holds her eyes shut and doesn’t pause in the kissing throughout. I try to keep up. I feel the bulbous fakeness hidden in her knockers. I feel the interplay between her ass and her Levi’s. I feel her tongue with my tongue. Eventually, my brain and self are in full ruckus and I’m at overflow with lust and here she detaches and smiles and leaves.
     I don’t think. I wash the cigarette down the drain.

     After getting frenched by Aunt Miranda I lurk in my room turning my Playstation off and on and waiting for Uncle Buzz to come demolish me. He never does. The day darkens. Conversations die and I’m soothed by starting cars and night noise. My Dad strides into my room without knocking.
     “You missed the game.”
     “Who won?”
     “Not us.”
     I yawn a yawn and say, “A shame, really.”
     In the quiet, I can hear my Dad’s breathing, how the doorknob flinches when he takes it in his hand.
     “Leftovers in the fridge.”
     “Leftovers in the fridge,” I say, not hearing him go.

     That Sunday I pull dayshift at Nathan’s. Beatrice works counter. I circulate the dogs in the deep fryer, tweeze my thoughts for long stretches of time. We barely talk, which is weird because we always talk. Beatrice points this out without pointing it out, with darting looks and confused stares. Old folks walk the concourse in droves. Commerce is scant. I feel nauseous. My sneaks are laced too tight. Beatrice continuously makes eyes at me and by eleven I’ve taken three breaks.
     Then sometime during the afternoon slog, this huge, cloaked, goth guy slinks up to the counter. I have seen him around, haunting the derelict corners by my high school, unfazed by the bitterest winters, a mammoth, animate gargoyle. I try not to drop eaves but I’m dead bored and there’s no helping. He leans so close to Beatrice his words come over the microphone, right into my ear.
     He says, “Let me bum a smoke, sweetheart.” That last word sends blood to my ears.
     “Oh,” says Beatrice. “Oh, I’d never smoke.”
     “Of course,” he laughs. “Smoking is reserved for us dirt-bags, right?”
     “No—not at all. I mean—I mean—”
     “Please.” His voice gets considerably louder, like he’s intending for me to hear as well. “Tell me what you mean…Be-a-trice.” He reads her nametag with dark relish.
     I can hear her brain churning replies. “I mean—I mean—”
     The guy’s voice goes harsh whisper, hisses in my eardrum. “Ugly bitch.”
     Before I can even get out of the kitchen, he’s halfway to the exit, steel-toed boots scraping like utensils on teeth. I am fuming and immobilized. I return to the kitchen, and a part of me is relieved, and I hate that part of me. Peeking over, I watch Beatrice open and close the cash register, once, twice, three times. After a minute, she comes back and asks if I want to split a Cherry Coke with her. She’s always doing this, offering to share anything sharable that she’s got.
     “We don’t have Cherry Coke,” I say, simply pointing out a fact.
     “I know. I’m going to go to Wok N’ Roll.”
     I’m too peeved to be thirsty, tell her, “I think I’m okay. Thanks though.”
     “You’re welcome,” Beatrice says, mouth barely moving.
     Over the next hour I wait for her to go to Wok N’ Roll, but she is rooted. Instead, Beatrice looks back and forth over the food court and bends the microphone’s pliable neck into some unknown alphabet, never acknowledging me. This gets me more pissed. My inner voices start yelling coward at each other. Suddenly, I wish I had punched that gargoyle right in his mush. I go up front. Beatrice wipes at her eyes.
     “You want me to watch the counter while you go get that Coke?”
     She processes this and lets her face fall and says, “I don’t want it anymore.”
     “You don’t?”
     “Not right now.”
     “You sure?” I ask. “I can go get it for you if you—”
     “I don’t want the Coke.” Her eyes meet mine. “Thanks though.“
     I tell her she’s so welcome, return to my station. The fryer is a bubbling, furious swamp. At five, I tell Beatrice I’m going to ride my bike back even though I don’t have my bike and I want her to drive me and park three houses down and neck with me, but I tell her I’m going to ride my bike. This, I decide, this is wit’s end. I take the long way, a forty-eight minute walk of angry, frazzled thoughts; the whole way avoiding any street Beatrice would even think about using to take me home.

     I’m in bed, hours later, still ensconced in thought. Usually Beatrice phones, but tonight she hasn’t and I’m feeling full-blown awful when thereabouts comes a rapping at my windowpane. I sit up. I squint and see my Aunt Miranda, right there, donning a fluffy fur coat and a smile that wobbles at the mouth corners. She fans herself, calling me over. I lurch up. I crank open the window. It’s got to be eighty-five degrees outside. She’s sweating. Her lips are dyed the slick maroon of a birthmark and I’m sensing she’s lushed up.
     “Don’t just stand there. Help me,” she says, lifting her arms like a pleading, ground-wary infant.
     “Why you wearing that coat?”
     She keeps her arms up. “Because I like looking beautiful. Now, come on.”
     I hook her by the armpits and carry her in. She’s light as a big thing of dog food.
     Immediately Aunt Miranda sets to smooching me. Omnipresent hands. At first, I’m wondering if my Dad’s konked out downstairs or if Beatrice is calling or if Beatrice is in sad consideration of the thought of calling but eventually the more present urges vanquish the musings and I’m kissing back. We’re against the dresser. We’re on my homework desk. The lamp plunges to the hardwood and we pause for any signs of life from the outside world. Nothing. I’m flung onto the bed. She lets the fur coat fall and she’s unconditionally naked beneath. My eyes palpitate. I get one sock off before Aunt Miranda’s mounted me, humping animally.
     Soon we’re breathing as if close to death and I’m so aware of my hardness it’s hard to stand. Aunt Miranda rolls off. She grabs my wrist like a reprimanding parental and stares at me in a vague anger. Her organ’s on full display and I can’t tell if I’m yucked or awed or what.
     “Is this all I’m good for?” She asks, gesturing towards her womanlies.
     Before I can answer she stabs my fingers into her scorching, sopping snatch and sets to humping my hand for a bit, amidst kissing. I put lips to her neck, hoping to satisfy without her guidance, but I’m a poor multi-tasker. She writhes. She clutches at me with arms, legs, mouth, pulling me closer. Things seem magnified. Her moans beat at the sleeping walls. I try to mute them with kisses or by misplacing my elbows, but this throws her further into rapture. Then she takes my hardness in her hand and, sans any eye-play or preface, slides me into her.
     Instantly, I’m swimming in joy waves.
     “In me, boy. In me,” Aunt Miranda commands, wriggling.
     I indulge her. I deploy and for scant moments I’m all contented molecules. Then I’m panting, and reality pounces, and I’m naked in bed with my Aunt.

     She humps a bit longer. Eyes shut, rapt, moving her mouth like she’s lip-synching. But, over time, her gyrations grow less fidgety. The moans subside. Finally, she disembarks and bombs my seed all over the bedspread. I get peeved that she doesn’t apologize for this. Leaving the fur piled on the floor, Aunt Miranda opts for my Panthers jersey—my Uncle Buzz #36—and excuses herself to the bathroom and I’m too mystified to think of the resulting disasters that short trip across the hall could welcome.
     From then on nothing. Sometime during Aunt Miranda’s bathroom break I slip into sleep and awake the next morning, alone, and try to re-piece the night. I can’t. I can recall the act itself, but the actual parts—the pulls of hair and hipbone-clutching—those are fuzzed. I don’t like it. I feel robbed. A memory flashes vivid: Jimmy Frack, utterly smiles in the back of the school bus, saying that he once gave Linda Wot lateral pity for three hours straight. I hadn’t known what that meant, but I think I do, now, searching my sheets for stains, seeing if my first time was really real.
     Before school I call out of work. I walk to the far cul-de-sac and back, figuring I have already missed the bus. Our neighborhood is newly paved and the blacktop winks with sun. The Yeltin’s dog barks at me, then a squirrel, then its fence. My bus honks when it passes. I hear screams yanked by wind. I hadn’t missed it. The only difference I can sense, in me, is a hazy woe brought on only by how un-different I feel, but my walk is aimless and reassuring. Sneakers-on-pavement rings simple and soft. I realize I’m missing a quiz in Chem. Covalent bonds. I was supposed to study with Beatrice.
     My Dad is in the kitchen.
     “Lost?” He asks, looking up from a microwaved bagel.
     “Missed the bus.”
     “This is a first.”
     “I’m sorry?” I say, the only reply I got.
     He munches the last of his breakfast. “Ready to go, then?”
     “So ready.”
     My Dad puts his plate in the sink and grabs his keys and we’re off.

     The Wallbanger Dry-Wall Mobile is rectangular. It is the color of eggshells and smells of cashews and Old Spice. In middle school, I was embarrassed of the Wallbanger Dry-Wall Mobile, but I’ve grown to view it as a worthy scar, a charming eyesore on the face of our driveway. It makes a sound like a distant, constant chain of sneezes.
     “Uncle Buzz invited us to the game tonight,” my Dad says.
     “That was nice of him.”
     The van spazzes to a stop at a red light. “You want to go or not?”
     “Is Aunt Miranda going to be there?” The casual divulgence makes my guts jump. My Dad purses his lips.
     “What’s that dumb broad got to do with anything?”
     “I don’t know,” I say, meaning it.
     The light changes. The van sputters on. Without taking his eyes from the road, my Dad pulls a jug of cashews from the center console and miraculously unscrews the lid with one hand and crams a fistful into his gullet and screws the lid on and chews. On the corner, I spot the Gargoyle from yesterday. He stares. I stare back.
     “In chlomp front chlomp?” Dad asks, barely forming words around chewing.
     I nod and watch the Gargoyle disappear in the side mirror.
     My Dad navigates the parking lot with a slowness that’s unlike him, uppercuts the parking lever. We’re right at the door.
     “So, yea or nay on the game?”
     He goes to hand me the cashew jug, but I wave him off. “I got a lot of homework.”
     “But you haven’t even been to any of your classes yet.”
     “I’m anticipating,” I say. I pop the door.
     “It’d mean worlds to your Uncle. He’s seems real down lately.”
     “I wonder why.”
     My Dad’s features snap at this. He looks at me all weird-like.
     “Something up?”
     “Nothing’s up.”
     “Sure?”
     “Positive.”
     “Sure sure?”
     “Positive sure.”
     I step out. I close the door. As I march toward school, I hear the van’s window crank down and I turn. My Dad’s calling. I go back.
     “Yes?” I say.
     “Give me your hand.”
     “Why?”
     “Give me your hand.”
     So I give him my hand. He crams a twenty into my palm.
     “For lunch,” he says, nodding.
     “I got money.”
     “So do I,” my Dad says, cranking up the window in complete disregard to my arm, which I retract in actual fright before it’s severed, and he tears off as he has for as far back as I know.

    Late Pass in hand, I head for Chem. The hallways are abandoned, thick walls and fire-retardant doors bottle up the classroom clamor. Three separate monitors inspect my Pass, and by the time I reach S Wing I’m basically jogging, holding the pass out like a shield. When I round the corner I spot someone outside Chem, sitting on the cold floor, back to the lockers. I hear one low sob and know that it’s Beatrice. So I start running.
     She never looks up, but the sobbing stops. I come to a halt right at her and ask, what’s the matter?
     “What did I do to deserve this?” She says, bringing her wet eyes up and the sight of them makes me look at my sneaks.
     “What are you talking about?” I say to my sneaks.
     “I just failed that quiz so bad.” I experience explosions of relief.
     Dumbly, I say, “Aw, he gave the quiz already!?” And, all of a sudden, I am to blame for everything. Beatrice’s eyes gush and she stands and grabs my sleeve and starts pulling me towards the bathrooms. I can hear running faucets and roaring toilets. I resist. She insists.
     “Why didn’t you come to the phone last night?”
     “Because you didn’t call,” I say, and immediately I see she did call.
     “Your Dad said you were ‘busy’ upstairs. Busy with what?” I stare, unable to process.
     “I’m not sure,” I say, but I am.
     “I’m sure,” she says, and I know she knows.
    I watch her disappear down the hall. I watch the Chem door the whole period waiting for her to return, which she never does, not even to get her backpack.

     At lunch, I learn, by way of Tim Krill who heard from Sara Ply, that Beatrice went home early. I stab at my egg salad.
     “Word is she’s got the Mono,” Tim announces, grinning moronically.
     “Is that the word?” I almost spit.
     “Thanks be to God.” Tim says, bowing his head.
    A mousey girl in a pep squad uniform hits Tim’s shoulder. “Shut up, Tim.” She smiles braces at me. “Don’t listen to him. I’m sure Bea’s Mono isn’t that serious.” I have no idea if she’s joking and I have no idea who she is.
     “Thanks so much,” I say. I get up, snagging my sneaks on the bench. At the garbage, without even looking for overseeing eyes, I dump my whole tray into the lightless, carved mouth of the receptacle. I set to wandering the halls until the bell, but Mr. Q. corners me in L Wing. He asks for my pass. I’m banished back to the cafeteria.
     I decide to skip the next period.
     I sneak outside. I head to the corner. It’s beyond bright out, and I have to squint the whole way. As expected, there he is, cloaked, cigarette dangling from his lips. I stop across the street. The wind kicks up. I open my eyes wide and stare. Undaunted, The Gargoyle stares back. He drags on his cigarette, exhales, never takes his eyes from me. This goes on way longer than a blink. The crossing guard lady gets up from her beach chair and asks for my pass. Without looking away, I reach into my pocket and give her my Late Pass from before.
     “That one’s no good anymore,” I say, handing it to her. She reads it anyway.
     Crossing guard lady asks, “Then why even give it?”
     To which I reply, “It’s all I got.”
     Here, the wind flings itself at my eyeballs and the Gargoyle can’t help but look away. I ask the crossing guard for my pass back. She refuses and ask for my name. I say, “Jackson Wallbanger,” gladly.
     When I climb up the stairs to the bus, the driver nods her matted head of spider silk at me.
     “You made it,” she says.
     I take the seat behind her, which I never do, and look right into the slanted mirror.
     “Here I am.”

