Archive for category: Fiction

“You want to jump in the creek?” my mother asks. It’s a Tuesday night in late July and we’re on the porch drinking Myers’s rum doused with lemonade. She’s wearing cut-off cargo pants and a Grateful Dead T-shirt full of holes; her cracked toenails are the chartreuse of limes.

“No,” I say, to which she snorts and throws her cigarette butt into the wet grass, where it hisses before losing its flame. Mist rises from the field. Baby grasshoppers pop. Clouds drift.

I don’t want to go down to the creek with my mom. Nor do I want to be living here at sixteen in this deciduous/coniferous northeastern no-man’s-land of Vicksburg, where we were both born, forty square miles of intersecting roads, intersecting streams, failing farms, and rocky ledge. Populated by ghosts and animals and lonely women. Frickin’ heaven, my mom calls these woods.

 

Heaven: like she’d know. She’s thirty-three years old and pocked with life’s failures: her sun-lined face and cheaply tattooed arms and soot-lined lungs. My mother has cleaned houses, waitressed, logged, gardened, trained horses, hammered nails, groomed dogs, hung Sheetrock, and killed other people’s livestock for a living. It’s made her body crooked, wrinkled, callused, bent. But she’s a tiger, too. She has a tattoo of a mountain lion on her left thigh that reminds me, every time I see it, of the love-warrior inside her. The one who wanted something other than what she was born with, who nursed me until I was three (little titty-monkey), the one who lays her hand on my shoulder when I come home from class and says, “Angel, you be good. You be real good, baby-o.”

 

Angel? Your mother named you Angel? 

What is it with us and our mothers? The way we both love and hate them. The way they define ugly and yet we catch their face in our mirror and surprise ourselves with—gladness.

The last mountain lion they saw in our state was in 1883. They shot it in the hills above our town, and now it’s stuffed in a museum in Boston, tawny eyes aglow. My mom tells me she’d like to steal that motherfucker someday. Free it from its goddamn stillness. She’s only one-sixteenth Abenaki but claims that cat as her spirit animal all the same. And so that tiger tattoo, inked across her bony thigh.

But tonight she’s talking about dogs. About how she thinks we should raise them to sell. For money. Always dreaming of money. Always in need of more. She gets up and pours us each another glass; coyotes yip down by the creek: a fresh kill. Her words drift to wolves. “Did I tell you about Alaska,” she says, taking a sip, handing me mine.

Yes. She has told me about Alaska. She’s been telling me about Alaska my whole life. Roy and a trailer surrounded by wolves, surrounded by pines. The only place she’ll ever go other than here.

 

My mother and I have lived in this house, this hunting cabin on concrete blocks she stuffed with insulation, since before I was born. There’s a creek below, a field out front, a gravel road that runs straight for a while, and this porch. This porch. What is it about houses? The way their simplest elements contain who we are, say things for us. I was born on the living room couch, a mattress over a couple of crates. There was blood and my mom’s great-aunt Sugar with bundles of herbs and warm, thick hands.

“I think we could make good money raising dogs,” my mom says, nodding her head, as if I’ve agreed. “Half-wolf breeds. Half wild. Big buckeroos. Big stinkin’ buckeroos. Don’tcha think, Angel-o?”

She doesn’t wait for me to answer.

“Wolves,” she says, balancing her wide, bony foot in the air, touching the moon with its silhouette, laughing. “There were goddamn wolves in Alaska.”

She’s getting drunk, I can tell. I close my eyes and she disappears. I don’t want to be a pioneer. I am silently naming the places I might go: Chicago. New Orleans. Amarillo.

We’re waiting for the storm, which we can smell coming through the trees. We’re waiting for Robbie, her boyfriend with the bad teeth. We are, in some regards, waiting for dawn, or tomorrow, or next year. Leaves shuffle. Milky clouds stream past. The creek calls the water in the clouds home. My mom says it smells like desire and tips her head back, sniffing.

Desire. For a moment I know we both feel it: our shared loneliness. A deer steps into the far edge of the field—stick legs, dark pools of eyes—then turns away into the gray trees.

Objective correlative. I learned about it in my course on twentieth-century American literature. The way we anthropomorphize the world around us. I read Faulkner and Hemingway and Eudora Welty, books by frickin’ dead white folks, my mother said at the time, reaching for her Pall Malls.

Yes, I didn’t say, eyeing the bitter streak of her cancer stick, but those books are beautiful. They make me think of nights like this, on the porch, clouds and crickets and this blue hunger, only they turned it into something other. Took it off the porch and into the air. They got the fuck out of Dodge, those men and those women. An aunt of mine lives alone in West Texas. Another on a mountain north of here. Is this hereditary? Some kind of messed-up, errant gene?

But back to the here, the now.

“Fuck, it’s hot. Just a quick dip, Angel-love?” my mother whispers hoarsely, opening her eyes for an instant before closing them again.

I don’t respond.

Someday I’ll talk about this porch. I’ll tell a story about Sue, my mom, weeping or yelling amidst the blackberry canes and fireflies, the wild roses. About the way she drags the TV out here sometimes late at night to watch scenes from the Iraq War: the explosion of far-off bombs, the sad companionship of the box’s blue flicker. About how she throws shit at the screen every time George W. Bush’s face appears, whispering Motherfucker. Or maybe I’ll just say “porch.” Porch. My mother had a porch, resting on telephone-pole piers, on which she lived.

“Let’s go,” she says, stubbing her cigarette and downing her rum. Robbie, we both know, will show up soon in his rusted-out plumber’s van, shuffle up the steps with a six-pack of beer. There is nothing wrong with Robbie. Absolutely nothing wrong with or extraordinary about Robbie.

We head toward the creek—Silver—its banks lined with rocks and moss and roots and tangled ferns. We’ve dammed a spot with logs and sticks and concrete blocks so that there’s a three-foot-deep pool of clear running water, a patch of sandy bottom. Not much, but enough on nights like this. We strip. Wade in. Feel the cool climb our shins. The aunt in West Texas lives in a trailer at the edge of town with a view of the Big Bend Mountains, a dog named Peco, and a truck named Rose. What the fuck, I want to say to the blood-dipped moon.

My mother goes first. Butt, chest, shoulders, then flips onto her belly and dips her whole head under. I go next. Underwater you can see the glisten of stones, the toss of ferns (ostrich, lady, wood). My mother’s white, magnified body resembles a whale, beached in far-too-shallow water. My own? Downed birch trees? Coiled wire? A deer?

The water is ice-cold, mountain melt from higher ground and deeper springs. I raise my face and look up at the dark sky, peppered with holes.

“Goddamn fucking lovely!” my mother shouts, grinning, stepping out of the water. She rubs herself down with her Grateful Dead T-shirt, slips into her underwear, heads toward the light. “Robbie’ll be here soon. You coming, Angel?”

“Nah,” I say. “I’ll stay.” I’m freezing underwater, my body a cube, but diaphanous with stillness. My mother disappears up the footpath, and I dip my face back under, head tipped back like a dolphin, like a bracken fern, like an old wheel, spinning.

I think of those people I will someday give my body to. I think of the girls I go to school with, their normal mothers. I think of these roads, fields, creeks, ephemeral mountain lions.

I stand up in that shallow lit by moonlight and stay there for a moment—naked amidst the eyeless trees—then step out of the water, dry off, and slip into my clothes.

There are voices on the porch. Candlelight, Robbie’s van, smoke rising. I’m freezing out in the field, but I’m made of bronze, too. Cast iron in T-shirt and jeans, barefoot and far from pregnant amidst the grasshoppers and trees lit by moon.

What is is about fields? The way they make all directions viable. The way they give houses, porches, voices perspective. The way the word itself—field—makes you feel both domesticated and wild, both wolf and human, capable of heading toward that porch with its smoke and laughter, or toward the woods, where you could quietly and, without a sound, start walking.

 

From Hunger Mountain Issue 20: Edges, which you can purchase here for $8, or consider a two-year subscription for $18.

Art by Kerri Augenstein

bridge media | Footwear

Once, my dad tried to give me the jacket the Army awarded him for serving in Korea. It looked like a varsity jacket, soft blue felt, pale arms. On the back it said, I know I’m going to heaven because I’ve been to hell. I was fifteen, and I thought a lot of my dad, where he’d been and how he’d built each of my family’s three houses with his bare hands. And there he was, trying to give me the jacket that stood for all of that. Son, he said, you have it.

I was a greedy little shit. I took it.

As soon as I did, a man grew inside the jacket. He had my red hair, my freckles, my short legs with big shoulders. But he was older. He looked upright and clean cut. He wore fancy shoes and his hair swept to the side in just the perfect way I’d never been able to produce.

Son, he said, I’m the man you could be. He saluted me.

I was horrified. I shoved him and the jacket into the closet, scaffolded on a hanger.

~

The next day, getting ready for school, the sleeve of that jacket whacked me in the face. The man kept grinning at me. I looked at the stupid skull T-shirt I’d grabbed and then at the jacket. I saw the hole in the armpit of the T-shirt, how it was stained yellow on the neck. I got goosebumps, since that fall morning was cold. Finally, I gave in. I slung the jacket over my shoulders on the way to the bus. It perfectly hid my shirt.

The man I could be was still in the jacket, and I wore him like a skin, like a cyborg suit. I let him do all the talking and moving, and the me that was still a kid shriveled and cowered and lay back inside of him. He picked up a girl’s books when someone sent them flying to the floor. He did not spit on the senior that tried to slam his head into the locker, like I usually did. He just held up his hands and crouched low to the ground. The senior didn’t know what to do except stare. The man told the hottest girl in school that she was beautiful, and she was all his if she’d let him, and he brushed past her arm in the hallway. Her pupils dilated and everything. He signed me up for JROTC, when I’d never even passed the gym ten-minute mile test. I was always staring at the clouds and the girls that would never love me. By lunchtime, when I walked down the hallway, everyone at school who before had been slamming their lockers and laughing, pressed up against the metal of their lockers and gave me wide berth. The principal called my name on the school speakers.

The man I could be marched me in there. He saluted the principal and sat down in the chairs in front of the desk. He leaned back, legs crossed so easily, like a cat of prey resting.

What do you think I’ve done wrong? he said.

The principal said, So, your daddy’s been to hell, has he?

I respect my father, I said. So should you.

This isn’t Columbine. How many guns do your parents own?

More than your parents, I told the principal. And I have impeccable accuracy.

I could tell how afraid he was of me. His lip quivered when I stood up, and he shrank in his chair.

You’re suspended today, the principal said.

That’s exactly what I wanted, I said to him in Russian, his parent’s language, one I didn’t even know how to speak.

I went home. I hid in the closet with the man I could be, both of us cross-legged on the floor, until my parents came home. I was terrified. I was impressed. What else can you do? I asked.

I know how to make love to a woman, he said. I can speak seven languages. I’ve been on every continent. I’ve killed a man. You could be me, he said.

Dread climbed up my spine like a monkey on my back. Would I have to wear the jacket for the rest of my life, to be this man? When I took it off, would I be skinny and atrophied, worse than I had been? Would I be a passenger in my own life? The truth was, I didn’t deserve to say I had been to hell until I had. It had felt miraculous that day, but also shameful, lying to everyone. I wanted to earn the jacket. I wanted to be that man, not wear him.

I hung the jacket up for safekeeping in the old shed behind our house, alongside my dad’s old army gear, canteens, boots, flashlights.

You’re making a mistake, the man said, arms out on the hangar like I had crucified him.

I locked him in the shed with a double padlock.

~

Girls all looked my way when I showed up on the school lawn the next day, but one by one their faces fell. I was smaller, ragged, my hair going every which way. My teeth were crooked. I was not what they’d dreamt about the previous night. They blushed and looked away, hoping no one else had caught them making eyes at such a boy. When I entered the front door, the principal stood behind a policeman who fingered his taser. The officer wanded me with a metal detector and told me to lift my shirt. I showed my puny ribs, and the principal squirmed, feeling silly that he had ever been afraid of me.

The senior who liked to bash my head into the lockers was waiting in the hall with a group of his basketball buddies. Where’s your fancy jacket? he asked, knuckling a baseball bat.

I wanted to spit on him. But I thought about the man I could be, and what he would do. I thought about what my dad had survived. So I invited hell. I spread my arms out wide. I could feel my stomach draining out through my legs. I smiled. Go ahead, I said.

The bat exploded in my face, and I saw galaxies. I fell down, frozen with pain, adrenaline commanding me forward towards the man with the bat. They held me down to the floor while he kicked in my ribs. I could hear my body breaking. I thought this was what war must be like. I thought I was going to die.

A sweet voice trickled down the hallway through my pain. You’re all so small, the voice said.

They let me go, and I heard sneakers running away down the hall. One of my eyes still hadn’t swollen shut. A girl stood over me. Rosario, the girl I had picked up books for yesterday. She couldn’t see that I was not the same person. But I wanted to be.

I went to the hospital several times that year, before the senior graduated. The principal and the police officer did nothing. I kissed Rosario in the eaves of the grade school playground. I didn’t tell her about the jacket or the man inside it, but she didn’t even seem to notice I was less of a man. I kept her away from the padlocked shed across the meadow, although sometimes at night I swore I heard the man singing. Rosario often had dinner with my dad and I. He liked her, and that meant a lot to me. I was fifteen and stupid, and I thought I would marry her. We hadn’t yet had sex because I thought that was the honorable thing to do.

~

One day Rosario was out from school sick. I came home to strange noises in the shed, like hands clapping. I sprinted across the meadow, blackberry vines snagging me the whole way. The chains swung loosely over the door of the shed. The windows rattled. I burst through the door.

Rosario had let the man off his hanger, and he was hunched over her. She lay naked in a pile of old sleeping bags on the floor. His face was buried in her hair, and he was telling her he loved her, words I hadn’t yet said. I wanted to puke.

What are you doing? I yelled.

He’s you, Rosario said. Almost.

I lunged. While she scrambled up from the floor and grabbed her clothes, he got in front of her like he was protecting her. But I wasn’t going for her.

He flipped me over, and the breath exploded from my chest. I lunged again and spit at him. I fell flat on my face, cold dirt grating my eyes.

I waited for the finishing blow I had felt so many times in that high school hallway, the one that sent me into the stars, that blacked out who I’d decided to be in that moment.

I won’t hit a boy while he’s down, the man said.

I will always remember you, he told Rosario. But you better not see him in this state.

It isn’t really cheating, Rosario said from the door, not if it’s a version of you.

He sent her out, and she left, as compliant as a lamb to his wishes. Then the man squatted down on his heels to watch me recover, snot and shameful tears mashing with the dirt on my face.

You could be me, he said. You could still be me, and you can wear this jacket.

When I finally got up, I wrapped chains around his arms. I dug a hole in the dirt floor of that shed, and I buried him up to his stomach. I didn’t go any further because I respected the jacket too much to sling dirt all over it. Meanwhile, he just sat there, taking all of it, looking like a god in full martyrdom. He watched me with pity. With pity! My rage boiled over. I added five padlocks, all with different keys and codes. I blacked out the windows. I camouflaged the shed in green paint and laced it with barbed wire.

Rosario never spoke to me again. I kept other girlfriends away from my house for as long as I could. Everything would be fine, and then, inevitably as clockwork, they’d get this distant look in their eyes. They’d gaze longingly in the direction of the shed. How they could possibly know what was in there? Maybe they could hear him still singing. They’d sigh and push their spaghetti around on their plate, and then finally they would leave me.

My father’s shadow was long and sometimes I drowned in it. So I left town for college. I studied meteorology. Something about the ways those women would sigh and look up at the clouds and then leave me made me want to figure it out. Then I left the state. I started a career. I appeared every morning at seven, eight, and nine on the local TV station. Eventually, I forgot about the man I could be.

~

Years later, my father died. I went home to bury him, clear out our old things, sell the house. My girlfriend drove down with me. We organized my father’s affects into boxes, tagged the furniture into what we would take with us, what we would sell, what we would bring out to the curb. She picked through my old toys, pictures of my mother. My mother had died before I could remember much of her and this only made my girlfriend more curious. I gave her a box of old photographs to pack up. When we were done, we sat on the porch and watched the ducks ease into the pond. I could smell her sweat from the day’s effort, like bread and lemonade, plain and good.

What’s that? she said, pointing across the meadow.

Then I remembered what I’d been avoiding all this time. I said, It’s nothing. It’s an old shed with nothing in it.

Hmm, she said. She turned her face towards the pond. She took in the meadow where my mother’s ghost picked white flowers for my father’s grave. The old, familiar fear loomed large in me, but eventually she looked away.

Later, while she was inside gathering her toothbrush and things from the bathroom before we headed out, I ran across the meadow.

The roof of the shed had caved in. I could hear soft little thuds in the dirt. When I pulled the door of the shed, the whole frame came off in my hands. The man was in there, still buried to his hips. He was spinning coins around his knuckles and dropping them into the dirt. He’d lost a few teeth. Mud and birdshit had dripped into the shed from the giant holes. The jacket I once told myself I would earn had rotted in tatters and bloomed mold on the shoulders. The man winked at me. It was so shameful. Someone should have taken better care of them.

Have you come back for me? he said. Have you finally given in?

I came back because my father died, I said.

And who are you now without him?

I’m a weatherman, I said. I can tell when it will storm.

Son, he says. I can skin a bear. I can kill any man within ten feet of me. I can speak languages no one even remembers. You see storms. You see storms? I can feel a storm in my very soul. I am a storm. I could let myself out. You think I’ve been waiting here all this while because I couldn’t get out?

He rose out of the pit effortlessly, hunching like a tiger.

I backed away.

He whipped me in the face. He stuck his hands out a hole in the wood and shook the chains. Let me out, he said. What are you so afraid of?

I know how you get, I said.

He hit me again. I spit out a tooth rattling inside my mouth.

You don’t trust her? he said. Why not let her decide?

He started singing this deep crooning song, so beautiful I almost cried.

Please, I said. Don’t make me. I love her.

Man up, he said. Let me put it this way. I’m not asking for your permission.

Finally I could see I would never escape him. So I called her name from the shed. I wailed to her inside the house. Dread hung on me in giant folds.

When she appeared in the doorframe of the shed, the light glinted behind her in sharp spears.

She saw the man. She squinted her eyes at me. She put her hands on her hips.

Everything I had ever done to her loomed in my memory. She had been with another man who treated her right when I decided I wanted her. We were in a movie neither of our partners wanted to see, and I put my hand on her leg. Don’t, she’d said, but I did anyways. I’m happy with him, she said, but she kissed me back. Years later when we were living together, I remembered her telling me about her past lovers while we walked around a lake, and once, I called her names because I was never okay with all the people she has loved, still continued to love. She cried. I had enacted countless, countless other sins against her. She took all my things to the dump and made me sleep in the backyard. I begged for forgiveness for months. Grow up, she said. And I did. I hadn’t yet asked her to marry me because I was afraid of what she’d say.

I burned with shame. I was filled with fire. I burst at the seams of my ordinary life. I could see, just behind her, my mother’s ghost flitting in and out of the meadow through the house.

You vindictive brute, my girlfriend said, pointing at my crooked nose, broken from all those years of fighting.

You lazy toad, she said, pointing at my gut. You’re a donkey, you’re an idiot.

She kissed me on the neck so softly her breath was like feathers. She knew me so well. Chills jolted up my spine. I put my hand in a box of my mother’s old clothes to steady myself.

My girlfriend took the moldy jacket off that toothless man I could have been. She pinned onto my chest every award that had rusted and rotted off to the dirt. The man shook his head, crushed the padlock in his fist, and left. He walked down the field, naked.

I slipped my mother’s moth-eaten white dress over my girlfriend’s shoulders, kissed her freckles on her collarbone, the chicken pox scar by her nose, the pinky that had grown bent after breaking. I would love her better.

Will we ever be enough? she said.

We stepped out into the meadow. Grass poked through the gaps in our toes. It was like all my guts lay open in that field in the dusk light. The sky was wide open and turning orange. A storm brewed low on the horizon. We were walking naked into it.

 

From Hunger Mountain Issue 20: Edges, which you can purchase here for $8, or consider a two-year subscription for $18.

Art by Kerri Augenstein

Brenda Peynado is a Dominican-American writer of fiction, nonfiction, comics and screenplays. Her writing style ranges from lyric essays, magical realism, fabulism, science fiction, fantasy, surrealism, to some perfectly realistic exaggerations thrown in the mix.

Her work appears in The Georgia Review, The Sun, Threepenny Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review online, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.  Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune, a Dana Award in Fiction, the Writers at Work contest, two Vermont Studio Center Fellowships, and other awards.

Mysneakers | Women’s Nike Air Force 1 Shadow trainers – Latest Releases , Ietp

Mama put a hand to her wide hip, plucked the cigarette from her mouth, and took a long look at Cliff. Pulled her eyeglasses halfway down her nose and said, “No you didn’t.”

“Mama, be nice,” I said. It had taken five years and three days for me to build the courage to bring him home.

Cliff wore ironed khakis that fell an inch above the ground, brown loafers with bow-tied laces, and a blue and white checkered shirt, the cuffs rolled twice.

“Ma’am,” he said, his forehead perspiring. “Wonderful to meet you.”

“Clifford,” Papa gushed, walking in from the back door and through the kitchen, past the table piled with unwashed plates. “Clifford.” He took up both of Cliff’s pale pink hands in his. “How wonderful to have another man in the house.”

The house. Bags of torn clothes, cigarette stubs collecting on piles of books, a child with a finger in her mouth, pots of flowers, healthy enough and blooming, but dirt overflowing onto the hardwood.

“Name me a president,” Mama barked.

“Kennedy,” Cliff shot back.

“Name me a homeless shelter.”

Cliff’s cheeks flushed and he glanced at Papa.

“Always pay attention to the little people, son,” Mama said. “If you’re going to be who you’re going to be.”

“Mama!” I moaned.

“What’s gotten into you?” Mama said and turned her wide hips to face me, looked me up and down. “You knew how this was going to be. You with your fancy-toed shoes and your fancy education. Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you!”

“Who’s this?” Cliff interjected, pointing to the child.

“That’s Bella,” Papa said. He sat on a three-foot high stack of records and pulled the girl onto his lap. “She won the school spelling bee today.”

Cliff dropped to his knee and smiled. “Can you spell school?” he asked.

“Can you spell patriarchy?” Mama said, and sat down in a chair.

The girl pulled the finger from her mouth. “P-A-T-R-I-A-R-C-H-Y.”

“Very good,” Mama said. She drew a sugar cookie out from the folds of her shirt and threw it at the girl.

At once, it seemed, the house became a jungle: myriad cats stalked out from behind chairs and boxes and stacks of books. A dog ran in from the back door. A lizard scurried across the ceiling. A raven landed on the windowsill, black eyes blinking. The girl stood from Papa’s lap and held the cookie in her hands. The animals watched. We watched. The girl held all the power in the world and all of us, even Mama, could not stop looking at her. Bella brushed dark hair from her forehead with one hand.

I saw her twenty years later, sipping wine at a café along the river. She wore a white wide-brimmed hat and told a handsome Italian about her crazy Aunt Gloria and the animals, slanting light falling across her gorgeous collarbone.

Now she crumbled the cookie in her hand and scattered the crumbs on the floor. “A little for everyone,” she said. The cats pounced on the crumbs and disappeared. The girl walked out the front door into the blinding sun.

“That used to be you,” Mama said, and extinguished her cigarette on an old hardcover book. “But then you became a capitalist.”

“Who is she?” I asked.

“My cousin’s cousin-in-law’s niece,” Papa said. He stood and stretched his hands to the ceiling, belly a mess of black hairs.

“So. When you get into the office are you going to take care of the brown people? The immigrants?”

“Gloria!” Papa grumbled, and let his hands fall to his sides. “Leave the boy alone.”

“What office?” Cliff asked. His hands searched for his pockets.

“You don’t know it yet, son, but you’re headed for high ground.”

“Cliff,” I said, and touched his elbow. “We can go.”

Beneath his shirt, the skin of Cliff’s arm puckered into ridges and canyons. During the war, a car bomb had exploded on the side of the road. He had been the only one in his Humvee to survive. Most of the time, he could not feel my touch beneath his latticework of melted skin.

“What do you mean, high ground?” Cliff asked.

“Have you ever stood on top of a mesa when the clouds buckle and every drainage flash floods?”

“No, Ma’am. I’ve never been to land like the land you live in here.” Cliff had his hands free of his pockets now and his middle finger twitched like it did when he felt unsteady.

Mama leaned towards him, elbows on her knees. “When you do—when you get out there—remember not every night is the same. Sometimes there’s a moon. Sometimes there’s stars. Sometimes there’s light from the cities.”

“Ma’am?”

Mama stood up and put her hands on Cliff’s arms, just above his elbows. I wondered if she could feel his scars beneath the shirt.

The dog suddenly stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, transfixed by Mama on her feet.

“In the fourth grade you owned baseball cards that went missing one day and you always thought it was Herman who took them but it wasn’t—it was your sister who stole them for her boyfriend but don’t get too mad at her, she tried to get them back, tried and tried, but he had already left her for another seventh-grader and then he switched schools.”

Cliff shuddered. For a moment, he furrowed his eyebrows and his shoulders caved. But then he recovered and pulled his shoulders back up. He looked as he always looked—happy.

“We can go,” I said again.

“Ok,” he said, and turned away from Mama’s arms.

~

Outside, the sun blinded us. When our eyes adjusted to the fence, to the garden of red rocks and wilting globe mallow, trimmed scrub oak and tall cacti, we saw the little girl. She bent above a prickly pear and cut off a lobe of the small cactus with a knife, her little fingers trying to avoid pricks from the needles.

“Here,” Cliff said, and stepped towards her. “Let me help you.”

“No,” she said. “I can do it on my own.”

In the car, Cliff rubbed his forehead with his fingers. “Jesus,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“How did she know that about my sister?”

“She knows things,” I said, not sure how else to explain. “You OK?”

“Sort of,” Cliff said. “That was pretty weird.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, but I only felt partially sorry. “She’s crazy,” I said. “She is.”

He ran his hand along the dashboard of the car, swiping at a layer of red dust. “Do you know things?” he asked.

I looked out the window. Knotted sagebrush and clumps of brown grass dotted the flat earth to where it dropped a thousand feet into a canyon. I could see across the canyon to its far wall, streaked in black stains from thousands of years of water runoff. I knew my first pet, a guinea pig, was going to run away. I knew the coal plant was going to close one year before it did. I knew that Cliff lied to me about his infertility.

“I used to know what everyone in my class had for breakfast,” I said. I shut off the air conditioning and rolled down my window. The smell of sage flooded the car. “It was a game we played. Guess the Breakfast. But when I moved to the city and went to school, all the new things I was learning and hearing and seeing seemed to drown out everything from before.”

Cliff sat still for a long time and looked across the desert. “Once in Iraq,” he said, “I was lying on my cot and suddenly the world got really quiet. Not even humming from the generators.” He rolled down his window too. “I felt, or maybe I saw, this huge mortar blast and my guys strewn about the yard. I told myself I was being ridiculous. All night I couldn’t sleep. The next day we got shelled. My guys were everywhere just like I knew they would be.”

Cliff never talked about Iraq. Over the four years we had dated, and the one year and three days we had been married, I had heard Cliff talk about Iraq three times. Whenever I had asked, he left the room, squinted out a window, turned up the radio. So I knew he needed to talk right then, in the car, I knew he needed me to ask. But I no longer had it in me.

We were the only car, on the only road, bumping over embedded sandstone boulders and tiny road ravines where unleashed water had sunken the soil. The flat red rock desert rolled up into hills dotted with sagebrush and green grasses. It was like driving between waves of a green ocean, except it had not rained in thirty-one days.

After a while, he said, “What a view,” and smiled wide. His middle finger twitched violently.

~

Near town we hit pavement, ate dinner at a bar. We fell asleep in our motel, with space big enough for a small body between us.

When I woke up, Cliff was gone. Light filtered in through the curtains. I got up and looked out, thinking he might be at the car in the lot. Dark water hung low and heavy in the clouds. In the distance, a sliver of lightning cracked across the mesa.

He was not there. I pulled on my jeans and grabbed my keys. When I opened the door, the smell of wet sage, dank and spicy, overwhelmed me. I had become used to the smell of San Francisco—of seawater blown into wind, of banana peels browning on the sidewalk. I closed the door and leaned my head against the wood. What was happening to us?

I drove through town, and checked the faces of men clumped against the drizzle, peered into the half-lit bars. No sign of him. I sped toward the crossroads. When the road hit dirt I cracked the windows. Tiny rivers broke the edges of the road and spread like ponds over the surface. I rolled through, careful not to hit hidden rocks with too much speed. Dark clouds unleashed sheets of rain and moved across the mesa towards me, until I was enveloped in the torrents. I could no longer see. I stopped and waited.

When it let up, I crawled onwards across the mud. He could have been picked up by the water, thrown against moving boulders, crushed at the bottom of a canyon. He had no idea what it was like out here, how dangerous water and earth could be. When I pulled up in front of Mama’s and let go of the steering wheel, I shook my hand. I had been gripping so hard all the blood had drained away, and I could no longer feel anything through my skin.

~

“What do you mean you don’t know where he is?” I yelled at Mama, who sat on her stool and hardly moved at the sight of me rushing in with my hands on my head, as if they would protect my hair from the rain. Mama lit her cigarette from a match. “What use is it if it doesn’t work?” I said. Mama looked at me coolly. “Why won’t you answer me?” I screamed. “He’s drowning somewhere!”

“You need an answer for everything, don’t you?”

The little girl walked into the room. Parakeets on the windowsill looked down at her. “I think I know where he is,” she said. The room seemed to grow quieter, as if all the animals around had stopped breathing. She brushed her hair out of her eyes. She looked at Mama, then at me. “Should we go?”

Mama drove the old Chevy that she had bought ten years ago across the border. It rode so low I thought we would get stuck. The little girl sat between us in the single long seat and hummed Mexican polka tunes, the only thing that came through on the radio out here.

Out the window, the sky rolled with dark gray clouds, light gray clouds, white clouds, all fading in and out of one another, mixing together like God was stirring the sky with a spoon.

“Please dear God,” I whispered.

“What was that?” Mama said.

“Nothing.”

“Go there,” the little girl said, pointing down a wash.

Mama turned in between two walls of dirt and rocks, each taller than the truck, where floods had carved out a winding lane just wide enough for the Chevy. Water ran underneath our tires. I knew that if the clouds let loose uphill all the rain would drain into this wash, gather speed and debris, and crash into our truck.

“Isn’t this dangerous?” I said.

Neither Mama nor Bella responded. I tapped my foot against the plastic mat on the floor.

“Stop that,” Mama said.

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

“Do you want to find him or not?” Mama said.

I thought of what I had seen when I was Bella’s age. Mama and I had gone to the top of the mesa to watch the flash floods. The storm was peaceful enough, at first. But then, all around, lightning started striking greasewood bushes, lit them in flames. “Get down!” Mama shouted, and we made ourselves small. A bush fifty feet away exploded. The rain extinguished the fires quick enough, and the lightning passed. But then we heard it—a rumbling—and when we turned we watched a wall of water rush the canyon, carrying boulders the size of cars and full, uprooted trees. We were safe, up high on the mesa, but I swore then that I would never be caught in a canyon in a storm. I thought now of those boulders and trees crushing the Chevy and our bodies. The water spreading our bones across drying earth, bones cracking like soil in the sun.

Ravens began to circle overhead. The little girl looked up at them through the windshield. Her eyelids fluttered. “Um,” she said. She twisted her hair, gripped the edge of the seat.

“What is it?” I said.

Right then the canyon widened and the walls became gentle slopes that rose to meet the mesa.

“Pull off!” Bella screamed.

Mama made a hard left and gunned it up the slope. Behind us, rumbling and cracking grew louder until it roared. Bella grabbed my hand. Just as we crested onto the mesa, we turned and saw the barreling water below slam against the walls of the canyon, rip off slabs of sand and buried rocks and carry it all downstream. At once, the canyon was a dirty, wild river.

The three of us climbed out of the truck and stood on the mesa. We watched the river beneath us. Over the girl’s head, Mama looked at me wild-eyed. Bella started to cry. “I’m sorry,” she wailed.

I picked her up, cradled her against my hip.

“I didn’t know,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said.

Mama came over and stroked the little girl’s dark hair with one hand. She kissed her on her forehead. She kissed me on my forehead. “I need a cigarette,” she said, and went back to the truck.

I held Bella a long time. We watched the river sink low and die to a trickle. I held her little body. Cliff said it was the blast that had made him infertile. But he was lying. It was the war, I thought. He didn’t want to be responsible for another life.

“Girls,” Mama called from where she sat on the front hood of the Chevy. “I think I see him.”

I carried Bella to the truck and put her down. The three of us squinted across the sagebrush flats into the distance.

“Do you see that little white speck?” Mama said.

“No,” Bella and I said.

Mama dragged on her cigarette. “See where the land out there slopes up just a little? There are two juniper trees. Right next to those trees is a white speck.”

“I see it,” Bella said. “I see it.”

“I think it’s moving,” Mama said.

“I can’t see it,” I said.

“It’s right there,” Mama said, and pointed across the desert.

I shaded my eyes with one hand. I saw red land, shining wet plants, clouds of all shades, but no white speck.

“It’s right in front of your face!” Mama cried. “Just look right there!”

“It’s moving,” Bella said.

Mama jumped off the hood. “Let’s go,” she said. Mama walked around me and opened the driver’s door. She helped Bella up into the truck.

I stood still.

“Get in the damn car,” Mama said.

We drove over the mesa but mud slowed us down. Mama swerved the truck around clumps of cholla, whose needles would puncture our tires. I looked for the white speck in the distance but I saw hundreds of white specks: the flowers of cactus, blooming in the rain.

“It’s him,” Bella said, shading her eyes with one hand.

Suddenly, I could see him. White polo shirt, khaki pants. “It’s him,” I said.

Cliff stood beside a juniper tree and watched our truck.

I rolled down the window and stuck my head out. Pellets of rain sliced my cheeks.

He didn’t move. I saw a look I had never seen on his face—his nose and mouth twisted up like gnarled roots, an upswell of dirty emotions ripped across his skin. And then the expression disappeared, replaced by a smile.

Mama stopped the truck. The desert was quiet but we could hear the sound of our feet in wet sand, like paper on wood.

“Not even within a single night is the night the same!” Cliff cried. “Rain, then the bright moon, then the city lights. Then rain! Thunder and lightning and rain.”