     My Dad has left a note:

     For some reason, I say, “Leftovers in the fridge,” to the abandoned kitchen. I go up to my bedroom. I peel off my shoes, let my socks breathe and try to nap, but my blood’s restless and I waste an hour bed-flopping. Nothing’s on T.V. Boredom creeps up my spine. I fiddle with my cordless, consider calling Nathan’s to see if Beatrice showed for work. I tell myself I’ll call later and instead jam the phone under my pillow. My room is hotter than usual. I change my shirt. The sun’s a busted egg yolk, out my window. I plop back onto my bed, practice opening and closing my eyes. After examining the blobby geography of my ceiling’s watermarks I figure I should be hungry.
     When I reach the bottom step I see Aunt Miranda’s Saab idling in our driveway. She gets out of the car, is wearing that fur, has my Panthers jersey on underneath. My eye twitches. I can’t take it. I yank open our front door and stomp out to her. Aunt Miranda scrutinizes me with small, bewildered eyes and gets back into her car. I walk around the sun-blurred hood and get in, too.
     “What’s all this mean?” I ask, real loud, gesturing at everything and nothing.
     Without answering, Aunt Miranda launches into the passenger seat. We set to kissing and groping. It’s broad dusklight out and I could really care less, until I’m about to deploy and she’s eyes-shut panting into my ear and she out of nowhere stops. Aunt Miranda doesn’t dismount me. She just stops. I clam up and blinklessly wait. My stomach hardens into something dense and painful. Uncontrollably, I attempt to get her to resume humping by continuing my humping. Aunt Miranda has none of it, remains clutched to me, face-to-face, her arms an X behind my head. I give up. She bends a double-jointed wrist and pets my cheek, pinches my cheek, lets my skin snap back taut. There are red blotches resembling sunburn or embarrassment on her neck and arms.
     “What’s your first memory of me?” She asks, way out from left field.
     “I don’t remember.”
     “You have to remember something.” She doesn’t look up.
     “I may think better if you dismounted,” I say. The seat’s fabric bites at my back.
     “Think.”
     Too exhausted and peeved not to, I try.
     “Think,” she repeats, and that one word summons up a memory, summer Sunday clear. “I got one.”
     “Tell me,” she whispers.
     “Dad and I were living in the pool-house, and you just got that red Mercedes. Uncle Buzz surprised you.”
     “I’m remembering.”
     “And when you first got in the car you backed up into that flower pot thing near the garage door. The whole side was gashed and Uncle Buzz got real pissed and was hollering at you. I was on my bike, standing over the mid-bar, watching Uncle Buzz cuss, then out of nowhere—”
     “I know, Jackson.”
     “Out of nowhere my Dad strides up and socks him right in the nose. And Uncle Buzz goes down, like plop, which was weird because Uncle Buzz is like two of my Dads.”
     “…”
     “But Uncle Buzz didn’t get up and wonk him. He—I remember getting off my bike here—just reached out his hand and my Dad hauled him up and my Dad told me to go ride my bike and I did. That’s it.”
     “That’s it,” she said, kissing me harder than ever on the mouth. “I remember.” She kissed me again. “That’s exactly right.” Again and again and again.

     Dad gets back around 11. He’s unsure on his feet, liquored. His wave is less a wave and more a petting of air. I’m sprawled out across the couch. Under my head, I got my Panthers jersey balled into pillow-status. His smile is toothless and he sags into the La-Z-Boy and pops the footrest. I roam the channels, settling on highlights of the game.
     “We won,” I say.
     “Can’t lose forever,” he says. “What you do all night?”
     “This and that,” I say. “Mostly absolutely nothing.”
     He sneers sort of, looks at me blearily. “You gotta start being more concrete about stuff.”
     “I do?”
     “You’re too old for me to be worrying about you day and night.”
     This catches me sideways, but without deliberation I’m saying, “I know,” and offering to split the leftovers with him. He accepts, lets his neck loose and exhales.
     “We gotta go through those before tomorrow,” he says.
     I agree, because tomorrow is Saturday, when the drunk droves of collegiates slog up to the stadium, and my house fills with wee-cousins, with elder relations and grill smoke, and understanding this I go into the kitchen and un-foil the leftovers. I put them in the microwave. I wait, and I wait, and I yank the kitchen phone from its rest and dial.

About the author:

Carmen Petaccio is a recent graduate of New York University, where he studied Economics and Creative Writing. Currently, he works in a laser tag. He would like to dedicate this story to Theresa “The Momma” Petaccio and Brian “Big Gun” Petaccio. That’s his Mom and Dad. He apologizes to the whole world if that’s lame, but doesn’t, really.

My boyfriend Jack likes to pretend I’m dead. At first the ice baths before sex and the blowjobs in the graveyard seemed weird, but now I like pretending I’m dead too. Jack’s ten years older than me and works as a medical assistant. He’s visited palaces in Nepal, seen the Northern lights over Moskosel, and rode elephants through muddy rivers near Chiang Mai. He’s so dreamy.

When Jack gets home from the hospital, I immediately start running the bath on cold and fill the buckets with ice from the icemaker. I get in the bath and shiver for him and try to really get into the part, really pretend I’m dead, and then towel off and lay on the bed waiting for him. When he enters me, my eyes are closed, my muscles stiff, and I don’t speak a word. I even try not to breathe.

It works out well because I’m a theater major at the state university. My past roles have included dead people. Juliet’s final scene in Shakespeare’s classic, The Ghost of Christmas Past. I won my high school’s best actress award for my portrayal of Emily in Our Town, my long deadpan monologue about the beauty of coffee and new ironed dresses and hot baths and how much I missed those things, being dead and all. But let me tell you, it’s much harder to play a dead person in real life. With Jack, I use my method acting and try to really be dead. Let my mind empty and my body float away, close my eyes and think the words I’m a corpse I’m a corpse I’m a corpse as Jack grunts and pushes and says oh baby oh my darling how beautiful you are. When he’s done he tells me how convincing I am. As an actress, “convincing” is my favorite compliment.

I go out on auditions sometimes. Jack drives me to the City on his days off, Mondays and Tuesdays, and sits in the car reading travel books. Once I got a part as CAREFREE WOMAN #4 in a tampon commercial, riding a bike around in circles in a grassy park, open-mouthed laughing. I also played TIRED TEEN MOM in a local PSA. My baby was actually a stuffed monkey wrapped in a baby blanket. This week I have an audition for a bit part on a crime show. The ad said nonspeaking, but any face time is worth it. I practice in the mirror, make villain-criminal faces, tough, chin up. I want my lawyer. Or plead with the mirror like a victim. No, please, I promise, I’ll do anything. Even a professional, unreadable detective. You have the right to remain silent. Jack watches from the doorway, smiling. He comes behind me and puts his arms around my waist and watches us in the mirror. I didn’t realize he was home so I giggle. You want me to draw a bath? I ask him. He shakes his head. Want to go to the graveyard? He kisses my hair and says he has a date planned for us. It’s our three-month anniversary. We’re going out for sushi and then renting a Hitchcock flick.

That night in bed, as I thaw myself beneath the electric blanket, we exchange gifts. He bought me a leather jacket that must have cost him hundreds. I bought him a book about the Black Dahlia murder with lots of pictures. He flips the pages and licks his lips. Then he puts it down and hugs me. He says he wants me to move in with him. I’m not that surprised, since I haven’t been to my dorm in weeks, but I fake it and flap my hands up and down and squeal.

On Tuesday, he takes me to the audition for that bit part on the crime show. After we park he opens his Italy book to the chapter on Pompeii and he says he hopes we can go there in the spring. I kiss his cheek and leave him in the car. The audition building looks industrial, square and gray and windowless. I go inside and sit down with the others, girls roughly my age, weight and height and haircolor. We smile fake smiles and make small talk about the crappy magazines in the waiting room. I ask the blond girl next to me who introduces herself as Asia if she knows anything about the part. I heard it’s just playing a dead girl, she tells me. The dead girl that starts the episode. I say yay and tell her how I’ve played a dead girl before: as Emily, goodbying Grover’s Corners. Juliet and The Ghost of Christmas Past, if that counts. And with my boyfriend all the time, you know, kinky stuff. Asia’s mouth drops and she says that’s fucking disgusting. I’m glad when my name gets called and I can leave the silence of the waiting room. I smooth my hair and skirt and go into a blank room with four bespectacled writers with coffee cups sitting behind a card table. I lay on the floor and pretend I’m dead. They call my performance convincing and shake my hand because I got the part.

I’m so excited. Jack’s waiting in the car. He’s moved onto the chapter on Palermo now. How’d it go? he asks. I tell him about how I got the part of VICTIM and we hug. You’ll be perfect, he says. I say filming starts in two days and he says he’ll get someone to cover for him at the hospital so he can come support me. You’re the sweetest, I tell him. We go get hamburgers to celebrate. The words “fucking disgusting” keep ringing in my head, but I don’t tell him. When we’re full of burgers, he drives to the graveyard.

A month later, when the episode airs, I feel like a celebrity. Even my professors saw my performance on TV and called it my big break. I lay in a sea of blood and spattered glass as the detectives walked around my body and collected evidence. Cause of death was strangulation, and at the end of the episode it ended up being my father’s new jealous pregnant wife. Jack recorded the episode and watches my performance again and again, squeezing my hand and breathing deep as the camera zooms in on my pale face, my long listless legs and blood-streaked hair, my naked sheet-covered body. I ask him if he thinks pretending I’m dead could be considered fucking disgusting. He shakes his head and says, never, with such verve I believe him. He runs a hand along my face and says, you’re so beautiful. You make such a convincing corpse. I’m so flattered that I can’t speak for a minute. I say thank you, and kiss the side of his mouth, and get up to start the bath.

Faith Gardner

Faith lives in Oakland and has stories in or forthcoming in Defenestration, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and PANK. She can be found at faithgardner.com.

Kathy came back for her mother’s stove. Early on a Sunday, wearing a shirt that showed all of her cream-colored stomach and her deep belly-button hole I never liked. She entered the house as if she still lived here and knocked on the wall while she walked down the hallway. I looked out the window and saw her man standing beside his idling Cheyenne. Muffler smoke rose a few feet and then disappeared.
     I locked the bedroom door and climbed out the window. I wanted him to see me before she did. I was only in my underwear and sneakers and I think my appearance put the man at ease. He walked toward me, his hand outstretched, but before I reached him she was already outside, now running. She stood between us. She didn’t want us to touch. I could see him, though, and he could see me. More of me than I could see of him. He wore a western shirt with pearl buttons and silver boots, black-tipped. If it was only the two of us I would remind him that we were in Connecticut, but she was there.
     I thought her request was ridiculous. The stove was heavy as hell, and I would need to unhook the gas line. No goddamn way I was doing it on Sunday.
     “It’s not like you’re going to church.” She stared at my bare legs. “Frank’s range kicked. We need to replace it, and that stove belongs to me.”
     “What am I going to do?”
     “You never use it anyway.” She looked back at her man. “He likes to cook over charcoal. Says the taste is more natural.” She intended that information as a sting against me, but the man–Frank–didn’t offer a smile or smirk. He simply nodded.
     “I’ll give you the stove if you give me your set.”
     One of the keys peeked from the pocket of her tight jeans. There was really no reason for her to have the keys anymore.
     “That’s a good trade,” Frank said. Yes it was.

I climbed back in through the window and opened the front door. Frank shook my hand then but it was bad timing, and as we walked down the hallway together his hand grazed my half-bare ass.
     “How are you getting this home?” I walked across the linoleum floor and flicked on the kitchen light.
     Kathy crossed her arms. “Could you please put some clothes on?”
     I looked at him. “How are you getting this home?”
     “I’ve got the trailer on the Cheyenne.”
     Fair enough. They weren’t asking for the stove, they were taking it.

I won’t deny that it was a nice stove. About 20 years old, with an antique copper finish. Three burners, plenty of dials, and a chrome tint to make it look expensive. It wasn’t quite what I expected from her mother, but the truth was that her mother’s second husband had bought it for her, and they’d gotten divorced within the year. My buddies had told me to look to the mother and you’ll see the way the daughter leans, but I didn’t listen. So here I was, about to say goodbye to this fancy stove.
     I shuffled the stove away from the wall, the metal sides cool against my thighs. I guess I could have gone in the bedroom and at least put on a pair of shorts, but what the hell.
     Behind the stove was dusty and oily, spackled with grime. We had a lot of moisture in the house, and I never did a good job of keeping the windows cracked, as the realtor had suggested years ago. I kneeled on the ground, screwdriver and pipe wrench in hand, and told Frank to sit, as if he’d come over for some coffee. I didn’t tell Kathy what to do because she already knew.
     I knew this was going to be a bit tricky because I was taking away the stove but I had nothing to replace it with; this was going to remain an empty space. I raised the wrench to the line but remembered that I hadn’t turned it off; I asked Kathy to do it for me. I don’t know why I trusted her to, but she went off without complaining, and left Frank and I together.
     “What kind of trailer you’ve got on her?” I looked out the window but couldn’t see the truck.
     “Six by twelve, open top.” He explained that he hauled things often; he did home-cleanings. “You won’t believe what people get rid of.” Then he rifled off a healthy list: Mason & Hamlin uprights, Winslow Homer prints, golf clubs. He was really getting into the list when Kathy came back. She stood in the center of the room, hands on her hips as if she’d completed some great task, and looked at both of us.
     “It’s off.”
     I thanked her and got to work. I removed the line from the stove and then pushed it into the center of the room. Kathy received it there, held onto the sides, laid her claim; I simply needed some more space and light. I spread pipe sealant into a cap, smoothing it along the threads, and capped the line. Kathy was now sitting with Frank at the table, and they were both watching me. I wondered why; the stove was out there, free, ready to go to its new home, their new home. Then I realized why they couldn’t leave: they needed me to help bring it outside. The nerve of them.
     I stood, my knees tired, my back feeling fine, better than crawling in the tobacco field. I flipped over a mug from the counter and filled it with water and soap. I took my time, building up a froth, and then dabbed the soapy water on the cap. I waited there, we waited, for a few minutes. We watched. There was nothing. The cap was tight, the line was shut. I was finished with that.
     I knew what was next, and there was no reason for them to ask. It was almost a favor on my part, to make them feel more comfortable here. A gesture along with the returned gift. I rolled in a dolly from the garage and situated it in front of the stove. I told Frank to get on the right, I would take the left. Kathy went to the back.
     I waved her away. “There’s nowhere for you to grip. We’ve got it.” Yes, Frank and I had it. Like brothers.
     We lifted. The dolly sprung forward and hit the table. We brought the stove back down onto the linoleum, hard. He said sorry.
     “Not a problem. I plan on replacing the floor anyway.”
     Kathy look surprised. I asked Frank to tip the stove back, and I slipped the dolly beneath. He eased it down and we turned to the left, angled it toward the hallway. “There’s a bump at the threshold,” I warned. He lifted the stove forward, I shimmied the dolly straight, and we brought it back. Kathy kept a hand on the stove, but I didn’t need her guidance.
     I don’t know what happened when we reached the threshold, but the stove shifted, tipped to the right, and Frank almost knocked-out Kathy while trying to stop the stove from crashing down. I lunged for the side but caught a sharp edge and slashed my palm down the center. I jerked my hand back and watched the blood flow.
     Frank steadied down the stove. Kathy screamed: it probably sounded fake to Frank, but I knew it was real. She put her arm around my waist and led me down the hallway and into the laundry room. Her shoulder was up under my armpit as if she was keeping my weight. My palm was going wild now, and the sting had begun to rise for the first time. I had never been in so much pain.
     She guided me toward the slop sink and leaned my hand beneath the faucet. She turned it on and the water gushed down onto the cut, and I pulled my hand back from the pain. The sink dyed a pale red. She forced my hand back under the water, and this doubled the pain, and I wanted to push her away, but Frank took care of that; he pulled her back and she almost fought his grasp. I sat on the floor and grabbed my wrist. The blood would not stop. Kathy began cursing at Frank, pointing at my hand, but he remained very calm. He turned off the faucet and said water and salt are the worst things for an open wound. I thanked him, stuck my hand under the faucet, and turned the water back on.

Nick Ripatrazone

Nick Ripatrazone is the author of Oblations (Gold Wake Press 2011), a book of prose poems. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Kenyon Review, West Branch, The Mississippi Review, The Collagist, Annalemma and Beloit Fiction Journal.

kayfabe n. the showbiz and stagecraft of professional wrestling, including the ring personas of professional wrestlers, especially when maintained in public.

     “Ladies and gentlemen, this next bout is for the No Limits Wrestling championship!“
     The announcer’s voice is washed out by hundreds of screaming fans — although ‘fans’ hardly seems like the right word. More like people who’ve spent the last three hours crammed inside a shitty high-school gymnasium, drinking dollar-beers and gorging themselves on snacks. They’ve been growing restless ever since the Wonder Wizards versus the Aztec Assassins ran long, but a title defence always brings them back around.
     I’m standing behind the curtain and waiting for my cue, but Bill is nowhere to be found. He’s running behind, as usual, which means we won’t get to discuss any last-minute ideas for our match. Not that it matters. We’ve wrestled each other hundreds of times. Our bouts are more like well-choreographed dances that end with bloody foreheads. I’m not worried about us putting on a good show.
     The announcer booms into his microphone, “Introducing first, from Las Vegas, Nevada…“
     My entrance music kicks in, filling the gym with the opening riffs of Heart’s ’76 classic, Magic Man. I twirl my signature wand between my fingers, try to focus the adrenaline coursing through my body.
     “Weighing in at 235 pounds, he is your current NLW champion…“
     The roar of the crowd changes into a cacophony of curses.
     “Marco ‘The Magician’ Morrison!“
     I throw back the curtain and step onto the ramp leading towards the ring, enveloped by a galaxy of camera flashes. Without missing a beat, I remove my silk top hat and flip it bottom-up, then tap the brim with my wand. Confetti burps from the hat and settles around my feet – a pathetic gag that wouldn’t impress at a toddler’s birthday party – but I sell it like I’m the second-coming of Harry Houdini.
     And it drives the crowd berserk.
     I can’t help but feel a bit ridiculous during this part, bowing and blowing kisses towards teenagers and full-grown men, but I never once slip out of character.
     Not even for a second.
     It doesn’t matter what ridiculous costume they give you, or how nonsensical your new catchphrase is. You live your gimmick. That’s the cardinal rule of this wrestling company: Never break kayfabe.
     See, I’m what most people call a heel. The villain. My job is to have every last person in the building practically begging for someone to kick my ass.
     As it just so happens, I’m a natural.
     I walk towards the ring, stopping every so often to single out fans who lean over the guardrails shouting obscenities. This one guy, wearing a faded heavy metal t-shirt and reeking of whisky, I hear him yell that he’s going to fuck me up in the parking lot after the show.
     My response is canned, but entertaining. I point to his sagging stomach, then to my washboard abs; to his flabby arms, then to my rock-hard biceps. For the kicker, I wave my magic wand and make a plastic flower appear from the tip, which I offer to the obese woman next to him. He flips me off with both hands and spits on my boots.
     Sadly, this is one of the more civilized exchanges I’ve had in a while.
     Slipping into the ring, I take a moment to remove the championship belt strapped around my waist and pose with it from each turnbuckle. After handing my belt to the referee, I reach inside my top hat and pull out a microphone.
     “Thank you, thank you. Honestly, you people are too kind.” I pause, taking in a fresh chorus of jeers. “However, tonight I stand before you bearing terrible news.”
     The crowd begins to chant, “Dozer! Dozer! Dozer!”
     I throw back my head and laugh. “Call for him all you like, he’s not coming. Bill Dozer hasn’t fully recovered from last week’s vicious beating by an… unknown assailant.”
     The crowd boos louder, and I give an exaggerated shrug. “While we may never know who attacked him with that steel chair, the fact remains that Bill Dozer isn’t medically cleared to wrestle tonight. Someone made his title match disappear!”
     I hear the sound of a wrecking ball crashing through brick, then Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA blares over the sound system. The gym erupts with cheers, and within seconds everyone is singing along.
     I contort my face into comedic disbelief, screaming, “No! That’s impossible!” but the truth is that this storyline has been planned for weeks now, and is scheduled to continue for at least another month.
     Bill Dozer, the construction worker with a heart of gold, has been chasing the belt ever since I cost him a Loser-Shaves-His-Head match against Rootin’ Tootin’ Bobby Newton. Tonight I’m supposed to squeak out a win after blinding him with a ‘magic fireball,’ which is actually just a firecracker wrapped in flash paper that I’ve hidden in my tights. Since it won’t be considered a clean victory, next week we’ll have a rematch inside a steel cage, guaranteeing another sold-out venue the next town over.
     But after nearly thirty seconds of thrashing around the ring like a lunatic, there’s still no sign of Bill. His music stops, and murmurs sweep the crowd. Thinking about it, I haven’t spoken with him since we left the Motel 6 this morning, but I’m positive his car is parked outside.
     Before genuine concern has enough time to take root, I snap back into full-on Magician mode. “I told you idiots he’s not coming! Bill Dozer is probably sitting at home on his couch, eating buttered popcorn like the rest of you fat–”
     Cheering picks up from near the curtain, and the Springsteen music begins again. Through the dim gymnasium lighting I see Bill staggering down the ramp. He’s wearing black and yellow-striped trunks that strain against his thick slab of a stomach, and a hardhat that sits atop his potato-shaped head. It’s the usual get-up, but something is different. He doesn’t take time to high-five the rows of outstretched hands, there’s no stopping to pose and belt out a line from the song. Just a wobbly trek to the ring.
     “Introducing the challenger, from the ‘Steel Town’, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania! He weighs in at 300 pounds… Bill Dozer!”
     The gym explodes into cheers, but as he rolls underneath the ropes and stands to face me, I know that something is wrong. Bill’s face is red and splotchy, and he smells like a bottle of Jack Daniels.
     “Well, look who decided to show up.” I work to maintain my condescending tone of voice. “You aren’t supposed to be here tonight.”
     Bill stares me down for a good ten seconds, his body practically vibrating with rage. Few people in this industry can look intimidating like Bill Dozer, but this is way beyond his tantrums over rigged count-outs or cheap disqualifications.
     I wonder if he’s forgotten his lines. Maybe that’s the reason for the excess intensity. But just as I raise my mic to speak, he snatches it from my hand.
     The crowd goes crazy, and for a moment I feel like one of them. We’re all waiting on Bill to say something, anything. It feels less and less likely that his opener will sound like we’d rehearsed a few days ago, but that’s fine. I’ll just play off of whatever he says.
     He lifts the mic to his trembling lips and bellows, “You fucking son of a bitch!”
     It’s loud enough to rival the Pontiac Silverdome now, and it takes everything I have to stop me from leaving the ring and walking straight back to the locker room.
     He knows. I don’t know how, but he knows.
     If this were any other time, Mark Thompson would ask William Daniels to take it easy. He’d remind him of their eleven-year friendship that began all the way back when they were both trying to break into this business. He’d suggest they have a civil conversation.
     But inside a No Limits Wrestling ring, Marco ‘The Magician’ Morrison hates Bill Dozer’s guts, and any signs that point otherwise would be disastrous for the company.
     You never break kayfabe. Not even for a second.
     I signal a guy on the ring crew for another mic, which he slides to me across the mat. “Whoa. Calm down, big rig. This isn’t an R-rated magic show. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m sure there’s a very reasonable explanation.” I force my cockiest grin. “Besides, I have an air-tight alibi for the time of your attack last week.”
     Bill’s expression bounces between wanting blood and breaking down. “How could you? How the fuck could you?”
     This is heading completely off the rails.
     “Okay, you got me!” I throw up my hands in mock exasperation. “I was the one who hit you with a steel chair! But whatever happened is in the past.” It’s a little blatant, but I’m hoping he can crack the code.
     “Fuck you, she told me everything!”
     And before I can respond, Bill socks me square in the nose.
     The secret to a good wrestling punch is simple: stop your fist just short of any real impact, while at the same time stomp your foot against the mat. The spring-coiled suspension of the ring is perfect for creating loud noises that give the illusion of landing a powerful blow.
     Unfortunately, this isn’t one of those punches.
     I feel the crunch of bone and cartilage against my face, and immediately drop to the mat and roll from the ring, collapsing on the cold cement floor. I’m in a daze, but scramble back to my feet in case Bill is already closing in for another shot.
     When my vision clears, I see him pacing back and forth inside the ring, still staring me down like a rabid dog. I wonder why he didn’t just follow me out here and beat me to a bloody pulp, but then I hear the referee counting, “Four. Five.”
     This was his plan all along: to make me lose. By our company’s rules, the title can change hands via count-out or disqualification. It isn’t good enough for him to injure me. He wants to humiliate me, either by making me break kayfabe in front of a sold-out house, or pummelling me into the ground. Either way, Bill Dozer will be the new champion – if only for a few minutes.
     He’s probably as good as fired right now, but there’s no way management will continue to back The Magician if I run from this match. I’ll be busted back down to the mid-card in no time. It could take years to build up my credibility again.
     I can hear fans in the front row chanting, “You fucked up! You fucked up!” They’re right. Blood spurts from my nostrils, runs down my chest and into my waistband. Although it’s expected for me to wear ‘the crimson mask’ before the match is over, a heel is never supposed to bleed this early.
     To everyone else, this is all part of the show. A mistake. What we call a ‘botched spot.’
     “Eight. Nine.”
     I dive back into the ring and rush towards Bill, locking his arms with mine. My sudden burst of resolve seems to catch him off guard, and I force him back into a corner turnbuckle.
     “Jesus Christ, Bill!” I speak in a harsh whisper. “Think about what you’re doing. You’re going to get someone killed.”
     Most wrestlers don’t risk talking inside the ring, but I keep my hair down past my shoulders for these very occasions. If a match is beginning to go sour, long hair is perfect for concealing your mouth, allowing you to communicate moves to your opponent. Right now, I can feel sheets of bloody-blonde hair plastered all around my face.
     “Please, just let me pin you so we can–”
     But he isn’t interested in what I have to say. Instead, he lets out a primal grunt and headbutts me right in what’s left of my mushed nose. I can’t help but scream in agony, and when I break the clinch and stumble backwards, he lunges forward and spears me in the stomach with his shoulder. The impact knocks the wind out of me and I crash to the mat, clutching my ribs.
     I curl into the fetal position and struggle to breathe. Bright flecks swirl in front of my eyes. Bill is standing over me, and he’s actually showboating for the audience. He holds one hand flat, then slams his other fist against the open palm. The crowd roars. It’s his trademark signal that the match will be over soon. He’s ready to deliver his finishing move, a backbreaker across his knee that has been dubbed ‘The Leveller.’
     Bill grabs me by the hair with both hands and pulls me back upright, shaking my skull like it’s a magic eight ball. He’s shouting too, about trust, or loyalty, or something, but everything sounds so distant, like we’re fighting underwater.
     I wonder what the news will say tomorrow about me being killed inside a wrestling ring.
     No. It can’t end like this. The Magician still has one trick left up his sleeve. Slowly, carefully, I reach into the waistband of my tights and remove a small, white ball of paper.
     Bill is too busy ranting to notice. I hold the flash-papered firecracker up to his eyes and snap my fingers, igniting the tiny ball into a brief woosh of flame. It’s a showy trick that’s perfectly safe when performed three or four feet away from the target. At this range though, it’s hot enough and close enough to scorch his retinas.
     Bill shrieks like a schoolgirl and covers his face, releasing me from his grip. I drop to the mat and scramble backwards on my palms.
     “You son of a bitch! I’m blind! You son of a bitch!” He swings wildly at the air, throwing haymaker after haymaker in all directions.
     I’m running on pure adrenaline now, half fighting for my life, half going through the pre-planned motions of the match. To my gelatinous brain, there’s only one way to end this match. If Bill can get away with attempting a finisher, then so can I.
     It’s time for the Ala-ka-Slam.
     I stagger to my feet, then take my opening when Bill throws a punch strong enough to lower his head. In one fluid movement, I leap forward, tuck the back of his neck against my armpit, and yank us both towards the mat.
     The crowd goes crazy, but all the noise in the world can’t prevent me from hearing the sickening crack of Bill’s neck against the canvas. His entire body goes limp on top of mine, pinning me underneath his massive frame.
     “Oh Jesus,” I hear him whisper, face-down against the mat. “I can’t move.”
     Laying here on my back, all the adrenaline is ebbing out of my body. Blood bubbles into my mouth and down my cheeks. I’m sure at least one of my ribs are broken, since every gulp of air feels like I’m swallowing needles.
     But despite that, the realization of what I’ve done slams down on me harder than Bill ever could.
     “How could you?” he starts sobbing against my arm. “Why would you do this to me?”
     He isn’t talking about his neck. I have no idea what to say.
     A Trio of EMT’s storm the ring and slide me out from underneath Bill. I tell them not to worry about me, that I’m the champ, and slink into the nearest corner to watch them work. Two of the EMT’s slide a bright yellow backboard between the ropes, while the other fits Bill with a thick plastic brace from chin to sternum.
     People sitting in the rows closest to the action have started to point and whisper, but most are either too drunk or stupid to realize what’s actually happening. They still think it’s all part of the show, so they laugh and cheer while Bill is slid out of the ring and onto a stretcher. They sing choruses of “Hey hey, good-bye!” as he’s wheeled back up the ramp.
     It’s not until he finally disappears behind the curtain that I notice one of the discarded microphones. I pick it up, hock a mouthful of blood onto the mat, then pull myself upright using the ropes for balance.
     I know that I should just leave the ring – it would be common human decency – but I’ll never get another opportunity like this one. So instead, I clear my throat into the mic, attracting the attention of the entire gym, and shout, “Would any of you inbred hicks like to volunteer for my next trick?”
     The crowd is ready to riot, and suddenly it’s raining popcorn and pretzels, chili-dogs and beer cups. I’m being pelted with snack foods and beverages from all sides, but it doesn’t bother me. I just stand there and blow kisses. Flex my biceps. Take a bow. This is what I’m paid for, and I’ll be better off tomorrow because I do.
     Because you never break kayfabe in this company.
     Not even for a second.

Chris Carter

Chris Lewis Carter was born and raised in Newfoundland, Canada, where he currently lives with his wife, Melissa. When he isn’t playing video games or listening to obscure podcasts, Chris will stare at his keyboard for hours on end. This usually means that he’s writing, but not always. His work has been published in the Cuffer Anthology: Volume Two, and 2013: The Aftermath Anthology. He is currently working on his first novel, and can be reached at chrislewiscarter@gmail.com.