“Take it easy, son,” Mama said. His polo shirt had short sleeves and she saw, for the first time, his mangled skin. She didn’t look long. She just reached out and touched him.

“The earth was dry,” Cliff said. “Dead. And then the rain—all this rain—moved the rocks and—look! Look! That cactus is blooming. That red flower is standing up now.”

It’s true, the desert looked lush. Tall straight green grasses, shining dark juniper boughs, prickly pear blooming white flowers.

“For a while there was nothing to see or hear,” Cliff said. “I just smelled plants. This one—what’s this one?”

“Ephedra,” Bella said, and told him he could boil it and drink the water for energy. She showed him the stiff stalks of Horse’s Tail, told him of its ancientness. He bent to them, shook his head.

Bella walked to a shrub that bloomed little white flowers. “Smell this one,” she said.

Cliff bent and smelled. “Yes!” he said. “This is what I smelled. It smells like the tea Iraqis make for a cold.”

Just as he reached out to touch a flower, a jackrabbit exploded from the bush like a gunshot. Mama and I jumped, and Cliff hit the ground, facedown, and covered his head with his hands.

He looked up. “What was that?”

The jackrabbit stopped. Its huge black ears turned toward us like satellite dishes. It eyed Bella and sniffed the air. Bella took four steps to the animal. We watched, transfixed. She reached out; her fingertips brushed its grey back. Very still, its black eyes pulsed, its nose twitched. For a moment, Bella looked just like any other little girl with a bunny. The jackrabbit hopped away.

Cliff stood up. “What was that?” he said again.

“Jackrabbit,” Bella said.

Cliff stared after the wild bunny longingly. He had never wanted us to find him, I thought. An upswell of emotion again ripped across his face. “Once,” he said. “A man was walking across the yard into his home and I shot him. Brains exploded everywhere. Then his wife ran out of their house. Then two tiny children. They didn’t think of their own safety. They just wanted to touch him as he died.”

Bella walked over and put her hand in his hand. He looked down at her. His face melted back into calm.

“I made nests,” he said. “Look.” Two juniper trees had been stripped of bark, which can be pulled off like sheets of paper. Cliff had wrapped the bark into tiny nests, placed them in the branches.

“For who?” Bella asked.

“I saw birds,” Cliff said.

Bella looked pleased.

“He died five feet from home,” Cliff said.

Mama walked to him and put her hands on his arm.

Mama was touching him. Bella was touching him. Still, to this day, I wish I had reached out and touched him. Years later, he would win a seat in the House. I would look up interviews to hear his voice. I would record the television to study his face. I would call and call.

I knew this.

But still I didn’t move.

“The air was very clear,” he said. “No radio waves. No pheromones. Not even light rays, or sound waves, until the light changed.”

He looked at Mama. “It was very clean,” he said. “I feel very clean.”

Mama and Bella nodded.

“Son,” Mama said. “I think it’s time we go home.”

For the first time, Cliff looked at me. “I don’t know if I want to go home.”

“You can’t stay out here forever,” Mama said.

He looked at me with big wet eyes, but still, I didn’t go to him. Many years behind us by then, and never once had he asked me what I wanted. I should have let it go, I should have told him we would survive. I should have at least touched him. But he was not reaching for me either, and I wanted, like him, to suddenly find myself in a flooded desert, after a lighted night, with a hand inside my hand. I wanted to be the kind of person who could risk it all to touch love as it died. But I didn’t have that kind of bravery.

I stood there, very still.

Later, I would listen to him. He wouldn’t talk about the changing light, or the smell of Ephedra and Horse’s Tail, or cleansing space. He wouldn’t talk about the juniper that grew bark like hair, or stripping it, wrapping it into a nest, leaving it in a tree for a bird and her eggs. Nor would he talk about the crazy woman he met who could see through time, or the father ready to bite his own hand, or the little girl who took his breath away. He would talk about the drought in the West. He would talk about drilling. About cattle and wolves. About emissions. About erosion. And he would talk about Iraq.

Mama watched us. “It’s time we go,” she said.

“One more minute,” Cliff said. He pulled off his white shirt. The scars of his skin puckered into mottled ridges, thick rips across his chest.

He lay down on his chest in the mud. For a long time, he lay still. When he stood up, earth filled in the dents of his skin and smoothed it all over.

“Okay,” he said. “We can go.” He followed Mama and Bella past me to the truck and climbed onto the seat. The mud dripped all over, into every crevice of the fabric. The mud dried there and later it turned to dust.

 

From Hunger Mountain Issue 20: Edges, which you can purchase here for $8, or consider a two-year subscription for $18.

Art by Kerri Augenstein

Alexa Hudson is the Director of the University of Utah First Star Academy. She teaches at Westminster College and is a graduate of the Solstice MFA Program.

Running sport media | Air Jordan

Single, childless Augustus Cyril St. Clair would have filled both vacancies with the same presumed applicant, would have married David Biffenbaugh’s daughter the moment she touched his shoulder and trailed a finger like a hot wire through the hair on the nape of his neck. Then, on her way out of the kitchen, Orrie leaned down to whisper in his ear, inaudible to her parents, “Tell Ruby another day.”

Ruby? Gus didn’t know any Rubys, but he clasped her message to his heart like a lock of her hair. Should the opportunity arise, Ruby would be told. Another day it would be.

Orrie went to school. Mother Cheryl went to work, dropping Orrie off on her way to her job at the American Bank, Port Henry branch. Gus lingered at the breakfast table with David, who nodded towards a calendar hung by the window over the sink. “Well, look at that—the middle of April. Took you long enough, didn’t it?”

Gus shrugged, sipped his coffee. “Marcus has jobs up the wazoo, man. He wasn’t happy about me coming over today.”

“Or you could have come over on your own time when the roof was caving in—how long ago? Two fricking weeks, I think. Just a thought.”

“If the roof was caving in, I would have. But it wasn’t, and I work for Marcus, David, not you.”

David smiled more to himself than Gus. “Well, when you’re not working for—what’s his name? Jerry?”

“Jeremy. Yeah, we’ve been busy.”

“That so? You’re getting new gigs?”

“Now and then. Mostly we’re working on that new CD.”

“You have a distributor for that?”

“Jeremy’s working on it.”

“I think it was Cheryl told me she heard Jerry—excuse me, Jeremy—was auditioning a new bass player.”

Gus blinked twice and gazed lengthily at David. “Well, I guess they decided to stick with me.”

“Well, I guess you don’t want to quit the day job, just in case. And what have I got to complain about?” David lifted one hand to the sunlight that glowed like sanctifying grace through panes of stained glass in that window. “It only leaks when it rains.”

This was the first day in two weeks without rain, the first good day for Gus to run estimates on replacing all the shingles on David’s back roof, or else just patching the leak around the skylights. “Lemme tell you, I am not in the mood for another big job with that fucking control freak,” Marcus had said that morning. “If what’s-his-name—Beef-’N’-Bawl?—just wants to patch it, okay—maybe. But if he wants the whole damned roof, you can blow up that estimate like a rubber doll. Fine with me.”

That put Gus in a tricky position. Once upon a time David was the drummer for the Jammerwocky, a bluesy psychedelic jam-band that Gus had started in high school. David was also the procurer of most of their hallucinogens—plastic bags of dried liberty caps in a gray-matter tangle of stems and collapsed cones, tabs of LSD on pink blotter paper marked faintly with the imprint of what was either a dragon or a winged serpent, they could never decide. “If I could get receipts for this shit, someday we could take it off our taxes,” David once said. “Business expenses—besides being the food of the gods.”

That presumed the gods had income, which mostly they didn’t. The Jammerwocky got a little too wocky, perhaps, and broke up. David quit both the drums and the acid in college and became a lawyer for Weyerhaeuser. Gus gave up lead guitar and became the bass player for a series of hard-scrabble bands. For the last seven years he had played for Wounded Heel, a band whose sound lead singer Jeremy Paltern described as neo-grunge or post-punk country, depending on his mood.

But Gus and David stayed tight. Gus envied, without admiration, David’s money and his trophy house on a hillside overlooking Puget Sound—a house on which the Seventh Day Roofers had replaced the front shingles last summer, Marcus and David wrangling all the while. Gus saved his admiration for Cheryl, who wasn’t afraid to stand up to David, and particularly for Orrie, whose beauty had grown in concert with her own willingness to rebel.

For his part David admired Gus for sticking it out, for chasing that whiff of immortality once so palpable to the Jammerwocky and their teen-aged fans. He also envied the practical skills Gus had picked up along the way with wood and plumbing and shingles. But another part despised Gus for his duplex housing on Port Henry’s east side, the long nights out with the band for next to nothing in pay, the late rent checks and deferred car payments. Lately, after Gus’s girlfriend Marcie had left, David started referring to him as Peter Pan.

“Are you all right, Mr. Pan?” David had said when Gus arrived that morning.

Gus stood dazed in the driveway after Marcus had dropped him off. Gus thought it was just the day’s burst of light that had stopped him in his tracks, the unaccustomed outline of his shadow. Then he found that it wasn’t just the light that had stunned him, but all creation, looking that morning like it had been hung and tacked into place just twenty-four hours ago—the blue firmament, the winking waters of the sound, the ripening grass in David’s lawn, the early shoots of the herbs in Cheryl’s rock gardens, the scent of blossoms in the pear tree at the side of the house.

Gus gave David the same rapturous grin he had once worn counting out tempo for the opening number of a Jammerwocky gig. David stood on his porch in pleated slacks, his tie still at loose ends. Gus lifted one arm to the sky, his index finger out straight, anticipating the jolt of a divine spark: “If you start me up….”

David waved Gus into the house and set about knotting his tie. “No thanks,” he said. “And I don’t listen to the Stones much any more.”

“Oh, man—no more sympathy for the Devil?”

David shook his head. “I think his place is drier than mine.”

“Is that Gus already?” Cheryl called from the kitchen. “Come on in, Gus. Have you had your breakfast? I’m fixing sausage and eggs and toast for Orrie. Would you like some?”

“Had breakfast. Thanks anyway.”

“Coffee, at least?”

“I could be tempted.”

In the kitchen, yellow-crested with pearly white feathers, Avens the cockatiel paced from side to side on the lower of his cage’s two perches. Willowy in a gray flannel pantsuit, Cheryl moved in frantic transits between the counter, the table, the refrigerator, the stove. “David, could you be tempted to lend a hand with the links here? Oh, no, wait —show Gus your tree first. He’s got to see that. Then come help. We’re late. And where’s Orrie?”

“Oh, yeah, the tree.”

The game room was lit by a pair of skylights. Its wide French doors opened to a cedar deck and a grove of Douglas fir out back. David hastened past the jury-rigged contraption on the pool table and put a foot on the stairs to the bedrooms. “Orrie, come on—get your ass down here!”

Orrie’s voice was smoky with sleep. “Mom said I could stay home today.”

“I think not. Cheryl?”

“I told her she could stay home if I could get the day off, which I couldn’t.” Cheryl’s voice rose above the sizzle of the sausage and a whistle from Avens. “Orrie, I told you that last night. Come on—let’s not spoil your birthday.”

“Birthday? Today?” Gus asked. “She’s what—fourteen?”

“Sixteen, but not sweet. Not even close.” David stared at Gus. “Neither are you, actually. What did you say? Fourteen?”

“Well, she was thirteen—”

“My friend, you’re going to have to start turning the pages on the calendar. You can’t look at Miss January all year long. Orrie!”

“Augustus?” The voice from the bedroom sounded like a moan, a dreamy sort of plea.

“Happy birthday, Orrie.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’ve got to check your daddy’s roof.”

“Yeah, it leaks like a bitch. You gonna fix it?”

“We’ll see. Come on down and have some coffee with me.”

“Oh, shit.”

“What’s that?” David said.

David and Gus had to wait a moment. Then, “Nothing. Yeah, okay­­—I’m coming.”

“That’s a good girl,” David said. “Just do it quick.”

“Does she drink coffee yet?” Gus whispered.

“That’s the least of her vices.”

David turned to the pool table, gesturing—with sulky pride—to the structure that linked it to the cathedral ceiling. Gus gazed up at three clear plastic trash bags staple-gunned by their spread openings to the ceiling, each enclosing one or more of the brown water-stains ranged across the ceiling. At their opposite ends the bags had been cut open to feed into the inverted upper half of a single one-gallon plastic milk jug. The jug’s bottom half had been cut away and the remainder dangled upside down from the ceiling by four lengths of yarn secured with tacks. The mouth of the bottle even yet dripped water into an aluminum funnel whose flexible tube fed into the raised end of a length of white PVC pipe. The pipe was bound with baling wire to the leg of a bar stool set in the middle of the pool table. Then the pipe sloped over the edge of the table and out the French doors to the rear deck. David tested the wire on the pipe. He picked up a pair of pliers from under the stool and set about tightening it.

“Shit—you couldn’t just put a bucket there?” Gus wondered.

“I did. I put up several those first three nights after I called Marcus, and I had to get up all night to empty them. This, you’ll notice, takes care of itself.”

“David, Marcus told you last summer you needed to have work on the back.”

“What was the point? I couldn’t afford it.”

“Maybe not after you bought that boat. But that was later.”

“I probably still can’t afford it.”

“Well, you still got the boat.”

“I also thought I had a buddy in the business. I thought my friend Peter Pan could float over here, sprinkle a little fairy dust.”

“Yeah, well, Peter Pan’s got a day job, and then he goes out nights to Never-Never Land.”

“Uh-huh. And that’s just what I started telling myself—never-never.” By then David had climbed on top of the pool table, and was squeezing moisture out of the bags and into the milk jug. Beneath the stool, billiard balls lay scattered like fallen fruit on water-stained green felt.

David’s loafer found the seven-ball, and he nearly fell: “Shit.” Then, “Whatever you do today, just don’t touch this, all right? The way things go in Never Land, I might need it next week—or next winter.”

“David, it’s not Gus’s fault,” Cheryl said from the kitchen. Then louder, “Orrie, I’m leaving in ten minutes. I’m warning you, you’d better not make me late.”

~

David wondered if Orrie wanted to go to the yacht club tonight. Orrie picked at her eggs. “For what?”

“For dinner. For your birthday.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

“The yacht club?” Cheryl asked. “I thought we were going to Tío Pedro’s. She likes Mexican.”

Orrie sat next to Gus at the kitchen table. Gus couldn’t help viewing Orrie differently on learning she so suddenly had gotten older, on feeling the stirring in his groin as she pronounced his complete first name from her bedroom, on gazing on her in his mind’s eye as Miss January under the sheets. She arrived in the kitchen dressed like the girls of Cheryl and Marcie’s generation, of the decade of the Jammerwocky—a flower-embroidered tank top, a full-length peasant skirt slung low on her hips, her lean brown belly a slice of almond above its top. Gus couldn’t tell if it was her perfume or the air through the window over the sink that smelled of pear blossoms.

“The problem at Tío Pedro’s is no liquor license,” David said.

“She’s only sixteen.”

“Yeah, but I’m not.”

“You know, here’s the thing,” Orrie said. “I’m old enough to get married now, legally, you know, as of today in the State of Washington. But I’m not old enough to vote, and I’m not old enough to have a beer or even a glass of wine. So, like, what’s the deal with that? Is that lame, or what?”

“I don’t know,” Cheryl said. “David, it isn’t your birthday. It’s Orrie’s.”

“The point being—?”

“Shouldn’t we go where she wants to eat?”

“She likes the yacht club. Orrie, where do you want to eat tonight?”

“I don’t care. Wherever. But what’s the deal with that?”

“With what?”

“That marriage thing? I’m sixteen now, and I can get married and have, like, six kids, but I can’t buy a beer. So, like, you’re a lawyer. Can you explain that to me?”

“We’ll get you some wine at the club tonight.”

“David, that’s not what she’s asking.”

“You know, I don’t even know if I’ll feel like going out tonight. I don’t feel so good now.”

“What do you mean?” Cheryl said.

“I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s these eggs, or what. But my stomach feels like shit.”

“Young lady, you watch your language,” Cheryl said. “You’re not old enough to curse like that—especially at the table in front of guests.”

Orrie glanced sideways, smiling. Her eye was a hazel gem in the midst of its liner and shadow. “Do I offend you, Augustus?”

Gus blushed and raised his coffee mug to his lips, hiding behind it. “Well, you know we never use harsh language in the building trade.”

David laughed, leaning back in his chair and jabbing at his mouth with his napkin. “Okay, I think I know what this marriage stuff is about.”

Orrie’s head snapped towards her father. “What are you talking about?”

Cheryl laughed too. “Oh, Lordy, I’d forgotten.”

“What? What are you guys talking about?”

“You don’t remember?” Cheryl said. “You always used to say—well, you said it for years when you were little—that the very minute you were old enough you were going to marry Gus. You don’t remember that? It didn’t bother you at all that he already had Marcie.”

“Is this the day?” asked David. “He’s available.”

“If she’s old enough by now,” Gus offered, “she’s old enough to know better.”

“I don’t know,” Orrie said. She leaned suddenly to her left and buried her face in Gus’s neck, inhaling deeply. Gus, startled, hunched his shoulders, then slackened them, welcoming her. “He still smells good,” she said.

“Fine with me,” David said. “I don’t know about his prospects, but I like Peter Pan a lot better than that Rory character.”

“Dad, Rory was, like, months ago. I think you can quit it with Rory.”

“Todd wasn’t so bad, at least by comparison.”

“Ditto with Todd.” Orrie nibbled at a sausage and returned it to her plate. “So you wouldn’t mind, for example, that Augustus is poor?”

“Orrie!” Cheryl said.

“I think the term is lower-income,” David replied, “and I don’t mind lower-income. I was lower-income myself once. Gus just chose to make a lifestyle of it.”

Gus nodded. “Money’s great, but it can’t buy poverty.”

“What about dinner tonight?” Cheryl said.

“Mom, I don’t even care about dinner tonight. And I really don’t feel good. I don’t think I should be going to school today.”

“Do you have a fever?” She stretched across the table, spilling the salt, as she slapped a hand on Orrie’s forehead.

“No, I told you, it’s my stomach. Maybe I’ve got—I don’t know—stomach flu.”

“Have you thrown up?”

“Well, like, any minute now.”

“It’s just as well I couldn’t get the day off,” Cheryl said. “You’ve missed too much school as it is.”

“Jesus, what’s one more fricking day?”

“Orrie,” David warned.

“Oh, Jesus—’fricking?’ That’s not even cursing. Give me a fricking break.”

Cheryl rose hastily from the table. “David, can you clear the dishes? We’ve got to go this minute. Gus, help yourself to more coffee. Orrie, come on, honey, get your coat.”

“Fine. What the hell. My life is ruined.”

That was when Orrie had touched Gus’s hair, and had leaned down to whisper into his ear, though it had looked to her parents as though she were absorbing more of his after-shave.

“Orrie, leave Gus alone,” David said, “or you’ll ruin his life too.” He sponged salt from the table and emptied Orrie’s sausage into the wastebasket beneath the sink.

“Happy birthday, Orrie,” Gus said again as Cheryl’s legs whisked down the hallway, flannel whirring, followed by Orrie’s taut almond stems moving silently beneath her skirt. A blue tattoo on the border between her back and her rump was only partly visible above the skirt’s waistband: the once-familiar image of a dragon, or else a winged serpent.

~

Gus thought Orrie must have been around ten the night she climbed the pear tree and claimed she couldn’t get down. Gus and Marcie were there for steaks barbecued on the rear deck. Cheryl was ready for people to sit down to eat, but Orrie was holding everything up. Finally David dispatched Gus to climb up and get her.

He didn’t need to. Orrie had descended to one of the tree’s lower branches and was squatting there among the thorns and fruit like a monkey in her summer shift. She threw herself at Gus with a shriek as soon as he was close enough, wrapping her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist, clamping her trunk so hard against his that he could feel the arch of her pubic bone against his stomach. “Whoa, little lady,” Gus laughed.

Orrie’s cry bubbled to the brink of a laugh, but then it died in her throat. She buried her face in his neck and shoulder, much like she would at breakfast years later. She breathed deeply. Still inhaling, she drew her head back to stare into Gus’s face. He could almost hear the thought running through her mind—So this is what it is, so this is what people do—while he tried, ashamed, to deny the same thought in his own. Then Orrie bit her lip, looked away, and relaxed the pressure of her hips. The girl slid down his torso like a wet towel, snagging herself for just an instant on the knob of his crotch. She landed with a shiver on the ground and flew across the yard to the deck. “That wasn’t so hard,” said David.

By then it had been several years since Orrie had vowed marriage to Gus. But she mentioned it one more time a month later. David still had the sloop he called the Wet Dream, the boat that preceded the big ketch he kept now at the Port Henry Yacht Club. Gus and Marcie were supposed to go with the Biffenbaughs on a day trip to Orcas Island, but Marcie had stayed home in a snit, mad that a vacation she had planned with Gus had been pre-empted by a series of gigs Jeremy had put together in Portland and San Francisco. Orrie took Marcie’s usual seat in the cockpit at Gus’s side as the sloop motored out of the harbor, and then she burrowed into his flank once the wind caught the sails and the spray began to spit. On the island Orrie took hold of his hand as the four walked up from the landing to the stores and houses nestled in the firs above them. Orrie let her fingertips dance on the calluses of Gus’s hand as she told her mother that someday she wanted to live in a house like one of those, on an island like Orcas, with a man like Gus. “Well, who wouldn’t?” Cheryl laughed.

“I think this place would be a little too quiet for someone like Gus,” David said.

“He’d be happy with me,” Orrie said.

“Happy enough to give up being a rock star?” asked David.

“Happy enough to give up his right arm,” she pronounced.

David and Cheryl laughed, and Gus joined in, squeezing the hand that nestled like a sparrow in his. Inside he nearly wept to consider how readily he would have sacrificed that arm, or nearly that much, to start over, to return to the beginning, to be almost that young himself, to need nothing more out of life than a little log house on an offshore island with a girl like Orrie, or the woman he thought she’d become.

This is what Gus wondered, once David had cleared the table and left for work, once he was alone in the house—if in fact the statutes of the State of Washington had made Orrie into such a woman today. And more—was there anything left of that little-girl crush she had on him? And what about that new tattoo? What was the deal with that?  Finally, after Gus had locked the front door, and then the French doors, feeding the wet end of the PVC pipe into a salad bowl from the kitchen, all to slow things down in case David or Cheryl came home unexpectedly, he wondered if it was all that or something else that tempted him through the game room, past David’s hydraulic tree, and up the stairs to Orrie’s bedroom.

Was it just something as creepy as her underwear? A more factual image of what lay now beneath Miss January’s tops and skirts? Was he really going to paw through her drawers? Maybe he didn’t have to. A pair of boxer shorts, checked in rows of apples and oranges, lay crumpled on the carpet in a beam of rose-colored light. The light came from one of the panes of stained glass David had installed in each window of the house last summer. Gus poked at the shorts with the toe of his boot. He hoped she had more fetching options than this in her wardrobe.

The bed was unmade. There was a Port Henry High School sweatshirt hanging halfway out a dresser drawer, a pair of gym shorts draped over her bed stand lampshade, a lone sock looking to wriggle its way into the closet. A Limp Bizkit poster—a histrionic, hip-hop-flavored band that Gus didn’t care for—was thumb-tacked above the dresser. A piggy bank in the shape of a toad stared from the dresser’s top, and behind it pranced a row of plastic horses in various hues and sizes. Taped around the mirror of her dressing table, and tacked to an adjacent bulletin board, were prize ribbons from her girlhood equestrienne days, also a gallery of  photographs—snapshots and digitals and even a couple of Polaroids.

Most were of girls, a few of whom Gus recognized as keeping company with Orrie. In one shot a pair of boys, dim in the dusk, mooned the photographer, their pants and underwear corded about their knees, the cheeks of their butts as hard and white as cue balls in the harsh light of the flash. In another Orrie was pulling up her halter top in broad daylight, the shutter clicking an instant before the image became indecent. A silver stud winked from her navel. Three photos, two of boys and one of a girl, contained faces crossed out by angry strokes of a pen. One had been slashed through its paper by the pen.

He searched with an unadmitted longing for photos of himself, and found one. It was a fading, dog-eared shot from that very trip to Orcas Island, taken by David. Gus and Cheryl and Orrie stood arm in arm and smiling at the head of the Cascade Creek Trail to the top of Mount Constitution. Gus stared at the photo, his throat tightening. It occurred to him that if he were to show that photo to a stranger and say that this was his own wholesome wife and lovely young daughter, the stranger would surely believe him. In one person’s mind, at least, the statement would be true. If the stranger repeated it to someone else, it would be true in two minds. He wondered how long that would have to go on before the rumor was granted the substance of fact, and it was David who had to live in Never Land.

Gus straightened, turning away from the bulletin board, preparing to go outside to look at the skylights, finding himself still unwilling to do so. He went to the dresser to give the piggy bank a shake. It was empty. She was as broke as he was. But what if he had money? What if Jeremy quit auditioning bass players—as if Gus were to blame for all the band’s problems—and this new CD they were doing struck a spark somewhere? Or what if the right well-connected person came to listen at one of their gigs? What if the dreary nights at bars and afternoons at county fairs turned into Nirvana-scale stadium shows?

Then, Gus considered, he’d have his pick of hot women. No doubt Marcie would ring him up again. He’d send Marcie some money, no hard feelings, but he’d remember Orrie, who loved  him when he was nobody even before Marcie did, and he’d buy Orrie not just a house on an island, but the whole damned island. It would have to be somewhere way the hell out in the Pacific for them to have any privacy, not too far from Brando’s probably. He’d buy Orrie a horse to ride, and he’d also bring in horses to run wild. He’d have a horse as well, and he’d learn to ride it. Together in the morning mist they’d gallop through the island’s meadows and pick their way along its rivers. Herds of—what? antelopes?—would blanket the meadows, moving peacefully out of the way of their horses, hardly disturbed. The antelopes had no predators except—what?—the Komodo dragons that lurked near the watering holes.

Those were subtle, dangerous bastards. One of them might spook Orrie’s horse when she took it to water. The animal would buck and send her flying. Orrie would twist her ankle when she hit the ground. Then the lizard would come lumbering out of the brush with its great red tongue flicking the air. That would be the one day he’d left his .30-06 back at the house. He’d have to stop the beast with only his sheath knife. He’d take off his shirt and do the matador thing, dancing away from its first lunge behind the cover of the shirt. Then he’d vault to its back, holding on like Velcro while the creature twisted and rolled over on him. He’d stab repeatedly until he found its heart. Finally, at sunset, they’d ride along the beach, where the coconut palms swayed in the breeze. They’d take off their clothes and swim, and then make love as the waves broke around them.

By then Gus was going through Orrie’s drawers after all. He had decided that if Orrie still had that crush on him, the evidence—photos, memorabilia, maybe diary entries?—would more likely be hidden away than advertised on her bulletin board. Then there was that tattoo. Why that design? Was she dropping acid now from the same vendor her old man had once used? Could the Arroyo brothers somehow still be in business, going on for generations like Sears or Coca-Cola? Or was David tripping again, and was Orrie getting into his stash? Or did David just have some of those old blotter papers hanging around? Some people collected those. There was money in them now. But if Orrie was dropping acid, what else was she doing? There was some bad shit out there, most of which Gus could tell her about. She’d listen to him more than she would David. He’d have to talk to her if he found needles or spoons or OxyContin or shit like that. He wouldn’t tell her why, exactly, he was talking to her. He’d just say that she’d reached a dangerous age, and this was precautionary. Let me tell you what I went through, or my buddy Mitch, your dad’s too, a good bass player who’s dead now, a guy who thought it was all part of the business expenses of being young and stupid. If she listened, cool. If she didn’t, he wouldn’t buy her that island. He didn’t want to get stuck out there with a junkie.

By then he was into the bottom drawer of her dresser. So far he had found socks wrapped into little balls, a few empty CD covers, some wadded clumps of underwear (bra size—32B, another pair of boxers, but also some scanty thongs—nice), a pack of Tarot cards, another pair of running shorts, three candles, a rosary-length necklace of small bells and tiny dice, a rainbow coalition of tank tops, a Slim-Jim still in its wrapper, the skull of something like a mouse or a gerbil, a box of sanitary napkins, a couple loose stacks of jeans and t-shirts, an electronic remote with its battery case open and empty, a tube of lip gloss, an empty tin of Altoid mints with a simple gold ring inside, and a cardboard jewelry box. A number of gaps suggested that some of her clothes were missing.

~

Gus nearly shoved the jewelry box aside. But because it and the ring were in the bottom drawer, rather than the top, where he would expect jewelry to be kept, he elected to pluck at its lid, and then fell still, staring.

Nestled primly between sheets of cotton, the three-inch length of flesh lay bent in a crescent-shape, curled like a silkworm, inside its box. Its color was a sort of blonde mahogany, like smoked meat, its surface smooth and vaguely striated, not so different from the Slim-Jim in the other drawer. He would have considered it just that, an unusual piece of smoked meat, if not a preserved worm or caterpillar, had it not been for features not clarified until he had lifted the box from the drawer and held it up to the light—a fleshy pair of joints, a nail with dirt or grease still visible beneath its cuticle, a stump end with a nick of bone nestled like a wee pearl amid dry and coral-tinted tissue. It was a pinky, from its length and width, or else a child’s finger, and it gleamed in the light from Orrie’s window. He sniffed at it. Varnish. Someone had varnished it.

The electric buzz of the front doorbell seemed to lift the finger out of its box all by itself. Gus snatched at it in vain as the box and its contents flew from his hands and fell scattered across the carpet. He stepped by accident on the bottom half of the box, crushing a corner and two sides. He jammed a layer of cotton back into it just the same, but he couldn’t find the damned finger. The buzz came again, in three quick jabs, as he went on his hands and knees and looked under the dresser, the bed, behind the ladder-back chair in the corner. Was it just blending in with the beige carpet? He felt his stomach begin to strain at its moorings as he trailed his hands across the carpet. The buzz came again, this time one long, sustained summons.

He thought about waiting it out in Orrie’s room. It might be a UPS delivery man who’d go away in a minute. No, this was someone more determined than that. It might be David or Cheryl without a house key, or even Marcus. Gus sprinted down the stairs and past the tree as the buzz was replaced by a rhythmic pounding on the door.

He stopped in front of the door to catch his breath, compose an excuse, before he unlocked it. He threw the door open just as his opposite stood poised to deliver another blow. For a moment he and Gus stared at each other in mutual surprise. “Sorry,” Gus breathed. “Can I help you?”

Gus couldn’t tell if he was white or black or Hispanic or some combo thereof. He was in his mid-twenties, tall and broad-shouldered, with skin like creamed coffee, a spare, hyphenated moustache, and hair that hung to his shoulders in Rasta braids. His shirt was an immaculate white linen pullover with flowers embroidered into its yoke. This hung loose over baggy cargo pants that trailed down to sharp-toed snakeskin boots. Gus saw behind him, parked in the driveway, an old Chevy Impala with a cracked windshield. The visitor glanced about as if he wasn’t sure now that this was the right house. Then he checked his watch. Finally: “I’m looking for Orrie Biffenbaugh.”

“You’re looking for Orrie? She’s not here.”

“Not here? What do you mean?”

“I mean this is Thursday. She’s in school.”

The visitor peered narrowly at Gus. “You’re not her old man. Who the hell are you?”

Gus stared back at him before answering. “I’m a friend of the family. That’s who the hell I am.”

“So what are you doing here? What are you doing here now?”

“Well, excuse me, but I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“Okay, whatever—I don’t give a shit. Listen, can you just tell Orrie, if you don’t mind, that Ruby’s here?”

“You’re Ruby?” Gus hadn’t imagined a Ruby like this.

“Yeah, I’m Ruby.”

“Okay—Orrie left a message for you. She told me to tell you, ‘Another day.’”

He saw Ruby stare blankly at him. “Tell me what another day?”

“‘Another day.’ I don’t know what. She just said, ‘Another day.’”

“You mean not today?”

“I don’t know, man. I don’t know what she means. I’m just telling you what she said, all right?”

“Another day? What the fuck’s up with that?” He put both hands on his hips and turned away. He checked his watch again. Gus saw that on his watch hand he wore a gold ring, and that only a nubbin of flesh stood where his pinky had been. “This is bullshit,” Ruby said, turning back to Gus. “She knows it’s got to be today. Damn, I got everything set up today.”

“Yeah? What’s got to be today?”

Ruby put on a bitter smile. “Well, excuse me, but I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“Would be if Orrie’s involved.”

“Friend of the family? Not good enough.”

“Well, whatever—another day.”

“Hey, Mr. uh—.”

“Pan.”

“Right, Mr. Pan—did her old man put you up to this?”

“Put me up to what?”

Ruby smiled again and shook his head. “Fuck it. Just tell Orrie I’m here, okay?”

“Maybe I’m not speaking loud enough? She’s not here, man. She’s gone.”

“You’re bullshitting me, right? And what the fuck are you doing here if she’s not here? You cleaning house? You her old lady’s handyman?”

Gus smiled, swinging the door back and forth in a narrow arc like a cat switching its tail. “So what happened to your finger?”

Ruby made first to shove his hand into the hip pocket of his pants, then changed his mind. He smiled again, lifting the hand to Gus’s face. He clenched the remaining fingers into a fist, thrust them out straight, wrapped them together again, then straightened them once more, making waggling motions in the air, like he was plucking harp strings. Gus wondered if it was the absence of the pinky that made the remaining digits so long and serpentine. The stump of the pinky twitched eerily in accompaniment. “Maybe you can tell Orrie I’m looking for this.”

“Maybe you’re one sick bastard,” Gus said as he began to shut the door.

Ruby stopped it with that left hand. “Listen, please, just tell her everything’s cool, but it’s got to be today, you know what I’m saying?” he said. “Tell her she’ll understand once we get going. But we gotta get going. Please. And no offense, but I know she’s in there.”

“None taken.” Gus took hold of Ruby’s forearm and removed his hand from the door. “This is goodbye, Ruby,” he said as he shut and locked the door.

~

The rest went down like a dream. Gus watched from the living room as Ruby stood with his head bowed on the porch step, as he stalked back to his car. Ruby sat motionless behind the wheel of the Chevy until Gus lost patience and went upstairs to look some more for the missing finger. The damned thing seemed to have vanished like it never existed, as if the guy were born with that stump and Gus had only imagined the contents of Orrie’s jewelry box. Eventually it occurred to Gus that he hadn’t heard the Chevy’s engine start.

The stone that burst like a bomb through Orrie’s window sent him sprawling back into the dressing table, bruising his ribs. He felt a sliver of glass glance off his cheek, saw pastel shards rain on the rug about Orrie’s shorts as the stone banged to a stop against the opposite wall. He heard Ruby yell to Orrie from beneath the window that he knew she was in there. If he had to, he’d come in to get her. It had to be today.

Gus didn’t want to be seen at Orrie’s window. He stayed low and abandoned the room as a second stone glanced off the frame of its other window, and then a third broke through. He sprinted downstairs in time to see Ruby striding back to his car. Gus threw open the front door. “So what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Ruby granted him scarcely a glance as he removed his shirt, folded it carefully, laid it on the Chevy’s back seat. Then he went to open the car’s trunk. “Those windows cost a lot of money, man!” Gus continued. “Your ass better be good for them!”

Ruby stood up with a pump-action sawed-off shotgun in his hands. Gus slammed the door when Ruby leveled the weapon in his direction.

The dispatcher who answered Gus’s call to 911 warned him to stay inside. Ruby was shouting at Orrie to stay in her room and not to worry, sounding like Hell’s version of that dispatcher. Gus, a wide-eyed Kilroy, peered from the kitchen window as Avens squawked and leaped from perch to perch, as Ruby circled to the back of the house and climbed the stairs to the rear deck. Tattoos ran in blue and scrambled profusion up and down his arms and across his back and chest. Splayed across the breadth of his chest was the same sort of winged serpent Gus remembered from David’s blotter papers, now also from the crest of Orrie’s rump. Gus wondered if David was just having a flashback today and if he had somehow gotten drafted into the middle of it. That had always seemed to the Jammerwocky like something that could happen, and this was more like David’s nightmare, he thought, not his.

Gus saw Ruby come to a halt before the French doors and pull at their handles. Then he saw him position the gun on his hip and fire a slug through the glass. That was followed by the sound—he guessed—of the aluminum funnel and the PVC pipe and the bar stool clattering in collapse across the pool table. By then Gus had backed himself under the kitchen table with Cheryl’s bread knife in his hands. A second blast blew the French doors open. Gus heard Ruby’s footsteps climbing the stairs to Orrie’s bedroom. Then he heard Ruby calling for her above the cockatiel’s shrieks.

One part of Gus wanted to get out, to escape through the front door into the light, into that sense of time being born that he had bathed in earlier. But the dispatcher had told him to stay inside. He stayed, wondering if that was just an excuse for the lassitude that gripped him, for the slack despair that drained all spark from his muscle fibers, amplified the ache in his ribs, that had drenched his own pants with piss. Mystifyingly, another Rolling Stones tune had come into his head, one that the Jammerwocky used to cover:

There’s no time to lose, I heard her say

Catch your dreams before they slip away…

He heard Ruby come down the stairs at the same time that he heard a pair of heavy vehicles pull rapidly into the driveway. Ruby walked past the shattered French doors and into the kitchen, halting when he saw Gus under the table. Ruby’s forehead was beaded with sweat. He cradled the shotgun in his right arm and carried in the palm of his left hand, with its ring and three fingers, the lost pinky. He gazed without blinking at Gus, who squinted in near blindness from the sting of his own sweat.

The racket from Avens and the loudspeaker outside seemed eclipsed by Ruby’s silence and immobility. Gus drew his knees against his chest to comfort a bone-deep chill, to relieve his feeling of nakedness. He heard the ticking of the clock on the wall. He saw Ruby’s red tongue come out and circle his lips. He watched Ruby look down at the finger in his hand. Gus said, “Where—where’d you find that?”

“In her drawer,” Ruby said without looking up. “Just lying there in her shit like it was a piece of lunch meat.” He stared at it a moment longer and then raised his head. “You know where the trash is?”

“Under the sink.”

Ruby moved ponderously to the sink, opened the door beneath it, dropped the finger into the wastebasket. Then, ignoring Gus, he took the shotgun in both hands and walked out of the kitchen and down the hallway towards the front door.

But Gus didn’t see that because by then he was in the middle of a flashback himself, or a dream. The years had been washed away, and he was only a boy again, sixteen himself, and he was at the helm of a little sloop with a girl just like Orrie burrowing into his side. They were on their way to Orcas Island, its bulk raised against a rainy sky like the contours of Never Land, while behind them Port Henry burned, throwing black and oily smoke into the clouds.

Art by Kerri Augenstein

bridge media | Patike – Nike Air Jordan, Premium, Retro Klasici, Sneakers , Iicf

Right while I’m getting my braces, and saliva I can’t swallow is pooling in the back of my mouth, Doc Hallowell tells me about square dancing.

“I do it every Saturday with Linda,” he says, “and after we’re done we go to Bobby Ray’s for a nightcap.”

I can see Linda holding “Mr. Thirsty” off to the side, and I silently curse her for not using him.

“Yep,” he repeats, “Bobby Ray’s for a night cap.”

Alrighty, then. Bobby Ray’s for a nightcap. This guy is nutty, and I don’t want to think about him square dancing with Linda and whatever they do afterwards. I don’t like that visual. He seems to expect a response, but I can’t answer him because the spit tide is rising in my mouth, so I roll my eyes and grunt.

Doc Hallowell wears a blue lab coat and has severe body odor. I think he never washes his clothes. Other dentists I’ve used have worn button down shirts or sweaters—one even wore a bow tie. But this one is always in the blue smock, and it always smells like B.O.

For a dentist he’s fairly good looking, but not in a way that makes you feel insignificant. Linda is his lax assistant—she doesn’t even consider using Mr. Thirsty until I’m drooling onto my pink paper bib—and I think she’s his girlfriend, too. What with the square dancing. She has bad breath, I’ve noticed, so probably they are a match made in heaven, The Couple That Smells.

He makes you call him “Doc Hallowell,” never “Doctor Hallowell,” when you are sitting in his chair and have a question or need to get up and use the bathroom (which I’m sorry to say has happened to me twice before; something about the atmosphere in this place makes me have to void). This makes him sound like a dentist from the Wild West, but it’s what he prefers so I say it even though it’s embarrassing.

“Square dancing,” he tells me while tamping a molar band down on my wisdom tooth, “is a fine art. It’s very complicated, and if you are not careful, you can lose yourself.”

I wonder what he means by lose yourself. I lose myself when I read—all right, I’m just going to say it—romance novels. Anything by Olivia Hartwicke. I forget my name and the fact that I have to cook supper or wash my dishes, take out the trash. I can see losing track of the sequence of steps, which seems rather tricky, while square dancing, but I can’t really see floating off into the ether, which is what happens when you lose yourself in the heaving bosoms of Regency England. At least, that’s how it is for me. But then, the last time I square danced was when I was in junior high school and we had to, for gym. My partner was always The Boy in Plaid, and he had moist palms and on his cheeks severe acne that was itself a sort of plaid.

I realize I am old to be getting braces—thirty-eight, with a ribbon of gray off my right temple—but last month I decided I’d lived long enough with this chaotic smile, so here I am in Doc Hallowell’s lime green dentist chair, getting acquainted with Mr. Thirsty.

“Square dancing,” continues Doc Hallowell, breaking my reverie, “is the Sin of My Old Age. I’m forty-nine.” He winks and pulls down on my chin so he can get a better look in there. I drool.

“Ung,” I say, thinking: where the hell is Mr. Thirsty?

“Linda has a great costume. Brown calico skirt with a frilly petticoat beneath. I think her shirt is purple. Linda?” he calls out. Linda has left the room and can’t see that I’m about to gag on my own spit. “Is the shirt purple or red?”

Linda’s voice, thin as a strand of her lank gray hair, answers: “It’s mauve. Mauve.”

Brown and mauve don’t go so well together, Linda.

Doc Hallowell pats my shoulder and tells me I can spit at the little fountain near the chair. My saliva is pink.

“It would be fantastic,” I say, avoiding his face, “if Linda would vacuum the spit out of my mouth occasionally, so my shirt doesn’t get wet.”

“Your shirt’s wet?” he asks, with honest surprise. I present my shirt. He frowns and shakes his head. I notice that his eyebrows meet in the center. “Next time we’ll double bib you.” This guy’s almost worth the price of admission. The three thousand dollar ticket.

“Brackets next month!” he sings in a shaky tenor, and then I go out to make my next appointment with Grace, the receptionist out front.

“Poor Doc Hallowell,” I say sarcastically to no one as I get into my car. What a loser. It seems the two most exciting things in his life are square dancing and the brackets he’s going to glue to my teeth next month.

~

I’ve taken the afternoon off from my job as receptionist at Vlad’s Cut N’Curl. I am the only quasi-educated employee there, what with my two point three years at Skidmore College. I guess I’m the poster child for unrealized potential. And so what? Vlad’s Cut N’Curl is better than the last job. Ten years as a cashier at Animal Universe, where I also filled the vending machines with llama pellets. Vlad’s is certainly a step up, even though Vlad has a face like a feral dog. I think he may be a descendant of the Impaler—a good reason to take a little work holiday.

I will spend my half day going to bookstores to look for an Olivia Hartwicke romance among the new releases, and if I score, reading said romance. I used to only borrow from the library, because Vlad is the stingiest beautician in the whole Leatherstocking region and I didn’t want to spend five dollars on a book, but now I mostly buy, because the last time I took a Hartwicke out of the library—it was one of the Regency Romances, Highland Lover, I think—I found, written in a man’s scrawl, the words “Gina your a cunt and it smells like bad tuna.” Then I lost my appetite for the library.

There is no new Olivia Hartwicke. I go home, disappointed, and make myself a bowl of pasta and a green salad for supper. While rummaging in the crisper I find something black and curled and apparently dead under the bag of radishes. I pick it up in a napkin and flush it. The cucumber was not in contact with the black curled thing so I peel its skin off in snaky strips that my cat Figlet will fish out of the trash and store under the hall rug. Then I sit down in my comfy chair, Figlet and his sister, Meat Foon Foon, parked on the floor next to me with two bowls of Fancy Feast, and watch the six o’clock news. There is nothing interesting happening here, besides the mayor’s arrest for cyber stalking a junior varsity cheerleader. He emailed her a picture of his naked ass, simply a picture of his ass, and now he’s holding news conferences and crying over humiliating his wife and kids. The ass turned up online and went viral. I notice he has a sacral dimple like I do. How nice that we have something in common.

~

Doc Hallowell has a column in the Herald Gazette. Once a week he writes about orthodontia—how it can make your life better—and at the end he invites you to come by for a free consultation. He makes it sound like you can just drop in off the street and he’ll take a look in your mouth—come on down!—although the truth is it took me three weeks to get in there and have my teeth seen. His picture is above the column—Doc in his blue lab coat, but with a tie underneath, and without his glasses. Every week I read the column, because there is simply nothing worth reading in that paper, and once, when it was devoted to adult orthodontia, I cut it out and taped it to my refrigerator as a joke. Now he looks at me every time I go in for a coke or a piece of pie, and sometimes I salute before I open the door and peer in. Once I even gave him the finger, just tried it out to see what it felt like, disrespecting him like that, and I immediately felt bad about it. There is something about that man that makes me feel like a rat.

~

At my brackets visit, the waiting room is full to bursting. Every buck-tooth kid in town is sitting on Doc Hallowell’s Naugahyde office furniture, thumbing through magazines and elbowing their siblings and picking their noses. I try to ignore them. I am the only person of a certain age here who isn’t the parent of a buck-tooth child.

I wait for Linda to come out and call my name, lead me into the treatment room, but after ten minutes someone else, a heavy bleached blond woman with a large, shelf-like rear end, brings me back. “Miss Bernard?” she asks, fanning her flushed neck with my chart, and then I get up and follow her to the lime easy chair.

While I wait for Doc Hallowell, I pass the time by looking at the plaster teeth lined up on shelves in a glass case on the wall. Most of them are crooked and look like crap. I wonder which one is mine, and whether I could take it home with me, maybe paint it with tempera paints. I could see doing pink gums and a gold front tooth. After I’ve studied each plaster mouth in turn, I sit back and close my eyes, fantasizing about my impending new teeth, which I will own in about two years’ time. I reach beside me for Mr. Thirsty, without opening my eyes, and feel his smooth shaft and the stark edges of his oval orifice.

The first thing I notice when Doc enters the room is his lab coat. It’s green, not the usual blue, which must mean the blue one’s in the laundry. Not a moment too soon. I am about to ask him about Linda when he says, “Have you met my new assistant, Betty? Linda’s moved on and Betty’s come on board, all in the past month!” Betty, who has materialized out of nowhere and is looming over me, smiles. She could use braces herself. I say hello, and ask Doc Hallowell whether he is still square dancing on Saturdays. He looks sad.

“I haven’t got a partner anymore. Now Linda’s gone. I guess I’ll have to find another girl, pronto.” I think it’s funny that he says “girl”; Linda must be fifty. He smiles weakly beneath his mask and fixes the blinding overhead light so it beams directly into my eyes. I squeeze them shut.

“Open please.”

“Uh huh.”

“Read any good books lately?” he asks with a look of deep concentration as he probes around in my mouth.

I try to nod and he steadies me by pressing on the crown of my head. Mistress of the Moors, I try to say, but my mouth is propped open, and I am engaged in swallowing the saliva that pools in the back of my throat. I make a sound like “ung ha ga” and gag on the saliva. Betty swoops in with Mr. Thirsty and vacuums me out.

Doc Hallowell has not noticed that my spit almost killed me. “I like mysteries,” he remarks. “Anything with a corpse and a lot of suspense.”

I must be frowning, because he raises his eyebrows and says, “No?”

I shake my head. “Okay,” he says. “When your brackets are bonded you can tell me what you read.” This seems a bit intimate, considering what’s happening here is basically a cash transaction—purveyor of orthodontic service meets consumer, and straight teeth ensue. Although he is friendly enough, and in a different context I might confess how much I like the feel of Mr. Thirsty under the pads of my fingers.

~

My braces hurt. I have called Doc Hallowell’s office and demanded that he see me this afternoon. Grace put me on hold for five minutes and then told me okay. Three-thirty. Vlad will have to answer his own phones from three to four-thirty, as the walk is twenty minutes each way. I eat my salami sandwich carefully at the reception desk, trying not to dislodge the four lumps of wax in the back of my mouth. But one dislodges anyway, and I roll it around in my mouth and spit it into my napkin. “Barbara, you do a shampoo!” calls Vlad from the sinks, and I wipe my mouth and go grudgingly to the back of the shop. “Mrs. Feingold,” he tells me. “Wash the color out.”

“Where is Martha?”

“Out,” he says shortly. I shrug and go collect Mrs. Feingold. Vlad never tells me anything, but he pays me the big bucks so I guess it’s my duty to wash the dye out of Mrs. Feingold’s non-existent hair.

Mrs. Feingold is an old lady with osteoporosis—she is curved like a shell and has St. Vitus’ Dance, but she still gets her hair colored once a month, and wears clothes that must come from The City. There is no store here that carries such clothes, all silky and bright, much too fancy for an old lady, in my humble opinion. She must have a daughter in New York who dresses her. She smiles at me as I lead her from the styling station to the sink, her eyes bright.

“Barbara,” she says, “I see you have braces on your teeth. You’ll be fending off the men after your teeth are straightened.” Mrs. Feingold knows that I am single.

“I don’t know, Mrs. Feingold. Anyway, there are no men here I would go out with.”

“Oh, now, you’re too picky,” she scolds as I try to get her settled in the chair.

“Put your head back, Mrs. Feingold.”

“I like that,” she tells me, as I spray warm water on her scalp, running my hands through her thin hair. “Do you ever see the Barnes boy anymore?”

I slept with the Barnes boy on and off for six months last year, and now I avoid him like the plague. He’s seen me naked. “No, Mrs. Feingold. He lives in Amsterdam now.”

“Oh, Amsterdam. Have you ever been there? To the real Amsterdam? I have. Mr. Feingold proposed to me there in nineteen forty-eight.” She closes her eyes.

“No, I haven’t, but I’ve read about it. There’s a Hartwicke romance that takes place there. The heroine is a receptionist in a podiatrist’s office who saves up her money and travels to Holland.”

“And what happens to her there?”

“She meets a wealthy Dutch businessman and falls in love.” I know it’s dumb, but I just can’t help myself.

“Naturally,” agrees Mrs. Feingold. “And the Dutch are so germane.”

“Ah—sure,” I say, not knowing what she means.

“Barbara!” barks Vlad.

“What?”

“Please, dry Mrs. Feingold with a towel and take her to the styling station. You work too slow!”

I pat Mrs. Feingold on the shoulder. “Time to get up.” She does, with difficulty.

“You listen to me, Barbara,” she says sternly. “There will be men, when those teeth are straightened, and you will take one of them.” She says this with finality, to let me know the conversation is over. I sit her down at the styling station and go back to the front desk. I spin idly in my chair for about six minutes and then I put my head down for a brief nap. After a while a violent snore wakes me and I look around to see if anyone heard, but Mrs. Feingold is under the dryer and Vlad is smoking in the parking lot. No one else is around.

At three o’clock I yell goodbye to Vlad and walk five blocks down Elm to South Main. A homeless woman and her child sit, as they always do, on the low step in front of the First National Bank. I can see her a block away. I watch a police officer walk over and nudge her with his foot. She moves around the corner. I stand still and watch some more. After a couple minutes she sidles back to her perch on the low step. Squatting down, she takes out a dingy breast for her baby, rocking like a boat while she feeds it. I fish in my paper bag and offer her the uneaten half of my salami sandwich. She grabs it out of my hand and I half run the rest of the way to Doc Hallowell’s office. “You have a good day now, Hon!” she calls out hoarsely after me, and the baby lets out a strangled shriek.

~

The first thing that happens while I’m sitting in Doc Hallowell’s chair and he’s fiddling with my wires is that I have to go to the bathroom. I sit for five full minutes without saying anything, because I’m embarrassed, and then, when it feels as though my bladder is going to burst, I raise my right hand and waggle my fingers back and forth. It takes him a moment to notice, and then he steps back and peers into my face.

“Everything okay?” he asks.

“Actually, no,” I tell him. “I have to use the bathroom.”

“That’s a thing with you, isn’t it? Sit in the dental chair and you’ve got to pee. Maybe it’s because the chair is the color of seawater.”

I shrug and smile weakly. “I’ll be right back.”

When I return to the treatment room Doc Hallowell is seated, face in hands, on a round, wheeled stool next to the green chair. He looks as though he might be crying.

Oh, Jeez. Jeezum Crow. I try to cheer him up. “I like the color of the chair. Seawater. Nice.”

He glances up at me. “Seawater, nice? You breathe in that stuff you’re going to last thirty seconds max. It’ll feel like your lungs are on fire.”

“Breathe in—”

“Seawater.” And he drops his face back into his hands.

Oh. My. Jeez-um. I clear my throat. “Uh, Doc Hallowell?”

“Hmm?” He looks up.

“You okay?”

“I have to find another girl for square dancing. Bobby Ray expects it.”

“Oh.”

“You wouldn’t happen to—”

“Oh. No, I don’t square dance.”

“That’s what I thought,” he says, sighing. Then, suddenly chipper: “Okay, let’s bend those wires!”

By the time I leave the office the pain in my mouth has eased, and I have agreed to accompany Doc Hallowell to the Masonic Temple on Saturday.

~

I lie in my bed and try to remember square dancing from junior high school, but I can’t remember anything except the way the Plaid Boy’s pimples erupted with a kind of yellow crust on top, like dried lava, and that he looked at my feet, not my face, when he do-si-doed me. “Do-si-do” I remember—the word and not the step—and then, suddenly, “promenade” too, but that’s all. The rest is like white noise: something you can’t define but know is there in the back of your consciousness. And then after a while you don’t even know it’s there anymore, you just go on living your life in spite of it, and for all intents and purposes it has disappeared. Square dancing is like that for me. It was a part of my life once, and then it wasn’t—and if I try real hard I can dredge up buried pieces of it, like “do-si-do,” and the humid odor, like fungus, of the Plaid Boy as he promenaded me listlessly around the square. I get a little hot, in spite of myself, when I think about Saturday.

~

“I’m not a member,” Doc tells me as he holds open the glass door of the Masonic Temple, “but this is where they have the dancing.” I know the Masonic temple a little, having had a friend in high school whose father belonged, and having accompanied said friend to a Christmas party here in 1988. It was a party for losers, with a polka band so normal people couldn’t dance, but on the upside my friend’s brother backed me into a corner and French kissed me. And there was a gag gift someone got, a pair of boxers with hearts all over them, and the giver said “they’re the boxers with the hearts-on.” That was another upside.

I chuckle at the memory, and Doc says, “What?” which makes me blush.

~

The square dancing takes place in a large room lined with folding chairs around its perimeter. We seem to be somewhat late, as people are already squared up and chattering madly. Doc takes my coat off me and places it tenderly on a chair. Then he takes off his own jacket, sits down and replaces his street shoes with a pair of sneakers. Uh oh, I think, looking down at my strappy shoes. He notices them too, and says, “You’ll have a little trouble on this floor with those shoes. I should have told you to bring a pair of sneakers.”

“Oh. No big deal.” The truth is, I’ve got on the closest thing I could find to square-dancing clothes, a blue and gold paisley skirt with white eyelet lace sewn along the hem, and a white blouse, and there’s no way I was going to put on a pair of sneakers.

Then he takes my hand and leads me to his square.

“Marty, my man!” says one of the guys, an older man with a large belly and a western-style shirt paired up with a pair of Sansabelt slacks. So his name is Martin. Somehow I hadn’t known that. Then the others weigh in—so glad to have you back, love your shirt, never liked that Linda anyhow. And then they turn their attention toward me.

“What’syer name, Precious?” asks a woman whose face looks like a piece of driftwood, and whose stiff blond hair is in a mad state of confusion, pointing in eight directions at once.

“Barbara Bernard,” I say coolly. What a specimen.

“Welcome, Barbara Bernard!” she says in a cordial way, which I totally don’t deserve.

“Thanks.” I allow the corners of my mouth to rise the slightest bit possible.

“Barbara,” says Doc Hallowell, “is my star patient.  She always wears her elastics, don’t you?”

Oh, Jeezum.

“Barb,” says the tanned blond woman, “tell us.  Are Bob’s fingers as clever as I think they are, what with all them elastics and wires and—small work?” She winks indiscreetly at me.

She’s obviously the boxers with the hearts-on type.  The best way to deal with a person like that is to ignore her. I turn to Doc Hallowell and say, “You’ll have to show me the steps, as I’ve forgotten exactly how they go.”

“Piece of pie,” he replies, and smiles. He looks good when he smiles, not rugged or outdoorsy or elegant—not like in Olivia Hartwicke, and I must admit she’s spoiled me for real men—but decent and kindly. I start to think that Linda’s made a mistake, and that maybe her error could work to my advantage. I think that for a millisecond and then I remember the B.O. and the general goofiness and the fact that he’s almost fifty. And then I sigh and blow my bangs off my forehead and figure if I can just get through this date I will go home and read The Heiress of Bingsbury in my tub, make the water so hot my legs and stomach go dappled and the humidity makes my hair frizz.

I stand next to Doc Hallowell, thinking how the hell am I going to square dance? The driftwood blond is staring straight at me—I think she’s got her sights on Doc. The last thing I want is to look ridiculous in front of that mummy. As I’m fretting over this, a man with an enormous wattle under his chin—two chins, three chins!—and a stomach to match, sidles up to a microphone and greets the dancers.

“’Lo, Ladies and Gents. Another Saturday night. I see Gladys Pepper’s got her red skirt on tonight,” he says with a wink. “Way to go, Gladys. The Lady in Red.”

Assorted murmurings from the crowd. Gladys, a wizened old woman with red glasses to match the skirt, drops a curtsey. I sneer inwardly and try to appear icy. The frigid temperature in the hall helps—my fingers and toes and the tip of my nose are frozen.

The man with the microphone and the wattle inserts a tape in the boom box. “Right then, squa-are up!” he shouts. And our undisciplined group squares up.

~

It’s hard to keep track of my feet and listen to the fat man’s commands at the same time. And the rules of square dancing do not come back to me, although I feel again the moderate embarrassment of a girl paired up with a boy even lower on the social ladder than she, as if it were just this morning that the Boy in Plaid walked me through those complicated figures. But Doc Hallowell smiles and offers encouragement: that’s right—do-si-do!. . .Cloverleaf! Peel off there and hook up with Scotty on your way back! You’re doing great! Whew!

After fifteen minutes of this I am no longer cold and ready to call it quits, but the dancing continues for two hours. Then sweaty cups of beer and two bottles of scotch materialize. Before I know it I’ve drunk two beers and a shot or three, and need to sit with my face between my knees. Doc Hallowell, who has drunk two large scotches—neat, he calls them—trips over my right foot but recovers before he hits the floor. I look up and he looks back and our eyes meet and we laugh. Then I rush to the ladies’ room and hang over the toilet for ten minutes. When nothing happens I splash water on my face and go out to find Doc.

It’s ten o’clock by the time we walk out into the cool night. My bangs are stuck to my forehead; the wind on my damp hair and face makes me shiver. Doc smells like booze. I like it. He takes my elbow and guides me across deserted Main Street to the post office.

“It’s closed,” I point out.

“Yes, but we can sit on the steps and talk. Linda and I did this every Saturday after square dancing.”

We sit. The wind picks up my skirt, exposing my thighs, and I slap it down. Doc looks down at his own thighs with a half smile.

I have no idea what to say to him, so I ask if elastics come in different colors.

“Yes, I have almost any color you can imagine. Mostly it’s the kids who want the colors, though.”

“Although,” I say, “I wouldn’t mind fuchsia, to match my bra.”

He startles.

“Kidding!”

Then we sit in a drunken silence.

“Barbara?” says Doc Hallowell after a while.

“Hmm?”

“There’s something I want to tell you,” he says. But he doesn’t.

“Go ahead,” I urge him.

“It’s a dark thing.”

“Because you’re drunk?”

“It’s dark any which way.”

“What is it?”

“It’s that— Shoot. I mean, you might change orthodontists after this.”

“You’re the only orthodontist in town.”

“Oh, right. Well, here it is. I once shot a man. I killed him.”

I am shocked. And also aroused. “Why did you do that?”

“It was an accident, more or less.”

“Did you go to jail?”

“No. Manslaughter, suspended sentence. It was a hunting accident. They took away my hunting license.”

“You’re a hunter?” I ask. Unbelievable. Isn’t there an Olivia Hartwicke novel about a hot cowboy who accidentally shoots some guy and gets charged with manslaughter, until his lover (the sheriff’s daughter) gives him a glowing character reference and the judge voids the conviction? Or did I dream that?

“No,” he says, his voice grainy. “I’m not really a hunter. Not a hunter per se. It was my first time. I got the license because I needed something to do on weekends.” He stares at his splayed fingers. “Wait, what was I saying?”

“You got your hunting license.”

“Yes. That was before I started square dancing. I hadn’t gotten the hang of the rifle yet and it went off when I thought it was locked. I told the guy it was locked, and he made a joke about walking into my line of fire. Then I shot him.” He snorts, and then the laughter turns to sobs. Jeezum Crow, I mutter, and he looks up at me wetly.

“What did you say?”

I dig a crumpled Kleenex out of my purse and offer it to him. “I wasn’t allowed to say Jesus Christ when I was a kid. I’d get whacked. So I made up Jeezum Crow. It kind of stuck.”

He starts to cry again.

“Hey,” I say. “If you want, I can get you twenty percent off a hair cut at Vlad’s Cut N Curl.” I know it’s lame but it’s the best I can do.

“Thank you, Barbara,” he says, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. “You’re a kind soul.” Then he jumps up, suddenly energized. “I almost forgot. Bobby Ray! Come on, we still have time!” And he pulls me to my feet.

~

Bobby Ray lives in the middle of nowhere. Doc mostly drives on the right, except around snaky curves, where he drifts a bit. I take this philosophically.

I ask where we are headed, and he tells me Salbury. “Salivary?” I ask, frowning, and he replies, “No, like Salisbury, without the I and the S.” We drive past open fields and trailers, dinky houses with dogs staked out front, cows and horses. By the time we pull up to Bobby Ray’s house, it is ten to eleven and the moon has gone under a cloud.  The darkness is heavy.

Instead of knocking on the front door, Doc Hallowell goes round to the back, takes out a key and turns it in the lock. The house is completely dark, and he quickly flips a light switch next to the door.

“Is no one home?” I ask, and he says, “Jenny’s home.”

“Who is Jenny?  His wife?”

“You’ll see.”

~

As far as I can tell the house is empty. There is no sign of Bobby Ray or Jenny. Doc Hallowell goes about the house, turning on lights. I can see now the trophies—deer and moose and pheasants, mounted on the walls. A beaver sits expectantly on its tail on a table by the fireplace.

“I don’t like dead animals.”

“They died of old age,” he says with a short laugh, and I laugh too, but inside I think, shit.

“Is he a hunter, then?”

“Was,” he says ruefully, “He had to give it up.” He motions toward the couch and I sit down, smoothing my skirt beneath my legs.

“Jenny will be out as soon as she hears the can opener,” he tells me, and then I know that Jenny is a cat. Sure enough, as soon as the electric can opener hums in the kitchen, a black cat emerges from the dark hallway and snakes around his legs. She looks a little like Figlet, only Figlet is fatter.

Doc Hallowell makes kissing noises and reaches down to scratch her head.

“You’re looking better, Jen,” he purrs. “Not so skinny.” She eats the cat food in big gulps, and when she has finished he picks her up and holds her slung over his shoulder like a baby. I can see her claws kneading the back of his shoulder, the way Meat Foon Foon kneads my stomach in bed.

“Sad girl,” says Doc Hallowell, and, “Poor girl.”

“Where is Bobby Ray?”I ask after a while, but Doc doesn’t answer.

“Will he be mad that we came right in?” I persist.

“No,” says Doc. He looks at his watch. “Give me twenty minutes, just for Jen’s sake, and then I’ll take you home.”

I am quite uneasy. The recesses of this house are dark. And it’s filled with bad karma, what with all the dead animals. I wonder what Jenny thinks of living here with them, poor thing.

Where the hell is Bobby Ray? I snap my fingers impatiently. I remember Doc Hallowell telling me about visiting Bobby Ray after square dancing with Linda. Maybe Bobby Ray is a strategy for luring women into this house. That might be okay—I’m starting to find him attractive. For a dentist. I mull this over, and after a few moments he pushes Jenny off his lap and comes to me, sits next to me on the couch.

“Hi,” I say, and my heartbeat quickens.

“Hi,” he echoes softly, and after a moment of idleness his head drops onto his chest. I think about what to do, and decide an elbow to the side would not be ill timed. I elbow him and he snorts awake. Then he leans over and kisses me. It’s a sad, boozy kiss, and after I’m over my surprise I kiss him back. We’re stone still for a moment, and then he says, “Bobby Ray would have liked you.  Jenny was his cat, you know.”

I nod and look around the room. Deer, moose, pheasant, beaver.

“Was it an accident, really?” I murmur.

He doesn’t say, just leans in for another kiss.

 

Art by Kerri Augenstein

Nike sneakers | Nike Air Max 270 – Deine Größe bis zu 70% günstiger

I had killed the engine, filed my nails, organized my wallet, and done a sketch of my left hand. Since we still hadn’t moved, not even a few feet, I started on a detailed drawing of Thomas Jefferson riding a dragon through a peach orchard. Next, I drew the goddess Sekhmet (woman’s body, lion’s head) riding a bicycle down a city street. Every half hour I ran the AC for a few minutes and listened to NPR for the traffic report. At seven p.m. I heard the announcement:

If you are in the back-ups on I-95 and 1-66 heading towards Washington, turn off your engine to avoid running out of gas. Please stay near your car. Announcements will be made every half hour. In the interim, turn off your radio to conserve your car’s battery.

“What? Why are they saying that?” Matthew asked from the back seat.

“They don’t want us to run out of gas while we’re waiting to start driving again. The traffic jam goes all the way to DC. I don’t think we’re going anywhere for a while.”

“Does that mean I can take off my seat belt?”

“Sure.”

I stepped out of the car and the heat thrust its damp, heavy body against mine. I breathed in the exhaust-saturated air, stretched my arms overhead and felt the blood tingling gloriously back into my limbs. As far ahead as I could see, countless cars glittered in the evening sunlight, a sparkling stream going nowhere.

All right—we were stuck. It wasn’t the end of the world. We’d surely be back at my brother’s house, where we were staying for the week, by what—midnight? Still, I did a quick mental inventory of all the things we had in the car: a picnic dinner in a quilted cooler bag, a blanket, two bottles of water, two Captain Underpants books, A Suitable Boy, and a flash fiction anthology. And I had one last syringe for my injection, with the necessary alcohol wipes and Band-Aids.

I sent up a sort of thank-you prayer—to whatever deities I didn’t believe in—for the syringe. It was left over from our weekend visit to Rachel and Fernando. I always take a back-up syringe in case something goes wrong with the injection, and I had never taken it out of my bag. Now I might be needing it.

Word to the wise: always, always carry an extra syringe with you, and two wouldn’t hurt.

All around us, doors were popping open. I dropped one sandaled foot behind me, let the knee of the other leg bend, arms in the air again: Warrior One. When I shifted to Warrior Two, I saw the green glow-in-the-dark soles of Matthew’s sneakers pressed to the inside of the car window, his body easily slung the length of the backseat as his dark eyes darted across the pages he held overhead.

I tapped on his window until he opened the door.

“Let’s call Baba so he won’t worry about us.” I ducked into the car for my phone.

Tariq’s deep, rumbly voice was comfort distilled into sound.

“Where are you?” he said.

“My guess is fifty miles away.”

“Are there any exits in sight?”

“Nope.” Scraggly pines lined the highway as far north and south as we could see. There wasn’t even a speed limit sign. “Matthew wants to talk to you. I’m going to walk around a bit.”

I handed over my scratched-up Motorola and heard Matthew say, “Yeah, Monticello was cool! They had this small elevator just for their food, and do you know what they used to write with back then? They actually—listen Baba!—they actually took a feather off of a bird—”

I followed the dashed white line, a thread stitching its way through the back-up. On either side of me, the bleeping of video games leaked from the cracked windows of SUVs.