My parents, they own a dying parlor. They operate it out of our house. A dying parlor is like a funeral parlor, only instead of people coming here already dead, people come here to die. Then they go to the funeral parlor.
     My room is upstairs. The dying happens downstairs.
     Tutti, that’s my mother, thinks she’s a great listener. What she doesn’t realize is she only listens for an opening so she can talk. I’ve tried to tell her this but when you’re screaming through a shut door things get lost in translation.
     Right now Tutti is listening for a yes. But she is getting a no. Tutti says, just for a bit. One hour, tops, for Mr. Wendt.
     Mr. Wendt, she tells my shut door, is not cranky in the least, he’s a special case.
     She says it would be a comfort for Mr. Wendt to have a young person there.
     My eyes are rolling.
     Tutti has a perfect rectangular mouth full of white teeth. I started calling her and Rick, my father, by their first names three years ago when I got my first period. Tutti is Tutti’s real name. Rick is Rick’s real name too, but he also answers to G. Rick Moneysack. Rick’s a retired hip-hop sensation.
     Please, Tutti is saying. I don’t know why you have to put up such a fight. Honestly, honey.
     In the years leading up to my fifteen-year mark Tutti made gingham dresses in pairs, one big and one small, and we dressed alike for clients. With the leftover fabric she made Rick matching ties.
     Clients at the dying parlor are gray and wrinkled. Well known fact: gray-hairs love little kids. I used to charm the pants off them. I’d smile and dimple and jig across the parlor, my curls bouncing to the sound of their claps. I made Shirley Temple look like dogfood. The clients ate me up. They always said death was a lot less scary with a cute kid in the room. And she’s so like you, they would tell Tutti. Back then it was a compliment to us both.
     The clients though, the dying people, they stopped smiling when my growth spurts happened. I shot up tall and lanky. My chest now has two lumps that look like rude jokes pinned on my skinny frame.
     It doesn’t take a genius to figure out dying people like to have a kid around to remind them of happier times. A teenager though, that’s something they’ll skip for their last two hours on earth. No one looks back on their life and says, remind me again of what it was like to be fifteen. Yeah, those were the days.
     Tutti tries her best to keep me babyish. Things were easier when I could be bought off with a lollipop. Back then I wouldn’t have minded an evening with Mr. Wendt. It would have meant staying up past bedtime, for one thing. I used to like watching the funny men on the late night shows tell jokes I didn’t understand.
     Now I understand the jokes and they’re no longer interesting.
     Tutti and Rick call me Little Red, or Red for short, on account of my red hair. My Christian first name is Michelle. I’m still not okay with the fact that I carry both Rick’s and Tutti’s family names, hyphenated: Riding-Hood. They say it’s unique, I say I can’t wait to change it when I’m eighteen. Smith, anydamnthing.
     I read that women in concentration camps used to cut themselves and rub blood on their cheeks like rouge. They did it to look healthier, in hopes of getting shuffled to a labor camp instead of the gas chambers. I did it because Tutti wouldn’t spring for Candy Cane Blusher Number Seven in Cupie Doll Rose. Rick called me dramatical. I called him an asshole.
     Tutti sighs on the other side of the door. Fine, she says. But Mr. Wendt is going to be very disappointed. Her voice goes up a notch when she adds, this is his last day on this earth, Red.
     When I don’t answer she whispers, we could really use a nice review from Mr. Wendt. Especially after the Mrs. Perkins fiasco.
     Tutti and Rick spend zilch dollars on advertising because they’re cheapo-s. Their business comes strictly from word-of-mouth-referrals. You have to believe in ghosts to understand.
     Mr. Wendt, I’m sure, is expecting what I was seven years ago because that’s how he heard it from someone else. He’s probably got this image in his head of corkscrew curls and a gap-toothed smile. He probably has a story about his first bicycle all queued up and ready to go. Mr. Wendt, I know, will expect me to be seen and not heard. He won’t be interested in any of the things I want to talk about. For example, how hard it is to meet boys when your parents run a dying parlor.
     When a dying person rings us up, Rick takes the appointment down. He has a funny voice and people say he’s easy to talk to. Rick asks their favorite meal, their favorite music, and if they have any special requests. The dying person always shows up early. I don’t know why.
     Tutti is the greeter on account of her nice smile, and she does have a nice one. Rick has a mouth of gold teeth like nuggets in a mineshaft. Tutti greets the client, takes their coat, and hands it to me if I’m around. I take it upstairs and put it in a cardboard box. The box is preaddressed to a family member or charity. That’s part of what Rick asks during the appointment call, where they want their personal effects sent.
     Clients like to have tea in the front room before dinner. Tea is something the elderly really zero in on, like punctuality. After tea we move into the kitchen and eat whatever they requested in the phone call. If it’s something simple, like baked ham or barbequed chicken, the food will have been made by Tutti. If it’s something hard like sushi or buffalo steak, Tutti will have ordered in before the client showed up. When she orders in she takes the food out of the to-go containers and puts them in her own dishes so it looks like she cooked everything. She even fake-dirties pots and pans to leave in the sink.
     After dinner we go back to the front room. No one ever chooses to die in the morning so it’s always dark outside by this time. Rick puts a fire together. Sometimes the client wants to talk or play cards or sing a song. Rick creams his jeans over the musical ones. He has a record player he drags out just for them. Then he scratches. That’s the thing where you take vinyl records and move them back and forth at different speeds under the record player needle. He learned to do it when he was a rapper. Sorry, hip hop sensation. It’s nauseating.
     We let the client tell us when the evening’s over. We’ve had them kick the bucket as early as dessert. Most stick around until conversation gets thin. I’ve heard death rattles, mid-sentence mumbles, and frightened sudden-death screams. They all scare the shit out of me.
     Tutti takes care of phoning the coroner. She and the coroner have what I would call a flirty relationship. Tutti touches his arm when she talks to him and laughs too loud at his stupid jokes (I thought about buying a sports car but there just wasn’t enough room in the back, har har har.)
     Rick thinks the coroner is a fruit.
     I’m thinking about how I never want to hear the coroner tell another cheesy joke when Tutti tells me I can leave before Mr. Wendt dies, if I’d rather not be around for that part.
     She doesn’t get it.
     I don’t want to be around for any part of it.
     Tutti is 25% Swedish, 25% Pixie, 25% Cherokee Indian, and 25% Sea Nymph. What this adds up to, Rick says, is an ass that won’t quit. I got Tutti’s smile and Rick’s big ass. When I was small Tutti used to pat my behind. Now that I’m older it’s big enough to be the elephant in the room. When I stomp up the stairs it moves like a waterbed.
     Tutti’s voice has this lilt when she gets really desperate, like when she wants to watch the world cheerleading championships on TV and can’t figure out how to work the satellite. Everything starts to sound like a question.
     Rick? The satellite isn’t working? I’ll put a pie in the oven if you’ll give it a look?
     Tutti’s lilting like crazy now.
     Red? she says. It would mean so much to us if you’d just come down?
     I’m tired of listening to the shut door and she won’t give up. I tell her I’m game so long as there’s a gift card to the cosmetics store in it for me. I try to take her for a hundred bucks.
     Twenty?
     We settle on twenty-five. Enough for Candy Cane Blusher Number Seven in Cupie Doll Rose, a tube of Lip Shimmers in Summer Sequin, and one pair of stick-on eyelashes guaranteed to glamorize my life.
     Okay?
     Okay.
     I follow her down the stairs. Pictures of me from aged kindergarten on up clutter the walls. Youngest first. Oval frames. The last one is from this year. I have acne in the picture.
     We go to the front room. Rick’s there but the fireplace sits dark. The kitchen doesn’t smell like food. There’s no tea. No coat to take. Tutti puts her hand on my shoulder. Her hand has the weight of a bird.
     Red, she tells me, this is Mr. Wendt.
     Mr. Wendt isn’t a Mr. at all. He’s just a boy. My age. Sixteen maybe. He sits on the edge of the sofa in a white t-shirt. His thin arms poke out of the sleeves. He’s just a boy.
     I tell him hello.
     Hello.
     I tell him I don’t know him from school and he says he doesn’t go.
     Mr. Wendt scratches at a set of animal ears he’s wearing on his head. They’re made of felt.
     I ask him if they’re supposed to be cat ears and he says, no, wolf.
     He points to a tail clipped to the waistband of his jeans. Real wolf tail, he says, but the ears are just pretend.
     Tutti still has her hand on my shoulder and says Mr. Wendt only requested one thing for his appointment – a walk in the woods with someone. She says she and Rick thought Mr. Wendt might prefer to be with someone his own age.
     Tutti could be a beauty queen with that smile. I think how good it would feel to slap it off her face.
     Instead of slapping her I say, oh?
     I wonder if that desperate lilt is hereditary.
     The boy is cute. He says his name is William. He tells me it’s raining outside and I might need an umbrella. Rick gets my coat from the closet before I can say boo, hi, or shit. I fantasize about strangling Rick with the arms of my coat.
     I’ve nevernevernever seen a client walk through the door who wasn’t old. Withered mummies with yellow skin. One foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel. That’s who comes here. William is neither.
     He’s just a boy. There’s no way he can know that Tutti paid me off with twenty five make-up bucks. Like that’s all his last day on earth means. I wonder if he can smell the guilt on me like a real wolf sniffs out blood and marrow.
     Tutti’s smile is tight.
     You two have a nice walk then?
     I go to the window and pull back the curtains. They’re gingham. I look out the window for a long minute. I can see Tutti, Rick, and William in the reflection behind me. The night is already black and the woods are too. The tree trunks stand close together like soldiers.
     I have a flashlight, William says from the sofa. If that’s what you’re worried about.

Andrea Joyce

Andrea Joyce retells fairy tales in the Pacific Northwest. She has recently completed a novel on Snow White’s family life. She writes with the help of a magical horse, cat, newt, and husband. You can visit her at www.andrea-joyce.com.

2:
     “Why don’t we, you know?” I asked her.
     “Because I can’t,” she said, Grace. “We’re giving it up to someone who wants it. My gyno said that when you want to give a baby away, they give you these dossiers—big fucking manila folders of these people’s lives—filled with everything that would make them perfect parents.”
     “And we have to decide?”
     “We get to choose the best ones.”
     “That’s sort of amazing,” I said.
     “It’s what every child wishes they could have done.”

3:
     Her doctor said the baby would come in mid-October. Grace and I drifted through May together as the weather warmed, and we spent evenings out on her small patio, reading and talking. A beer for me, orange juice for her—with a little water because the tart got to her more with the baby altering her foundations. I tried to touch the swelling.
     “Don’t grab at me like that,” Grace said.
     “I’m sorry. It’s weird for me, to have the baby there.”
     “And how do you think I feel?”
     “Weirder.”
     “Damn right,” she said. “Hey, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. You are the father, after all.” She said this as if she’d survived a tragedy that should not be mocked, like an earthquake or an unfounded love for country music. “I know you do your best.”
     “That’s good enough for me.”
     “Just don’t dare fucking think you’re sleeping here tonight.”

4:
     Insomnia. As I counted down the days to her due date, I ate little. I was motivated to go running late at night. Soon enough I could see abdominals poking through my gut, and my pants were fitting me, for once. I stopped drinking so much on the weekends, which gave me time to spend late nights in the misery of my lonely apartment pondering with what effort we create, and by what simple motions we forget. I drifted into this disquieted belief that the whole world was a neuron of mine, one moment from being jettisoned into darkness, where everything can be reduced to taking a shit. With this growing expectancy of loss, I fell in love.
     And I started to wonder what would fill my dossier.

5: Name: Chris Robertson. Twenty-four-year-old male. Born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. I have a Bachelor’s degree in economics from Boston College, two years as a low-level economist at a no-name firm. Too poor for graduate school and the big bucks in Manhattan. Too afraid, if we’re being honest. Got a girl pregnant.
     “Could we make this work?” I asked her.
     “No, we couldn’t,” she said. “We could have worked without it, maybe.”
     “What about after, you know, when she’s gone?” We had just, perhaps a day before, found out the baby was female. We would make some dossiers very happy.
     She said, “But I’ve changed. Haven’t you?”
     “I have, but not the same way you have. I’ve just become more accepting of what we have here. It’s not all bad.”
     “You say that from a man’s perspective.”
     “I say that from a father’s perspective.” I thought I was being insightful.
     “Christ, get out of here. Go, seriously. Go.”

6: I make about $50,000 a year, which is pretty good for my age. I’ve cut down on the video gaming since college. I enjoy the Saturday morning farmer’s market a few blocks away, mostly because I’m trained to wake early and can’t break the habit, even on weekends. I can cook myself meals with these foods: kale and heirloom tomatoes and artisanal cheeses. Olive oil crackles in my skillet—cast iron—the only sound falling through the heavy, salient air of my apartment. I weigh 178 pounds, and I like reading books by Charles Dickens.
     The adoption agency bombarded us with pamphlets of the process, the emotions we would feel during the transition. They offered weak confessions of gratitude: You are doing an admirable thing. No dossiers yet—they didn’t want us getting attached to a single couple when so much still stood open to possibility. When I took my short shy glances at Grace while we sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the shallow chairs of our interrogation, I had this feeling she was cauterizing dusty deliberations she had congregated since childhood, beliefs about the kind of man who would help her bear her first child. This man was not me.
     I drove her home and ended up staying. In truth, my love for the child was expanding its boundaries, swallowing up her guts—her liver, her pancreas, the lower portions of her heart—the glowing bloody things that made her live.
     “I was thinking that maybe it’s time for you to move in,” Grace said.
     “Move in.”
     She could sense my hesitation. “It would be nice to have you around, to help with the baby here and there.”
     “But the baby isn’t even here yet.” I said. “It won’t ever be for us.”
     “What if I said I really liked you?” she asked.
     “I would say I thought you had really liked me all along. Remember six months ago? If that wasn’t you liking me, I’m not sure I want to know what your definition of love is.”
     “I don’t have one,” she said. “But right now, I’m telling you I really like you. Does Saturday work for you? I can get the U-Haul.”

7: My favorite movie is The Shawshank Redemption, but whose isn’t? I like that the themes are manifest. No one is asking you to dig deeper for an analysis of the movie’s redemptive plot, which is good because no one should live their life thinking their failures are irredeemable. And Morgan Freeman’s voice is like a warm cup of cocoa slipping into the back of my throat.
     I underestimated the weight of souls on paper. The dossiers were not simple facts bookended by salaries and claims of healthy lifestyles. They were women born without uteruses, who had strings of miscarriages and no will to risk iteration. Women who explained how all the world’s genetic fanfare merged into them, and how it should have continued through them—a conduit into mankind’s future—except that there had been a mistake. A child would be their life’s denouement, a gentle settling into the dust. These people were genuine, unlike me, because I was doing the one thing they would have found impossible to understand. There were men who lost their will to make children through cramped jeans, hot offices, and non-breathable chairs. These men typed their testimonies because handwriting would have been too honest. One-inch margins, Times New Roman. But their words spoke far more than I could have known. They did not discuss favorite films.

8: How can I explain myself in more complex terms, with a little sincerity? How can I split myself into identifiable parcels without denying the whole? Well, here it is, the whole of me: I don’t go to church, but I’d like to be married in one, someday; I’m no pessimist, despite what some think; I have a faith in something beyond me and its ability to fuck with the good in my life; I find love a difficult subject because at twenty-five I’m not sure I’ve ever felt it, but I can accept being behind the times; my life’s one goal is to save enough money to take a trip into space, because I want to know how it feels to be weightless from obligation, and to know how it feels to be a mote in the night sky; I can’t sleep some nights because I am tethered—like a hook through the flesh of my calf—by the affliction that not one thing looks up to me with unconditional love. I think there is a reason for this, but I’m not quite sure, which is why I keep Grace close. She might know, might feel in her foundation, why we have to toss away my daughter. No, this isn’t working. I feel like I’m running loose off the page, and for a young professional, this is unacceptable.
     “Have you ever thought about not giving her up?” Grace asked me.
     “I have,” I said, not wanting to appear too eager.
     “There’s times I wonder if we’re doing the right thing, because we’re stable now. About as stable as relationships get these days. Right?”
     “Stable? Sure,” I said.
     “It’s crazy, though, to think we’re giving her away. But then I read through those folders, the—”
     “The dossiers.”
     “Yes. And you can’t help but think there are better people out there than us. She’s a mistake for us—I think we can both agree on that. She’s not a mistake for them. For whoever we choose. If we make it until a time we really want to have kids, then we’ll do it. But this one isn’t ours anymore.”
     If I had the opportunity to alter my history with Grace, I would have willed our daughter to be broken apart by mitosis in reverse, a devolution of her small features into a single cell—a sperm and an egg—which would part ways with a sigh, return to the dark springs they call home, we call miracles or mistakes. Return her and me to a more paradisiacal state.
     “Have you narrowed it down any?” I asked, pointing to the dossiers.
     “No. They’re all so fucking perfect.”

9: Nothing in the world prepares a man for that day. None of the required reading accurately describes the fear, even for something that would soon not be your own. It is the closest I’ve ever felt to a faultless love, both of me and to another. Worth is not something that can be compiled into a manila folder.
     The new father hugged me, and this is when I felt the burden pass on. His wife touched his arm and smiled as if to ask him to stop. Together, he and I walked to the observation room, where I picked out my child as if from a police lineup.
     “Thank you,” he said.
     “It’s better you than me.” He couldn’t fashion a response to this. “The doctors say she’s pretty big, which kind of sucks, because I’ve always tried to watch my weight.”
     “You’re talking to a vegan here. I think she’ll be fine.”
     “So no McDonald’s when you’re too tired to make dinner?” He shook his head in fierce disapproval. “No Hamburger Helper?” Again, no. “And no Hot Pockets, either?” Now he was laughing. Good. She would need to grow up with a sense of humor. “That’s good. Those are all things I would have done.”
     Even while we stood there, it was hard to think about my daughter. In an hour we would sign the papers giving her away, relinquishing all right to parenthood, to visitation, to knowing her name. I was anxious, eager even. “When you wrote your dossier, was it hard?” I asked.
     He seemed surprised at the question. “It wasn’t hard, no. I just had to look at myself in a different way. And honesty, that was important. The words come easier when you feel like it’s your last chance.” We both knew why, by sundown, the girl would be his, not mine. “Why do you ask?”
     “It’s just something that’s been on my mind for a while.”
     “Was that the reason you picked me?” he asked. “The dossier?”
     “I wanted to meet the man who wrote it more than I cared for him adopting my child. If that makes any sense.”
     “Well, I’m here right now. Do you have anything for me?”
     “I like the name Zoey.”

10: So, is this good enough? For what it matters, I’m sorry. I’ve run out of ways to apologize. Everyone suffers, but none more than the people I’ve pulled into my life. A man’s value can be seen as the amount of pain his companions are willing to endure for his sake. How deeply they reach into the fire. If that is true for every relationship I have ever nurtured or broken, I have little value. Even this daughter of mine reached into the fire long enough to understand it, then receded into darker pastures of the greater Boston metropolis. It’s a lonely place, among these ashes.
     I was a good enough man to tarry, to continue sleeping in the same bed as Grace, so that she did not experience loss twice in quick succession. But I felt as though we could not last. I think we both knew this all along, but masked the truth around platitudes of generosity, of affection’s serpentine descent into love.
     “Did we do the right thing?” she asked me.
     “We did about as good as we could. We did all right by everyone.”
     “I’m sorry I called you a son of a bitch.”
     “It’s okay.” No hard feelings, because that is what I am.
     “What should we do tonight?” Grace asked. I didn’t bother responding. I had visions of returning to my old place, clearing out the belongings of whoever lived there now, and coiling into sleep, being safe. Visions of my daughter in her new home, curled sleeping in a clear medium of stability that I simply could not offer, not at twenty-four. In the vitreous swill of her adoptive parents’ love.
     Grace said, “You can walk away, you know. The obligation between us is done. The contract expired.” She was lying on her bed, in her apartment, among her things.
     For that reason, I turned the doorknob. The open doorway led to a flight of stairs, which led to a lobby that funneled quiet half-composed dossiers like myself into this glacial November. I walked the borough alone, for an hour, before my legs started to tire. I don’t know if she ever did move from the bed and wonder where I might have gone, but I like to think she did, and sighed, and went to the window to find the quiet streets dusted with snow before tuning the television to a different chorus, a backdrop to our fallout, our charity to strangers.
     In all honesty, I would have liked us to end there, neatly. I would have preferred we severed ourselves and forgotten the other’s face. I considered moving to a different state, maybe undertaking that Master’s. I didn’t want to be saddled with the possibility of recognizing my daughter in these streets someday, when she looks more like us. It would have broken me for her to know what I had done. But Grace and I were never halves of a couple capable of making our own choices, so I turned around. Somewhere among the fifty blocks of migration I hesitated to reconsider, then walked on. Perhaps, someday, I would not mind my girl knowing my name. With Grace, that felt survivable. She had become enveloped in a part of me without my knowing, but it swelled, and it was now manifest. I knew I would have to be careful around her. I would have to tiptoe back into her bed, and I would have to speak softly.

IN THE MIDDLE OF CYPRESS STREET:
     There was a crazy person with a hammer running around the neighborhood, was what Roger thought when he saw the man waving the hammer like a nunchuck or some sort of martial arts stick. It’s funny how one minute you were thinking about how that new diuretic you’re taking made you have to piss like a racehorse and wondering if you oughtn’t mow the lawn before it started to rain, and the next minute you were watching some nutball run down the middle of the street with a hammer, whacking trees and mailboxes.
     It wasn’t one of those things you saw every day, and in fact, as Roger observed the man hitting his neighbor’s Hummer’s side mirror and felt a nugget of satisfaction, it was so bizarre that for a good ten seconds the only response was to watch the whole thing. Of course he should do something. The guy could hurt somebody.
     On the other hand. He had a hammer and he was using it.
     Roger stared up at the sky from the window as the first few fat drops of rain dotted the glass and realized that not only was he not going to be able to mow the lawn, but he also had to pee.

AT CYPRESS AND ELM:
     The dude with the hammer was back in the yard again, Dora noted and picked up her cell. The last time he’d just milled about and sniffed her bouganvelias, but this time he was doing a little bit of a jig, his limbs bending at the knees and elbows as if he was dancing some sort of crazy German log chopping routing.
     The 911 operator sounded bored. “Nine-one-one, state your emergency please.”
     Dora pressed the cell to her ear and sat back in her chair. She looked down at the man on her front lawn and spoke softly. She was on the balcony and it wouldn’t do to scare him off or something. “Yeah, I’m on fifty-five Cypress, and there’s a man in my front yard with a hammer.”
     “Is he hurting someone with the hammer?”
     “No.”
     “Did he threaten you or anyone else with the hammer?”
     “Not me. I don’t know.”
     “We’ll send someone, but unless he’s threatening anyone directly, it might be a while.”
     Dora thanked the operator and hung up, watching the man pick at the bark on her maple tree, then back away suddenly and wave his hands, as if he was warding something off, and then abruptly turn and speed off down the street. He ran in a straight line until he saw the sign for the local football team that Mrs. Davies had put up in her yard. He ran towards it, circled it three times, and then stopped to read the front of it before kicking the tiger mascot design and dancing back to the sidewalk. He bolted west.
     Dora set the phone down and turned to her client. “Now, where were we?”
     The man widened his eyes, but he couldn’t very well say anything. Not with that ball gag.

ON ELM STREET:
     That crazy fuck with the hammer better go away soon, Cameron thought as he watched the man do a cartwheel in the street. This was his second pass, but he seemed to be flagging a bit. Cameron wouldn’t have noticed the first time, but he had been about to take the first load of bags out to the car, and he had been looking for the neighbors. He should have parked the Prius in the garage, and then he could have loaded the car away from prying eyes.
     It was too late anyway, he figured, with half of the trips done, and he still had to wash down the shower and change his clothes. It would suck to get this far and then be discovered because some wacko with an impulse control problem and a few too many shots of Cuervo decided to do victory laps around town.
     The man banged the hammer off the side panel of the car parked across the street, raised his arms in a ‘SCORE!’ gesture, and took off.
     Cameron wasn’t about to go after him, though he did watch him for a few more seconds before hefting the bag over his shoulder, opening the front door, and striding purposefully out to the car. He keyed the trunk open and dumped the drum liner in, then set the bowling ball bag with Sammy’s hands and head off to the side. Those had to stay separate.
     A car alarm went off down the street and there was a screeching of tires. Someone had finally hit the fucker. Awesome.
     On the other hand, he had shit to do.

THE CORNER OF ELM AND WACKER:
     The old man with the hammer came out of nowhere, Stacey decided as she sat sideways in the driver’s seat, door open, and dialed 911. He was lying in the street in front of her car and not moving, and Stacey decided that since she didn’t know anything, she didn’t even know CPR, the best thing to do would be to call for an ambulance and wait. With her luck she’d try to move him, sever his spinal cord, and paralyze him for life.
     Her hands shook and so she pressed the phone to her ear harder to keep from dropping it.
     “Nine-one-one what’s your emergency?”
     “Oh my god I hit some guy, he just came right out of nowhere in the street—”
     “Ma’am, what’s your location?”
     Jesus, she wasn’t even from around here. Stacey found the street signs and repeated them for the operator, then watched as the man tried to move his hand. “He’s not dead, but I don’t know what to do.” Down the street there was a car alarm that wouldn’t stop, and between that and the thunder in the sky, she could barely hear the operator when she said that she was dispatching an ambulance.
     The rain had started as a misting and now it was serious about being real rain. Stacey debated what she should do—should she cover him with something? Stand over him and shield him with some newspaper or something? She shut her phone and tapped it on her lip. The man twitched again, and she noticed that he still had a grip on the hammer he’d been holding.
     Stacey turned off the radio and the car, and sat in the rain. Before the ambulance got there she took the dime bag of pot and the bowl she’d been packing when this had happened and dumped them in the nearest sewer grate. She was never smoking up again.

THREE BLOCKS DOWN ON WACKER:
     The ambulance was pulling away as she got home, and that was strange. She’d almost been sideswiped by a Prius coming down the street, too, and why were the police all over the neighborhood? Karen popped the trunk, pulled out the groceries and sprinted for the door in the rain. Dad’s truck took up the whole driveway.
     The house was dim when she got in, what with the cloud cover and all, and she dumped the groceries on the kitchen counter. “Dad, you have to turn the lights on or you’re going to ruin what’s left of your vision,” she called into the air.
     There was no answer, but that was probably because he was out in the garage. He’d said that he was going to clean out all the tools so that Edgar could come by and take his pick of them before they gave the rest to the Salvation Army or somesuch. Karen wasn’t sure if she thought Dad giving all his tools away was a good idea, but he was adamant about cleaning out the house before anything else happened.
     The insulin syringe sat on the edge of the table, and Karen picked it up. Dad was usually better about tossing his sharps than this. Karen picked it up and looked for the cap, which had rolled off the table onto the floor.
     The car alarm that had been going off for a while finally quieted, but she heard sirens in the distance. The news had said something about a fire at the Dairy Queen, which was sad because she was itching for some soft-serve. Maybe after lunch she’d take dad over to the Denny’s for a banana split, if his insulin was okay.
     “Dad,” she called, “did you see the ambulance?” She flipped the lights on as she walked down the hallway towards the garage. She could hear his Dean Martin Live from Las Vegas CD going and it was towards the end. The garage door was open when she entered from the house stairs, but it was empty.
     “Well, I don’t drink anymore,” Dean said from the speakers, “I freeze it and eat it like a popsicle.”
     Karen glanced at the half-packed boxes of tools strewn about, partially put away, partially hung along the wall still, their outlines drawn on the wall to indicate what should go where. “Dad?”
     The insulin syringe glinted on the ground and she picked it up, holding it up to the light. It wasn’t like dad to use two. Unless he forgot. Which wouldn’t be good. Karen glanced at the blood sugar monitor on the workbench and its readout completely blank, indicating that the batteries needed to be changed.
     “Dad?” she called as she walked out the open garage door to see that the side mirror to his pick up had been smashed. She glanced back over her shoulder at the worktable and the tools hanging on the wall.

About the author:

Amanda Ching quit teaching high school English to live in the suburbs. She spies on her neighbours and makes foam animals with her kid. She likes the dinosaurs the best.

Carlotta
     Back then, I had to wet the bed for attention. “You’re a teenager, why are you STILL wetting the bed?” Sometimes I wouldn’t tell anyone, and let it fester until Mom did the laundry and then she could tell. I placed bets with myself to see if she would ever say anything. Five times out of ten she never did. When she divorced Dad and met Mr. Dad, life got better for a while. We went to Applebee’s every Saturday night like a normal family. He took an interest in the scars on my hands, and together we named them after constellations in the sky. Gemini. Orion. Perseus. Canis Major and Minor.
     There’s a playground near where I live. After dark, when no one is around, I get up on the seesaw. Up and down, up and down I go. I try to remember what it felt like to be a kid, but I can’t. All I can see is the way I am now. Going up and down on that seesaw, having all the time in the world.

Janaki
     I was born an Indian, but I now live as a Pakistani.
     When my mother arranged for our union, the matchmaker told us that in the seventh year we would face some troubles, but that many marriages were often displaced by precipitous events and that was the way in which Hanuman and Lakshmi and all of the several hundred deities distanced themselves from the mortals that they were beginning to love. When our sixth year was about to expire, my husband began questioning my dowry. He told me that we had nothing left. He forced me to sell my gold, my jewelry – the trousseau that had belonged to my maternal grandmother. Even then, after it was all traded and money was received, we still had nothing left; I was forced to sell even more.
     Eventually, I killed myself. But not really. I pretended.
     I do not consider myself an imaginative woman. I learned much from watching American television and its inventions. Laura Burney became my hero. I watched “Sleeping with the Enemy,” and I saw what could be done. Laura Burney. I liked her name, and I liked her strength. She gave me hope.
     My husband despises Pakistanis; he will never believe that I have become one of them.

Jimmy
     I used to play scratchers when I had the money. Every month, when the government sent me my disability check, I went to Corner Joe’s and picked ‘em up. The owner, he was a good guy. He never told me to beat it or harped on me to buy a drink. I became a local celebrity – those were his words, not mine. I was the fool with the habit. That’s what they all said, but they watched. They cheered when I won, maybe five or ten bucks. They felt sorry for me when I lost. Those days were aplenty.
     I met a gaggle of girls this way too. They’d cozy on up to me, feelin’ like I needed some comfort ’cause why else would I waste my disability money? I let ‘em think what they wanted to think. Thighs spread, I’d be anything you wanted me to be. That’s a damn fact. One girl in particular, oh she was real sweet. She had red hair, haircolor box red. Her lips were always open – talkin’, eatin’, or smokin’. She was real sweet. Always talkin’ about her mom, her dog, never said a bad word about nobody. I wanted to marry this girl, I did.
     But then she wanted me to stop turnin’ over my disability check for tickets. She said I could invest it, maybe do somethin’ real with it. Like what? But she never had an answer. I told her I had a six sense, but she never listened. She talked a lot but listened de nada. Then one day I did it. I hit it – big. I mean big time. Corner Joe’s never seen a day like it before in its history. People were hootin’ and hollerin’. I paid for drinks all round.
     I told her I had a six sense, but she never listened. But after I won, and I told her, her mouth closed. I never seen her mouth closed before. And I knew, because I had a six sense, that she was going to kill me, or was going to try to. So I beat her to it.
     You’d be amazed at what money can buy you. I have more than one girl now, and they’re all real pretty, with hair that same box color red. But these girls – they don’t talk. Nope, not at all. They only talk when I tell ‘em to.

Annam Manthiram

Annam Manthiram is the author of two novels, The Goju Story and After the Tsunami, and a short story collection (Dysfunction), which was a Finalist in the 2010 Elixir Press Fiction Award and received Honorable Mention in Leapfrog Press’ 2010 fiction contest.

Annam’s fiction has also been nominated for the PEN/O’Henry Prize and inclusion in the Best American Short Stories anthology. A graduate of the M.A. Writing program at the University of Southern California and a 2010 Squaw Valley Writers Conference scholar, Ms. Manthiram resides in New Mexico with her husband, Alex, and son, Sathya. So far, she is quite enchanted. You can visit her online at AnnamManthiram.com.