The phone, the phone! The venerable, aging flip phone that I’d clung to for four and a half years, my gesture of protest against the tech race, had a relic of a battery that went out as fast as a shooting star. I sprinted to the car and took the thing from Matthew.

“I’m hanging up so the battery doesn’t run out, Habibi. We’ll probably be home in a few—” but already I could hear that particular silence that meant I was talking to no one. The battery had died. I slipped the phone into my pocket.

“What are we going to do now?” Matthew asked.

“You have two books, don’t you?”

“Finished one.”

“Well, read the other.”

 

~

 

For dinner, Matthew and I split one of our sandwiches (chicken on whole-wheat, everything organic, cage-free, local, scrutinized down to the last ingredient in the mustard) and drank sparingly from a bottle of water. I turned on the car radio for the nine p.m. announcement—it hadn’t changed.

Ideally, I would have done my injection as night fell, but I needed someone to give it to me, and Matthew was out of the question. It had occurred to me to walk among the cars and tap on windows, asking for help, but I didn’t like the idea of a complete stranger plunging an inch-and-a-half needle into my butt. Better to wait, see if the cars started up, which might happen at any minute. I read A Suitable Boy by the pale orange light of the nearby highway lamp, not knowing the time. After forty pages, I contemplated truly spending the night, or part of it, on the highway, in which case it was probably wiser to save the syringe for the morning.

I hadn’t missed an injection in almost a year, so it was possible I might be OK until we reached home. But if the rabbits came, I’d rather they did during the night. Matthew was already asleep in the back seat, the sweet sleep of a nine-year-old worn out from a day of looking at the inventions of a different era and chasing a dog around the lawn of Jefferson’s estate. I could get away from the car while he slept and he wouldn’t have to see the rabbits. Getting up in the morning would be rough, but with the injection I’d be strong enough to drive us home.

I curled uncomfortably across the two front seats, my back against the stick shift, and woke to the sun washing through the passenger side window, heating my legs.

“Finally!” Matthew said. “I thought you would sleep forever!”

“There’s nothing wrong with sleeping so long,” I said.

“Unless I wake you with a gong!” Matthew said.

“A morning gong is like a song.”

“It makes you strong when it goes bong.” He was on a roll.

“So come along, you won’t go wrong!” I managed.

“And join me for some ping-pong!”

For breakfast we split an orange, which I pulled from between ice packs in the cooler bag. It was, miraculously, cool to the touch.

“Can’t we eat the other sandwich?” Matthew asked.

“What if we’re still here at lunchtime? Wouldn’t you rather have it then?”

“Oh,” Matthew said, apprehension flashing across his face.

“Don’t you wish we were back at Monticello, where there was a café, and all those peach trees, and the apples, and the raspberry vines?”

“Yeah!” Matthew said. “If we were there, we could have anything we wanted to eat!”

“We will when we get home,” I said, kissing the top of his head. “You’ve been really patient so far. You haven’t once told me you’re bored.”

“Only one problem,” Matthew said.

“What?”

“I’m gonna get bored really soon. I’ve read both my books.”

“Can’t you read them again?”

“I already have read them again.”

“What about making a comic book?”

“No paper.”

“I’ll see if I can find you some,” I scanned the scene. Car doors were open, windows down. Our fellow travelers lingered outside their vehicles, trying to catch what little breeze there was. “Do you want to come with me?”

“Nah, I’ll wait,” Matthew said, pulling a piece of snarled blue string and a muscled, military-looking action figure from his pocket. “I’m gonna see if the Dominator can beat the Snake Dragon.”

 

~

 

“You want paper?”

“For my stepson,” I told a woman about my age in a blue Prius. As I talked, I scooped the hair from my perspiring neck and fished in my pocket for a ponytail holder. It couldn’t have been much past eight, but already the air was like the hot, panting breath of an animal. “He’s bored. He wants to make a comic book. Look.” I held up the flash fiction anthology. “I can give you this in exchange.”

“Flash fiction? What’s that?”

“Very short short stories, only a page or two long,” I flipped open the book so she could see. “David Foster Wallace, Ha Jin, here’s one by Julio Cortazar, the one about winding the watch—a classic.”

“I’ve actually got plenty of paper,” the Prius driver said. “Do you have any food?”

“Sorry,” I shook my head. Not quite a lie.

“I’ll take the book, then. Or you can just have some paper. It doesn’t have to be a trade.” She got up and opened her trunk, pulled open a Staples bag and extracted a ream of paper. Matthew had popped up by my side.

“Paper!” he cried out.

“This is Matthew,” I told the woman.

“Paper!” he said, jumping up and down. He held the Dominator up in front of his face. “We like paper!” Matthew rasped in his Dominator voice.

“How much do you need?” she asked.

“I need a lot! Twelve pages! I’m going to make three comics! The first is about Thomas Jefferson!”

She slid her finger into the folded end of the wrapping, broke the seal, handed Matthew a generous stack of crisp sheets.

“Paper! Paper! Paper!” Matthew said, bouncing on his toes.

“What do you say, Matthew?”

“Thank you, Paper Lady!” The paper lady and I laughed. Matthew turned and jogged back towards our car.

“My name’s Lucy,” she said, extending a hand.

“I’m Noelle. Nice to meet you.”

“Listen, do you want this book?” She pulled a paperback thriller from her trunk. “It’s pretty awful, but it’s the only thing I have in the car. I finished it last night.”

“Keep it,” I said. “The book I’ve got is long enough.” I asked her what she usually read, already resigning myself to Eat, Pray, Love.

“Oh, you know I just read that one about the two magicians, Dr. So and So and Mr. What’s-his-name—wow, that’s embarrassing!” She gave an easy, alto laugh.

“Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell!” I wanted to hug her. “Didn’t you just love it?” Her face broke into an ample smile, and we leaned against the shady side of her car, skipping from Susanna Clark to George Eliot, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman.

“Listen,” I said. “I want to check on Matthew. Do mind if we walk over to our car?”

“Not at all.”

Matthew was making his comic book. I turned on the engine long enough to put down the windows for him, and Lucy and I walked on.

“I have one, too, you know,” she said.

“One what?”

“A stepdaughter.”

“Really?” I didn’t know any other stepmothers, not my age. “Do you have your own kids, or just the stepdaughter?”

“Just her.”

“As if that’s something to say ‘just’ about,” I laughed.

“Oh, I know!” Lucy said.

At last, someone who might understand. My friends had babies and toddlers, which was joyous and difficult, but in a way that didn’t shred your heart. I went on and on to them about the frustrations of sharing a child, sending him back, at the end of a summer of organic food, reading, and drawing, to a house where there were no time limits on TV, and chicken nuggets and Cocoa Puffs were standard meals.

But it was more than that. When he was gone, it was the way it was impossible to help Matthew with his math homework long distance, the way there was no one to play the rhyming game with, no one to read a few pages to before bed, no one to help me pick the last cherry tomatoes of the season. When he was with us, it was the tantrums that set in at day five and lasted to day twelve, and the way he said, “My mom would let me do that!” It was the way the arrival and departure of one forty-pound house guest flipped you instantly, mercilessly, from one universe to another.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Six.”

“Oh, what a fun age!”

When Matthew was six he was all sweet innocence and Spider Man. Each summer came with a startling update of the person I thought I’d known.

“Do you like it when she’s with you?” I asked.

“Oh, of course! But I also like it when she’s gone, the way everything is so quiet, and we can go out to dinner on the spur of the moment, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said. But I wouldn’t trade it for Matthew, not if I had a choice.

“Still, I’ll probably cave and have one of my own in a year or two,” she said, almost absent-mindedly. Lucy was a good three inches taller than me, with black curls and porcelain skin, broad in the hips, a loping carelessness to the way she carried her body.

“Listen,” I said. “I need help from someone. Do you think you could give me an injection?”

Lucy’s eyes widened.

“I go queasy when I see blood,” she said. “But the guy in the Lexus next to me is a surgeon. I’ll introduce you.”

The doctor, Max, gave me the injection while I leant against the side of his spotless, bottle-green SUV.

“Why don’t you come by and play a round of cards with me,” he said as we chatted afterwards.

“You’ve got cards?” I ran and got Matthew. We stayed for hours, playing Go Fish, War, Hearts, and Blackjack.

 

~

 

“Really, you’re going to drive to Monticello?” My brother had teased me two nights ago, when I asked to borrow his car for a day. We stood on his six-foot-square back porch, nestled in a brick-and-concrete bend of the alley behind his house, slapping mosquitoes while he barbecued enough shrimp skewers for his family and mine. “I thought you wouldn’t go anywhere if it wasn’t on the Metro or your bike.”

“I can stand a car for one day,” I laughed. “You know Matthew’s obsession with seeing everything about the founding fathers while we’re here. When we were at Mount Vernon, this tourist told him about Monticello. He’s been barraging me about it since then, so I uncled. Besides, we need to do something on our own the day Tariq has his interview.”

“Sure, you can take our Honda. We don’t need it Wednesday so it works out fine.”

“Thanks,” I said. “The drive should be easy as long as we can avoid traffic.”

“Did you hear about the traffic jam in Singapore that lasted six days?” my brother asked.

“Very funny.”

“No, for real. It was in the news.”

“It’s just like that Cortazar short story! This guy’s driving back to Paris. He doesn’t make it home for weeks.”

“It could happen,” he said.

“Trapped on a highway for weeks? You think that’s possible?”

“Not weeks. Six days. Or maybe seven,” he countered.

“Why not eight?”

“Make it eight then. I’d say eight days is the ideal length for a traffic jam.”

 

~

 

Now it was noon, and spending twenty-four hours or more in a traffic jam seemed all too possible. Teenagers came through on bikes, selling bottles of water and peaches out of backpacks. Supply was limited, we were allowed only one of each item.

“Are the peaches from your farm?” Lucy asked as she handed over four dollars.

They stared at her wordlessly, their faces somewhere between sullen and bewildered.

“We bought them at Food Lion,” one girl said at last. She was skinny, flip-flopped, with a dramatic fringe of mahogany bangs.

“Oh,” Lucy said, disappointed. “Where’s the Food Lion? Where do you live?”

“Thornburg,” the girl scoffed out, as if it scarcely needed to be said.

None of them had news of what was causing the back-up. As they were about to pedal off, Max stopped them, saying he would pay top dollar for a hamburger. A boy with a crew cut promised to come back in a couple hours.

Max was smart, I thought. I wished I had cash.

The peaches were flavorless and watery. We ate them with our hands under our mouths to catch the drops that ran down our chins, licking the anemic sweetness from our fingers. It only left my stomach hurting with hunger.

“It’s time for us to let you be,” I told Max. “Matthew, why don’t you work on your comic book while I take a nap?” We went back to the car and split our last sandwich between us.

From the bottom of the cooler, I pulled a battered Ziploc containing a handful of raisins and almonds. It had been our reserve. I handed it to Matthew.

“I’m still hungry,” he said after he had eaten the last of it.

“I know you are, sweetie. Just try not to think about it. Did you know if you have enough water you can survive for months, even if you’re hungry? Imagine we’re on a survival adventure.”

“I don’t need to imagine it. We are on a survival adventure,” he said.

“And I bet this is all over the news. You can tell all your friends about it when we get back to Seattle.”

At that he cheered up considerably and began a comic about being trapped in a traffic jam. In it, he turned into his secret self, the superhero Independence Boy, and flew over the cars to find the bad guys who had bombed the bridges into the city and all the monuments in Washington.  

 

~

 

In the late afternoon, National Guard helicopters flew overhead, raining down bottled water, Power Bars, and plastic-sealed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The Power Bars landed with satisfying thwacks on the car roofs. Matthew ran after the choppers, catching the food as it fell to earth and handing it to whomever was nearby.

There was no longer fear of hunger, although the processed food brought with it other fears for me.

All is well, all is well, all is well, I told myself as I curled up to sleep again with my back to the stick shift. We had food to eat. We had water to drink. Even if the rabbits came, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. I’d been through it countless times before. I would survive.

We woke to the sun marching through the passenger side windows. We played cards, we read, we made comic books and drew monsters. Night fell. Morning came. The days went by. It was what I imagined a miles-long, minimum security prison might be like.

I longed for news from Tariq. Had he flown back to Seattle without us, so he could go to work? Or was he still at my brother’s in DC, worried, waiting?

After the sun set and Matthew fell asleep in the locked car with the windows gapped a few inches for air, Lucy and I would walk up and down along the dashed white lines, talking. She told me how her first marriage had unraveled, how her ex became obsessed with his status at his law firm, working eighty hours a week. “I ate dinner alone every night for a year. It was awful,” she said. In an attempt to get him out of the office, she signed them up for tango classes. When he didn’t show up, she went by herself and fell in love with a guy in the class, a GAO analyst.

“It wasn’t the most honorable way to end a marriage,” Lucy admitted, “but I didn’t realize just how miserable I’d been until I met Andrew.”

I confessed to her what I’d told no one before, not even Tariq: there were times I secretly wished Matthew’s mother dead, so I wouldn’t have to share Matthew. Teach a kid how to ride a bike and how to make scrambled eggs, and it hurts to let him go.

“You can’t have kids of your own?” Lucy asked. The orange fluorescence of the highway lights gave everything a dim, ghastly glow. Another night stroller threaded among the rows of cars, holding a flashlight that bobbed with every step.

“No,” I said. “It has to do with my medical condition, why I needed the injection.”

“How often do you need it?”

“Twice a day,” I said.

“And you haven’t done it since the first morning? Are you OK?”

“So far I am,” I shrugged and looked away, hoping she would be perceptive enough not to press for details. “Things could go at any moment, but what can I do? I’m getting quite skilled at not thinking about it.”

Lucy looked worried.

“If you need any help that doesn’t involve needles or blood, just ask,” she said.

 

~

 

Griping about the lack of air conditioning was good etiquette. The unmitigated July heat, which pounded sweat from every pore in our bodies, was taken as an affront, a violation of our inalienable right to be comfortable. The opening gambit of all polite conversation was a complaint—something along the lines of “how they expect us to survive out here without a drop of AC is beyond me,” (as if some form of government could parachute down and create a climate-controlled pavilion out of the median strip). This was a ritual to be upheld before talk moved on to other matters, usually speculation about the cause of the back-up.

Over the first few days, when the luxury of news access was something some of us indulged in—before we all started taking the issue of conserving batteries very, very seriously—there was no explanation for the back-up from the media. We heard only the same message about cutting your engine and staying near your car. (This we did. Although there was always talk of walking to the nearest exit, no one went. We didn’t want to be caught away from our cars when the traffic started, which might be at any moment.) Once the batteries for the iPhones ran out and there was no way to recharge them, not without idling and wasting precious gas, we designated one car out of thirty to tune in to the radio announcement on the half hour, then not at all. If it was time to start our engines, the word would spread like anthrax on the wind.

In the void, rumors circulated: a terrorist attack on the Pentagon, a tractor-trailer containing biological weapons overturned on I-95, all the bridges across the Potomac River blown up at once.

There were lesser rumors as well. Four miles ahead, they said, a woman had given birth to twins (or sometimes triplets) in the back of a minivan; closer to DC there had been a shooting (in one version it was a murder) during a domestic dispute; there was a band of meth dealers who were pedaling their wares at night to teenagers. And so a citizen’s patrol group formed, a curfew was established.

During the day Matthew worked on his comic books or played with the two girls—eight-year-old Sonia and ten-year-old Iris—who were in the silver minivan twelve cars up. Or he found Max, who was teaching him to be an expert at Blackjack and Poker. The water supply was ample enough that from time to time we could use a bottle to douse our necks and armpits. Soap was said to be available for cash fifty cars to the south, but as I walked that way and made enquiries, the fabled soap was always fifty cars away.

I asked Lucy for more paper and drew her portrait. Soon I had requests. I drew family portraits, couples standing in front of cars, kids standing in front of cars, occasionally just the cars themselves. It was a souvenir of the back-up, one that didn’t require batteries to come into existence.

Although I didn’t charge anything, people paid me: cash, PowerBars, toilet paper, a string of blue glass beads—nothing I wanted. What I wanted was one of those helicopters to lower a ladder down and lift me and Matthew out of here. Because I was a special case, because I couldn’t go on eating hydrolyzed soy protein and hydrogenated vegetable oils without it catching up with me, and the effects of the injection couldn’t last forever. But then who would drive our car once the traffic started? And how would I make such a request, to whom, and what would I say that had an ounce of credibility?

 

~

 

On the fifth day, just as the women from the white Ford Focus and the old green Volvo were inviting Lucy and me to join their book group (we would read selections from the flash fiction anthology, which was making the rounds), we heard a wave of human voices, traveling toward us from up the highway.

We quieted, straining toward the sound. It drew closer, resolving into words.

“Run! Run!”

“Run to your cars! Start your engines!”

We ran.

“Matthew!” I shouted. “Matthew! Where are you? Matthew!” I cranked my voice until it went no louder. I made it back to the car, opened the door and stood on the edge of the doorframe, twisting around, hoping to spot him from that height. An hour ago he’d gone to play with Iris and Sonia. They knew not to go farther than the white service van twenty cars down and the yellow SUV twenty cars up. I couldn’t see them. “Matthew!” I called.

“MATTHEW!”

Far, far up the highway there was a ripple—cars were in motion. All around me engines started.

“Get in your car!” someone behind me shouted. “You’re gonna hold us all up!”

“My son!” I screamed. “Where is my son?”

The ripple drew closer. The yellow SUV was moving. Lucy’s blue Prius was moving.

“MATTHEW!” I screamed one last time, then dropped into the car, closed the door and turned the key. I put down the window, yelling as I drove. I didn’t make it out of second gear before the brakes of the black Accord in front of me lit up. I stopped.

We had moved a few hundred feet. An unbroken, double-stranded necklace of red lights burned in the summer haze. Five more minutes and we had all shut off our engines. A figure darted among the cars. Matthew.

“We went to Sonia and Iris’s car for some water,” he panted. “Their mom told me to stay with them.” I kept him near me for the rest of the day, but how do you keep a nine-year-old tethered to a car for more than a few hours? The next morning I had to let him go play again. They’d invented a game of hiding behind cars of a designated color. There were superheroes involved, and the string of blue beads had turned into a magic object at the center of it all. I exchanged addresses and phone numbers with the girls’ mother, told her next time to send Matthew to our car. He knew to wait for me if I wasn’t there yet.

 

~

 

Like the Hanukkah oil that lasted nine nights instead of one, the one injection Max gave me lasted longer than I could have possibly hoped. But it didn’t feel like a miracle—more like one serving of uneasiness divided among too many meals. There wasn’t too much of it, but it was always there.

On the afternoon of the sixth day, as I was sketching the couple from the green Volvo, I felt the first wave of nausea. No, it wasn’t even that—just a little lurch, a wiggle of queasiness, easy enough to ignore if you shimmy your shoulders for a moment and stretch your arms, then concentrate on getting the swoop of the woman’s hair and conveying the exact, reassuring knuckliness of her boyfriend’s hand on her shoulder. But by the time I’d finished and handed them the portrait, the rabbits were undeniably on their way. The queasiness was mounting, soon it would be true nausea, and there was nothing I could do.

My skull cramped in on itself like an angry fist, my heart shoved up against my lungs. I drew my breath through a narrow straw. The heat beat upward from the asphalt, clanging off the metallic painted surfaces, battering at my ears, face, arms, and legs. The air was crammed with more heat than it was designed to hold. And I wasn’t meant for this, not for this Teflon world, these highways it had taken countless human generations to achieve. I wanted nothing more of this habitat of steel and tar and concrete, even if it had—undeniably—nourished me, raised me to be who I was.

Matthew, thank god, was sitting in the car, reading the Percy Jackson book Iris had lent him.

“Matthew,” I said. The nausea was now an immense pressure, bullying its way out of my body. “I have to tell you something. You know the injection Baba usually gives me? Well, I haven’t had it for days, and now I’m about to get sick.”

Matthew looked frightened. I should have phrased it differently, but the words were out, I couldn’t reel them back.

“Do you want me to get Max?” he said.

“No, no, it’s not something he can help with. And it’s only a little sick, actually. But the thing is, it lasts a while. So I need you to help me.” The scratching had started in my stomach. My words were choked. “Find Lucy. Tell her I’m going to be in the woods. Then come back here and stay at the car until I’m back.”

Matthew’s eyes were wide, but I knew his eyes like that meant he would do what I told him. He usually did, regardless. He was a good kid.

“It’s really important,” I said. “Sonia and Iris can play with you here, OK? Don’t go farther than three cars from ours in any direction. Wait for me to come back.”

He nodded again.

“Now GO!” I crept to the right, bent over with the discomfort, almost stopping to lean on a searing metallic black hood, thinking better of it, forcing myself on across the pallid, scrubby grass at the edge of the shoulder, into the no man’s land of unattractive pine trees.

It was cooler beneath the trees, and I felt a little relief and even wondered why no one had thought to come in here any sooner. Then another wave of nausea hit. I coerced my legs forward—twenty, forty more feet—until I guessed I was out of sight of the cars. I let my body drop to the ground, which was packed and pebbly, but ultimately hospitable in that it was horizontal, in that it held me up.

Thanks to this illness, I will never have my own child, but I can well imagine the horror of childbirth. We are designed for it, our bodies a vector pointed toward reproduction, and yet the birth canal tears apart.

And for me, when the rabbits come, the nausea crests and then crests again, until it feels as if my body might rip from it, and then the scratching starts. The frightened creature claws in my stomach, feeling for a way out. My belly swells and contracts, and I am sweating, clammy, shaking with how desperately I want this beast out of my body. I heave and heave, until the scratching finds a direction: up and out. The thing feels like it’s taking my insides with it, but for a wild, bargaining moment, that’s OK—anything, dear god, dear god in whom I’ve never believed—anything to get this thing outside me.

My esophagus stretches beyond its accustomed capacity and the world goes black for an instant as my throat and mouth rupture for the slick-haired and clawed beast. The thing uses every millimeter of my widened jaw to make its way into the world. And then it’s over—for an instant at least. The first one is out. The first one is always the worst.

 

~

 

It was at that moment, as I lay spent, panting into the golden, slowly blinking eye of the first rabbit that I felt Lucy’s hand on my shoulder.

“Oh dear, Noelle, oh dear,” she said.

 

~

 

When it happened the first time, while I was watching TV in my solitary apartment one night years ago, I thought, naturally, that I was going insane. When I woke the next day and the rabbits were still there, and I saw little turds dropped on my rug, I considered I might not have imagined it after all. But if I’d imagined vomiting up rabbits, why wouldn’t I imagine they had crapped and were still there the next day as well?

I panicked silently for hours. My mind skidded in and out of netherworlds as I paced and stood paralyzed, then shook myself into motion, towards the phone or door, only to stop before I could dial or make it through the threshold.

At last I gathered the creatures in a laundry bag and took them to the animal shelter. With my heart exploding ninety times a minute, I carried the bag through the front door and showed it to the receptionist. Could they take these rabbits? I opened the sack. The woman nodded, gave me paperwork to fill out, another staff member arrived and the rabbits were instantly elsewhere, on the other side of a very ordinary, very beautiful door.

As I made my way home, it occurred to me that this, too, I had imagined; but with the rabbits gone, it was easy to go on. Things were normal again, and I’d gained a reverent appreciation for normalcy. I pleaded laryngitis at work, made up the missing day and a half over the weekend.

When a week later I felt the nausea and scratching while I was at the office, I knew it would not be so simple. For three months I rushed home at all hours of the workday, ignoring the doubtful looks of co-workers. I preferred to vomit up my insanity in the privacy of my apartment. I made up for lost hours on evenings and weekends. I set my alarm for four a.m. and released laundry bags of rabbits into the dark, dewy garden of the large apartment complex at the end of the block.  

When I’d used up all my sick leave and half my vacation, I took the train to my parents’ and I told my mother that in all likelihood I had gone insane. When she witnessed the first rabbit come out of my mouth, she gasped, then pulled my sweaty hair back from my face, dampened a washcloth and wiped my forehead. She would fix this, she said, she would drive me to the doctor the next time it was about to happen.

Three days later, I was at the family doctor’s, vomiting rabbits in his examining room while he moaned a very particular moan—of not knowing what to make of reality, and I knew then the rules truly had changed.

Or, if I had gone insane, it was a seamless, complete insanity that encompassed the far corners of my mind’s universe. Perhaps I had imagined my mother’s reaction and the doctor’s, too—just as I had imagined the rabbits; perhaps everything was taking place in my own head, and I was now living in a dream world from start to finish. But if so, why worry? Dream had traded places with reality. I might wake up, I might not. For now, I could only operate inside these new laws of biology. At least I wasn’t being checked into an imaginary psych ward.

 

~

 

Dr. Turnbull ran test after test, found I had an overactive thyroid and adrenal glands, my thymus was not functioning correctly and most significantly, he thought, I had a genetic liver disorder. My liver did not clear synthetic chemicals from my body the way it should. So he blamed the confluence of toxic chemicals I was exposed to in daily life—the traces of pesticides, steroids, and artificial estrogens in the water supply, the unregulated chemicals in laundry detergent, toothpaste, shampoo, dish-washing liquid, the slightly more regulated chemicals in our food.

“How this results in the rabbits—your guess is as good as mine,” he said, extending his hands in a weary gesture. “But there are things we can do to help your liver and with any luck control this symptom.” I was to eliminate anything artificial to the extent possible, buying everything at the organic co-op. And there was the injection, twice a day for the rest of my life.

 

~

 

Lucy and I stared at that first rabbit as it sat quietly blinking in the light of the world. It was large and gray-brown, each nostril and hair so real, so complete that Dürer could have drawn it. I hated the thing.

That made four, I thought numbly: my mother, Dr. Turnbull, Tariq, and now Lucy.

I closed my eyes and gave myself over to my few moments of relief. The absence of suffering is a pleasure in itself, the sweetest pleasure imaginable when it arrives. I sank down into that heavenly, blank feeling, knowing it would last about two more minutes.

“Are you OK?” she asked. “What should I do?”

“Find Matthew. Keep an eye on him. I’ll be here a while. Three or four more come after the first one,” I rasped. There were twiggy, pebbly bumps mashed against the cheek I was resting on the ground. I didn’t care, felt only the beauty of my body’s weight released into the ground, the bliss of the earth holding up my heavy head.

“Do you want me to bring you something, water?” Lucy asked.

The word “water” and my stomach lurched.

“Just find Matthew,” I said. “Tell him I’m OK, he can play with the girls, or cards with Max, but be sure you know where he is.”

“OK, I’ll go,” she said, running a soothing hand across my back for an instant. “Don’t worry. I’ll watch him.”

 

~

 

There were five of them altogether, and they had the nerve to stick around, licking their already wet fur and letting it dry in the sluggish air. Didn’t they have somewhere to hop off to, I wanted to know. Wanted to shout at them to go away instead of sitting there, observing me as I suffered through vomiting up another of them. But I could spare no energy for speech, wouldn’t have attempted it with my throat as raw as it was.

After the fifth, I lay panting on the earth, pine needles and dirt covering my tank top and shorts, bare arms and legs. Was I done? Two minutes passed, five, then ten. It was over. Let my limbs crush themselves into the earth. Let me rest, let me sleep. And just as I felt secure in that absence of suffering, just as I thought I might let sleep cradle me under the shady trees, I heard a wave of voices, shouts from the highway.

I jolted up, stumbled on trembling legs back to the road. When I stepped into the dazzling sunlight, everything wobbled. I blinked, reaching out my arms to find something that would steady me. My hand landed on a car’s scalding hood.

“Hey, lady! Get back to your vehicle. We’re gonna be moving soon!”

Where was my car? I pushed my weak legs forward. It was in the far lane, a few cars back. I staggered towards it. Engines were starting all around me, but no one was moving yet.

I was at my brother’s Honda. It was locked. Matthew was away with Lucy. I pulled the key from my pocket. A swelter of air burst from the door as I opened it. The two of them would be here any second, or Matthew would come on his own.

I craned my head. Where were they? Lucy’s car was six up from mine, one lane over. My clawed throat stood no chance of calling to them. Matthew must be in the Prius, or he was in the van with the girls. I had their mother’s number. I had no phone.

The cars up the highway were moving now, the ripple drawing towards us.

“Matthew!” I rasped into the muggy air.

“Hey, Honda! Don’t hold everyone up! Get in your car!”

I slumped into the seat, closed the door, lowered the windows. Matthew, Matthew, Matthew! I should have made a plan with Lucy, I should have gone to her car first. The Accord in front of me was moving. I eased off the clutch, pushed the gas pedal. I didn’t have Lucy’s phone number. Everyone’s phone had been off after the first day. We’d existed in a world without contact lists or even hand-written notes, simply walking from car to car to find each other.

The speedometer was up to twenty. I shifted to second, to third. I caught sight of the blue Prius up ahead, one lane over. Matthew must be with her. I would follow her into the city.

Did Matthew have any way to contact us? Of course not. No one memorized phone numbers anymore. We were just names in his mother’s phone and on Skype. I realized that after all this time, he didn’t even know my last name, would have no way to look up my family in DC information. He was nine after all. I was just “Noelle,” or sometimes, “Tante Noelle,” my brother and sister-in-law simply “Uncle Peter” and “Aunt Melissa.”

With a feeling of endless plummet, I thought how if we’d been in Seattle, things would be different. He could rattle off our address, or give Tariq’s name. But I hadn’t thought to give him contact information during vacation, and I should have.

If I could just get a little closer I might be able to see Lucy’s license plate number. Now we were up to thirty, forty miles per hour. Lucy’s lane was moving faster. She was pulling too far ahead. I needed to catch up, signal to her. I flashed my lights. She should drop back, get over to my lane. Did she see me in her rearview? Was it deliberate? Was she stealing Matthew?

No, those things didn’t happen. I was just nervous, exhausted—my imagination running wild. She had been my friend, my temporary friend. Did that mean I could trust her? She had been good company, but what did I really know about her? She was a stepmother. And she had cheated on her first husband.

The Prius was just barely in sight. In an hour and a half I would pull up to my brother’s block with the back seat empty save for a hand-written comic book. I put on my blinker, shifted to fourth, but the cars to my right were moving faster and faster, while my lane stayed at forty. I couldn’t get over.

Art by Kerri Augenstein

Noelle Catharine Allen has worked as a newspaper reporter in Buenos Aires and Mexico City, and now lives in Seattle. Her fiction has appeared in Phoebe, JMWW, and other publications. She was a finalist in the Bosque and Bellingham Review fiction prizes in 2014, and won the Editor’s Choice award in Best New Writing 2012. She is working on a novel, and is represented by Donald Maass Literary Agency.

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When your friends ask you what he’s like, you’ll tell them he looks like Rock Hudson, the way he chews his words like gristle and hides his smile behind his drink. You’ll tell them how he got you to quit smoking weed, his love for plaid, the fastidious way he greases and combs his hair back every morning. You won’t tell them how he finally convinced you to sleep with him, how he told you he’d never sucked dick before, how he wanted you to be his first. You remember feeling his wedding ring when he gripped your thigh. You also remember not minding.

So when he asks you to pick up his twins from school, you say yes. “When?” you ask. “At four,” he says. His old lady is out of town. He’s working until seven, can’t shake it both ways, needs you. Whenever he gets serious, Patrick squares his shoulders and cracks his knuckles. He gives you money for gas and food, tells you his daughter is going vegetarian and the boy will eat any goddamn thing. A year ago, you would’ve found him objectionably unattractive: the accent, his height, your age difference of almost two decades.

It’s 3:45 when you pull up to the school, the galvanized steel railing encircling the brick building like a rack of spears. It’s the first time you’re on time for anything. You wait outside in your ’97 Toyota Camry with the radio on and the windows rolled down. When you bought the car five years ago, the owner’s manual said the color was “beige pearl.” Now it looks like day-old shit. The interior smell has been described as part roadside motel, part Chinese buffet. A rosary chokes your rear-view mirror; it’s Patrick’s. You want to believe it lends you some form of grace.

You instantly recognize them by the shapes of their eyes, like baby Angelfish. It’s a miracle really, out of that swell of navy blue blazers and bleached dress shirts. You see Seana first and watch the daylight burnish her hair a deep tangerine as she gallops towards your car in buckled shoes, her brother sauntering behind her. You wave to them. The sleeves of your Oxford shirt are buttoned at the wrist to hide the concertina wire tattoos circling your forearms.

Seana piles in the passenger side and pumps your hand like an over-caffeinated intern. “Nice to meet you,” she says. “You’re a lot younger than I thought you’d be.”

Ciaran sits behind you, pulls out his smartphone, and says nothing. There is something violent about his eyebrows, shunting out of the broad and flat pan of his face like porcupine quills. As you shift into drive, you hear someone call the girl’s name. A nun moves to the passenger window, her habit a cut of shadow. She signs the cross with her eyes, scanning the inside of the car for evidence of your evil, and asks Seana where her mother is. Behind you, a line of waxed minivans and sedans slide away from the curb, unbothered.

“It’s okay, Sister Frances,” Seana says. “He’s a family friend.”

“He’s Dad’s special friend,” Ciaran clarifies.

The nun looks at you with a special brand of suspicion normally reserved for prison convicts and the homeless. “Remember to tell your father about the PTA meeting tomorrow,” she says. Her tone promises trouble. Questions.

You pull into a McDonald’s down the street and tell them no combos, something light so they don’t spoil their appetite. The kids are gleeful. Seana orders a Premium Bacon Ranch Salad without the bacon and soaks her greens in five packets of dressing. Ciaran orders a snack wrap stuffed with processed meat and melted cheese. “Mom never lets us eat McDonald’s,” Seana says.

“Sounds like she knows what she’s doing,” you say.

“Mom doesn’t know shit about anything,” Ciaran mutters behind you.

“She means well,” Seana says.

“She hates black people,” Ciaran snarls.

“She’s afraid of them,” his sister corrects.

“Mexicans, too,” he adds. “She says they’re the reason why people are unemployed and the economy sucks.”

Exhaust blooms in front of you as a dinged pickup hiccups out of the drive-thru.

“She hates you and Dad the most,” Ciaran says.

~

Before you met Patrick, you suffered from insomnia and worked for your Vietnamese landlady as a private English tutor. She lived down the street next to the 24-hour convenience store her husband owned, manned by their child army. You felt sorry for their children the same way you felt sorry for the shackled animals in the PETA commercials, the skeletal horses and kittens with fur like ripped Velcro. You think it’s because your family came from the same country. Pushed you the same way.