The night nurse rang at midnight to say that he had gone on hunger strike, would I speak to him? I heard his voice strong and clear. It’s my decision, it’s my way of getting out of here. Then he said; When coming over tomorrow would I bring one of his little purses with the coins in it, pounds, shillings and pence. I shouted for Mimi but she was preoccupied by frozen pipes. We have no water, she said. She’d also got a shock from the gramophone, the bloody thing was live. She turned off the electricity while rewiring it. Everything at a standstill, running water, electrical current. I gave into insomnia, rummaging in drawers for the purse with silver coins, walking around the house, eerier silence without the buzz of water in pipes. In the hallway I tripped over the stepladder she’d used to reach the electric mains and while trying to avoid a plant she had bought that day, tumbled heavily into the radiator making such a racket that brought her to the top of the stairs. It sounds like an earthquake, she said, is the house collapsing around us?

The following day I drove to the hospital with the leather purse in my inside pocket. I walked over the bridge with the South Link road beneath. I took the elevator to the first floor, pushed through heavy doors, walked down the linoleum covered boards into the ward.

He was asleep. A nurse approached and said that after the conversation at mid-night he had taken tea and toast. She said that it was quite normal to go on hunger strike at this stage but that he had seemed more determined than most. She wanted to know what I said to him? He did most of the talking, I said. She said that he’d been telling her his life-story, extraordinary events. They should make a film about him. She had lovely aquamarine eyes. And who do you think would play the part of yourself in your film, I asked? She twinkled her eyes at me.

I sat by the bedside waiting to share twenty minutes of his twenty four hours. In the window frame – even though it was mid-day – I saw the moon spinning around like a top. A cat stepped along on a rooftop below.

They asked me to read the eulogy at his funeral. But he’s not dead yet, I said. It has to be done, they said. For a moment I saw myself standing on an altar. The listening congregation sat very still. I can’t, I said. I can’t do it. The cat looked up at the moon. I can’t do this. When they repeated that it had to be done I shook my head.

My neighbour on the left believes that the soul transmigrates into the body of an insect. He hails from Central America. My neighbour on the right is from Ballydehob and he believes in something else entirely, he believes in Heaven where eternal life will be found as a reward for being here in the first place, minding the mother-in-law who unfortunately has moved in with them. He says unfortunately only in the way a man from West Cork could do it. Ballydehob, he says, how beautiful, the street winding up to the Woodcock. That’s my idea of heaven. .

He woke and asked for a drink. I tried to keep his hand steady as he raised a plastic cup of Seven Up to his mouth. He sipped the bitter sweet liquid, eyes popping with the effort of swallowing two drops. They pulled the curtains around the fellow in the next bed and sent for the priest. In the bed opposite a decrepit head on a stalk held up by a stack of pillows spoke in a querulous voice; I hope he makes it this time, the fecker. He was sucking an orange. His beady eyes were wild.

How’s Mimi? he asked. She’s fine, I said. She got an electric shock from the gramophone. Did she? Is she alright? She’s fine. I’d be lost without her. The water pipes froze. She had to turn off the mains. Did you bring the purse, he asked? Yes, here it is, why do you want it? I want to have a few bob to give the children when they call. It’s Christmas already, I can’t believe it. But tell me more about Mimi. She was dancing outside in the other room, I began, but he dozed off again.

The nurse returned and in reference to an album of photos Mimi had brought to the hospital, said; Isn’t it amazing how family resemblance is passed on? Even two generations later you suddenly turn out the spitting image of your great grandmother. Our eyes are the conduits of illusion, I muttered. What? And then she asked me what it was I did? I told her I’d been an actor for many years. How do actors do it, I often wonder? I mean how do you possibly remember the part of Hamlet, how do you memorise every, single line? When I was a child I was beaten for not knowing my poem. I couldn’t even learn a sonnet. She went on to express her admiration for Dr. Jones. He’s a genius, she said. I know that, I said.

The elevator presented a mystery. Pressing number 1 brings you to the second floor. Pressing 0 brings you to the ground floor. At the front door a hall porter greeted me as I braced myself to return to the frozen world. I ignored him for a moment then before departing said; I can’t figure that elevator out. You push 1 to get to the second floor and yet 0 gets you to the ground floor. He said remember I told you about my bad luck in Dundalk the other night, the photo finish, well all losses recouped yesterday, a 10/1 winner in Killarney.

Outside the accident and emergency there was a drunken girl being subdued by security men. Her coarse voice bleated out ridiculous obscenities. A medical student in a white coat and lovely, long, black hair shining beautifully in icy air, knee-length brown boots with furry inners, fur overflowing onto the knee, tripped towards the pathology building with a carton of blood or maybe urine. Even there in the hospital car park, there were cars stacked up to the roof with Christmas presents.

I left the car and took a walk downtown. Sometimes the world comes at me like a shark out of the water, ready to snap my head off. Every man has a purpose, every man’s death has a reason but I couldn’t see it for fear of the shark’s teeth. Sometimes the world comes at me like a blowtorch. Everything that happens, happens, and for fear of the blowtorch I can’t see reasons. Nothing is important I say to myself with no conviction at all. I crossed a square with a glance up at high buildings with clocks and advertising. I wondered what it would be like to levitate and rise up towards the stars? I wanted to go up there and find answers. A favourite catch phrase of his captured his cosmic awareness; We only live for a second. I touched the purse still in the inside pocket. I felt the coins. They were useless now. They wouldn’t buy a coffee. I felt a sensation of pain in my left foot as I swung it to clear the pigeons out of my way, heads nodding towards the dirt, beady eyes, beaks pecking at nothing, insouciant cooing sound, trapped in black and white feathers, harmless yet annoying.

I walked along the quays by the river. A freezing mist shrouded the weir. I turned over Parliament Bridge onto The Mall. I felt like crying above the beat of music from bars and clubs. I paused outside the G.P.O. The air was heavy with ghosts whose history rose quietly out of the frozen stone. They were like silver lights flashing without meaning we could decipher. I kept an eye on their movements like a child watching electronic gadgets running in a shop window; a black Marklin steam engine, Scalextrix racing cars, a bear with a telescope in a hot air balloon, descending, ascending, a techni-coloured ferris wheel and a miniature circus big top illuminated from inside. The child’s mind is impressed forever as the pulse of life throbs with abandon around him.

By the time I got back to the car I was very tired. Both my legs ached. I looked up at the windows and thought of him in there, then I got in the car and drove. The pure cold light of the night sky troubled my animal blood.

About the author:

Edward Mc Whinney lives in Cork, Ireland, with his wife and son. He has stories published online, most recently in Contrary Magazine where there is an index of his work. He also features in Word Riot, Juked, Fiction on the Web and Spilling Ink.

I turn up at the apartment. “Don’t try to be too original, whatever you do,” said the shadowy voice on the telephone. “You may write of lighthouses, or the parasitic invasion of love. Stick to those and you will go far in this business.”

I set down my bag, admiring the cream coloured sky beyond the tall windows. One of these I open so as to stick my head into the cool April air.

A knock on the door. A man with an equine face introduces himself as Dmitri, says he is from Slovakia. Breezes in, swinging a battered leather case at his side.

I discover something new – a message scrawled across the wall in foot high letters:

II

The medicine cabinet is crammed with dusty bottles with labels such as: Perpetual Happiness, Total Confidence, Genuine Interest in the Problems of Others, Dreams Fulfilled, and so on. Medications long expired.

A group of girls outside break open a fire hydrant, releasing a noxious vapour. They’re flat on their backs, out cold for hours.

The voice of my school friend crackles from the free-swinging telephone. “I’m blameless. I had a twisted childhood. Does this musketeer hat make me look quirky, or desperate?”

How typical it would be if he were to fall into nihilism, to fall and fall.

III

To make himself feel at home, Dmitri tacks up a circus poster. He tells me he loves the circus. And milk.

Dmitri is a trained sniper. Each day he sits at the window, one eye glued to a rifle sight. When I ask if he’d like to come away from the window or play hide and seek, he says, “No. I am sniper. I shoot …” and mimes a shooting gesture. He is, however, thankful when I take him glasses of cold milk.

I sit writing a sestina, not trying to be too original. I try instead to be enthused by the parasitic invasion of love; lighthouses; the act of tracing a lover’s name in dust…

Dmitri is nodding along to the music on his headphones. Now and again he chews the sleeves of his jumper. Must be nerve-wracking, being a sniper.

The more attention I pay to the floor, the more I notice the chalk outlines like those used to mark bodies at crime scenes. Except that these outlines are for all the life choices I murdered. Like that time I forced myself to go to a party for gender politics and folk music enthusiasts, for fear of missing some brilliant moment that never came.

“…of course I believe in equal rights,” I said, “but you seem more concerned with revenge. Is the degradation of a male on television any more acceptable than that of a female?”

Somebody somewhere played a bum note on a ukulele.

IV

Dmitri is a “sniper of the people”; meaning people are his target. He takes aim at morning commuters, afternoon shoppers, disgruntled postmen … Such an albatross of threat hanging over them will keep them on their toes, he says.

I tell him I’m going out to the bakery. “It is safe to cross the road, right? Don’t want a kneecap blown off,” I joke.

“Is perfectly safe,” Dmitri says. “If I shoot you it will be in your head.”

He has a codename: Nanny. Whether he was issued with it or invented it himself is unclear. Sometimes he takes a break to have a sip of milk and whittle circus ornaments. The floor is strewn with wooden trapeze artists, clowns, dancing bears, lion tamers and big tops.

Mornings are for thinking. I consider this huge apartment gifted to me, my chest home to a nervous brass band.

I drift through it and the truth slams into me with the weight of a cartoon anvil: I do not know what to do with so much freedom.

An aeroplane writes a message in the sky:

V

We sit on the sofa in our pyjamas, the sniper and I, watching Saturday morning cartoons. In this single hour of intimacy afforded us, I do not wish to do anything else.

I open a can of Assorted Flavour Doctors: coffee, liquorice, and placebo. “They’re so good for you,” I say, offering one to Dmitri. I ask: “What’s it like, being a sniper?” He explains, through his broken English, that the best thing about the job is the time it affords.

Time, in which the smaller things gain sharper focus “like crystallized butterflies.”

At night I lay on the sofa under a thin blanket. Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space plays on TV, the volume down low. Only drifting anonymously through a strange town is comforting in the same way that black and white film is comforting.

Dmitri slumps forward in his chair, the rifle gripped between his legs. What do I make of these dreams in which I roll with him through oceanic cornfields and fly coloured kites beneath water? Dreams which, in retrospect as I awake, seem more like poorly-wrapped gifts.

VI

I have bought a tape machine and a pile of motivational tapes. At first the voice on the cassette spouts the type of sentiments I would expect:

Gradually the sentiments change:

Over by the window Dmitri has been crafting a jewellery box in the shape of a grand piano. He has pasted gold leaf over the box and carved ornate legs from cardboard. There is a full set of keys made out of lollipop sticks. He tells me he made it for a girl in the street below. She has bubblegum pink hair and green hoop earrings.

I peer out the window. The group of girls, now an army, choke and hurl makeup bombs at each other; flashes of hot pink and powder blue, through which the lights from other apartment windows twinkle like miniature power plants.

I pat him on the back. “How’s the sniping going?”

“This old lady outside supermarket … I try to take out her eye, but miss.”

“Dmitri, your English is coming along beautifully.”

VII

Perhaps I am in love with Dmitri; it would explain the dreams.

I have spent so long telling people how I will never write of the parasitic invasion of love, that to do so now, under these new conditions, would suggest I was embittered all along. So I maintain the facade of happy solitude, embracing the resulting loneliness.

There is coffee boiling. I am eating an almond croissant from the bakery. Beyond the window the town is scenery from a German folktale.

To have this moment swell, to become all of time, for it to always be now… Must we endure time between these moments, I wonder; intervals in which sickly wax castles are constructed? Must there be hours?

I think of the thirty mix-tapes stashed in my bag, not a single one of them handed out. Letters I never posted…

VIII

Dmitri is dead. A tulip of blood blossoms beneath his jumper.

The parting words I imagined so succinctly have been cut down by a stray bullet. One of the postmen, perhaps, fed up of being shot at.

Had there been any last words, I might have told him of how we rolled in those cornfields, how we swam with those kites.

The voice of Roy Orbison floats from a radio somewhere across the street:

Only in dreams, in beautiful dreams…

Dmitri, Dmitri… His death is a baroque city in which it has rained for years.

My attention is caught by the poster on the wall, the assortment of hand-whittled ornaments. I imagine a circus-themed funeral where mourners hurl rubber balls at a target and the coffin plunges into a dunking pool, Dmitri’s lifeless corpse flopping out to applause.

EPILOGUE

Fuck originality. I write a love sestina to Dmitri. I tuck his hand-crafted piano under my arm and leave the apartment.

The corridor is littered with monstrously tall men in sharp suits. The men possess the thick, tanned necks of oxen, the shoulders of Greek statues. Each man has his head stuck inside something – a hole in the wall, a lemonade jug, etc.

“This is because I wrote that love sestina, isn’t it,” I say.

Outside, the street is a warzone. Sandbags topped with barbed wire cordon off either end. Broken glass and scattered limbs are illuminated by red whirring sirens. In place of the girls, I see an assortment of mannequins. Some are about to toss grenades, others hunkered down behind smashed cars, fingers jammed in their ears. I pass one with bubblegum pink hair and green hoop earrings. Her eyes cast around for any reflective surface.

An unsteady hand has scrawled a legend in blue eyeliner across a pillar box:

Crystallized butterflies drift between piles of wreckage. Smoke snuffs out the sky.

Am I to walk through that foggy curtain now, appearing as somebody else on the other side? Every door we pass through is such an opportunity, I tell myself. Every day can be a Saturday morning.

The piano fits my palm perfectly.

About the author:

Matthew Haigh is a charity worker from Cardiff, with tales of suave ghosts, asexualism and bird police either floating around online and in print, or forthcoming. He enjoys making Cactuar men from green felt, and has a strong dislike for love poetry. As such, this is his love poem.

He’s sitting on his bedroom floor, kneecaps even with his head. His fingers click crazy on the controller between his thighs. His tongue is pressed wide between lips rounded and tucked, hiding the rose of them. Xbox. I pray today he will eat breakfast.

“I’m not hungry, mom,” he says without looking up.

He never looks up.

“You need to eat. You’re getting too thin,” I say. “Look! It’s a bacon house with a pancake roof! See the toast tower? Chocolate milk juice!”

I sound like a cheerleader.

He grunts and says something about ‘we gotta kill these guys’ into his mouthpiece. I stand for a moment deciding whether or not to touch his hair before I leave his room. I cannot risk him pulling away again. Yet the pinprick of possibility that he would let me heavies my hesitation; such a prize.

I decide the risk is too great, and I go.

When I check on him, an hour later, the food still sits, cold.

I take the plate away. The buildings crumble into the sink.

#

It has been eight or more days since he stopped sleeping next to me. The space is cold again, wide again. Even when he was there, it was not much smaller, his frame so flimsy inside the most burdensome of gaps; a dead father’s side of a bed.

During the first days he’d crawl in from my side, and roll over the top of me until his body rested next to mine, two lines in a broken barcode. He’d stay that way through the night, as if by leaving the gap vacant, it might be filled again.

It made me regret the tales we’d told him of fairies coming in the night, taking and leaving things while we slept.

The last one that visited only took.

#

He’s never been a big eater so this struggle is not new, only the circumstances are; so dire and life-changing and therein lies my worry. I need to know what to do. His care is my concern. Mine alone.

I ask myself what I did before and the answer is; nothing. It was his father.

“Race you to the bottom of the bowl, champ!”

And so would go the stew.

“Two more bites and you get an extra half hour of Xbox tonight!”

And so would go the spaghetti.

“Twelve more peas and I believe we will be the World Pea Eating Champions. We can do this!”

And so would go the peas.

I would make a certificate on the computer with both of their names and present it to them after the meal. It would hang on the fridge with the rest of them; Pork Chop Eating Champions, Baked Potato Eating Champions, Asparagus Eating Champions and so on.

They are still there, overlapping and white; feathering our fridge.

I am not sure what I should do with them.

I am not sure of many things now.

#
At the dinner table with the emptiest chair, I continue my contrivance: Darth Vader head meatloaf, hot dog pirate ship, macaroni and cheese man.

A hot fudge sundae volcano.

I try to lead by example; eating the mast off the pirate ship and the right leg off the mac and cheese man. I chew enthusiastically and force myself to swallow.

“Mmmm…it’s good baby. Try some. At least eat the sail or those two arms.”

He picks at it all, trying, but not really trying, to appear as if he’s eating.

“If you eat three forkfuls, I’ll kiss Chester,” I tell him. Chester is our goldfish.

“Can I go play XBox please?”

Defeated, I clear the table. Dishes and food mass the sink with a smell that taunts of failure. Chester swims, stupid.

I go to my bathroom and vomit my hard work into the toilet.

I lie down on our bed. My bed.

Across the house, the sound of chainsaws.

#
My son’s PE teacher leaves a message about his lack of class participation and asks me to phone her. I call her back and we make an appointment.

When the day comes I drive to the school, park and start walking. It’s only after many minutes of turns into long hallways and wandering down concrete corridors. I realize I am lost. For a moment I feel invisible. For a moment I want to stay there.

The PE teacher’s name is Ms. Boyce. She looks like she is better than me. I sit across from her while she eases me into the matter at hand. I try to make my face look normal. I feel as if I need to force it.

I don’t want her to know.

When her monologue breaks I ask her if she is a mother and if she knows any recipes that 9 year old boys really like. I tell her I’ve been trying things with cheese and bacon.

She tilts her head then changes the subject back to my son’s withdrawing from the class, his lack of attention.

I make sounds of agreement and understanding. When she pauses, I ask her, “What about quesadillas? Don’t they like quesadillas? I thought I could use a cookie cutter and make them into…”

“Mrs. Stevens!” she interrupts, and then, softer, “Please, I need you to take this seriously.”

I tell her, “It’s ‘Ms. Stevens’.”

She mutters something in apology and our meeting fumbles to a close.

I walk back to my car, questioning my response. Does becoming a widow change your status to Ms. or am I still Mrs.?

I’m not sure.

I feel like I should know this sort of thing.

I don’t.

#

It’s his father’s birthday. It’s a Sunday. My husband died on a Sunday. Or it could’ve been Saturday. When someone dies during the night there is no official time stamp. The day of his death was a best guess made by officials who needed to turn in paperwork. I have decided he died on a Sunday because that is when I woke up to him, unresponsive, unmoving, un…John.

Even though my touch knew better, I decided he died five minutes before I woke. I want to believe he stayed warm and sleeping next to me through the night, letting go at the last second. The thought of an entire night of him lifeless next to me, in a place where so much life was spent, was too much. The thought that the last hours we had were wasted on sleeping was too horrible to bear. We could have tangled ourselves sweetly, we could have held each other hard and read our lives back to each other until it was time for him to go.

He could have prepared his son.

Or me.

In honor of the occasion I make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich cake.

He takes four bites. It feels like a gift.

#
I pick him up from school and the first thing he says is, “Brian Welsh’s mom overfed their hamster and it died.”

His tone is tinged with accusation.

“I think you overfed.”

I don’t know what to say. I know one cause of heart attacks is being overweight. I know his dad was the champion of many meals; the evidence hangs heavy in our kitchen. It weighs down our fridge.

Our lives.

I drown in a torrent of blame.

Tears I have tried so hard to hide from him take over. I put them on display: flashing neon arrows, air horns, yellow highlighter strokes.

It takes him a minute before he reaches over and holds my hand.

#

I keep him home from school and make him nest with me in a fort made of blankets. Pillow walls pile around us; soft, protective.

My t-shirt rides up during fitful sleep. He pushes my ribs with his thumbs, counting me awake. He asks if he can make me a pizza sandwich. I do my best not to cry when I decline his offer.

“I bet I can eat it faster than you,” he challenges, his voice, sing-song and steadfast.

“Mommy’s not hungry anymore baby.”

He looks at me the way I normally look at him. It’s disjointing seeing my worry on his young face.

His sunken eyes should have the power to sway me, to make me care, but I am spent. I am empty. I am the air inside the blanket fort. We are out of supplies and the enemy never leaves our gates. We continue our standoff.

xTx

xTx is a writer living in Southern California. She has been published online in places such as PANK, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, elimae and Dogzplot. Her free e-book entitled, “Nobody Trusts a Black Magician” is available at nonpress. She says nothing at www.notimetosayit.com

Phyllis is having a yard sale. Everything must go. I hate to see this. Ed fumes around the toy table. Finally he throws a fifty at Phyllis and loads his car with all of Mary’s things: stuffed animals and Barbies and other dolls with big, surprised eyes. Everything of hers has eyes. A hundred pairs, happy or sad, stare from the windows of his Chevy wagon.

“Take a ride with me,” he says, and peels out of the driveway. Eyes sway and rattle, open and close.

We drive around town, coasting through the park as he scans the kids and whoever’s with the kids. Ed does this often, on his own crusade, and will call the cops if he sees someone unusual. Today’s different, because it’s Halloween; people walk around disguised.

Ed pulls into the Park Motel, and goes to the office to rent a room. He hands me a Coke from the machine. “Keep me company?”

I call my wife and tell her I’ll be late, Ed needs me. She understands.

There are monster movies on all day. Ed finds the Abbott and Costello, and we’re soothed by the goofiness. Ed comments that the real world should be like that, all slapstick, pain that lasts for only a moment, nothing really on the line.

He goes out to the ice machine, and I don’t see him for fifteen minutes. When I open the door, there’s Ed between two cops. At the door to room five stands a grizzled man guarding a small girl. She holds the man’s baggy pants and peeks from behind. Ed lunges toward the man, grabs for his beard, but the man stiff arms him and holds him off. Ed shouts, “Is she yours?” The girl starts to cry. The cops pull Ed back.

The man holds up one hand, with the other reaches for a pocket. He hands his wallet to one cop and some folded papers to the other. “She is my daughter,” he says, in an empty, gravelly voice. “They’re taking her next week. She’ll live with someone else, because I can’t afford my medicine, and I see dragons.”

“They breathe fire,” the girl says, and smiles. The creases on her face are dirty, and it looks like she’s been wearing the same clothes for a while. But her eyes are clear and alert.

The officers call Ed by his first name, because they see him enough. “What’s going on here?” One points to Ed’s car with the dolls, and Ed tells them he’s keeping them for Mary. “Well, get them out of there,” says Officer Webb. “They’re obstructing your view.”

While the cops leave, the man and his daughter slip back inside their room. When Ed taps on the door to apologize, there is no answer. “How do you like that?” he says.

Ed is keyed up, and Abbott and Costello can’t cut it anymore. He crumples the plastic cup in his fist. A door slams, and he jumps up and peeks out the window. “There they go.” He flops onto the bed and looks at the ceiling. “Did you see their clothes? Maybe we should get them something at Goodwill.”

Goodwill is within walking distance. “That guy is about my size,” Ed says. “And the girl…”

He paws through the racks and picks out a couple pairs of dress pants, some nice button down shirts, a couple sweaters. Then he finds dresses, some pink sweats. He picks out a glittering princess outfit with sparkle-crusted wand. He measures the magic slippers against his hand, but then his hand forms a fist.

We’re sitting on the folding chairs outside the room as they walk up. The man carries a paper bag with a loaf of bread peeking out, and the girl swings a clear plastic bag of oranges. They slow up when they see us, and Ed stands awkwardly and brushes back his hair with a hand. “Please,” he says. “Let me say that I’m sorry.”

He points to the shopping bags, and the girl runs over. The father barks, “Suzy!” But Suzy is already on her knees pulling out the costume and squealing. The father reaches into the other bag and holds a sweater up to his chest. He nods to us, but doesn’t smile. His eyes are haunted. I’m sure he’s not as old as he looks, that the deep lines on his face and the gray in his beard are premature.

Suzy spins with her outfit. “Can I trick-or-treat?” She sits on the concrete and exchanges her dirty sneakers for the slippers. They fit her perfectly, and I can see Ed sway, like his heart just lost a few beats.

“Sure,” the father says, stroking his beard. He follows her in, not giving us a second look.

We lean against Ed’s car, expecting the girl to come back out and show us, but she never does.

After a while a troupe of costumed girls comes down the sidewalk. “We’re going to see the old people,” one of them offers. She’s dressed as a raccoon, with the black mask over her eyes. Ed leans down to look into those eyes, and one of the women comes over quickly. The girls circle the car, looking and cooing. “You sell these?” a ballerina asks, because the price stickers are still on.

“We’re giving them away,” I say, and Ed elbows my ribs. “Well, why not?” I ask him, opening the back door of the wagon. He sits on the rear bumper with his arms across his chest, and the girls step back. “Come on,” I say, with my hands on his shoulders. All eyes are on him, waiting. I can feel his pain, a dislocation, but then something pops back into place. He loosens. Something shudders up through him and into my hands and flutters across my chest.

“Okay.” He sighs in defeat. “Line up. Have your bags ready.”

I clap him on the back, rub a couple circles, and start peeling price tags and handing him dolls and bears and dogs. Ed kneels to place them into their bags. He studies the girls’ eyes carefully before letting them go.

I talk Ed into coming to my house to stay. “I just refinished the basement. Fifty-two inch screen down there. Brand new sofa that turns into a bed. What do you say?”

There are still bars on the casement window, from when this was not such a good neighborhood, and that’s the first thing he notices. The second thing is my daughter, who is now thirteen and is swaying on the hammock outside the window, letting her hair dry in the sun, painting her fingernails for a party, getting ready for her life to begin. His hands open and close on the bars as he watches her. After a while, they just stayed closed.

About the author:

Gary Moshimer’s stories appear in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Necessary Fiction, Decomp, Pank, and upcoming in the Emprise Review. His story, “Formation,” in LitnImage, was a million writers’ award notable story for 2009.

“Did you run into a girl named Yael?” Ben asks me later that evening while we are chopping onions together. His eyes are watery, I am by the sink washing mine out. They are so unused to tears it hurts.
     “Yeah, why?” I ask.
     “She called for you,” he says with a strange look on his face, “I think she’s hot for you.”
     “What are you talking about?” I scowl, “She thinks I’m a fag.”
     “I don’t know,” Ben continues, as though he is genuinely worried, “I told you about her…she can tell a fag from a fag with other tendencies. I think she wants you.”
     “Whatever,” I wave him off and head for the living room. Ben thinks anyone who talks to me is after me. He’s gotten so insecure lately. He knows I don’t like his newfound godliness. I think he believes I’m brainwashed. By the religious lunatics who scream “God hates fags” at us and carry signs that quote Leviticus. Maybe I am. I just don’t believe in pushing myself where I am not wanted.
     “Do you still love me, Aaron?” Ben asks, scraping the onions off the cutting board and into the pan. I can hear the sound of the knife against the wood, scritch scritch scritch, between my head and the couch cushion beneath it. I put the couch cushion on top of my head and pretend I don’t hear his question. Ben asks me if I still love him every day, so often that my answer has become a routine, and I don’t know if it is true anymore. I can hear Ben following me into the living room. I roll over and pretend to be going to sleep.
     “I know you’re not really asleep, Aaron. Why won’t you answer me? Is it because the answer is ‘no?’”
     “Why do you ask me every day,” I mumble into the pillow; tiredly, bored, not expecting him to answer. Last night when he asked me this question, I pretended to be too tired to talk. So he’s probably not buying it again tonight.
     Ben squeezes in on the couch next to me. He pries the pillow off of my head and studies me like a page of Talmud. I roll over to face him so I can meet his hard gaze.
     “I’m treading into the deep end, Aaron. This whole religious thing – I like it, it makes my life more meaningful, but it’s scary. I need you now more than ever, and I kind of feel like it’s coming between us.”
     I smile softly. Barely a smile, but Ben sees it. Eight years ago, in Austin, Texas, I realized I loved Ben when he while he was chomping on Fritos and trying to tutor me in whatever college class it was that I was currently failing. He turned whatever it was we were studying, probably Statistics, into an opportunity to launch into a diatribe about the problems with the gay community. He understood how important being a part of a community is, but he was too honest to let any community become his whole life.
     “I got you something,” I say, leaping off the bed excitedly. This last year has been sad, filled with wonder and doubts if he was the “one,” but it’s had its moments. Now is one of them – I know at this moment that I could never love anyone like I love Ben. I ignore the little voice in the back of my head that’s whimpering, ‘you’ll probably change your mind tomorrow.’ Ben just gets it, gets me, in a way that no one else ever has.
     “Oh, Aaron. You remembered,” Ben coos when I return to the room with the mezuzah cover I found for him this afternoon. I convinced myself it wasn’t really religious, it was just away to tell anyone who came to our door we were Jewish, and that we intended to carry that into the world with us. Our last mezuzah cover broke when our cat tried to leap from the couch to the coat rack right by the door.
     “I love you, Ben,” I tell him. We sit there and stare at each other for a really long time. If we were Quaker, we’d have just been declared married.