Your high school guidance counselor, Mr. Oswald, had a bald spot that dilated in the morning sun. He was arrested for molesting your best friend your junior year. He told you once that he believed in you. It should’ve made you sad that he was the only one, but it didn’t. You knew you’d leave eventually – southern California, your parents, the friends you took for granted. Forty class credits and twenty-five thousand dollars in student loans later, you’re back. The house you grew up in is no longer there. Neither are your parents.

As you make your way onto the 405-S onramp, the sun tie-dying the sky ochre and lavender, you try to give the twins a crash course in secular education. You tell them that the Avengers are whack and that the X-Men are the first and only superhero team to challenge the heterosexist, uniracial society of the West. You talk about the Milgram experiment and warn them about the dangers of authority. You promise them that Simone de Beauvoir, Henry Miller, and Lao-Tzu will change their lives forever. You forget that they’re only twelve. When Seana asks you if you really love her daddy, you tell her yes even though you’ve yet to say it to anyone and mean it.

You take them to your apartment. The heating in Patrick’s place still hasn’t been fixed and the last time you were there, you found a family of rats in his kitchen. Your apartment unit isn’t exactly immaculate either, but you at least strive for some semblance of hygiene. That morning before you left to pick up Seana and Ciaran from school, you spent nearly two hours cleaning your place: laundering the sheets, towels, and bathmats; mopping the floors; hiding the cap vials of poppers and packets of lubricant. When you let them inside, Ciaran comments that your place smells like a new car. You tell the kids to get started on their homework as you prepare for dinner.

Two hours later, Patrick arrives and finds you in the living room sandwiched between his children, watching Louis C.K. on your laptop. The pot roast is simmering on the stove and the tang of beef slow-cooked in onions, garlic, and red wine fills the apartment. You nudge them both off the sofa to go say hi to their daddy. Patrick snorts into their hair, girdling their narrow shoulders with arms like low-hanging tree branches. “How was school?” he asks them.

“We drew Punnett squares and mated fruit flies,” Seana says.

“I got kicked out of choir,” Ciaran announces.

Patrick looks at you. “And how was your day?”

The question barely reaches you under the weight of its meaning. The both of you have traversed into unfamiliar territory under uncertain terms and you imagine telling him there are stranger families in the world, that you can handle this, that you want to. His kids are adorable and, for some reason, they like you. But in the four months you’ve been together, his wife still hasn’t filed for the divorce papers. And parenthood? Appearances aside, you’re still making sense of your own life and you’ve always been a slow learner. But the kids are looking at you and waiting for an answer too, so you kiss him and tell him exactly what they want to hear.

~

It was the mid-nineties. You were sixteen. All of the white kids at school were listening to The Smashing Pumpkins, the malcontents to Marilyn Manson, and you and your minority friends had Public Enemy. Everyone believed the end was nigh: Kurt Cobain and Tupac, the Oklahoma City bombing, the summer heat wave that killed seven hundred plus Chicagoans, Hurricane Gordon, fucking Beavis and Butt-head. All signs seemed to point towards south of hell, which you had on good authority existed somewhere in the sweltering San Fernando Valley where your best friend Wei Long made headlines and got himself killed. He dropped out of school after Mr. Oswald touched his dick and ended up joining the ABZ Crips soon after. The two of you spent your weeknights getting loaded on the poor man’s speedball and shoplifting Walmarts. You stopped calling after he started carrying his .38 on your runs.

There was no funeral, but you buried a shoebox where Wei Long had presumably taken his last steps. “He went out like a true O.G.,” his boys told you. “Guns ablazing, real Western shit.” You filled that shoebox with his favorite CDs; a gram of Jack Herer sealed in a zip lock snack bag; your old Zelda Nintendo cartridge, the sparkly gold-plated one that’d become a collector’s item, just like he’d predicted; new Nikes; a few condoms. You wanted him to have some real shit for the afterlife, things he could remember so he wouldn’t have to come back and haunt you for being an uncaring asshole.

You were on a real horror kick back then, devouring Stephen King and Clive Barker in between binge-reading comic books and jerking off to gay porn sites that took half an hour to load on the dial-up. You wanted to believe in real evil, the kind that drank blood, walked through walls, and lived in the dark. Sunday Mass used to terrify you. The Pauline epistles gave you nosebleeds every time. You couldn’t explain it. Your parents were convinced you had cancer. When the CAT scans revealed nothing abnormal and your doctor diagnosed you with somatoform disorder, they attributed it to an overactive imagination.

“White people make up disorders to excuse their weakness,” Dad told you. He blamed himself for the laxity in your life. That summer, he prescribed a strict regimen of SAT prep classes, private tennis lessons, and physical labor. You spent your weekends working on a dude ranch in Riverside County, where you learned how to horseback ride and mend fences with baling wire. It was also where you lost your virginity.

The ranch’s guesthouse where you stayed sat atop a dumpy hillock. Wind and rain had dashed grass, rush milkweed, and brittlebush into crusted streaks of yellow and green across the knoll. The younger hands called it the Vomit Dollop. Sometimes, when the moon opened its carriage and spilled its old silver over the Santa Rosa Mountains’ twisted and rumpled spine, you’d slip naked onto the hidden path that wound through a copse of blue oaks behind the house, the wind brushing against the turns of your hipbones, the cool grass like soft glass beneath your feet. You still think about that place sometimes, the gamboling shadows and rust-colored thickets springing from the meaty earth.

The owner’s wife’s nephew was working off his community service hours at the ranch that summer. “Petty larceny charges,” he told you and you thought that must’ve been the attraction, the mutual deviancy. But it was really his ass. He had one of those white boy hams that no pair of jeans could ever suppress, that waggled even in repose. You dreamed about that ass, biting it, kneading it like dough. Everyone was always touching him, his neck and arms and shoulders, and it used to piss you off. Not because of any jealousy or sense of ownership, but because of what they’d say when he wasn’t around: he’s got a butter face, that’s why he works out so much; he’s got a small dick; he never showers.

One night the nephew followed you into the woods. There was no fanfare, no talking. He kissed you, stripped, and the two of you rolled around trying everything your porn-instructed mind could think of. You remember thinking how ticklish you were, how rough his skin felt. He made you come in five minutes, your fingers gripping his hair like a steering wheel, but you still wanted more. When you asked him if he had a condom, he told you not to worry about it. “I’m clean,” he said, which you came to understand meant he was both STD-free and had had an enema. Finally, that ass was yours.

Good sex, you discovered, was addictive. You’d spend the entire week anticipating that Friday evening when Dad would drop you off at the guesthouse for the weekend. You tried for some measure of restraint at first, working all day with a mad case of blue balls like a pair of dumbbells swinging between your legs. After he scheduled his shifts to coincide with yours, you couldn’t keep your hands off of each other. It got bad; he grew cavalier and you grew careless. The both of you were late to everything, always together. People took notice as your silent staring contests and mutual game of grab ass got a little too frequent, a little too familiar.

It wasn’t long before the stable boy spotted the hickeys stitching the side of your neck. The trail girl overheard him calling you babe. It didn’t mean anything until one of the trail guides caught the two of you in the barn, sucking each other dry in a makeshift bed of hay. On that last night together, you begged him to leave with you. “We can be together,” you said, your breath hitching in the dark as he quietly listened. You told him your desperate, eleventh-hour plan, how the two of you could leave for the Bay that night, find work as baristas or drive-thru cashiers, fuck your brains out and be accountable to no one. Just, try.

~

Seana blinks at the mirror. She looks like a kabuki demon. It doesn’t help that your bathroom walls are papered with cherry blossoms and the windowsill is lined with a procession of Buddha statues. You can hear the boys down the hallway cheer and scream. You suspect that you’ll never understand Patrick’s love for boxing. Seana doesn’t understand it either, and after dinner, when she told you she’d never put on makeup before because the school and her mother disapproved, you took it upon yourself to teach her the ways of womanhood. You have no experience with this sort of thing, but you’d secretly hoped that being gay afforded you some natural talent at makeup. It didn’t.

“We can try again,” you say doubtfully.

“I look like that one actress,” she says. “You know, the one all the boys like.”

“Oh yeah,” you say. “The girl from that one movie. So hot.”

Seana laughs. “Can you do my hair next?”

The glare of the fluorescent lights cruelly spotlights the carnival horror of her face, but she’s enjoying herself and you’re surprised to discover that you are too. You grab Patrick’s sculpting gel and the twenty-dollar hair straightener you picked up at the corner store with the mascara and rouge.

“I read on the Internet that you can pierce your own ears with a pin and an ice cube,” she says.

“Not tonight, Seana.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to be responsible for giving you an ear infection,” you say. “Now stop moving your head.”

Every Sunday, your mother used to spend four hours prepping for mass. You and your father were barred from the master bedroom as she waxed, showered, tweezed, and burrowed in her closet. Your mother had an old phonograph she’d inherited from her great-grandmother and only two records survived the test of time: Frank Crumit’s “True Blue Sam (the Traveling Man)” and Elsa Murray Shelly’s performance of Chopin’s “Etude in E”. She always played them right before she’d emerge from the bedroom, dressed in a long silk dress with her hair tied so far back it made her forehead shine like plastic. You knew that etude by heart. Even now Chopin’s silver melodies never fail to evoke the smell of your father’s pipe, the whistle of a tea kettle, and the spice of ginger snaps pulled fresh from the oven. As much as you hated church, you loved Sundays. It was the only time when neither of your parents felt the need to talk about how you were fucking up your life somehow.

“What did you want to be when you were a kid?” she asks.

“A superhero,” you say. “Tight spandex in primary colors, a girlfriend, telekinesis.”

“A girlfriend, really?” she giggles, opening her eyes.

“I was young.” You shrug. “I thought girlfriends were like personal assistants you’d occasionally kiss for doing a good job.”

“I don’t think that’s very far off.”

“You’re too young to think that way,” you say.

“As if you know anything about having a girlfriend.”

“Don’t they teach you to respect your elders at Jesus camp?”

She grins at you, all teeth and lipstick. Seana has that same special sincerity that drew you to her father, the remarkable way she unremarkably sets people at ease. You remember how Patrick strolled up to you at the bar, sat down beside you without introduction, and asked you how you were as if you’d known each other for years. Everyone else there was shopping for meat, staring at each other through the flickering strobe lights to gauge the likelihood of a hot, unattached fuck. The two of you discussed Celtic punk, the worst sports to watch on television, how dogs were better than cats. That night, he didn’t ask you to go home with him; he gave you his number. You still have the napkin.

“I wanted to be a nun when I was younger,” Seana says. “Travel all over the world to help starving people and children without shoes. Like Mother Theresa.”

“What changed your mind?” you ask her.

“I met Sister Frances.”

“What’s wrong with Sister Frances? You know, beyond the obvious.”

“Nothing, other than the fact that she’s like every other Catholic,” she says. “She’s against abortion, gay marriage, women in the priesthood, Harry Potter…”

“And this surprised you because?”

“Because she should be better than that,” she shouts, startling the both of you.

There’s a knock on the door and Patrick comes in to ask if either you or Seana would like some ice cream. He nearly chokes when he sees her, and behind him, Ciaran falls to the floor howling with laughter. You’re immediately at her defense, telling them both to close the goddamn door and pick up some butter pecan for you. Patrick dutifully tells Seana that she looks beautiful before quickly ushering his son out of the hallway. On the bathroom counter, Mick Jagger is singing his hope that the Lord will shine a light on you. His voice is tinny through your phone’s mp3 player, as if he swallowed a fistful of tin foil.

“You won’t get anywhere in life if you’re constantly disappointed in people,” you say gently. “We’re all fuck-ups.”

“I know that,” Seana says, her fingers clenching her plaid skirt. “It’s just, I don’t know what I want to be anymore.”

“That’s okay, you know.”

“Yeah,” she replies, unconvinced.

“Listen, go to college,” you tell her. “It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll find what you’re looking for, but it can’t hurt to learn more. Just make sure you get as far away from your parents as possible. Get your heart broken a few times, travel to some place you’ve only seen on television, don’t stop for anyone. Once you’ve done all those things, we’ll pick up this conversation again.”

She smiles at you and it’s sad and a little comical with all that face-paint caking her face. “I never would’ve pegged you for a romantic.”

“Most people wouldn’t.”

~

A month before that night, Patrick asked if you knew of any affordable tattoo parlors. It was Sunday morning. He was wearing his favorite greasy wife beater and your Mickey Mouse boxer shorts, hair unkempt, cooking scrambled eggs on your stain-crusted stovetop with a wilted cigarette in his mouth. NPR was featuring yet another exposé on the Church. On the table were two empty handles of Jagermeister and a coffee cup overflowing with cigarette butts. You told Patrick that you knew a few places, but warned him that if he wasn’t absolutely certain what he wanted, he ought to wait.

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” he said.

“It’s not a crucifix, is it?”

“Do you want toast? The bread’s a few days past the sell date, a little stale but it tastes okay.”

“If you get a tribal, I’m taking back my keys,” you said.

He handed you your plate, stamped out his cigarette, and lit another. “For your information, I’m getting a tribal cross with ‘Carpe Diem’ in capital letters,” he said, snaking a hand down your shirt. “Maybe a couple of shamrocks, too.”

You closed your eyes and leaned back. His aftershave smelled like lavender. Outside, a car alarm blared. Pale yellow light stretched across the tiled floor and you thought you could smell the salt of the Pacific through the open windows.

It was noon by the time you both got out of the apartment. A young Chinese family was picnicking at the park across the street. You hoped that they checked the grass for needles and broken glass before rolling out their Pottery Barn tablecloth. The kids were young enough to be innocent, but old enough to know better, wiping their hands with napkins and helping their parents toss trash into the waste bin nearby. You remarked how precious they looked in their canary yellow sweaters and cardinal red sneakers. Though you mistrusted happy looking families, you couldn’t help but want what you saw.

You took him to a little brick house parlor in Eagle Rock. The pregnant receptionist with a safety pin through her nose gave Patrick the procedural form. She then told you how she landed this job by way of the owner who’d been in her father’s platoon during the Vietnam War. Her safety pin caught sunlight and quivered like a sprung trap as she leaned over the counter.

“So, how long have you guys been dating?” she asked.

You asked her if it was obvious that you two were a couple. You told her that most people couldn’t tell.

“The way your eyes keep moving back to each other,” she said, tracing invisible lines with her index fingers between you and Patrick.

Old Porter – the seventy-year-old owner and tattoo artist who inked all three of your tattoos – trundled out of the back office and barked at the girl to stop bothering his customers. He opened his arms and told you to get your queer ass over there and give him a hug. It was a balmy seventy-five degrees outside, but he still insisted on wearing the camel-hair coat you got him from the Salvation Army a couple of years ago. The tattoos inked across his scalp had blurred over time, the images bleeding together into a faded swirl of colors like an Impressionist painting.

“Porter, there’s someone I want you to meet,” you said.

Patrick extended his hand and introduced himself. Porter shook it, but said nothing. Porter furrowed his brows and drew back his front lip, revealing three missing teeth and purple gums. He dropped Patrick’s hand and asked you if you were planning on getting your fourth tattoo today.

“No, but Patrick’s thinking about his first,” you told him.

“So what do you want, Paddy?” he asked. “Celtic Cross? How about a shamrock?”

Patrick blushed and stammered. “Uh, no, I was thinking about…”

“Because I got to tell you, I’m sick of you micks coming in here and asking for the same goddamn tattoos,” Porter said, crossing his arms. “Just the other day, this Irish fuck comes in here and asks me to ink him an arm sleeve of fucking shamrocks. A sleeve of shamrocks. Christ on a pogo stick. We’re tattoo artists, Paddy, emphasis on the word artists. So if you’re thinking of getting a clover on your mick ass, get it somewhere else.”

The first time you’d gone in for a tattoo, Porter had called you a slope and a gook, told you that he’d killed a dozen of your uncles and aunts during the war, and he didn’t want your fucking yellow business in his establishment. You’d replied by telling him to step outside because he was about to get his ass handed him to him by a Vietnamese faggot. That was how your friendship began. You’d wanted Patrick to earn Porter’s approval the same way you had, but for a moment, you wondered if you should have warned him first.

“Yeah, I do want a goddamn shamrock you fucking asshole,” Patrick said. “And if you call me a mick one more time, I’ll fucking bury your fat old ass, friend or not.”

Porter paused and looked at you. “I like this one.”

“He ain’t too bad,” you agreed.

“What?” Patrick asked.

“So you really want that shamrock or was that just your blood talking?”

The tattoo was a quote. You helped Patrick choose the font. It was French and he told you that he’d translate it for you once it was done. Due to its size and the amount of shading involved, it took nearly two hours. The entire time Porter yakked and yakked as the needle gun droned like a hungry mosquito and small beads of blood blossomed across Patrick back. Porter talked about how he met you and how much you reminded him of the son he’d lost to AIDS.

“Wasn’t afraid of nothing, my boy,” Porter said. “Full of piss and vinegar.”

“How do you move on from something like that?” Patrick asked. “I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to either of my kids.”

“I knew I did right by him,” Porter said, leaning into Patrick’s back as he rubbed the needle into the outline of a letter. “It took me a while to accept it, but our kids have lives outside of ours, as much as we try to make it otherwise.”

It took you nearly two hours to get to the west side from northeastern Los Angeles. A rig had crashed into the highway median barrier. The semi-trailer’s fifth wheel coupling had detached from the rig’s kingpin and lay on its side with its ridged belly ripped open. White fabric spilled out and the police had set up a line of flares that cut off the three rightmost lanes. On the other side of the highway, eastbound traffic was completely halted. Two EMTs slowly picked up a body covered in a white sheet and set it on a stretcher. A slab of concrete had smashed through the windshield of the sedan behind the rig. A man in a yellow polo shirt and grey capris squatted on the shoulder with officers on either side of him, his face buried in his hands.

As you pulled the car into the parking garage, Patrick said, “Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait.”

You looked at his clenched brow, the locked jaw. The tension in his forehead could squeeze water out of rocks. It scared you how beautiful he looked in his remoteness, like a mountain stabbing into the sky from the distance, forever out of reach. The radio warbled out a Miles Davis number, filling the car with sweet strains of trumpet. You wondered when you’d finally get to meet his children. He’d told you their names, their age, Seana’s grades, and Ciaran’s obsession with anime. Would he still want to be with you if they didn’t like you? Should he?

“What does it mean?” you asked.

“If youth only knew; if old age only could.”

~

When the boys return with ice cream, you light candles around the apartment and turn off the lights. You suggest watching a movie before bed. Seana wants to watch something foreign. Ciaran requires a certain amount of violence. As always, Patrick is open to suggestions. You settle for a Kurosawa film. Seana keeps her makeup on despite her brother’s constant teasing and the four of you clean out the entire bucket of butter pecan in the first half hour. It takes another hour into Ran before the kids start to yawn. Patrick tells them to get ready for bed and if they want to shower to save some hot water for him. As he sets up the futon, you tell him that the kids are taking the bedroom tonight and the two of you will be camping out in the living room.

“Are you sure?” Patrick asks. “You hate this futon.”

“What are you talking about? I love this lumpy, itchy mattress. We can pretend it’s the frontier and we’re roughing it like cowboys or something.”

“You’re kind of weird amazing,” he says and maybe it’s the trick of the laptop light, but his eyes look glassy to you.

“I know, I’m the tits,” you say. “Smoke a cigarette?”

“Go ahead, I’m going to grab your pillows from the bedroom first.”

“What will the kids use?” you ask.

“Each other for all I care,” he says, heading down the hallway. “They’re getting the bed tonight.”

Ciaran returns to the living room with a toothbrush jammed in his mouth to ask if you have a smartphone charger. “I forgot to pack mine,” he says.

You direct him to the charger plugged in the kitchen next to the coffee maker and tell him that he can find extra towels in the hallway closet. You grab Patrick’s sweatshirt, your lighter and pack of smokes and head out the door. As you’re closing it, you hear Ciaran ask, “Whoa, is that a real samurai sword?”

“Don’t take it out of the sheath,” you yell inside.

“What’s a sheath?”

“The cover!”

“Is it real?” Ciaran asks, coming to the door.

“Yeah, my great grandfather made it and passed it down to my grandfather and so forth and so on,” you say.

“Cool,” Ciaran whispers, fingering the silver scabbard.

“I’m joking, you nitwit. I’m not Japanese.”

“But is it real?” he asks again.

You take the sword from him and slowly pull out the two-foot blade. You tell him it’s actually a wakizashi, a companion blade to the longer samurai sword. “It’s real steel,” you say, showing him the Kanji inscription near the hilt. “That’s the maker’s name.”

“Can it cut stuff?”

“Go get a napkin,” you tell him.

Ciaran dashes inside and returns with a single napkin. Blade side up, you tell him to gently place it on top. “Gently,” you repeat.

He gingerly places the napkin on top and squeals as the paper slices neatly in half. “Holy shit, that’s so cool! Where did you get this?”

“Germany of all places,” you say. “Remind me to tell you about it someday.”

“Okay,” he says, suddenly awkward. “Uh, thanks for having us over tonight. It was a lot of fun.”

“I had fun too,” you say, sliding the sword back in its sheath before handing it to him. “Go hang it back up for me, alright? And be careful.”

You close the door behind him and light a cigarette. It must be fifty-five outside tonight, cold for California. The stars look like shattered glass rubbed across dark purple quilt and you can hear the roll of traffic on the 405-S ebbing and flowing.

Wei Long told you once that all parents secretly hated their children. Parents committed abominable acts under the guise of love all the time, and you were simply the product of your mother and father’s need to procreate, nothing more. The two of you were in his beat-up Civic in front of your house, smoking cigarettes and rummaging through that night’s stolen merchandise: CDs, books, a radar detector, packets of AA batteries, a new designer shampoo he’d wanted to try. You never asked about the purple bruises taping his forearms and his busted lip. You didn’t need to.

You’re only halfway through your cigarette when Patrick and his kids come outside. The twins wish you goodnight and you tell them that you’ll see them tomorrow.

“Are you picking us up again?” Seana asks you.

“I’ll be your ride tomorrow, little lady,” Patrick says. When they head inside, you remind Patrick that he has a PTA meeting tomorrow.

“Better lay out your nice suit tonight,” you say, handing him your cigarette. “You lost some points today when you asked your gay lover to pick up your kids.”

He drags it and pitches the burning butt into the parking lot below. “I have half a mind to pull the both of them out of that fucking school. God knows neither of them are happy there.”

“Your old lady would rather kill them first. Their only hope is college.”

“Don’t I know it,” Patrick says, hunching forward to hang his forearms over the balcony railing. “So, have you decided to dump me yet?”

“Why, because you didn’t do the dishes again?” you ask.

“Well that, and getting roped into daycare duty. I know it’s not ideal, being with someone who has children. And a bitch wife to boot.”

You think about the clock maker you met in Berlin; the teaching assistant in your sophomore literature course who spoke seven different languages; your former roommate who joined the Peace Corps and never came back. You remember little things about all of them, tokens of memory that would occasionally resurface to the forefront of your mind like old photographs you’ve forgotten: how the clock maker took his coffee, the teaching assistant’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s Captain’s Verses, how your roommate’s left eye was a darker shade of green than his right. But you don’t remember any of their names, not even the farm boy you loved so many summers ago. It was easier to live that way, sawing away the parts that make you feel and expecting nothing from anyone.

“I wouldn’t worry about the kids,” you say, jabbing his side. “I’d be more concerned about your age. What’s going to happen when you can’t get it up anymore?”

Patrick moves behind you and squeezes you close. “Want to go for a test drive?” he growls into your ear.

Finally, a relevant question.

~

The ranch owner’s wife ended up telling your father about what you did and your mother couldn’t bring herself to look at you. The conversation you had with them would have broken your heart had it not been broken already. In the end, the nephew chose to stay at the ranch. Your last fuck had felt like death, the end of all ends. You couldn’t forget the weight of his body curled up against yours, the rise and fall of his chest underneath your arm, the way he always smelled like grass. When your parents handed you a brochure for the Christian conversion camp, you made plans to leave the country. The money you’d saved working at the ranch was just enough for a one-way ticket to Heathrow Airport.

The week leading up to your flight, you spent every evening at the matinee. They were showing Godard’s films that fall and the only other people there were old, married couples you envied, holding hands and sipping diet soda. You thought about the nephew as you lusted after Jean-Pierre Léaud. How would it have gone had you told him how you felt instead of assuming he’d divined it on his own? Would it have ended differently had you pushed first?

You took a taxi to LAX at two in the morning with a single backpack stuffed with underwear, socks, your only dress shirt, a travel guide you stole from the library, and a carton of cigarettes you’d convinced one of your classmate’s older siblings to buy for you. You’d never seen the 405-S so empty. You thought of the river Ameles in Plato’s Republic as the stretch of highway unfurled beneath you, pulling everyone you’d ever known behind it: your mom and dad, Wei Long, the nephew. As the plane lifted from the runway and Los Angeles opened like a glittering jewel box below, you promised yourself that you wouldn’t give yourself so completely to anyone ever again. Not unless he was worth it.

~

You decide to have sex in your car because neither of you feel comfortable fucking in the living room while the kids are sleeping in your bedroom. The logistics are a little tricky. Patrick’s frame takes up too much space and your head keeps bumping into the roof handgrip. You idly wish that you drove a minivan. But eventually, you forget all of this as your prostate starts to hum with his rhythm inside you. Patrick tells you again and again how tight your ass is, punctuating his statements with grunts like a bad porn script. He’s the only lover you’ve been with who verbalizes during sex. You’ve always found it slightly embarrassing how much it turns you on when he asks you how badly you want his dick, and tonight is no exception. You come without touching yourself, which is a first.

Once you’ve both recovered your ability to string complete sentences together, you tell Patrick that you’ve never done that before. It all felt very high school.

“I lost my virginity in the back of my brother’s sedan,” he tells you, wiping you down with his shirt. “I don’t even remember what she looked like, I had my eyes shut the entire time.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

“No wonder.”

“No wonder, what?” he asks.

“That it wasn’t a challenge for you to get hard.”

“It helped that my teammate was watching us from the passenger seat,” Patrick winks.

You laugh. “You’re so fucking perverted.”

“You love it,” he says, running his fingers down your chest. “And I bet you were downright depraved as a teenager, rutting boys left and right. Orgies, older men, tearooms.”

“Nice to finally know what you think of me.”

“Well, how’d you lose your cherry?”

You touch the tattoo on Patrick’s back, reading the raised letters with your fingers like braille. You feel like a river climbing uphill, leaving the things you would no longer carry in its shoals with the past and present on opposing shores. Your parents showed you exactly who you weren’t. Wei Long taught you not to follow trauma’s misdirection. The nephew testified the difference between love and passion, and how neither should be blind. And in the past twelve hours, you determined that Ciaran would benefit from exposure to hip-hop and Seana was in desperate need of a new wardrobe. You learned that Patrick needed you as much as you were afraid to need him. You discovered a family of your own.

You begin your story with, “It was the mid-nineties.”

Art by Kerri Augenstein

Lam Pham is a native Texan and received his BA in English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Wyoming. He is a Pushcart Prize nominated author and his fiction has appeared in various publications.

Authentic Nike Sneakers | Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG “UNC Patent Leather” Obsidian/Blue Chill-White UK

You don’t stay here on account it’s convenient. You want convenience, you go to Norfolk or Virginia Beach, Richmond or Raleigh. Somewhere hundreds of miles away from the blackwater swamps of the Alligator River, the Albemarle and Pamlico. Here, there is nothing for the city crowd, those what need electricity and hair dryers. Plenty for those who know how to see. Cypress, rust-water thick, knees knocking against each other in clumps of billowing muck. Snakes tangled like cut ropes looped by the current. Broad black mud with a stink so sweet you gather why the gators and deer and bear wallow in it. There’s raptors floating on the updrafts in a robin’s egg sky. Ospreys, bald eagles, buzzards, falcons, all swirling, scanning for dinner. And the fish. Tannic rivers and creeks bleeding with croaker and shad, bass and blue-gill and soft shell crab skittering in summer. Mud turtles and wood ducks and crotchety herons evolved to life in these pocosin waters. Man’s mark is here too, in the rawboned trunks of cut-over forest and falling-down tobacco barns. You see it in the coming-upon of a crab apple in a woodland where not one is native. But even those marks are fading with time. The land reclaims her own. Birthing new generations. Stealing back her territory. Like the wolves.

It was the wolves for me. Red wolves. Thirty years on since those first days trapping the leftovers in Louisiana swamps and people still arguing about red wolves being real wolves and deserving federal protection. Once we argued about human beings being real human beings, slaves and women. When will people educate from their mistakes?

I live here on the Alligator River, always have. Not much of a river. Finger of the Albemarle Sound more like, but currents slug some and river’s the name what stuck. Sometimes that’s the way life is, drops out of the sky or crawls from the water and sticks, a tick burrowed under your skin.

I called her Tick day I found her, thunder storming, huddled next to the wolf pens. She was soaked wet, bruised and scratched with something more than branches and brambles. Hurt she was, by someone who knew how. She wouldn’t tell her name, wouldn’t say a word, just locked her fingers through the chain link of the pen and held for dear life when I pulled her elbows. She wouldn’t bathe, terrified of the water, so I took a cloth to wipe muck enough to see the pinky-white of her skin. How’d she get to my wolf keeper’s cabin in the middle of the swamp I don’t know. No matter how I asked it, soft or booming or bribed with cookies, Tick didn’t answer me. Only sound I heard her make was howling at night when the wolves mounded their calls to the sky.

“Tick, where’d you come from?” No answer. “Tick, what’s your name?” She let on she could hear with a shake of the head, a flick of the tongue over her skinny brittle lips. Made soft sounds too, a whimper, a sigh, when she thought she was out of earshot, but none else.

Wolf would have been a name for her, but it was already took. I am Wolf Woman, weird and strange and living in the swamps. Sixty odd years I been muddling my life out of these woods and waters and muck. Crabber’s daughter, born here and bred on catfish and crabbing before the wolves came in ’87. Moved us to Mann’s Harbor they did when the government took the land for the wildlife refuge. Mama and Daddy were old, and didn’t mind the new house with lights and bathrooms. I did. Too much of the wrong kind of noise even for a place what’s a blink of a town like Mann’s Harbor, a jut of firm land with houses bumped out of the ground like knots on a log. The stars was duller what with watch lights glaring all night and road traffic buzzing by on the highway, vacationers droning to Outer Banks beaches in their bloated cars, metal flies flocking to white-sand honey.

Six, maybe seven, is Tick’s age I reckon. I should have told the authorities, I know, but out here in the swamps you get to thinking there’s no law but nature’s law. Tick came in the storm, child of the storm, though I know’d all along she belonged to someone somewhere. I should’ve told them at the beginning.

~

“Tick, hand me that scoop.” She does and I scoop the dog food we feed the wolves in the pens. Follows me around everywhere like a lost pup, Tick does, eyes big and hands turtled inside the rolled-up sleeves of my old jacket. Good worker. Tick does whatever I tell her so long as it don’t involve talking or leaving my sight. Scared little thing. How could I not fall in love?

“You know, Tick, these are wolves. Not dogs. Red wolves. Special wolves. They went almost extinct, killed them off we did, save but a few. Bred them. Brought them back. Reintroduction we call it. Wolves running free in North Carolina again. Not for a couple hundred years did wolves run free. Now they’re back. Home. Where they belong.”

~

Them months in Mann’s Harbor caring for Mama and Daddy, I missed the turning of spring buds and the grunt of black bears stealing apples. I spent what days I could fishing in Daddy’s flat-bottomed johnboat tied to a stump. I’d wade through the brambles and get deep in the pocosin, sit for a while. Listen. Flitting birds. Squirrels scattering up a tree. Tread of a deer herd on sprinkled leaves. A bear wading through a ditch, flinging water drops from his coat on the other side. The wolf. I saw her back then, one of the first four what was released to make their way to wild survival. She did, partnering with a male, whelping a litter of fuzzy pups. I saw them in my days sitting and waiting and blending into the swamp water, a silence ignored by the forest long as I kept from threatening. The wolf, she saw me too. Looked dead at me, head low, sussing the risk. Yellow eyes, like goldenrod blooming in summer. She nosed her pups around me, almost out of sight, well out of reach, slipped down a rabbit path in the cane and disappeared.

~

Tick has yellow hair. I couldn’t tell with the muck in it, but weeks on, she trusted me enough to close her eyes. I tipped her head back and swooshed it with warm water heated on the wood stove. Not too hot, mixed with cold enough to be just right. Goldie Locks. Her new name? The Algonquins, ones who used to hold this land, if land can be held at all, took new names when weighty events pulled on their lives. Birth, death, coming of age. Washing of hair, closing of eyes—trust. “Tick ain’t no name for a goldie-haired girl,” I tell her, smoothing my fingers over her head, water dripping like summer rain. “Can’t call you else but Tick now. You’ve got under my skin.”

~

When I buried Mama and Daddy, died quick they did, six months one from the other, I took the job of wolf keeper, minder of the penned wolves what’re not quite ready to run free. The sick, the injured, the too young or too tame to survive on their own. I heal them, raise them up right. Teach them of predator and prey. My job is bound to make even the sanest strange after a time I suppose, living like I do, single room wood slat cabin what’s got no plumbing or electricity. What gets me is I’m thought odd for wanting my first sense on waking to be brightness streaming through my windows, breezes shushing the branches, not the beep of clocks or metal machines roaring down the road. Don’t get why wanting here more’n anywhere makes me a kook. When I wander to town, eyes watch me like they would a bear what wandered out of the swamp. Noses flair, catching my scent. Feet shuffle sideways. Hands fish for children and reel them back. Beware the Wolf Woman.

~

Tick darts now, a dragonfly defying the air. Fall’s on and the weather’s cooled. Balmy days, chilly nights. Indian Summer. Not afraid of leaving my sight now. She’s up a tree, down a deer path, splashing through runnels of creek water. Darting all the time, humming. Happy. Still no words, not happy enough for words, but I don’t push. Words will come I suppose, one day, but until they do she has new sounds. Tread of feet on moist earth. Brush of her breeze when she zips past. Laughter.