I ran into Yael twice this past week. It seems strange, to hardly remember someone one minute, and then not be able to avoid them the next. It has been a month since Ben turned twenty-eight; he has been harping on this fact ever since. Ten years since he graduated high school. Six years since he graduated college. Eight years since we met. Twelve years since he came out. For almost every numerical dimension of his chronology, he has a Talmudic explanation for the significance of that number. It is driving him crazy; he is obsessed with finding the meaning for his existence, wavering between feeling unaccomplished and overburdened. This is all I could think about when I ran into him mid-afternoon, mid-cafe, hunched over close with Yael, in a Jerusalem cafe. I don’t know what they were doing – or why I am worried. My boyfriend is as gay as Liberace.
     Except that just the other night, while club-hopping in Tel Aviv, Ben at home bent over books, I saw Yael. Pushing a woman up against the wall, her hands groping her. I wondered what her teachers at Shea’rim would think if they had seen her. But I didn’t say ‘hi’ there either. I kept to myself, like I’ve learned to do so well.
     Now I am home. Alone. I don’t know where Ben is. It is the first time in months I closed out the restaurant, made it all the way home, and finished my dinner before Ben has even called to say he’ll be late. But I feel silly for worrying – worrying is what he does about me, because I am the swayable one, right? He is the one who knows his convictions, who wears his kipah proudly through Jericho and Ramallah, whose pink triangle is always in his well-pierced ear, in a country where pink triangles are still reminiscent of the Holocaust.
     Two bottles of cheap Israeli wine later, I am still alone. Feeling pitiful.
     “Hey, Aaron,” a voice bellows, “Sorry I’m late.” Ben stumbles in the front door, looking as drunk as I feel.
     “Shit, chaver.” He starts putting away the wine bottles, cleaning up. Maybe he isn’t drunk. Maybe he spent all night studying. Maybe he went out with people after work. I pull him by the hips on top of me. He squirms, then relaxes, sits on my lap.
     “Where – uhm – ,” I try to figure out what I was going to ask him. Instead I kiss him. A sloppy, drunk, thankful kiss.
     “I met Rabbi Aryeh after work,” Ben says reasonably, “Remember? I told you I was going to.”
     “Oh right. I forgot,” I say, not remembering.
     He slides off my lap and sits beside me, legs still in my lap. We’re still kissing, and then we’re lying side by side on the couch, uncomfortable but not caring. It occurs to me we haven’t made love in weeks and I wonder why this didn’t bother me till now.
     “What?” he asks, mid-kiss. I guess I stopped kissing, without realizing it.
     “Nothing,” I wave him off, trying to resume kissing. But he won’t let us, he sits halfway up. Now he must be really uncomfortable, is all I can think. He’s got chronic lower back pain from a car accident when he was a teenager.
     “No, what?” he persists.
     “I don’t know,” I sort of slide my hand inside his shirt so I can play with his belly hairs, “I saw you today.” Wait, where did that come from? I didn’t mean to say that. Maybe he won’t notice.
     “You did? Where?” Ben asks.
     “Lunch,” I say, “I’m sure it’s no big deal. You and Yael. Looked pretty heavy, so I didn’t want to interrupt.”
     “Oh yeah,” Ben grins, sitting all the way up now and straightening himself out, “It was the strangest thing. I was going to talk to you about this later.”
     I sit up as well. I guess that’s as close to sex as we’re getting tonight.
     “She has a suggestion. A proposition, really,” Ben continues.
     “A what?” My ears freak out at the word.
     “Yeah. She thinks we should get married.”
     “Oh really,” I say flatly. It somehow doesn’t come as a surprise, even though I couldn’t have predicted exactly what it was I saw coming. I just knew, from the moment I saw her in that Tel Aviv club, that I couldn’t trust her.
     “Yeah. She has this whole scheme. She continues sleeping with girls, we keep seeing each other, but we get married, so we can both participate more fully in Orthodox life. Crazy, huh?”
     “Ridiculous, really,” I tell him.
     “But not a bad idea,” Ben adds.
     I stare at him. I don’t even know what to say. All I can think is: This is not the same person I was in love with a few months ago, that I gave up my life 12,000 miles away for. This is someone I am not sure I know anymore, or can trust.
     I stare at him, and then I rub my brow, and then stare at him some more, until my drunken head begins to wobble; I am trying to stare some sense from my brain into his.
     “Ben,” I begin, slowly, “I love you very much. But I am afraid you have lost your mind. Do you honestly think I am going to agree to you and Yael going off and getting married to impress some fucking rabbi?!”
     Ben stares back at me, tears piling up in the bottoms of his eyelids. He leans in, kisses me, and stands up.
     “Maybe we should talk about this when you’re sober,” he says, and walks out of the room. I watch him leave, stunned, then flop back on the couch, where I pass out quickly.

Yael has agreed to meet me for coffee at this little bookstore cafe I love to hide out in. It’s a popular hangout for young Israelis and American students, and a disproportionately large number of lesbians. Somehow it is the one place I have found myself able to feel completely relaxed. Yael and I are crammed into a tiny table under the Poetry and Drama sections. Her skinny muscular legs look sleek and recently shaved underneath the skirt she is wearing. Her gun leans against our table; nervously she chews her left pinkie nail. Even in my disgust and rage, she makes me hard. But then I have to smile – if only she could make Ben hard too, and then he’d just be fucking around. Somehow that’d be easier to take. Spiritual infidelity hurts more, drives an irreparable wedge between my heart and my mind.
     “It’s a business contract,” Yael explains to me, “This is the only way we know to become more fully participating members of the community we’ve been learning with.”
     “But you won’t be members, ” I say, not really expecting reason to change her, “You won’t be who you say you are. What I can’t come to grips with is how I could have gotten myself involved with someone who would even consider such a choice. The Ben you know is not the Ben I knew.”
     “Aaron,” Yael says, “I’m not sure why you think this is a big deal. Ben loves you. There’s nothing between us.”
     “That’s the whole problem!” I explode back at her. She looks startled at my outburst, and we sit quietly for a few minutes, “Is your self-hatred that great?” I ask her, softer.
     “I know who I am,” she whispers fiercely. But her eyes are furtive, as though the wrong person might be listening.
     The sun is beginning to set; the rest of Jerusalem is rushing home to be with their families for Shabbas. The cafe closed a half an hour ago, but we still sit here, like hockey players in a face-off, vying for the neshama of my b’sheret. Now I can feel the tears beginning to swell up my own eyes and cheeks. I’ve lost him, this voice inside my head says. I’ve lost him. I’ve lost a part of myself. I’ve lost him, and all because being alone in the world with me scares him more than just being alone.
     Yael has noticed my tears by this point, and she reaches out to hold my hand. Her comfort wraps around me like a quilt, but I know I’ll be cold when she leaves.

Eve Lyons

I am a thirty-something year old poet, fiction writer, and playwright who is living in Boston, MA after previously living in San Antonio, Texas and Portland, Oregon. I have been previously published in Fireweed, Labyrinth, Concho River Review, Barbaric Yawp, Women’s Words, Woven, Sapphic Ink, Texas Observer, and two different anthologies. I have a short poem appearing soon in Houston Literary Review.

About the author:

My work has appeared previously in decomP, Pindeldyboz, Pure Francis, The Santa Fe Literary Review, and other journals including, happily, Word Riot. Stories are upcoming in Hobart, Muse & Stone, and The Dark Comedy Review.

About the author:

Christopher Mohar is the recipient of the 2009-10 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin. He co-teaches a weekly poetry workshop in a nearby men’s correctional institution, and has previously worked as a metallurgical researcher, a literacy tutor, a computer programmer, a busboy, and a legal assistant’s assistant. Chris is a fiction editor for Devil’s Lake literary journal, and his writing appears or is forthcoming in The Southwest Review, decomP, Ink Node, Bull and elsewhere.

My parents died within a week of each other. I sold the house and moved into a room. I found work in a travel agent’s. Every day I saw arrangements for planes heading out into the clouds; adventurers bound for travels in exotic lands, families choosing exile or, simply, men off to the races at Cheltenham or Kempton; couples heading for Tenerife.

My own decision to leave Ireland was made easier by so many circumstances; family ties gone; a certain cooling in my girlfriend, Laura (and her obsession with her studies in hotel management); an assistant bank manager who would tie you into a five year fixed before you could say; one way to Tangiers.

It was Autumn. I sat in the room feeling giddy. I gazed around with a longing for a maternal touch; mammy, mammy, or maybe a nurse, a topless nurse out of a birthday cake. I had bacon and cabbage from Delight’s Deli before going out to the streets full of people with laughing faces. I didn’t discourage a delusion that it was Paris, London, New York. But it wasn’t. It was Cork.

Coming up to Christmas the kerosene ran out and a cold snap rolled in. I sat in my room wrapped in two overcoats. Books remained on the floor, un-read, like a line of tasks frozen in a solid row. It was best to get on and read those books and fall into a beautiful absence. Friday after work. All day Saturday. All day Sunday. A long list of forgotten artists flickered on and off like the lights on a Christmas tree.

Laura left a scarf behind. It smelled strongly of perfume but did nothing to revitalise the memory of her face which remained an empty shell. I remembered going to the pictures when Captain Marvel was serialised as a short each week. Captain Marvel was in a vast cave and there was a river of burning lava coming after him. It came not only straight for Captain Marvel but for the screen, threatening all of us sweet-suckers, with annihilation. Captain Marvel raced for the mouth of the tunnel where the rock-gate was descending. The screen went blank. To be continued.

We have been six days at sea. Another six days before the Anita is due in port. The drone of the engines is soothing, as is the smell of oil from the next cabin where the telegraphic apparatus is installed, our progress over the depths of the Atlantic recorded by the slow change in wavelength as local news – man armed with hammer and man armed with knife and Lotto player wins half a million and a substantial amount of gold jewellery stolen from a city centre jewelers – gives way to static then calm, slow voices of newsreaders in foreign tongues, reminiscent of childhood turning the dial of long wave radio in the early hours, staccato bursts of world music, crooning jazz, Cuban salsa, then French, Italian, Spanish, maybe Russian, heady mesh of idioms, proportionately thrilling as a meter to fathom the depths below us.

I had a bicycle. I cycled into town. When I met people I tried to keep words to a minimum. At least that was the plan. I loved the narrow streets with the postman whistling up and down small gardens. Noisy Yamahas cut the corners. Anything could happen. An exhaust pipe might fall off sending out sparks as from a rocket engine. Chronic drunkards like Marmeladov staggered along. Women wearing slippers, and curlers in their hair; the fag butt in the corner of the mouth, the smoke curling from the jaw over the crown of the head. I tied the bike to a pole and climbed a wall onto the railway line. This would be on a Sunday morning, free from the office, pausing on a hillside to admire the beauty in the distance, beyond the steeples and spires and red smoky rooftops. I felt the breeze with more than a hint of diesel and creosote in it. The silver rails led away into rich, green hills, banks smothered in a blaze of yellow furze come Spring.

In Laura, for a time, I was sidelined by the mysterious perfection of the female, meeting on Christmas streets, stars bright, ice blue, her hair still wet, in her new shoes. Sometimes, it felt better staying in the room, linoleum and wood, writing about a walk we took on a beach, while she was still interested, watery horizon and kelpy sea air than going out and becoming entangled in the complications. How much longer? The tide at a low ebb. The motive to continue not always so evident. Her hair with the wet look.

I sat on the window sill in her bedroom, her parents downstairs. Her garden drenched in rain. So much in the darkness out there. I must jump out the window and fly. Once more the moon was covered over and a drizzle turned to heavy rain, drummed heavy patterns on the roof of the shed. In a few days, in a few hours. I have a confession to make I said to Laura. I can’t sing a note and I can’t dance. I should entertain normal dreams like owning a fine car with leather upholstery and ivory fittings and a dashboard like the control centre of a nuclear submarine.

In never-ending cold I remained undecided, ice-water shave in the dawn, falling out the door. I bought the newspaper along the street, local stories with a universality I choose to minimise. It couldn’t happen in Tangiers, Barcelona or Chicago.

I am afraid of nothing the merchant seaman writes, on the stormiest day yet. The joists creaked. Anything not screwed down clattered and smashed. It seems I will never become accustomed to these sounds. I am not afraid of creatures from the deep; crazy witches or the legendary Fee Jee mermaid, comprised of a monkey’s torso sewn on to a fish’s tail. The ship rocks and creaks, her bowels quiver, sounds like the death rattles of monsters. The lamp flickers.

The room, three storeys up, took in light from the street by way of two small windows; droplets of sunshine during the day, neon glow worms by night; a desk, a bookshelf with twenty books. I would have to stay in it for a long time, maybe forever. The city was flooded. I studied a photo of a man floating down Great William O’Brien Street in a wheelie bin. A record volume of water fell from the sky. If it went on so, it could get very scary, the radio broadcaster said. No-one needs to see a disaster movie at the present, he continued, we are living in one. People’s front rooms were flooded; mattresses, old hats, socks and underpants, who knows what, hairbrushes and false teeth floating around the house?

Laura was suspicious of married men who did not wear marriage bands. Is that so, I said, well did you know that the speed of the male can be judged by the length of his fingers? If we ever get engaged will you wear a ring? Her father at the table with bread and cheese, the laughing cow, spoke of seagulls attacking people down the docks. He spread the cheese with podgy, little fingers. He spoke of a neighbour whose car alarm had a habit of going off in the early hours.

Later, when she was feeding the cat, I said that I hate cats. I’m allergic to them. My tongue was stilled by a quick glance. It hovered beneath the fragrance of her perfume, the secretion of the civet’s anal gland.

When the storm abated, I once more felt in charge of my immediate destiny, that is, I was in charge of the light switch and the radio tuner and I could sit back and listen to the whistling of the second mate through the porthole. I saw him sleeping on a three-legged stool yesterday with his curly head in his hands. He looked like he was holding a cat. The rest of the crew went about their business, a daily clamour drawn from an eternal pattern. It’s always the same, never the same, like each swell of the sea, always, never. The men drink coffee laced with brandy and rum and from this remove their murmur is the same as it was yesterday, nothing about it to distinguish one day from the next. The chef breathes tobacco smoke through the porthole of the galley, dreaming of a girl with buttons on her dress. He learns French and Spanish and Portuguese from phrasebooks, one expression per day, calculating how many charming sentences he will know by the time we reach Valparaiso.

We drove out to Weaver’s Point in Laura’s Micra. She was quiet, looking for swans and egrets in the estuary along the way, hoping to spot a whale or a school of dolphins when we got to the point. She wore a new hat and a natty, tweed jacket. She was as composed as the manager of a four star hotel. On the way home she became more talkative. What would you like for your birthday, she asked? A birthday cake, I replied. Well, that’s easy, but I mean what present would you like? How about a typewriter that talks, I said? I guessed that she already had something bought, probably a shirt and tie, held together in a plastic box with a score of tiny pins.

When the flood waters abated I went for a walk along the railway line. The city covered in smog seemed to be floating on more than water. The spires of St. Finbar’s, Holy Trinity, Shandon and the North Cathedral stuck up out of it. Something was changing in my head. There was a vague idea of slipping silently and unnoticed away from the conventions, becoming a vagrant, wandering around the globe somehow in anonymity. I observed two types and thought about them in the ignorant language of a twenty year old, those who dreamed of fame and wealth and power and those soft spoken men with leery eyes, beery breaths, and wives with pregnant bellies. I stepped into a bar and fell into shadows as powerful as echoes along hollow walls up to the ceiling where they twist with the smoke and paint, where the paint warps until nothing is heard but noise.

Laura’s mother made skirts and kidney stew. After eating I went to talk with her sixteen year old brother, Noah, who was writing a science fiction novel about the Planet Pett which has a twenty four year day followed by a twenty four year night. I overheard snippets of an argument in the kitchen, Laura and her mother; sighs, angry suppressed voices. I left. As I walked I felt my head spin. I made my way to the Ferry House, clouds of smoke, kegs of alcohol, where sailors gathered and whores and where the confusion in my head was calmed. The Spring was on its way.

The grey smog came in the open window. It, too, will evaporate; nothing is permanent. I slept on the linoleum floor with books for bedclothes. The smog turned blue. It would be wiser to take life by its scruffy neck and change it before it changes itself.

It was late April. On the table, my passport and airline ticket. Laura’s final word in my ears. We had parted in Delight’s Deli. We should never have met, she said. You’re so young. God bless. She was young too but she spoke those words like an old aunt. God Bless. I’ll think of you.

We will reach port tomorrow. We celebrate our last night at sea with bottles of Guinness and beef stroganoff, with South African wine and German schnapps.

About the author:

I am currently finishing a degree at Ole Miss. My fiction has appeared in about 30 journals, including American Short Fiction and Iron Horse Literary Review. I have stories forthcoming from The Literary Review, Cream City Review, Echo Ink Review and elsewhere. I am on the faculty in fiction at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference.

“Do? We don’t do anything.”

They lived alone in a 6000 square foot ‘cottage’, preaching the virtues of consumption as a vocation, and I had to keep reminding myself they were my new employers. All the while, m