Defensive she is. Always defending her territory. She captured a corner of the cabin for herself, staking a tent from branches and an old sheet. She growls when I get too close but I smile and whisper soft and duck away. And the wolves. She’s taken to the wolves. Since she’s found her legs, she’s found her way to crawl over the fences and into the pens. I caught her playing with juvenile pups, rolling and nipping like she was one. The parents tolerated her but kept to a corner, undecided on the goldy-haired girl what smelled like soap. I tell her get out, not to go in there, but she don’t listen to me. Hardly let me go in to feed the wolves myself for a day or so, growling at me like she was guardian. “You hush up there!” I scolded and puffed and growled right back so she’d know I mean business. She backed off and let me by. I hugged her after, let her know I weren’t mad. She kissed me. On the cheek. No child ever done that before. I dropped my arms and she laughed and darted away, up the side of the cabin and on the roof before I could tell her to get down. My little hummingbird. Bright, tiny, flitting, territorial and beautiful. Oh so beautiful.

There’s a hunter in the swamps. They come this time of year to run dogs and deer. This one, his tracks tell a different story. Alone he is. Always. No buddies. No dogs. Boots with the toe crumpled on the right. Lumbers like an angry bear, probing, pushing, not like any hunter I’ve seen, more like he’s tearing things up. I see the tracks ‘bout a mile from the cabin down near an old cut-water creek. Trash and tracks and bullet casing from his rifle scatter around where he fires at cans set on a falling down stump. I leave his leavings and hurry my way back to Tick. I’ll give the bearman his bit of forest, hoping he’ll stay clear of my refuge.

 ~

Rick steps from his truck, and quick as a squirrel, Tick darts up a tree, peering through the leftover leaves of late autumn. “Who’s this, Mae?” asks Ranger Rick. Least, I amuse myself calling him that. “Hey little girl. Don’t you fall now,” he says laughing at the frail, shaking cub in the tree. I feel the Mama Bear rise up, but don’t take him on. Rick is okay, never bothers me. Harmless, like a box turtle. Usually Tick’s gone long before his truck winds down the sandy drive. Must not have heard him today. “She’s my niece,” I lie. “Didn’t know you had family,” he says all smiles. I mimic his face, friendly, defenseless. Like the turtle, I know how to hide too. “Just found out not too long ago myself.” I cross my arms and plant my feet. No Ranger Rick is getting past this Mama Bear. He shifts his cap. “Don’t guess home office needs to know ‘bout visiting relatives.” He nods. “Don’t reckon they do.” Rick and me lifts supplies from the truck bed, Tick watching from her perch in the sweet-gum tree. We shake hands when he leaves and I hold the feel of its roughness long after. All our years working out here and he never touched me before. Tick slips her hand in mine. I didn’t hear her come out the tree. We stand still, watching the light fade and the bats quiver and listen to the penned wolves howl their missives to far away relatives running the swamps.

Homer is the blind wolf. After the poet. One thing about genes, they go bad when they get too cramped together and don’t have enough room to stretch out right. It’s happened to the red wolves. Seventeen came out of the swamps back in ’78. Only fourteen paired up to breed. All the red wolves in the world today came from those fourteen. When you think, it’s amazing there are red wolves at all, but those fourteen were just too cramped in their genes. Blindness set in. Hereditary. Curses passed down through the lines. Homer lives in the pens with his brother, Alpha. Follows him everywhere, depends on him. There was a third brother once. He died. More gene trouble. Now, only Homer and Alpha sing their song come nights. Neither one ever passing on their genes. Never given the chance. Too risky I know, cramping the genes up more, but I wonder if they’re singing sad songs, mourning for their stolen sons and daughters. I wonder when my heart pulls and feels the same thing. I’m too old for babies myself. Over sixty is too old. Wanted them only when I grew too old to have them. When it was safe to want them again. Then Tick dropped from the sky, crawled from the backwater. I wonder when I listen to the wolves if I can hear the mourning of her mother, out there somewhere, crying for her child. The pull of genes is strong. I wonder where it leads.

~

Tick’s filled out some from the summer. It’s frost now, winter settled in to freezing slow-water edges. “You need schooling,” I tell her. I know this much is true, a child needs to go to school. I went myself. Didn’t like it much and they didn’t like me. Shoved me into the slow class on account of my strangeness. Teacher used to smack us with a wooden spoon if we mussed up our lessons. I cried so much Mama kept me home after awhile, filled me with books what Daddy checked out from the library over the water in Manteo. Never learned arithmetic more than settling up poundage for crabs, but don’t need too much numbering out here in the swamps. Still read though. Ranger Rick brings a stack of books for me every two weeks on his supply runs. Time to teach Tick to read.

She grins at me and darts away. A game, chase and catch. I wait. My own game. I pretend she’s a speck of dust floating in the sun. She can’t resist and stretches forward like a bobcat watching my eyes for a give-away. I snatch her from the air, a swallow on the wing. We laugh and shriek, all a game. I tuck her into my shoulder and settle her on my lap. “We’re going to read,” I tell her and I do. I read for hours. Poetry, because stories taste mostly of sadness. Poems, now, poems are gumdrops. Even when they’re sour, they’re over ‘fore you feel it too much. I pop gumdrops in Tick’s mouth, one for each poem, to keep her still. We work through my favorites, the ones my mama read as a girl and the ones she learned me. Tennyson and Longfellow and Whitman, the great ones. The raindrops of Emily Dickinson so small I scribble them on slips of paper and tuck them around the cabin walls. And Yeats. Yeats most of all.

“Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

Tick stills when I read that one, like she knows, like she’s seen. I hug her tighter, breathe her smell of murky woods and gumdrops. Tick—a poem.

 ~

“Eat,” I tell her. Tick looks at me. Used to be she’d guard whatever I put in front of her, hungry, stuffing her mouth and hands, afraid I’d snatch her peanut-butter bread or oatmeal. I’d catch her with pockets stuffed with green tomatoes and bitty cucumbers no longer than a finger. She’d see me tend my garden and sneak food when I weren’t looking, that’s how starved she’d been. Who knows for how long. Now, with meat on her bird bones she affords pickiness. “Eat your squash or you won’t get no cookies.” Ranger Rick brings one pack of Oreo cookies on his supply trips once a month. I hide them, make them last. One a day, no more, save the day he comes with a new pack. With Tick here, I order two packages. “You know these things’ll kill you,” Rick laughs when he scans my order list. I hint a smile, no more. I like Rick, but never say more than I have to. Never quite sure who you can trust, who’s a wicked faery what come to steal you away.

~

That bearman rumbles, circling my refuge. A blue truck rattles by us out on the refuge road. Tick bolts to the cover of the brush. He drives by, smiling, nodding at me. Can’t see his boots but I know he’s the one, a rifle in the gun rack behind his head. He waves, I don’t, and when he’s long gone down the straight road out of sight, I find Tick hiding in a blackberry bramble. She’s scratched and shaking and peed on herself and my gut knows. I know.

It takes an hour to get Tick out of the brambles and back to the cabin. Another hour to treat her scratches with antiseptic and get some warm food in her belly. I watch her as the evening dims to dusk and dark and when I’m tidying up the dishes, I hear her playing with her pinecone family, whispering, “Don’t tell. Don’t tell. Don’t tell.” She smacks one pinecone against another. I have to stop sluicing the water to make sure it’s her voice I hear, the outside dark pressing through the windows against my two fragile lamp lights.

~

First words is supposed to be celebrated. Da-da and Ma-ma. Bubby and Sissy. Family. These ain’t no good words falling out of my baby bird’s beak. My belly twists over the whispered hiss. Don’t tell. I won’t say a word O human child. I wait for her to fall asleep on the braided rug before moving her to her cot. The rest of the winter’s night I toss about the cabin, worrying my knuckles until they ain’t nothing but an ache.

~

Release day. Tick’s plopped on the seat between me and Ranger Rick, driving to the remote pen where one of my breeding pair’s been waiting to be set free. When red wolves are ready to run, they’re moved to a pen way out in the forest, deep in the refuge swamps. We lay off feeding them as much, switch to game meat instead of dog food. Road kill deer if it ain’t rumbled too bad. Wild rabbits Rick raises and lets go in the pen. Gives the wolves hunting practice, lets instinct teach lessons of hunter and hunted. I won’t let Tick watch wolf kills. The screaming of the rabbits is almost too much for me. Want her to see the release though, the day we open the gate. Rick parks a ways away and hauls a deer carcass from the pickup to the pen in a wheel barrow. Tick’s hand grips mine, eyes scampering like a songbird. Me, wolves, deer, Rick, trees, path, back to me. Always back to me, a pup checking with her mother for permission, for safety. Wordless, I help Rick open the gate and dump the carcass. The pair huddles at a far corner, watching us, noses tickling the air. Tick’s locked her fingers round the chains, staring at the wolves. We leave the gate wide and back away, Tick between us, each enfolding a tiny gloved hand. “This is the last meal we’ll feed them,” Rick whispers. “I’ll come back in a few days and they’ll be gone. Off to find a new home, claim territory, start a new pack.” He smiles as Tick ducks behind my legs. She’s not scared I can tell, just playful. Rick’s smile extends to me and I feel that bit of warmth inside I ain’t felt for many a year. First Tick, now Rick. My pack’s growing.

 ~

“Mama.” It’s Tick. Her first real word said to me. Mama. Me.

“Come on.” I pull her little hands from the covers, tucked under the sleeping bag and quilt and Army blanket. It’s cold, February cold, and like a hummingbird Tick hides from cold. But she won’t want to miss this. I’ve warmed her clothes by the stove, her boots and sweaters and socks and jackets, all child-sized. Rick knows she’s still here with all my ordering clothes, but he says nothing to the powers that be. I carved a wolf’s head from knot in a maple tree struck by lightning last summer to thank him. He tucked it in his pocket. Said nothing, like me, but he knows what I meant. I wrap Tick in my arms and carry her to the fire, dressing her like a squirmy baby doll. “Stop that now, little bird. You’re going to want to see my surprise.” She stops wriggling long enough to let me pour some oatmeal down her belly. Warm enough she darts outside to the pens, howls to the wolves, gloved fingers wrapping round the chain link. Alpha swifts to the far side of his pen, calculating a good distance from the ruckus. But Homer, he knows her I think. Not close he comes, but not hiding either. He sniffs the air just to her left, right, over her head. He’s learning to trust. She knows how he feels. “Mama, he likes me,” Tick says and I nod, my hands flicking open and closed. Come, come away. I wonder of the mama who taught her to talk. Where is she now? How could she let her baby get lost in the forest? Tick darts, there’s no other word, and we load up the canoe. I paddle for the both of us but she wants to try until she splashes herself with cold and leaves off. She waits until we see them, hundreds of them, a lake, a sea of white feather swans. Tundra swans, bigger than Tick is tall. Massive, grace-filled birds. Supple and snow with black beaks on a slate gray day. Whoo, whoo, whoo they cry as they fly in loose Vs over our heads, splash landings on the water. We watch, paddling around the waters, awed at their agile necks, their liquid movement. Elegance. I knew she’d love them.

Home again, Tick mimes a bird, arms like wings, legs racing in flight. “Whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo.” I watch as I put up the canoe, watch as I feed the wolves in the pens. I know I have to ask with her talking now. I don’t want to. I want her to stay my little bird forever, but you can’t lock up a bird. Or a child.

~

Eighteen when I met him. Old for a girl with her first boyfriend maybe but I was happy on our scrap of planted land, just me and Mama and Daddy, the goats and chickens and crab pots. Eighteen was the summer Daddy hired a hand, Jimmy, and I caught the need for other people in my world. He was handsome, Jimmy was, with a strawberry smile and teeth not yet stained by chaw. I told him straight up I weren’t kissing no boy what tasted like tobacco. He spit the wad out right there and popped a few spearmint leaves from Mama’s garden in his mouth. Smiled at me, sun warm on my skin, the hum of honeybees in my ears. Sometimes I catch a whiff of Ranger Rick’s spearmint gum, smell of cigarettes on his shirt. Tobacco and spearmint. Two plants what tipped my world over.

~

“You’re talking now,” I tell her. Tick grins. Mischievous. Pocahontas, means Little Mischievous One but most people don’t read enough books to know that. I take Tick’s hands and settle each with a cookie, look straight in her eyes, signal her attention. “You’re talking now,” I say, “and you’ve got a name what ain’t Tick.” She looks away, out the window, cookie stuck to her damp lip. Is she trying to hear the wolves shifting in their pens? I squeeze her wrists, gentle still. No wooden spoons for her. “What’s your name?” “Tick, Mama.” I shake my head though my heart pulls. “Not my name for you, what’s the name they called you?” No answers. I pick up her pinecone family, the ones she plays with splayed on the rug like a mud turtle sunning his back. “Who’s this?” I ask. “Mommy,” she smiles, touching a finger to her favorite pinecone, the one what’s slim and smooth. “Who’s this?” I ask of another two. “Granma and Granpa.” “And these ones?” “Rick and Mama and Tick.” I put the family back on the shelf before she gets distracted. “My name is Mae,” I tell her. “I was lost once, like you, but I found my way. What’s your name?” Tick gums a cookie, lost in sunlight.

Jimmy. We had us a summer season. Crabbed right through September. A hurricane blew that year, knocked our big old oak tree out of the sky, but the power of winds and rain never compared with my Jimmy. Eyes grey as river water at twilight. Tall and strong and wiry, he let his beard get scraggly when I said I liked a bearded man. He never touched tobacco again once I said I weren’t kissing him if he did. And I did kiss him. Under that old oak tree first, then in the goat shed, up on the straw bales. Kissing and holding me like I was worth more than catfishing and crabbing and sky and water and land together.

~

I could turn her over, turn her in. They’d find out who Tick is, find her kin. I don’t though. Those what hurt her may be kin.

With spring coming on, that man is back, circling the refuge in his truck, stomping through brambles, flattening brush-grass, disturbing deer and rabbit paths. But you can’t find someone what don’t want to be found and Tick surely don’t want to be found. I have Tick burrowed down.

~

“Mama! Three puppies!” We thought they had them, the pair next to Homer’s pen, but weren’t sure. Weeks since she went in the den, a plank and plywood box salvaged and nailed together a couple years ago. Used to be Mama’s old goat shed. Hauled it off our strip of land. Our house was bulldozed when they made the refuge, but they left a few falling down outbuildings. I scrounge amongst them every now and then when the need for scrap wood arises. I could have Rick haul in what I need of course, but I like having a reason to visit the old place. Like having a reason to keep that goat shed around, made new, made into a den for fuzzy, blue-eyes red wolf pups born to run free.

~

Bobby. I wanted to name him Bobby what for the man on the radio wanted to be president and my great-grandaddy named Robert. “You like Bobby for a name?” I asked Jimmy. “Works both ways. Bobbi or Bobby, with a ‘y’ for a boy, an ‘i’ for a baby girl. Family names are as good as land to pass down.” Jimmy’s teeth gnawed on his lip some, scabby from all the nipping. “Yeah,” he said and spit a clear wad, rubbed it out with his boot toe. Gum ain’t quite enough to smash the need for chaw, but Jimmy ain’t touched snuff since his lips touched mine. Months on and my belly full of baby, his lips full of promises. I didn’t want him to go, but Jimmy, he was the kind with big plans. Go to work the boat yards in Norfolk, make good money, build us a house, get married. “Even a honeymoon in Florida, Mae,” and he’d kiss my hesitations away, my worries. Then he left. Gone four months before we got the news. It were a storm, a bad one, and Jimmy was drunk, walking on the deck of a ship, swaying into the wind. Fell over. Found his body two days on, nibbled away by fish and crabs.

 ~

Tick darts past me. Early July. Almost a year since I found her crouched beside the pens in a thunderstorm. Thunder Moon the Algonquins called the July full moon for all the storms what blow through the sky this time of year. A woodpecker laughs, clatters his eerie cackle over our heads. Messenger to the gods them Algonquins thought. Sacred bird.

She musta had a birthday sometime this year. Missed it like I did Christmas and my own birthday. And Jimmy’s and Mama’s and Daddy’s. Don’t take the calendar much into account out here in the swampwater. Breeze foretelling a thunderstorm or the sun rising early and setting late. But Tick deserves a birthday with colored candles and cake. I’ve already hung on to my baby bird longer than I should. Rick’s been asking how long she’s gonna stay and if I need to think about school come August. Real school, not just my poetry lessons and the little bit of counting we do of deer tracks and bird feathers found. There’re rules for what happens when lost things return and I know I don’t got no say in it. So I hang on to her a little longer though my rope’s getting frayed. Something’s bound to break.

~

Bobby Kennedy. Assassinated. I asked the doctor what it meant. “It means we’ve killed all hope.” Nurse give me a jittery smile, shuffled Doctor out the door. I could hear them talking in the hall. Squeezed Mama’s hand holding mine. Daddy pacing the waiting room. “What’s wrong?” “Baby’s turned is all,” she said. It weren’t all.

Bobby, little Bobby, he came out of me without a holler. Dead. “Stillborn,” Doctor said. “It’s a shame, but you’re young. You’ll have more babies,” Nurse said, patting my forehead with a damp terrycloth. Mama said nothing, just looked at the wall, her hand limp and slick like a dead fish. I asked for him, my Bobby, but they took him away. Never got to lay eyes on him myself. “Better this way,” Nurse said. “You don’t need the memories.” I still don’t believe her.

~

Clouds blow up, drop their shadow. Breeze turns cool, slashing the water with bloodless light. Thunder on the way. “Mama, let’s go back,” Tick says. “In a minute,” I say. We’re almost there. I pluck the tall grasses some, but leave off after a time. Orange tiger-lilies decorate the clearing, planted there myself years and years ago. Wild now, they’ve spread across the ground, popping gentle heads from the earth. Life continuing. There’s no grave, no house now either, but I planted my flowers in memory. “We’ll go home now.” Tick tucks her hand in mine and we walk through the rain back to the cabin on the road, raincoats keeping us dry, Tick splashing in puddles left from the ruts of a truck.

~

He comes close on toward dinner time, his blue truck rumbling up to the cabin. Tick, jabbering about the snakeskin she found, freezes, fork in her hand crashing to the tabletop. “Get under the bed,” I whisper to her ear when the knock comes. She scrambles as I walk toward the door, wishing my lock were stronger than a hook-latch. “Evening, Ma’am,” that man says tipping his ball cap at me. “How are you doing this evening?” I see his crumpled up boot toe and know for certain this is the hunter what’s been dogging around my refuge for nigh on a year. “I’m mighty fine,” I answer, sliding through the thinnest gap in the door I can manage and on to the porch. “Mighty fine. Yourself?” That man shuffles his feet and lifts his cap, rubbing his cropped head of hair. Not a grey one amongst them and muscles on his arms. For the first time in my life I feel the weight of being in the swamp. When I’m the only human around for miles, nothing but calm accompanies me, but with Tick hiding inside and that man clomping on my porch my gut twists. “Ma’am, I heard tell in town something strange.” I cross my arms. “And what would that be?” That man shifts his weight, leans in. “I heard tell you’re keeping a kid out here in these woods.” I clamp my mouth tighter than an oyster. “You see, Ma’am, I lost a little girl, my little girl, out here a while ago. I’ve been looking for her for a long time. Ain’t you seen the posters up in town?” “I don’t go to town,” I say, raise my chin a bit and tuck my hands down to keep from shaking. That man frowns at me, smacks at a mosquito on his arm. “Ma’am, I don’t want no trouble, but if you do have a little girl I want to see her. See if she’s mine.”

I lie. “There’s no kids around here,” I say, though he can see the child-size boots lined up by the door and the toy truck Tick’s been driving over the sand hill I dug up for her to play. That man stares at me. “Okay,” he says slow, nodding, quiet. I stand my ground. A wolf defending her territory, her pack, her pup. “You got no business here,” I tell that man. “It’s time you should leave.” He nods and smiles and walks off my porch to his truck. He don’t pull away though. Just sits there. He knows how to hunt prey. He knows how to hold his patience.

Inside I latch the door and pull the dresser over to block the way. I have my phone, can call Rick for help, but I ain’t run the generator for a while so the battery’s dead. “Tick,” I say and when she don’t answer I get down on creaking knees to look under the bed. She ain’t there.

Window’s open over the sink. A sneak look outside shows me the truck is here, but that man’s gone, gun rack empty. Rip up the floorboards where I hide the Oreos and my shotgun. Old and ain’t been cleaned in a year on account Ticks’ been here and I weren’t wanting to bring it out. Check the barrels, slip two slugs in, snatch a handful into my pocket. Shove my way out the cabin and down the path past the wolf pens.

~

Tick could be anywhere, but that man ploughs his way through the brush, laying a path clear to those who know how to see. Follow him. Keep back a ways so he don’t know the Wolf Woman’s on his trail. Lose him at the ditchwater, find his mud tracks on the other side, press on. He will not be hurting her again.

Voices up ahead on the road. Slow and watch through the trees. A scrim of brush keeps me from them, but I see what’s what. Tick a fledgling at a snake’s mercy. “What happened to your Mommy shouldn’t have happened, but you didn’t do what I said, did you?” Tick, eyes wide in fright, shakes her head, a tiny “No” slips from her throat. She turns, ready to run. That man takes another step toward her. “Katie! You have to come with me or bad things will happen.” Poison leaks from his lips, infecting her. Not Tick. Katie. She whimpers. One step. Two. A couple more steps and she’ll be too close for me to do what needs to be done. I raise the shotgun to my shoulder.

~

We hike out of the refuge by the road. Tick, now Katie, cries like a pup for its mother and I carry her draped across my front, arms aching. I leave my shotgun to rust by the roadside. I get her back to the cabin and cut on the generator, charge up the phone, call Rick. I don’t tell him nothing. Just I need him and since I never call, it ain’t an hour before his truck’s parked outside. Katie won’t let go my hand, still sniffling from her sobs, so I tell Rick where he can find that man. He goes off while Katie and me split a whole pack of Oreos and watch the bats eat their supper. After a time, Rick comes back, head hangdog from what he’s seen. He flips off his cap and twists the brim in his hands, rolling and rolling until I’m sure it’ll roll in on itself and disappear. “Mae, I’ve got to talk to her,” he says and I let him, but Katie holds my hands and won’t let go. “What’s your name?” “Katie.” A whisper. “And who was that man?” She looks at me, checking. “You can talk now,” I tell her. “You can say anything you want.” “He’s Mommy’s boyfriend,” Katie whispers. I stroke her yellow hair, hold her head to my chest and hum soft-like.

“Do you know where your mama is?” Rick asks. “In the water,” she says, a quiet breath, and I know what I’ve known for a year underneath the fear her mama would come steal her away. I’m the only mama anymore.

We sit for a time, me rocking my girl and Rick talking to his friend in the police. Later, headlights blink through the trees as cars drive past the cabin and down the road to where he lies. Katie sleeps, leaning against me, and Rick squeezes my free hand. “What will happen, Rick?” I say low. “There will be questions, Mae,” he says. “You’ll have to talk to them, tell them everything.” I rub Katie’s back. “I ain’t afraid of questions.” I’m afraid of where the answers lead.

~

Release day. Ranger Rick takes her in the morning. His friend in the police, she waits until Katie’s full awake and washed and breakfasted before taking her to the social services woman. Katie’s looking anxious waiting in the truck, twisting hands, her pinecone family on her lap, but a good kind of anxious is working in there too. She’s learned all I could teach her. My little bird is migrating. I won’t go. Can’t. This place, it won’t leave me and Katie needs school, real school, and somewhere with electricity and plumbing and more family than I can give her. I know soon I’ll have to leave too. Face the police and the courts and the questions. But not today. “I’ll do what I can,” Rick promises. I watch his hand close round the wolf’s head I carved, pull it out of his pocket, thumb rubbing the head, fingers clutched on warm wood. “Thank you,” I tell him. “For all of it.” He gives me a smile, a sad one, but a smile. Shakes my hand again. I don’t wave when they drive away. I know Rick’ll make sure she’s taken care of. Good man, he is. Trustful, enough to hand him over my most precious pup. Can’t help my watering eyes though. I wander down the path to the wolf pens. Homer paces the fence line. I know how he feels. I kneel on the softy pine needles, fingers through the chain link. He steps close, whimpers. “Come away, O human child, to the waters and the wild,” I hum to him. A true poet, Homer steps, wavering closer, his cold nose grazing my fingers.

 

Art by Kerri Augenstein

Debra Rook  lives and works in northeastern North Carolina where the only free roaming packs of red wolves claw their way back from extinction. She teaches, mentors and writes for children and adults. Her works of poetry and fiction have been published in The Lyricist, the Wolf Warriors anthology and the children’s anthology Doorway to Adventure. She is currently at work on a novel in verse.

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Recipe
5 jumbo egg whites, room temperature, if the room is cold and dark
1 1/4 cups caster sugar kept dry, despite dampness
scant 2 teaspoons brown malt vinegar
1 1/2 cups cold, fresh whipping cream
1 tablespoon sifted cornflour
4 ripe kiwis
2 ripe passion fruit

 

1. Wielding a wire whisk, mix whites with vigor, as if your arm and hand have suddenly become possessed by the desire to dance. Stop when whites begin to take on shapes of things you’d rather forget.
2. One tablespoon at a time, add sugar, whisking relentlessly until you can see the shadow of your sweaty face glistening in the meringue.
3. Spoon mixture onto metal tray lined with parchment to avoid stickiness.
4. With rubber spatula, smooth into shape of theater in the round.
5. Bake at medium temperature for 90 minutes or until pavlova is hardened and dry, like a brand new pointe shoe, ready to break in.
6. Having switched off oven, open door and leave ajar for dessert to rest briefly.
7. Whisk cream in chilled bowl until peaks resemble scenery from Kingdom of Snow.
8. Peel and slice fruit into corps de ballet of equal portions.
9. Decorate cooled pavlova with cream and fruit.
10. Serve immediately after final standing ovation.

Note: Dessert is delicate yet unwieldy. Be careful with assemblage.

Notes on recipe
Created and named in honor of Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova after her 1926 tour to New Zealand, the dessert is well known worldwide. This version has no author or date of publication. We don’t even know what country it comes from, but the terms cornflour and caster sugar help to exclude the United States, where Pavlova dreaded dancing in 1913. However, a prominent food anthropologist classifies the references to meringue as distinctly American. Handwritten in elegant script, this recipe appears to exist only on a three-by-five note card sandwiched in a collection belonging to American balletmistress Zella Muris of Missouri. The ingredients are basic. No one at Midwest City Ballet, where Muris works, is known to have allergies to any of them. But one thing’s for sure: When Alexander Green first ate the pavlova, he morphed into one of the strongest male dancers of all time.

Notes on prima ballerina
Pavlova lived to be one of the world’s greatest and most celebrated ballerinas. Still worshipped by many a dancer, the Russian icon of grace is known for her elegance, etiquette, and determination. Despite her allegiance to all things feminine, she presided with a heavy hand over her male partners. If they failed to live up to her expectations, she slapped them, often in public. Eighty-two years after her death, Pavlova is still recognized for her ability to intoxicate audiences, particularly through the roles of the Dying Swan and the Butterfly.

Corrine’s perspective 
I don’t like to say negative shit, but Alex Green is too short to be in the company. Most of the women are at least two inches taller. And at twenty-five, he isn’t getting any younger. Why he was hired I’ll never know. Politics. To make things worse, he’s oh so holier than thou: “Ballet is my lover, my life.” Give me a break. Probably a latent homosexual. Worst kind. And Zella, his little advocate, she’s too old and dried up for anything. Couple of bitches: both of ’em. Well, at least one’s gone. You know, before he left, that excuse of a man got away with violating the company contract. Nobody can get that big and buff in such a short time. Must’ve taken something. Or Zella slipped it to him. Probably a witch. That’s what you should be investigating—the two of them, not me.

Dancer’s Contract, Midwest City Ballet, Section 7B 
Despite requests for dancers to lose or gain weight, which may be issued at any time (See Section 35C), the Company officially condemns any self-destructive behavior, including but not limited to actions that resemble or lead to the development of eating disorders, to the consumption of illegal substances, and to unwarranted surgical and other medical procedures. Dancers who fail to comply with this edict will be dismissed and replaced immediately.

Excerpt from a review of Midwest City Ballet’s winter performance
Grafton’s Lightness of Foot pays tribute to the devil-may-care playfulness of Gugnoni’s score. A series of vignettes that fluctuate between petit allegro and adagio movements combine classical vocabulary with contemporary gestures, making the choreography as light and up-to-date as the dancing. However, an unwelcome serving of irony was offered up in the section titled “Whipped Topping,” when one of the dancers landed heavily from a series of jumps.

Tony’s take
Corrine is the one who landed like a lead weight in that performance. Of course nobody’ll admit it, including Grafton, and he’s the artistic director. Corrine didn’t just come down heavy; she would’ve fallen if it hadn’t been for Alex. When he saw what was happening, he placed his hands on the small of her back to keep her upright. Instead of thanking her savior, the bitch issued a complaint—said Alex caused her to land funny because he was standing too close. Alex denied it, there was a company hearing, and nothing happened. Grafton stood up for Corrine, and Zella for Alex. Us dancers thought it was all over, but Corrine refused to give up. Had to find something to cause more grief. So she got out the contract. Convinced Grafton that Alex was underweight.

Notes on Zella
If you saw her walking down the street, you’d know, despite the cropped white hair and slight limp on the left, that Zella Muris was and is a ballerina. Not a modern one, but the kind you read about in books. A woman organized equidistantly between vertebrae—so elegant that even the most inept and poorly mannered step aside to let her pass. Her figure is trim, her expression amenable. Once she was great. Zella’s voice feels like maple syrup filling the squares of a waffle. When she speaks, dancers listen. You are one of the few. You have been chosen for a life unlike any other. Sex, family, computers: they come later. You won’t relate, no matter how hard you try. Going to the bathroom: even that is different. Doctors will see the X-rays and say something is wrong with your spine. But it is straight because you know how to stand straight.You are a dancer. Like the members of the Imperial Ballet—the first, along with political officials to be escorted to safety when invasion was imminent, you are commissioned to preserve order in a world of chaos.

Excerpt 1 from Alex’s diary, left in a storage unit on the outskirts of town
Zella wants to talk. I know what she’s going to say—gain weight or my contract is up, except that’s not how she’ll say it. She’ll speak in a way that makes me feel both special and unworthy. Must have been a nun in another life. Huge surprise! Zella’s invited me to dinner! Tells me not to worry. Dessert’s fantastic. Meringue cream thing with kiwi and passion fruit—named after Pavlova. Don’t know why, but feeling lightheaded, kinda giddy. Zella loves the way I jump. Must have forgotten about the contract. Feeling too good to worry.

Interview with Tony
Yes, it’s true: Alex gained ten pounds and not a bit of body fat. The whole thing happened in a week, when Zella fed him the pavlova. He said he loved it; it gave him confidence. You have to understand: Alex is straight-laced. That means no drugs, no alcohol, no smokes—nothing. Not even caffeine, and that includes chocolate. No, he’s not religious. Married and monogamous to his art. Probably straight. Just my luck. Alex started acting strange after he ate the dessert. Started going out late at night. Said he wanted to get in touch with nature. What that has to do with getting buff I’ll never know. With extra activity, he’d be losing weight, not gaining it. But, as you can see in the picture, the man looks like a god—one of those Greek statues you see at museums.

Notes on Alex’s picture
No one knows who took it or where it came from, but the pic is running around the Internet. Alex’s expression is confident yet distant, the open-lipped smile a sign of ease, the far-off gaze an indication that part of him is somewhere else. His outfit is contemporary—light blue form-fitting sleeveless shirt and red skinny jeans, which outline his forceful chest and powerful quads and calves. Yet somehow he appears anachronistic, as if he came from another time, and someone photoshopped the clothes onto his body. His kinky hair appears almost as a halo. Around the lower right corner of Alex’s lip is a tiny speck of white—not milk, for the consistency appears thick like whipped cream or meringue before it is baked.

Interview with Zella
The recipe is basically sugar, egg whites, cream, and some fruit. Ask anyone with the least bit of knowledge of nutrition, not to mention anatomy and physiology, and you will see that what you propose is preposterous. Of course I am no expert, but these are hardly the substances that build muscle. I made the pavlova to cheer up a downtrodden dancer. That’s all. Alexander worked very hard to perfect his art. Why not give him the credit? Yes, it may appear to some that he developed quickly, but I’m sure you are familiar with the concept of hyperbole. Dancers are notorious for it. Life is either perfect or doomed, performances great or worthless.  No, I’m not sure where the recipe originated. It’s been in my family for generations. Of course I miss Alex. He was one of our finest.

Interview with Grafton
I have no idea where Alex went after he left the company. We don’t keep tabs on our former dancers. Have you checked the Internet? How about the IRS? Now I really must be going. I have a meeting with the Midwest Prairie Alliance. Our company is collaborating with conservationists to preserve classical ballet, the nation’s most unappreciated and endangered art form, alongside the prairie, the nation’s most unappreciated and endangered ecosystem. If you want to do a story on this exciting development, I’d be happy to meet with you next week.

Alex’s Diary, Entry 2
She makes me call her Mademoiselle, and I must bow whenever she enters the room. At first I thought it was a dream, but once she slapped me, I knew Anna Pavlova was real. It’s true: she’s as light as the dessert created in Her name. Pavlova is teaching me all kinds of things I never really knew. When a man dances with a woman, he must worship her. He must make it look as though he’s in charge, but underneath it all, she is. That’s how it works. She wakes me up at three in the morning. I bow and kneel before her, and then we head out to the prairie preserve. When I’m with Anna, I never feel cold. The stage is filled with leftover snow and dirt, but somehow we manage. We rehearse until six, and then I take her back to the apartment. We share a slice of pavlova, and then she disappears until the next night. Despite all the extra activity, I feel rested, ready to dance. My body is changing—fast.

Tony’s final statement
There’s something I forgot to say. Before tech rehearsal for the spring performances, I went to wish Alex merde—that’s what dancers say instead of good luck or, God forbid, break a you-know-what. Well, I got to his dressing room door and stopped short. I distinctly heard a woman with a Russian accent screaming at him. Then what sounded like a slap. When I knocked at the door, I heard furniture crashing to the floor. When Alex opened the door, the left side of his face was all red, a chair was overturned, and the room was empty, except for the two of us. Yes, I’m sure. I know what I heard and saw.

Excerpt from a review of Midwest City Ballet’s spring performance
Rarely do soloists outshine the principals, but such was the case in Grafton’s Prairie Progression, when Alexander Green and Tony Perugina took flight in a feverish series of man-to-man suspension lifts and supported jumps. Reminiscent of lightning spawning a wildfire, the two men epitomized not only the strength and beauty of the male form but also the stoicism of our ancestors arriving in covered wagons. Kudos to Grafton and his collaboration with the Midwest Prairie Alliance. Good luck to MCB. With dancing and choreography like this, companies on the coasts can’t compare.

Alex’s diary, last entry
Last night was strange. We talked more than we danced. Both captivated by nature—open landscapes, beetles crawling in grass. Think I’m falling in love. Anna says she could easily replace Corrine. Finally together in front of an audience. I asked how she planned to do it. She made a joke—called herself The Phantom of the Ballet. I laughed. Asked why she didn’t go to New York. “Because you are here,” she said. I’ll never forget those words. My wrists slipped during a press lift, and she punched me. The frozen grass clinked in the wind. The prairie was laughing.

Notes on YouTube video
Extensive investigation, but no one knows who posted the video or where it came from. It’s called Boa. The picture is clear: Alexander Green partnering none other than Anna Pavlova. Alex looks like a Greek myth come to life—beige dance belt and nothing else but his sparkling brown ringlets dripping with sweat as he lifts his partner high in the air. Pavlova, skin tanned and expression distant, sports a black bikini. Her hair is buzzed to a bristle. The choreography is distinctly twenty-first century—unabashedly sexual, moments of sustained extension followed by repetitive, spastic moves—peace before the storm. Pavlova constricts her partner to death. The final scene focuses on Alex, eyes rolled back, face blue, expression slack. Three comments posted on the accompanying YouTube page: “bout time,” from sexyladycub; “gr8 hairdo pavvy,” from pickleloverspoon;  “What happened to human tenderness? Violence gratuitous,” from MidwestSpiritWeaver.

Excerpt from arts section of Midwest Tribune
Despite local, state, and national funding, Midwest City Ballet and the Midwest Prairie Alliance received a heavy blow today. Late Summer Dance on the Prairie, held at and supported by the privately owned Midwest Prairie Preserve for the last forty years, will be discontinued. The land has been sold to the Mall-Mart Corporation, and construction for a new Mall-Mart Megacomplex will begin within the month. The site will include multiple stores, a ballpark, two daycare centers, a one-acre prairie preserve, and a new four-year college featuring the highly popular Corporate Studies major. “Once the construction is done, the ballet can perform at the ballpark,” said Hugo Spitz, spokesman for the multimillion-dollar project. Midwest City Ballet Artistic Director Frederick Grafton, who received the International Green Space Choreographic Award earlier this year, was unavailable for comment.

Front-page story in Midwest Tribune
“Mall-Mart Project Swallowed Up”
After a month of rumors and jokes claiming that the Mall-Mart Megacomplex was jinxed, haunted, and doomed, the project caved in on itself—literally. Only two days after the completion of nine buildings and a ballpark, a giant sinkhole swallowed up everything except one acre of prairie, leaving no trace of the $80 million complex. No one was injured, since the cave-in happened sometime between 3 and 6 a.m., according to police. A worker who wishes to remain anonymous said he found piles of kiwi peel at the construction site during the last month. The cause of the sinkhole is under investigation.

Statement from a baker in rural North Dakota
Fat little dude—called himself Al Green. Hired him because of the look on his face. Real depressed. Getting out of a bad relationship, he said. Only worked here a short time. Crazy about the prairie, he was. Talented baker. Never tasted a pavlova like the ones he made. So light—gave you energy, made you want to dance.

 

Art by Kerri Augenstein

Dr. Kendall Klym has won numerous awards for his short stories, which have been published in literary journals including Puerto del Sol and Fiction International. His collection, STEP LIGHTLY, won the Tartt First Fiction Award.

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Right around the time that Martha’s marriage fell apart, her only child became a runner. A distance runner. A runner of distances so long and arduous that some nights Martha crept into her room to examine her daughter’s sleeping feet. How did they do it? Mile after mile, hill after hill? The slapping and pounding! In the light from the hallway the twin soles glowed slick as sea stones. Martha could remember when they were brand new, and fit into the palm of her hand.

Emma had always been a sedentary child, probably too solitary, certainly no joiner. When she decided to go out for the high school cross country team, Martha at first assumed she wanted to lose the baby fat that jiggled over the waistband of her jeans and swayed at the back of her arms, the very same places Martha jiggled and swayed.

“I should start running, too,” Martha said, when Emma came home after the first practice. Her hair was plastered to her brow. Her skin—not only her face, but her arms and legs and that heart-breaking scoop above her sweaty tank top—was the color of bruised rose petals, the terrible blue-pink Martha imagined skin would be during a heart attack. She’ll give this up before the week is out, Martha told herself, and the thought made both regret and satisfaction crowd up inside her. That’s how she was these days—conflicting emotions elbowing each other as if she were an elevator crowded with panicked passengers.

Emma looked up from unlacing her shoes. Her round face was hopeful.

“You really should,” she said.

“I should,” echoed Martha, though she’d already forgotten what she’d proposed.

Emma did not quit. Soon she was running twice a day, once on her own and once with the team. Jon, her father, Martha’s husband, was encouraging.

“I used to run in high school. Did I ever tell you that, Em?” He leaned his chair back on two legs.

Martha, sitting across the table grading spelling tests, set down her green pen (she never graded in red, she was not that kind of teacher). Jon had been teasing chairs that way as long as she’d known him, which by now was more than half her life, and only lately had the habit come to annoy the hell out of her.

“But I was a sprinter,” he went on. “Anything longer than the 200, I died.”

Martha snorted, and he gave her a wounded look. Emma took a quiet suck on her water bottle and drifted out of the room.

˜

Martha had been a mere child when they married. What did she know? How to bake whole grain bread, how to get A’s on all her papers, how to rouse the handsome boy with the dark curls perpetually dozing over a volume of poetry in a back corner of the college library. Back then, Jon wanted to be a writer, and she had a misty vision of herself skimming up narrow, dark stairs to a narrow, dark apartment where a poor, stricken family waited for her. When she entered, they all lit up—the children ran to her, the parents managed dignified smiles. And Martha did work as a county caseworker for the first few years of their marriage. She’d taken children away from mothers, she’d left children with mothers who subsequently abandoned them. She’d threatened landlords, found her windshield smashed. Martha quit sleeping and started drinking lots of wine. Jon, who was in grad school by then, told her to quit. But Martha persisted, sure she could get it right. An older co-worker, a woman with dark purple dents beneath her eyes and a voice ragged from the cigarettes she could not, so help her Jesus, quit, stopped her in the office hallway one afternoon. “You’re breaking my frigging heart, honey,” she said, “just when I was sure it couldn’t break any worse.”

Jon convinced her to go back to school for a teaching degree. She could still help children, but she’d get to read them stories, take them to the zoo. What did she know? In the inner city school where she taught third grade, she was still a caseworker, only now she had to ruthlessly drill children to pass state tests, too. Every year at least one student begged Martha, Take me home. I want you for my Mommy. When had Martha stopped being moved by this? When had she come to realize it wasn’t her that the little girl in the dirty blouse, her chin bisected with the scar from a dog bite, yearned for? It was any old refuge, any hint of permanence and safety. When one of these children abruptly stopped coming to school, leaving behind a small sweatshirt limp on its hook, a desk crammed with broken pencils and failed spelling tests, a dewy-eyed caseworker would appear in the doorway of Martha’s classroom. She’d hesitate, her long hair lustrous, the earrings her boyfriend had given her for her birthday twinkling in her little ears. Martha strove mightily to be civil to these nymphs. These angel wannabes.

What did they know?

Jon was the one who should have become a teacher. It was more in his nature than hers. He loved pointing things out, leading people to his cheerful point of view. Instead he adhered to his original plan, more or less. He was an obit writer for the local paper, and free-lanced for Waste Age Digest and Refrigerated Transport. For awhile he’d been on the staff of Welding Distributor, but they’d recently down-sized. He submitted poems to electronic journals, where they appeared for a while then evaporated.

These days she’d still find him dozing on the couch, a volume of Yeats or Goethe spread across his chest like a large, drowned moth. But now only rarely did she wake him.

˜

A month or so earlier, during the last days of the school year, the two of them had taken a walk by the lake. The day was hot and gusty, and downtown shimmered in a gritty haze. Bits of trash blew against their legs. Jon had just sold a piece on laser-powered food warmers, and, in a jubilant mood, pointed out the way the gulls all sat on the sand facing the same direction, and how the Terminal Tower remained superior to every other building in the skyline.

“Says you,” she replied, the wind snatching away the words. The need to contradict everything he said was exhausting, yet she couldn’t kick it.

He skimmed a rock out across the choppy water. His curls—the very curls that luxuriated on Emma’s sweet head—were still dark, but they were retreating, like the front line of a spent army.

“What a day!” he cried. “It gives you such boundless…”

Martha squinted out at the lake, waiting for him to finish the thought. The arthritis in her big toe ached. She’d overheard Emma crying on the phone, but couldn’t get her to talk about it afterwards. For the past week, her student Anthony had arrived later and later each day. He gobbled his breakfast, then lowered his head to his desk and fell into a sleep so sound even the other children respected it, hushing their voices.

“Boundless what?” she asked.

“Oh Christ, I don’t know. But boundless is the crucial word.” He shouted into the wind. “Immeasurable! Unbridled!”

When she didn’t reply, he took her hand. “Remember what we wrote into our vows? Our promise never to measure life in coffee spoons?” He grinned and swung her hand. His cheerfulness was unwarranted, simple as a child’s. Some of her students seemed older than he did.

“If you ask me,” she said, “there are boundaries. Cement walls. With barbed wire on top. Embedded glass.”

“You always get like this at the end of the school year.” The sand whirled, and he held up an arm to shield her. Martha could see where he’d be sunburned tonight: the bony pink swath that time had cut through his inky forest

“Hey,” he said, not resisting as she pulled away from him. “It’s almost over. The finish line’s in sight.”

˜

Home from her first meet, Emma bounded up the stairs to her room. “I took thirty seconds off my PR!” she cried.

Martha felt a stab of anxiety. Time was not normally a concern of her bashful, pensive child, yet now Emma was referring to her time, as if she’d forged a private continuum. Was something really happening here?

“That’s terrific, sweetie. What’s a PR?”

“Coach says I have boundless potential.”

“Wow. I didn’t think coach-types used words over two syllables.”

Emma made a face, then tugged the slippery red singlet over her head. Martha glimpsed the little roll of tummy, the round slope of shoulder and breast. This was a view she was no longer allowed, and she attempted a rapid-fire inventory of latest developments before Emma covered back up.

But to her astonishment, Emma, in nothing but sports bra and panties, sat on her bed and leaned back on both hands.

“She’s a French teacher. She’s run the Boston marathon twice. And her mother helps us, too.” Emma looked so adorable when she blushed. “We call her Coach Mom.”

Anxiety and meanness crowded together inside the dark shaft that was Martha.

“Good name for a tacky TV show.”

“Make fun, I don’t care. She’s an Olympic athlete. She threw the discus in the1960 games, and she has a lot to teach us.”

Emma retrieved her uniform from the floor. As a baby, she’d plucked her father’s socks off the floor and toddled to the hamper with them. She’d wept when a crayon snapped in two.

“I need spikes,” she flung over her shoulder, disappearing into the bathroom.

“Ooh. Medieval.”

The bathroom door clicked shut.

Jon was the one who’d stayed home during Emma’s babyhood. He’d coaxed her first step, written a sonnet on the day she spoke her first word, light. Fourteen years ago the arrangement had still felt daring, a slap upside convention’s head, and other women repeatedly assured Martha how lucky she was to have such a mellow, easy-going man. Driving home after school Martha’s arms would begin to ache so badly for her baby, sometimes she could barely hang onto the wheel. The place would look like a cartoon house: milk puddled on the table, a rubble of clothes and toys on the floor. By the time she made it to the living room Martha’s bereft arms would be loaded with damp onesies, board books and plastic blocks and gnawed, gummy zwiebacks. The two of them would be watching Oprah, which turned out to be Emma’s second word. Jon claimed he tried to put PBS on, but Emma cried Opa, Opa. She’d press the fat moon of her cheek against the screen, bubbles of affection glistening on her sweet, red lips. Martha, arms full, could only watch, too.

“What’s Coach Mom like?” Martha called through the shut bathroom door.

She raised her voice. “Em? What kind of things does she teach you?”

Water thundered, the first of many lengthy showers. Martha and Jon’s water bill doubled that fall, not that Jon, who left the bills to her, noticed.

˜

The next week Emma magneted a list of vitamins and minerals and the foods that supplied them to the refrigerator door. Martha skimmed it daily, wondering, Maybe if I ate better. Maybe if I paid more attention to my body’s needs. The secretary at work took a dozen vitamins a day. She kept the jars lined up on her desk, and offered them to haggard teachers as they stumbled through the office.

“B-6, Martha,” she’d call, shaking the jar like a magic maraca. “Iron for your poor tired blood.”

Emma scorned supplements. Coach Bentayou advocated nutrition, a solid eight hours of sleep, and—above all—hydration. Emma carried a water bottle everywhere.

“Remember how much you loved your pacifier?” Martha asked her at dinner. “That water bottle makes me think of it.”

Emma was working her way through a plate of mustard greens (calcium) Jon had cooked for her. Her dessert banana (potassium) rested beside her plate.

She took a hearty pull on the water bottle and said, “We ran ten hills today.”

“You were four years old and refused to give it up. Finally I started hiding it.”

“What hills?” asked Jon, also forking up the slimy greens.

“The sledding hill in Forest Hills Park.”

Jon’s eyes went wide. Martha, however, could not get off the pacifier.

“You found it no matter where I put it. Once in my sewing basket, once in the bread drawer, once in your father’s backpack.” Martha paused, remembering. “You just wouldn’t quit.”

“That mother of a hill? Ten times?” Jon tilted back his chair. “That’s like, supernatural.”

Emma lowered her eyes in a failed attempt to hide her pleasure. “I finished first.”

Jon righted his chair and fist bumped her. The two of them went back to huge, enthusiastic mouthfuls of greens.

“I could have just thrown it away. The pacifier, I mean.” She paused, but neither of them asked the obvious question. “I wanted it to be your decision, Em.”

“I remember this.” Jon pushed his plate away. “It was torture.”

“I never wanted to be an enforcer,” Martha said. “That’s not how I ever saw myself.”

And yet just that morning she’d hustled her student Anthony to the office. He’d decked De’Andre, accidentally knocking out Eternity’s loose tooth in the process, blood and tears and snot raining over Morning Meeting. A few feet from the office door, Anthony tried to make a run for it, but Martha dug her fingers into the baby skin above his elbow. Anthony’s head jerked back and her own heart leaped, partners in twin astonishment.

“You’re hurting me!” yelped Anthony, a sullen, fat boy who surely, surely, had been hurt by adults before. Yet he’d trusted her, at least up till now. Who am I? she wondered. How did I get here?

Jon gazed at her, rubbing the side of his face in a way she’d once found comically sexy.

“But you kept hiding it from her. You didn’t really leave the choice up to her.”

Emma took her plate to the sink, rinsed it and set it in the dishwasher.

“It was ruining her bite, the doctor said.”

Jon’s cheeks were boyishly pink from his self-massage. He leaned forward, both hands on the table. “Every time she found it, you took it away again.” As usual he focused on the wrong detail. “Why didn’t you just…”

“Because! You think it was easy? Being the bad guy? Ha!”

She’d almost let go of Anthony’s arm. No child deserved to fall into her principal’s clutches. The woman dressed like a depraved evangelist, in flamboyant synthetic suits and false eyelashes, and Martha had witnessed her reduce fifth grade boys to tears within seconds, and leave kindergarteners curled in the fetal position, all for their own good. Yet Anthony kept erupting, frightening the other children, who were not easily frightened, and Martha drew the line at bloodshed. Through the office door they’d marched.

“Someone has to do these things!”

“I’m glad as hell that someone’s not me.” Jon stood up. “And it never will be. Me.”

Emma had slipped out of the kitchen. They could hear her, running the stairs to the second floor and back down. Her feet in their socks struck the carpeted stairs with a muffled yet definite thump, the house’s heartbeat suddenly made audible. Tears welled up in Martha’s eyes.

“Isn’t she overdoing it?”

“Can’t you say one positive thing?” He lowered his voice, condensing its anger. “Damn, Martha. Finally something she can star at.”

He left the room, pretending not to see Martha was crying, a crime he’d never committed in all their years together.

The pacifier. She’d never thrown it away. Just in case. It had broken Martha’s heart to stand by and watch Emma hunt for it! Hunt and hunt, for something she had to learn to do without, that was all there was to it. But flinging it away among the eggshells and coffee grounds—no, Martha couldn’t bear that. She kept it, she had it still, in the corner of her jewelry box, shriveled and brittle as something unborn.

˜

Emma finished fourth in that weekend’s race. She came home wearing a bright yellow tee-shirt that said WINNER on the back. Martha worried that it was a fluke, that all the really good runners had been sick that afternoon, or missed their bus to the race. False hope was a thing she simply could not tolerate these days.

“Look at this,” said Jon. He held out the Sunday sports page, on which Emma’s name appeared in infinitesimally small type. “You’re in the news, babe. The paper of choice!”

It was their small city’s only paper, and shrinking by the day. Martha paged to the obituary section, but there were no write-ups, unusual on a Sunday.

“They’re cutting you back, aren’t they?” she asked Jon.

“Huh? What? Nah.”

“I’m just asking. No need to be defensive.”

“If there’s one sure thing, it’s obits.”

“Papers are shutting all over the country! It’s nothing personal.”

Emma had moved to the doorway, against which she braced her arms, head bent, as if determined to take the wall down.

“Hey,” said Jon, jumping up from the couch. “Okay if I try to keep up with you for a few hundred yards?”

˜

I can be rich, Anthony wrote in his journal that week, officially designated by the principal I CAN Week. I can drive a Lexus. I can have a million games. I can buy my grandmother a house. I can have a million dollars.

At least that was what he told Martha he’d written. IKRIKLILG $$$10000000000000000 is what she saw on his paper.

She’d brought in the newspaper clipping, Emma’s name and time highlighted in cheerful yellow.

“That your daughter?” Anthony peered at it. His uniform shirt stretched tight across his belly. The free glasses he’d gotten that fall had disappeared, and he squinted like an old man.

“Yes, that’s her name right there.”

“She rich?”

Martha plucked a bit of lint caught in his hair. “You know why I’m so proud of her, Anthony? Because she works really, really hard. She tries her best and she doesn’t give up.”

An absurd speech to give to someone so young and neglected. But what else did she have to offer? He eyed her, chewing his thumb.

“Last year she couldn’t even run at all.”

He’s listening, she thought.

“She has a coach who helps her. She tells Emma how to get better and stronger, so she can win.” Martha swallowed. “Guess what, Anthony? I’m your coach.”

“That blows.” His voice was low and private, the voice he used to talk to himself in the time-out corner.

“No, listen. You’re smart. You know you are! You shouldn’t be getting into so much trouble. Let’s try this. How about it? I’ll coach you.”

He slid the chewed-up thumb into his mouth, then curled the fingers of his other hand around his fist.

“We’ll both win,” she said.

He fixed her with a liquid gaze, and nodded.

˜

In the dim staff room, where the clock on the wall had read 3:00 for years, Martha read the newspaper. Obit writing allowed little room for creativity, yet Jon always managed to inject a whimsical turn of phrase, and the quotes he chose from the deceased and family always came off as sincere, even the worst clichés. “He makes everybody’s life interesting,” Emma once wrote in a grade school essay, MY HERO. “Especially if they are dead.”

But again, today, his by-line was nowhere to be found. It was as if he, like one of his subjects, had ceased to exist. Crossed to the other side–passed, her students said, as if referring to yet another test. Why wouldn’t he confide in her that he was losing his job, about to be laid off? Why wouldn’t he admit it?

On the way home she stopped for a bottle of good wine, their favorite, a faintly sweet white they’d considered theirs for twenty years. Emma wouldn’t be back from practice yet. Martha would tell him all about Anthony, how he’d put her at the end of her rope, how she dreamed of running him over with her car, how she was making her last, desperate stand with him. Or maybe instead of talking, she’d just kiss Jon. His kissing was one thing that never, ever disappointed her. It had the power, at times, to transform her into a different, much more likeable person.

But he was dozing on their bed, unshaven, eyes crusted with sleep, The Complete Book of Running open on his chest. Martha banged hangers together in the closet, kicked her shoes into a corner, until he said, eyes still shut, “Listen to the message on the machine.”

“Bon jour, this is Claudie Bentayou, Emma’s cross country coach. It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Logan, at our last meet.” Pause. “I hope you, too, Mrs. Logan, will attend a meet at some point.” Longer pause. “What a delight it is to coach your daughter.”

“Of course it is!” retorted Martha. What a snotty, mellifluous voice the woman had.

“Quiet!” Jon commanded. “Listen to this part.”

“…her progress. Her work ethic is outstanding, but beyond that, she possesses enormous natural talent. After a decade of coaching, I know a winner when I see one. My mother, Coach Mom, would love to adopt her!” A small, artificial chuckle. “Again, I hope to see you both soon, and au revoir!”

Jon, sitting up by now, immediately tapped the machine again. Martha watched his lips move along with the words I know a winner when I see one.

“How many times have you listened to that, may I ask?”

She only meant to tease him, but her tone was sickeningly off, and he bolted up.

“What’s with you?” he shouted. He rubbed the side of his face as if he’d been attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes. “You’re vinegar! You’re brine!”

“Kiss my ass. I just came home from a terrible day at work. That makes it about a thousand terrible days in a row, and….”

“Okay okay, the world sucks, we’re circling the drain, all the more reason! Your daughter’s a winner! Come to a meet! Be happy for a change!”

Happy! The flimsiness of that word! One day, and Martha somehow knew it would be the very day she came to watch, one day Emma was going to lose, she was going to race full speed ahead into crushing disappointment and cruel doubt, and Martha would have to comfort her, You gave it your all, you did your best and that’s what counts, that’s what matters. It was absolutely required of mothers to say these things, no matter how heavy their own hearts were, how many dreams they’d personally waved goodbye.

“It bothers me to see you taking such vicarious pleasure in her success,” Martha said.

“Why?”

“It feels pathetic.”

“More pathetic than you taking pleasure in belittling me?”

“I don’t! I…I don’t feel any pleasure at all in anything at all any more. At all.”

The late afternoon, autumn light fell across the side of his face, bathing the tortured, whiskery skin in soft radiance.

“It’s just a bad stretch,” he told her. “We’ve been through them before. We’ll come through it. Out the other side.”

But instead of kissing her, without so much as touching her, he turned away to close the blinds. Later, after she’d put the unopened wine away, she discovered its twin in the refrigerator. When had he bought it? She visualized him in the store choosing it, carrying it home, anticipating the toasts they’d make.

˜

Anthony came to school in gleaming new LeBron James shoes. He told everyone they made him run faster and jump higher, but at recess, tiny De’Andre beat him in a race, and Anthony used his bright, beautiful shoes to kick his friend in the butt. A recess lady dragged him to the office, where Martha found him blubbering on a bench.

“You’re sorry,” she told him. “It feels so bad to hurt your friend.”

“Granny’s gonna beat me,” he sobbed, showing her how dirty he’d gotten the shoes.

While the rest of her class went to toot recorders, Martha scrubbed his shoes clean, and read him a story about a gentle bull who’d rather smell flowers than fight.

“My daughter always loved this book,” she told him.

Anthony took his thumb out of his mouth long enough to say, “She cool.”

A few days later, the principal stopped Martha in the hallway. She’d left off her false eyelashes today, revealing a face so unguarded Martha felt uneasy, as if she were the one stripped of disguise. The school had received bad news: their state test scores made them an official “academic emergency.” Unless things drastically improved, the principal was headed for the curb. The whole school, in fact, would be dissolved and “reconstituted,” like toxic sludge.

“Good news, Mrs. Logan.” The principal’s eyes were streaked with red. Even her ears looked tired. “I finally got the go-ahead on moving our little Anthony into SBH.”

Martha slumped against the wall, rumpling a WE CAN BE DRUG FREE poster. Relief and guilt clashed thug-like inside her. If Anthony went to the Severe Behavioral Handicap dungeon, relative peace would reign, but she’d never see him again, or at least not for ten years, when he’d try to carjack her.

“I wish you wouldn’t. I’ve been working with him. I’ve got some new ideas, I just need some time.”

The principal gave Martha a disgusted look.

“I moved mountains to get that move through.”

Martha straightened her shoulders. “Can’t I change my mind?”

“FYI, Mrs. Logan, I don’t have time to take a crap, let alone second-guess decisions.” She narrowed her naked, lash-less eyes. “He’ll be moved next week.”

˜

Jon moved out on an afternoon when the trees had turned overnight, without warning, having heard some starter pistol audible only to green leaves. The sky was brilliantly, boundlessly blue. When he told Martha it would be better all around, she could only gape at his optimism, this pure, bone-chilling spring that fed at a source fathoms deep. If he got out of the way for a while, he said, things might sort out. She and Emma could have some time together, for the first time. And the last, before she left home for college.

“That’s years away!” Martha accused. “It’s just an excuse for you to walk away instead of face your own problems! You coward! You shirker!” Her throat closed up. “You chicken shit,” she managed to croak.

She watched from the window as he trudged away, bent beneath the weight of his pack, the autumn sun a spotlight on his bald, bony ridge. Did he know he was getting old? If not, who could blame him? Oh, she’d understood the years would pass, of course, but who’d guessed they’d pile on this way, moldy blankets heaped one atop the other? She’d imagined time wafting by, like a fragrant breeze ruffling her hair, a chuckling stream massaging her toes.

She pressed her forehead to the window glass. She was still there when a van drove up and Emma jumped out, her lean legs a mile long. Look at those cheekbones, jutting out like little shelves. The muscles played across her arms as she grabbed the backpack another member of the team held out to her. Bits of her had melted away when Martha wasn’t looking. How much less of her there was to grasp!

“I already know,” Emma said, the minute she came in the door.

˜

His new apartment was only a mile away, and since they couldn’t afford a second computer, he came over during the day, when no one was home, to work. Martha found herself hunting traces of him—a chewed pen cap, a bitten fingernail. Once he left behind some post-its, the top one dark with moisture.

Martha touched it, then put her finger to her lips, tasting for salt.

Mysteriously, his obits began to reappear, and it seemed to her they took on a new, almost manic zest. Everyone from oncologist to homemaker to the night-shift security guard crippled by gunshot wounds had lived a full life.
He’s miserable, she told herself. He’s consoling himself by inventing happy endings.

The alternative, that he was free to sing his own song for the first time in decades, couldn’t be true. If that was true, they’d ruined one another’s lives, and how was it possible to believe that and keep on going?

People did, she knew. People kept on going in the most appalling circumstances.

She visited Anthony down in the basement whenever she could, despite the disapproval of the SBH teacher, who considered Martha a disruptive force.

“He almost always goes on red after you leave, even if he’s been on green all day.”

“Screw you,” Martha said under her breath.

“This weekend’s the league meet,” she told Anthony. Just when the sore on his cheek had at last started to heal, he’d picked off the scab. Beneath his uniform shirt he wore the WINNER tee-shirt she’d given him—Emma owned so many by now. “Know how far they run, Tony? Over three miles.”

“Far away.”

“Far away.”

These days, Emma sitting still was unnatural, like a gazelle in a zoo. Since Jon had moved out, she was either running or sleeping. Laying down the miles, she explained to Martha, before tapering for the last, really big meets. Piling up her kilometers, hoarding her strength.

“Don’t go.” Anthony grabbed her sleeve.

“I have to go get my…my other kids.”

“I wanna come back upstairs.” He kicked his desk, and the teacher loomed over them.

“Orange,” she threatened.

Martha stood up. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she promised.

Things had deteriorated in his home setting, the teacher told her. There was a better than fifty-fifty chance he’d be back in foster care soon. As the teacher unlocked the door to let Martha out, Anthony jabbed the point of his pencil against his WINNER tee-shirt again and again.

˜

A photographer for the paper caught Emma flying down the home stretch of the league meet. She was so far out in front that, looking at the photo, you’d think she’d run the race solo. Martha’s little girl was a goddess—her arms tucked to her sides, neatly folded like wings, and neither foot touching the ground. Her face was composed, serene, as focused as if she were in prayer.

FRESHMAN PHENOM read the caption, and when Martha went to school on Monday, the secretary had posted the picture on the office bulletin board. What vitamins did that child take, she demanded?

Coach Mom had the photo enlarged and laminated. Emma left it lying on the kitchen table, and the next afternoon, it was gone.

“I told Daddy he could have it. I didn’t think you’d mind.” She was rummaging in the refrigerator, moving around half-empty bottles of fish sauce and capers.

“One thing I wonder, Em. On the course. When you’re passing all those other kids. When you’re leaving them in your dust.”

Emma kept her head inside the refrigerator.

“Do you ever feel sorry for them?”

Emma turned around, a crusty ancient jar in either hand. “Sure I do.” She marched to the trash and dropped them in. “For half a second.”

Martha watched her methodically clear the refrigerator, then pull out the shelves and wash them one by one in the sink.

“Not everyone’s made for distance,” Emma said. “Though Coach Mom says it’s 99% mental power.” Without turning around, she paused for a suck on her water bottle. “Coach Mom says marriage is like a marathon.”

“Coach Mom sure has a lot of…”

“She says you’ve got to run it in sections. One stretch at a time.”

“I thought she threw the whatever-you-throw. What does she know about running?”

“She knows!” Emma spun around, brandishing a shining shelf like a shield. “She knows a lot, about all kinds of things! She’s a real grown-up!”

“Emma. Oh honey. I’m so sorry you had to talk to her about this.”

Martha took the shelf from Emma’s hands and linked her arms around tight strung bones and coiled sinew, skin hot with fury.

“I thought he’d come back by now,” Martha said. She tried to hold her daughter, though there was not a single familiar element in this jack-knife of a body.

“He can’t!” Emma’s breath came short and fast in her ear. “He can’t make any decisions! He’s too depressed.”

“He is?”

Emma pulled free.

“You both are, I hope you know!”

“At least I go on! I face things, I work, I support you. Did you forget that little detail?”

“I don’t want to talk any more.” Emma was shoving her feet into her running shoes.

“I thought that’s what you did want! You talk to her!”

Emma put her foot up on the table, yanked at her shoelaces.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Martha cried. “It’s dark out!”

She was so fast, there was no telling where she’d disappeared by the time Martha found her keys and backed out the car. She could be blocks away. Six minute miles—she could be nearly to Jon’s by now. Choosing him over Martha, who would blame her?

Searching for your child in the dark—here was the waking version of every bad dream Martha had had since she was born, since she first broke free of the safety of the womb. Martha once dreamed that Emma was no bigger than her finger and had vanished into a sea of tall, waving grass. Another time that she’d left the baby in a strange cradle that, on second look, was lined with teeth and bones.

That Emma would turn her back and run away as fast as she could had never been one of the nightmares.

Martha gripped the wheel, the car driving her, and when she saw the silver fireflies winking on the black road, impossible for October, the sweat rolled down her back. Her daughter’s feet, her leathery, award-winning, reflective feet, running past her father’s street, running, just running running running, so unflagging and determined that who would ever catch her? Who would dare to pass her? Relief left Martha too weak to even consider rolling down her window and trying to persuade Emma to get in. Instead the car nosed along in the winking silver wake, as if Emma were towing it.

˜

Martha lay awake half the night, and when she slept it was Anthony she dreamed of. Anthony in a dilapidated lifeboat, adrift among snapping serpents. Lost in the alleys of a city made of dirty glass. Anthony forced to run, his basketball shoes on fire.

Anthony needed her. That alone made him unique in the world.

When she woke her skin itched, and her eyes were as hot and swollen as if she’d cried for hours. She knew this feeling. The membrane separating her from the world was beaten so thin every sorrow, every ugliness and cruelty rushed in and possessed her as if it were her own. She didn’t dare look at the newspaper or turn on the TV. Her heart was lumpy inside her, like something that had melted and hardened into the wrong shape.

A notion had crouched at the back of her shadowy mind for weeks. Now, defenseless, she watched it burrow to the front. Day by day, the light was draining from Anthony’s eyes. His tough little shell was growing thicker, hardening from the outside in, so who knew what was left inside him, what sliver of space remained for the curious, big-eyed boy he’d been. Anthony was growing less loveable. Soon, no one would want him. If the child-protective system swallowed him up, that could be the end of him

The system she was part of! You worked and worked and in the end, were never sure if anything you did made a difference, if you’d even put a drop in the bottom of the filthy leaky bucket. But with one child, one specific child, you could know. Martha drank her extra-strong coffee and walked through her house, past the computer where Jon wrote his happy endings, up the stairs and to the foot of Emma’s bed, neatly made, a pile of tee-shirts folded on top of the quilt. The world could still be brought to order, she thought, good things could still be made to happen.

Martha dressed, hurrying. The idea of taking Anthony in beat its wings inside her, stronger and stronger. She was not naïve, no longer an idealist, but she could help. She knew how to make some things better. Driving to school she berated herself for hesitating so long. Giddiness jittered up inside her, the way it had when she was young, as if she were on her way to meet a new boyfriend, or fling herself off a cliff. This was who she used to be.

She led her class through Morning Meeting, where she taught the state-mandated lesson on empathy, then, tossing aside the lesson on fractions, passed out the precious markers and let them draw whatever they wanted.

Outside the window, narrow yellow leaves streamed by like a school of fish. She brought the class to gym a little early but the teacher, a darling young man the kids loved, didn’t mind. Martha dashed to the office and unpinned the photo of Emma levitating, then ran down the stairs to SBH.

The teacher was surprised to see her. Hadn’t Martha watched the news this morning? Her voice was lightly triumphant, for she’d been proven right after all. Martha gripped the back of Anthony’s empty chair as the teacher related how the grandmother’s boyfriend had finally gone too far, beating her unconscious as the children watched, and how all of them were in county custody. All except the fourteen year old brother, who was being held for shooting the boyfriend in the leg.

Here the teacher, who was not, after all, a monster, gave a soft groan.

It wasn’t Martha who’d made the boyfriend go berserk. Martha’s stingy pessimism hadn’t put the gun in the brother’s hand, her being too late hadn’t pulled the trigger. This was just the kind of thing that happened these days. These days when the world itself was worn out, liver-spotted, incapable of miracles.

“I was going to show him this picture.” She offered it to the teacher, who glanced at it but had to dart away to stop a girl who’d begun pulling her own hair.

“You tried,” said the teacher over her shoulder. “We all did.”

It was no one’s fault. And yet if Martha wasn’t responsible, what was she doing here? Could someone please tell her that?

˜

“Madame Bentayou and Coach Mom will drive us down.”

Emma had come in first in districts, first in regionals. Martha had read all the stats in the paper, viewed the photos a teammate’s mother had put on-line. Emma and that teammate had qualified for the state meet, being run a hundred miles south. The whole team was going, to cheer them on. They’d leave early the day before, spend that night in a hotel, and run the race the next morning.

“It starts and finishes in a big stadium,” Emma said, rolling white socks and putting them in her suitcase. Four days ahead, she was packing. “Like thousands of people come. Coach Mom says when they shoot the starter gun, the roar is deafening.”

Martha’s own pulse roared in her ears. Emma tugged at the suitcase zipper, long black curls curtaining her face.

“Dad’s driving down Saturday morning. He can’t afford a motel, since the newspaper finally gave him the pink slip.”

“It did?” Martha leaned against the doorframe. “Poor Dad,” she whispered.

Emma strung her spikes with new laces.

˜

Martha had tried to track down Anthony. He and his siblings, except for the oldest, had gone to live with an aunt in another city. It was good the siblings got to stay together, people agreed. No one could tell her much more.

Two new students arrived in Martha’s class, one a small Chinese boy who couldn’t speak English and the other a girl nearly as tall as she was, a third grader who already got her period.

˜

The Friday before the state meet, Martha called in sick. When the coaches arrived to pick Emma up, Martha met them for the first time. Madame was at least six feet tall, with dreds spilling halfway down her willowy spine. She took the hand that Martha held out, then leaned in and air-kissed her on both cheeks.

“Quel plaisir de te recontrer!” Stepping back, she scanned Martha’s face with the practiced, assessing look of a coach.

Coach Mom was short and stocky, with a weathered face and grizzled, cinnamon-colored hair. Her blue windbreaker had an American flag sewn to the back, and her red spandex pants showed off her muscled thighs. The orange and green running shoes, those she must have gotten on discount.

“You can trust us.” She squeezed Martha’s hand with a discus-thrower’s might. “We’ll take good care of your baby.”

“Is that your Olympic jacket?”

“Why yes. It is.” Coach Mom’s smile was broad and kind. “I only take it out for special occasions.”

Martha squeezed her hand back. “You’ve made all the difference for her.”

“Well now, I don’t know about that.” Coach Mom allowed Martha to grip her hand far longer than was normal before she gently withdrew her fingers. “Emma’s a very determined child.”

Coach Bentayou handed Martha a packet of information about the race, including all the numbers where they could be reached.

“And here,” she said, tapping the paper with a long, square-tipped finger, “here are the driving directions.” She looked up. “It’s only about two hours.”

Emma came rushing down the stairs.

As the three of them walked toward the van, Martha called, “Bon chance!”

“Oof!” Madame shook a finger. “Chance has nothing to do with it!” With that, they whisked Emma into the car and away.

˜

Martha was still awake at 5 AM when someone knocked on her door. She tried to convince herself she was having an anxiety dream, but the knock was persistent, and there was no denying her eyes were wide open. She could see the clock, and beside it Emma’s school photo, her smile as pained as in every picture she’d ever posed for.

When the knocking stopped and a key turned in the lock, Martha picked up the photo and carried it with her, like an Egyptian preparing for the after-life.
Jon gazed at her from the bottom of the stairs. He was thinner. He wore new running shoes, which made his feet look like something he had yet to grow into.

“I’m on my way to Emma’s meet.” He pointed at the photo she held, as if Martha might need a visual aid to understand.

“She told me.” Martha descended the rest of the steps to stand on the last one, eye level with him. “Thanks for going.”

His eyebrows shot up. Thin as he’d grown, with those puppy feet, he was close to the boy she’d gone hunting in the college library. Back then, as she tiptoed up to him, his eyes would fly open, and she was sure it was her heart, thumping so loudly, that waked him.

“Why thank me?” he demanded. “As if anything could keep me away!”

The window in their front door framed darkness.

“Did Emma forget something? Why’d you stop here?”

“I’m not letting you miss this, Martha.” He crossed the hallway and yanked open the door of the closet. “You’re coming.”

“Oh no.” She clutched the neck of the tee-shirt she’d slept in. “I can’t.”

He was rifling through the jackets. “You don’t even know what you’re missing. Do you realize that? You’ve never seen her race!” He held out her winter coat. “Come on.”

“What…what if I jinx her?”

He tried to fit her arm into the coat, but she shook him off. She tried to turn and go back up the stairs, but his fingers dug into her.

“I’m not letting you do this to yourself.”

“Let go! You’re hurting me!”

“And I’m not letting you do it to her.”

Martha clutched the banister. “Don’t be so righteous,” she said. Only the very last syllable didn’t make it out of her mouth.

He threw the coat over her shoulders.

“I had a dream where she fell on the course and everyone ran right past. No one even noticed,” Martha wailed. “What if she goes out too fast, and can’t finish? What if she gets cramps?”

“Winning doesn’t even matter at this point.”

“Don’t lie! You know that’s not true!”

“She’s in this for the long haul. If she falls she’ll get back up, trust me.” He shook his head, as if this were something a blind person could see, then touched her face. “Christ. She’s your daughter, Mart.”

˜

It was like an encampment of hundreds of armies, with tents and banners and uniformed combatants warming up everywhere you looked. The stadium was cupped by rolling land, fringed with woods stark and bare in the November light. It was all gorgeous, like so many battlefields before the bloodshed began. As Jon went to buy Emma a souvenir shirt, Martha searched the beautiful, lithe bodies for the one that belonged to her.

Instead she saw Anthony, already taller than the last time she’d seen him, with a new, slick haircut. He stood in the distance, on the edge of a group of older boys in warm-up suits, one of whom she watched play-wrestle him to the ground and not let him back up. She cringed, expecting Anthony to spit or bite or kick the boy in the balls. Instead he rolled up like a bug till another boy, grinning, gave him a hand back up. Anthony bounced on his toes. He crouched and danced, rocking his pelvis, jabbing the air with his splayed fingers, little tough guy in the sunshine. Martha had never seen him outside the dingy walls of the school. She’d never witnessed this joy that lived in him, this exuberant, heedless geyser bottled up side by side with his anger.

“What are you looking at?” asked Jon, coming up beside her.

“One of my students.”

“Are you sure?” He followed her gaze. “Down here? That’s a pretty big coincidence.”

It was Anthony, wasn’t it? She should call to him, go speak to him—night after night she’d lain awake, thinking of all the things she wished she’d said to him.

“You see your kids wherever you go, don’t you,” Jon said. “You can’t ever leave work behind you.” He rubbed the side of his face. “I always counted on that tenacity. I figured it’d make you stick with me, no matter what.”

Anthony and his boisterous, athletic crew drifted farther away.

“Opposites attract,” Jon went on. “Lately I’ve been thinking that’s a real understatement, when it comes to a long marriage. Opposites are a necessity.”

She was letting Anthony, this happier, more hopeful Anthony, disappear, borne away on the buoyant crowds of runners and spectators. What if the sight of her, the embodiment of his past, poisoned his joy? Or even worse, what if it turned out not to be Anthony? What if this hopeful vision of him resurrected and resilient was only a figment of her own moronic, dogged will to right the world? Her conviction that she had the power to make Anthony happy or sad, make him succeed or fail–it was hubris, that’s what it was, because in the end it was all up to Anthony whether he made it or not. That was the hard truth, that was the bullet you had to bite. What this boy latched onto, what he let pull him under or over, was all up to him. The burden and the glory of every child. Every human. Martha closed her eyes, delivered to a terrifying place.

“Hey!” cried Jon. “Hey look!”

Martha looked. As long as it had been since she saw her child run toward instead away from her, she became even more disoriented.

“Don’t run!” she commanded Emma. “Save your energy!”

That made Emma laugh. “You came.”

“Just do your best,” Martha whispered, folding her close, and Emma laughed again, because it was far too late for advice like that, for any advice, from her mother. Or maybe not.

“I’m so glad you came,” Emma whispered back.

˜

At the sound of the pistol the stands roared, and the runners surged across the field toward the stadium’s opening. In a heartbeat they were out of sight. Jon, who’d studied the course, knew where to be to watch them just before they entered the woods. He took Martha’s arm and they ran, too, Martha stumbling in her clogs, struggling to keep up.

And here the girls came, rounding a curve, thundering down an incline. Martha’s heart banged so furiously, she leaned on Jon for support. The runners had thinned out into an endless string, and at the front was a small pack, four or five girls, which did not include Emma. Martha clutched her chest. Then she saw her, ten yards back, eating up the ground, narrowing the gap stride by stride.

“Emma!” they both bellowed. “Emma!”

The lead pack was tight and impenetrable, and Emma had to go wide of them, close enough now Martha could see the dark pearls of sweat at her hairline. Her concentration was so fierce, Martha didn’t dare call to her again. Their girl sailed past, eyes on the ground, and then, just beyond where they stood, she took the lead.

Martha had never seen anything like it.

The stampeding pack disappeared into the woods.

“Over there, by those cones—that’s where they’ll come out.”

They pressed forward along with all the other families and friends, the stadium in the distance now. Martha caught a glimpse of Coach Bentayou loping across the grass, clutching the stopwatch around her neck like a crown jewel. Coach Mom scurried behind, her face wild.

All of them, all the spectators, knotted by the edge of the woods, waiting.

Emma had looked so strong, unbeatable. But it was a torturous race, and way too early to predict. Anything could happen. A hush came over them as they squinted toward the trees, at the dark tunnel where the runners would emerge. The cold sun beat on Martha’s head and shoulders. Her blood pounded in her ears. She was dizzy with fear and hope, woozy and tipsy, practically air-borne.

 

Art by Kerri Augenstein

Tricia Springstubb is best known as an American writer of children’s and young adult literature. She has also received praise for her work published in literary quarterlies. As of November 2009, her most recent award is the Iowa Review Prize for fiction. Her most recent book sold over 100,000 copies.

bridgemedia | Nike Dunk – Collection – Sb-roscoff

In 2009, we reprinted George Saunders’ FIRST published story.  This story originally appeared in 1986, in Volume 24, Number 2 of The Northwest Review. If you’re a George Saunders fan, you’ll love this story. It’s beautiful, raw, funny, and heartbreaking, and it takes place in the George Saunders dreamworld of meta-reality and unconventional kindness. When we first ran this story at Hunger Mountain, we included an introduction by Tobias Wolff, who had been George Saunders’ graduate creative writing professor, about first reading this story as part of George’s application to the Syracuse MFA program. We hope you enjoy the story and Tobias Wolff’s commentary. –the editors

It’s like this, and it is no dream: First off, a plastic palomino and its stiff-armed rider float above a toybox. The rider is a dyed Custer, and everything’s red. I mean boots and kerchief and holster and eyebrows even. He is one ruined and reduced cavalryman, he was poured and solidified with horribly bowed legs, simply because his only reason for existence is to straddle the palomino. Denied Comanches. But the horse and rider float and revolve anyway, on the lookout for marauders. They rotate at about a revolution a minute, as per specs. Also: a velour basketball, half the size of a real basketball, hangs mid-aired over a crib. In the closet, the arms of tiny jackets and sweaters wave and salute wildly. The threads of the carpet flatten out like grass under a helicopter, and then circular waves run outward from the middle of the room. When the waves die down, it’s just a regular carpet again. The whole cycle takes three and a half minutes. An empty rocking chair rocks faster than any mortal granny could.

Out the wide window across the room, it’s a crescent moon in bough-crook kind of thing; caramel lights through sectioned panes in houses of white wood, trees blown and slanting like smoke. Windows and doors of the houses wide open with Trust. Children breathe pillow air. Hills roll away behind the row of houses in a fairly pastoral manner. It is a kind of smooth blue Ireland. And the blue is in the room too. It is the blue of night scenes in animation. The cloak of night and all that. It is very much like the nights when little kids point at the moon and say odd things. There is the smell of very clean carpet. There is no sound of bugs and no sound of rocking chair or wind or of anything scraping the windowpane. But you can hear the air conditioning. I rub my window clean and enjoy a soft drink.

Here’s something, basically the abuse of an elderly couple. Watch: when they first step in, I’m not worried. They stand in the doorway. He pushes back his baseball cap. She goes for the camera and says, “Cry Pete, woudja lookit all this…” All is well. His hands are behind his back and he steps in, to figure out how it all works. She inspects the finish on the dresser. That she can touch. I have no problem with that. He gets closer and closer to the window (and the village of the caramel lights) and, by gar, it still looks real. It even looks real when his toes touch the crib. Which sits protectively in front of the window. But then he puts his dusty boots on the crib, and his hands on the window frame, and pulls himself up, leans in close to the pane. I cannot have that. I key the mike: “Please refrain from interaction with the components, sir!” Is that any way to talk? Still, it’s a living.

He jumps down like he’s been pinched on the inner thigh and chunks his elbow on the crib and loses his hat in the plastic birds of the mobile. He has acquired a hot and red face, with awkward strands of white hair plastered across it. They stand in the doorway for a long time. He breathes hard. They don’t want to look like they’ve cut and run.

I opt for the Juarez at the Hollo-Chick Haus. It’s a South of the Border Taste Riot. A Hollo-Chick is a kind of chicken conglomerate, the size of a football and hollowed out. You can have whatever you want in there, croutons or sweet-and-sour pork or a light salad even. The Juarez is the one filled with sour cream and refried beans and some little sliced black things. I opt for extra sauce packets.

Hollo-Chick Haus is national. Everyone knows Hans the Hollo-Chick. In the TV ads he strolls along an alpine trail, steam pouring from his beak. One enormous and multi-colored wing is draped over some kids. They look pleased. The voiceover says, “The chicken with the inside as big as all outdoors – and better tasting!”

I finish my Juarez and return the extra sauce packets to Annie, my girl. She used to work at the Haus by the storage units. But then she got transferred in. She says the food set-up is the same, but in here, atmosphere is imperative. At the counter she tells me she has to stay late. This is an Employee Objective Assessment Evening. I forgot. I hang my head and thumbprint the stainless steel counter.

Bart the Manager squeezes between Annie and the heat lamps, in the unit’s Hans suit. That really hacks me off, that squeezing. He puts his left wing on her and tells me he’ll get her home, not to worry. At least that’s what I think he says. It’s muffled through the beak. He squeezes back the way he came. I wonder how much he can feel through that suit. Annie sneaks me a free Coke and I drink it in the tunnel, on the way back to the Room. You’re nuts if you think I’m making any of this up.

˜

I shut it all down manually and come out. Everything floats slowly down and the lights come on in the room. It’s bright enough to see the paint strokes on the white furniture. The window has gone blank and looks like a movie screen, set up in someone’s living room and waiting for films of Uncle Pete’s trek across the Mojave. Overall, it feels like morning in the real room of a real kid, though it’s actually just after midnight. I vacuum the carpet and scrub the baseboards. I check the wiring in the Palomino Quadrant. I remake the bed and dust the dresser. When it’s like this, it’s easy to believe that Employee Parking is behind the window. Which it is. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve tried to grind against Annie down there, at my car. Even in her brown polyester uniform. And rust vest. And hair net. And lederhosen. I just can’t help it. I’m a man.

On the phone, Annie tells me about last night’s dream: Bart the Manager, in an ill-fitting tuxedo, picks her lock and compels her to don odd lingerie. He looks almost svelte, out of the Hans suit. He kisses her with his overly red mouth and his wispy mustache. Again and again, and with the TV on. They make popcorn, he keeps kissing her. She tastes the butter and salt on him. He tells her a pitiful story from his youth, something about his bathing trunks and a schnauzer, and persists in the kissing. She begins to warm to him. And on and on. It gets mildly kinky; some kind of strange submission scenario where he forces her, at butter-knifepoint, to carry the TV down into the parking garage and back up again. They reach new heights. “I swear, it seemed so real!” she tells me, in a tone of wonder. I tell her it’s interesting.

˜

The couple is young. Their eyes adjust to the dark and she says, “Hot Damn!” He looks around coolly and says, “Shout down Babylon.” She says, “Still, there’s something about it,” and he says, “Ay, ‘tis dreamlike, lass,” and squeezes her breasts from behind. He slinks around in front of her and faces the same way she does and takes her hands, slides them down over him. He pushes her back against the wall, beside the picture of Mother Goose in the sensitive garden. For a while I think it’s going to be okay, but then she actually opens his pants. I have my finger on the mike button but then they move so fast and fine, there is a flurry of clothes and his buns shine globe-like in the light from the caramel village. They really start moving then, together. Above the waist she is dumplings on tramps. I do not key the mike. I do not say anything. And it is not mere voyeurism either. And it is not just the idea they are fucking, standing up, in the Floating Object Room. It is their talking. They have each other kind of by the ears and they’re staring at each other hard and bucking wildly too. And the talking never stops. There is something about a time by some train tracks. Wild geese, seen from a porch. He says he will tomb with her. But first Mexico, and all that implies. God, what are they talking about? It is a foreign tongue. I want it.

I still just stand there, even when, at the end, he reaches out with some kind of broad and calloused hand and whacks the basketball out of the air and across the room. It jangles the metal trash can in the corner, that which has never been jangled before. I let them finish. Boy do I.

He is breathing hard after, with his face down in her hair. He says, “Babylon has been shouted (gasp), in a sense…” and I hit the mike button without thinking and say, “Damn right!” For just a second they’re as stunned as the old couple and it makes my stomach hurt. But then they’re themselves again and he says come out come out wherever you are and I do, grinning like an initiate. He beats my ass from here to Topeka. He wipes my lip-blood with the velour basketball. The room is a mess.

I feel them help me up. I see the tidy, coyote-less hills of the night scene, and the trees still appearing to blow in a fictional wind. I smell her next to me, her sweat and what’s left of her perfume and the smell of them on her. He is saying some things. At first I am just waiting for the words to stop but then I start to hear them. They sound a little like an apology, or at least an explanation. He says I violated something. He says a lot of things. The words sound like instructions and then finally they sound like an invitation.

˜

We drive in a fine and maniacal desert. We drink cheap wine and mine tastes bloody. But I don’t care. We see pink stars over glaring mesas and delicate red and white mini-marts and a hitchhiker dressed like Bing Crosby. The desert is all prophets and loam and rusty gas tanks, if you see what I mean. I’m sitting between the two of them and our knees touch. He keeps calling me bud. We’re singing obscure songs I didn’t know I knew. Dusty folkloric ballads and oddball songs from the sixties, songs about unions I guess, and simple blond girls on next-door porches, freightjumpers, that kind of thing. We’re having a hell of a time. We sing them loud. We rollick.

After a while I ask to be left in the desert and they leave me in the desert. They give me a bottle of wine. I drink it on a big rock. The rock has little pits in it and a smashed Mountain Dew can. My lips hurt a lot but I keep drinking and starting up those songs. I sing them as far as I know them. The foreman said well bless my soul. Everything in the black and hacked desert is twinkling like mad and I throw red rocks like arrowheads into the dark, and sit in that desert and think, think, think.

 

Art by Kerri Augenstein

George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children’s books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian.

spy offers | Nike

Bobby Alamo’s dead. Just don’t know it yet. No footprints. Hair stopped growing. Sense of taste is gone. He only exhales now. Like he’s got one last breath inside him and needs to dole it out.

We’re not bodies with souls. We’re souls with a body.

Couple of Providence wise guys down at Mayflower Lanes argue about how and why an ace in the hole like Bobby Alamo got himself whacked. They bowl candlepins on Tuesdays. League night. Knights of Columbus team. Out with their goomahs. Deals are made over pizza and warm beer. Legacies are reevaluated. Stories told.

Bobby Alamo? One hell of a cleaner.

Mr. Diddle was his downfall.

That Vegas job?

Father Niko’s on the team. And the septic tank guy who launders the cash. Stinky Muffin Top. Swears he’s seen Bobby Alamo with his own eyes. Looking like death warmed over.

Bobby Alamo? With the Yoda tattoo?

Shooting the shit at HoJos.

Like he done every morning for twenty-two years. Ever since he timed out of Walpole. Same booth. Same tired look in his eyes. At least when he’s in town. Between jobs. Disappears for days at a time and then shows up like a tomcat. All flirty with that waitress.

Joey the Peanut’s niece.

Francine.

The retard?

She’s a little slow is all. Shy.

Two scrambled. White toast with grape jelly. Bobby Alamo always mixes the jelly in with the eggs. Francine noticed that first thing. The purple-gray sweetness, with just a hint of salty.

You gonna play with it all day?

I should have married you when I had the chance.

Francine and Bobby Alamo get up to the occasional nooner. Strictly informal arrangement. Francine’s got six kids at home. Piece of shit husband to feed.

The one that works down at The Dunk. Driving the Zamboni.

Bobby Alamo and Francine fuck at the Holiday Inn. That suite in back overlooking I-95. They make it quick. That is, if it happens at all. These days they’ll mostly just cuddle. Watch some tube. Maybe talk old times. Sometimes Bobby Alamo squeezes the skin around his Yoda tattoo and makes him talk dirty.

Francine pussy, Yoda like.

It’s a fleeting pleasure for both of them.

Do me again, Bobby Alamo. Like you mean business.

I’m tuckered out, babe. Let’s just watch the TV for awhile. Something old. Where you can tell the good guys from the bad.

Francine’s never seen Bobby Alamo’s cock. He’ll climb under the covers in his underwear like a boy at camp and then strip down. Curtains closed in case some fed is watching. Lights off. She’s had to learn his body through touch. Afterward, Francine lets him sleep. Puts her uniform back on. She smells of bacon and pancake batter.

Escalade.

What?

You said that in your sleep, Bobby Alamo. You whispered “Escalade.”

Bobby Alamo’s a cleaner. Best in the business. Somebody screws the pooch, he gets rid of the mess. Scrubs the crime scene. Disappears the bodies. Most cleaners are street-smart. Bobby Alamo’s book smart too.

Master’s degree from BU.

No shit.

Father Niko’s got a turkey going. Lane five. The lucky one.

Molecular genetics. Rumor has it. Fella can really wipe down a crime scene. Take a first-class clusterfuck and turn it into chocolate cake.

Father Niko’s using that orange Day-Glo bowling ball. The one he had custom-made.

Bobby Alamo cleans the clusterfuck, sure, but then spins an alternate story that he wants the cops to hear.

Bobby Alamo carries an aluminum suitcase with him. Filled with vials and packets. Petri dishes. Test tubes. Sprinkles DNA like fairy dust.

Has the CSI geeks running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

Bobby Alamo’s got virtual savvy as well. Internet presence. Credit history. Facebook. Public records. All that jazz.

Just think of the possibilities. Erase anybody you want. Clean up all your snafus.

Bobby Alamo’s got an iPad. Film-editing software. Hacker code. Knows how to augment the matrix. Doctor surveillance tapes. Medical records. Dental X-rays.

He’s got a guy he goes to for code.

That fat fuck from the ’Tute.

Captain Jack.

Real mamma’s boy. Lives in her basement over in Braintree.

Captain Jack sits in front of the tube all day. Gamer. Pizza boxes and Mountain Dew cans. Stacked six feet high. Sweat suit. Never brushes his teeth. Except when Bobby Alamo visits. Then he scrubs himself clean. Take a nice long bath. Puts on a suit and tie. Gets his mamma to fix a lasagna. Old-country spices. Hand-pulled mozzarella. Tomatoes and peppers from her garden.

She put a bunch of single servings in the Tupperware. Extra sauce on the side. Just like you like.

Thanks, Jack-o.

Captain Jack hands him a flash drive.

Everything you need is burned onto here.

Bobby Alamo’s puts the flash drive in his jacket pocket. He pats it a couple of times just to make sure it’s there.

Woof woof woof woof.

Bobby Alamo’s cell phone rings. He’s got it set to “Who Let the Dogs Out?”

Woof woof woof woof.

Bobby Alamo doesn’t need to look at the number. He’s know it’s Tony Vega.

A thing went down in Philly, Bobby. You need to be on a bus tonight.

Next morning Bobby Alamo’s in back of a Walmart, stuffing a security guard’s corpse into the trunk of a rental car with some kid he’s never met. Bobby Alamo prefers to work alone, but the kid is Tony Vega’s nephew and so there’s nothing he can do about it. Kid’s a real wiseass. Calls himself “Kid the Kid.” Washed out of the army or whatever and now he’s trying to learn a trade. Kid the Kid’s spent the morning trying to jerk Bobby Alamo’s chain.

I heard you were queer.

They’re on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Driving through Amish country. Looking for a good place to dump a body. Kid the Kid keeps trying to get under Bobby Alamo’s skin.

I heard you can’t get it up with Francine no more.

Bobby Alamo flicks his cigarette out the window. Doesn’t say a word. Kid the Kid keeps trying to put Bobby Alamo’s panties in a twist.

I heard Francine rubs her pussy all over you, but all you do is watch cooking shows on the tube.

Finally, Bobby Alamo’s had enough.

Look, Kid, I’m dead, all right? There’s a lot of human emotion that don’t interest me no more.

Kid the Kid squints up his eyes, trying to decide if Bobby Alamo’s pulling his leg.

What do you mean you’re dead?

I’m dead. What more can I say?

You mean you’re dead like you’re a marked man?

No. I mean I am literally dead. As I appear in front of you.

You mean right now?

Yes, now.

Kid the Kid don’t seem fazed. He acts like he’s seen it all before. Like he’s seen a lot of a crazy shit in the past couple of years and talking to a dead cleaner is just another day on the job.

Sure, man. Whatever toots your horn.

The wise guys down at Mayflower Lanes sit in rapt attention as Father Niko describes the scene. He’s heard the story from somebody in confession who heard the story from another guy who heard it from Tony Vega himself.

After they dump the body, they stop at a titty bar Bobby Alamo knows in Harrisburg.

Where do they dump the body?

Some farm. Amish guy feeds him to his pigs. Owes Tony Vega a favor.

At the titty bar, Kid the Kid and Bobby Alamo buy a few lap dances. After awhile, Kid the Kid goes in back, into one of the executive suites, and bones some ginger with tiny tits and a cesarean scar and a Hello Kitty tramp stamp who’s putting herself through nursing school. Something about Nursing School Ginger is familiar to Bobby Alamo, but he can’t say what. Bobby Alamo hangs out with a girl called Brandy Moonshine. Brandy Moonshine asks Bobby Alamo if he wants to ride around the block in the massage limo but Bobby Alamo says he’d rather sit and talk. The two of them sit there for a few minutes in dead silence until finally Brandy Moonshine decides to break the ice.

You’re dead, aren’t you?

How’d you guess?

Had an uncle who died. Walked around just like you. Vacant on one hand, but on the other hand filled with remorse.

I think a lot of folks are walking around dead these days.

Maybe we’re in the end times.

Maybe Heaven is too full with souls and now God is filling up the slums.

They sit in silence for a few more minutes. Then Bobby Alamo sighs.

I just don’t know why I’m still walking the Earth.

Brandy Moonshine holds Bobby Alamo’s hand.

Maybe you’ve been chosen for a higher purpose.

Bobby Alamo closes his eyes.

It’s exactly like you see in the movies. I’m lying dead on some street, but I’m looking down at it. My soul is just sort of hovering above my corpse.

Back in Providence, Stinky Muffin Top is playing Ms. Pac-Man in the arcade. Father Niko chugs down the rest of his beer. One of the wise guys pours him another glass from the plastic pitcher on the table. The other wise guy looks at his watch.

You fellas got some place to be?

Father Niko’s getting pretty sloppy. He knows it and tries to focus his mind on the theological implications of Bobby Alamo’s predicament.

Bobby Alamo is in both locations at once, you see. He’s both here and there. Dead on the street, but also at the titty bar.

Brandy Moonshine takes Bobby Alamo out to the parking lot. They sit on the hood of his rental car. Like a couple of kids in high school getting ready to watch a drive-in movie on a hot summer night. Brandy Moonshine strokes Bobby Alamo’s hair. Tells Bobby Alamo she’s been sent to help him with his journey.

How do you feel?

You mean here with you or there with my body?

With me here, Bobby.

Bobby Alamo’s body is hundreds of miles away. Somewhere in southern California. His last job. On the way to LAX. Body lying on the street. Next to an Escalade.

Bobby Alamo was shot in the Escalade and tried to crawl away.

Stinky Muffin Top asks Father Niko if he has any more quarters for the machine.

I’m working on the high score.

Bobby Alamo is bleeding out. One hand grabbing the gutter. Like he was trying to lift himself up. The bugs have already found him. A fly has landed on his eyelid and is laying her eggs beneath his cornea. Bobby Alamo wonders why he’s being given these visions.

If I suck your cock here, Bobby, do you think maybe your body will get hard there?

Bobby Alamo chuckles. Embarrassed. Nervous.

Worth a try, right?

Brandy Moonshine unzips Bobby Alamo’s fly. Digs around for his cock. Pulls it out.

I let my life slip by. I tried to grab the good times. I clutched at love and it went right through my fingertips.

Bobby Alamo closes his eyes. His body is hundreds of miles away.

Escalade.

What’s that?

Brandy Moonshine’s come up for breath.

I just remembered. There’s a guy in the passenger seat.

Bloody face. Air bags deployed.

Mr. Diddle.

The fella Bobby Alamo was cleaning up after when the shit hit the fan.

The wise guys are in the men’s room at Mayflower Lanes. The walls are decorated with silhouettes of pilgrims bowling. Father Niko is in a stall. Puking his guts out.

(Meanwhile, somewhere in southern California, while Bobby Alamo is getting blown on the hood of his rental car in the parking lot of a titty bar, two archangels are moving cautiously toward the Escalade with their pieces drawn.)

They’re after Mr. Diddle’s shoe.

Father Niko wipes the puke off his mouth with his sleeve. There are bits of pizza in the puke. Mixed in with the beer. One of the wise guys hands Father Niko a linen handkerchief. The handkerchief is embroidered with the initials “T.V.” Father Niko leans up against the wall next to the urinals. He unzips his fly and uses the handkerchief to pull out his cock. Father Niko cradles his cock in the handkerchief, like it’s an unclean thing in his hand. He pisses. He tries to aim at the deodorant puck in the urinal, but ends up pissing on the floor. The wise guy closest to Father Niko has on a pair of thousand-dollar shoes. The piss sprays over the fine Corinthian leather. Later, at the sink, the other wise guy helps Father Niko clean the puke off his collar.

The angels are after the shoe?

Mr. Diddle’s shoe. What’s hidden inside the heel.

Bobby Alamo met Mr. Diddle in a high roller’s suite in Vegas. Mr. Diddle was a producer at one of the big studios. He had a dead call girl in the toilet and Bobby Alamo was there to make her disappear.

You the guy?

I’m the guy.

Tony Vega sent you?

That’s right.

Sure took your time getting here.

Mr. Diddle unlatches the chain on the door and lets him in. Bobby Alamo sets his suitcase on the bed. He opens it and takes out rubber gloves and an apron.

Where is she?

Toilet. The one off the master bedroom.

Mr. Diddle’s cell phone rings.

Listen, I gotta take this. There’s some coke in there if you need a little something to get you through.

Mr. Diddle walks out onto the balcony. Bobby Alamo steps into the bathroom. It’s really gaudy. Golden swan faucets. The shower’s the size of a garage. Three shower heads.

To wash up after a threesome.

There are two toilets and two bidets.

For the Japanese clientele.

Just then, the emergency exit of the strip club opens. Nursing School Ginger steps out into the evening. She’s wearing Kid the Kid’s leather jacket. He’s nowhere in sight.

There’s a scuzzy area in back where the dancers hang out. Smoke cigarettes. Give cheap hand jobs behind the dumpster. Plastic baggies on the ground. Crack. Some harder stuff. A few syringes. Bouncers sometimes roll drunk frat boys. Put empty wallets back into their pockets. Pour them into taxis. Send them back to the suburbs. A couple of folding chairs to take a load off.

Nursing School Ginger has a white sheet. She and a couple of the other dancers attach the sheet to the dumpster with duct tape. Like a movie screen.

Bobby Alamo and Brandy Moonshine are still sitting on the hood of the rental car. Nursing School Ginger sees Bobby Alamo and sneers at him. Bobby Alamo feels a rush of adrenaline. A sudden racing heart. It’s an unfamiliar sensation.

Fear.

Brandy Moonshine snuggles up to Bobby Alamo. Strokes his hair.

You’re perfectly safe with me.

After she finishes hanging the sheet from the dumpster, Nursing School Ginger sits in one of the chairs and starts painting her nails. It’s like she’s waiting for a movie to start. Bobby Alamo stares at Nursing School Ginger for the longest time.

You know her?

She was on the floor. In Mr. Diddle’s bathroom.

The dead girl is so small that at first Bobby Alamo doesn’t notice her. She’s barely ninety pounds. Naked, except for a pair of plaid socks that make her look like a schoolgirl. Bobby Alamo can tell she’s been around though. Cesarean scar. Hello Kitty tramp stamp. Needle marks between her toes. There’s a spoon on the sink, next to a lighter and a bag of smack.

Meanwhile, in the titty bar parking lot, the dead are gathering. Hookers. Soccer moms. Schoolteachers. Mechanics. Pizza delivery boys. Baseball players. Gamblers. Rodeo clowns. Security guards. Accountants. Priests. Bikers. Bartenders. Freaks. Showmen. Convenience store clerks. And a mall Santa Claus. Bobby Alamo recognizes them all. These are the people that Bobby Alamo has cleaned over the years. Some were intended victims. Others were at the wrong place at the wrong time. But all of them Bobby Alamo made disappear.

Brandy Moonshine rubs Bobby Alamo’s earlobe. She twists it around in her fingers. She smells like baby powder and musk. Some of Brandy Moonshine’s enchanted body glitter gets caught in Bobby Alamo’s eyes.

You erased them all, Bobby. They don’t have names or memory.

Back in Vegas, Bobby Alamo cleans up Mr. Diddle’s mess. After he’s done in the bathroom, Bobby Alamo makes Mr. Diddle strip on a sheet of plastic. He digs through his wallet and other personal effects. He places everything in a burn bag. He tells Mr. Diddle that he has to leave town for a few weeks. Mr. Diddle doesn’t seem happy at first, but the gravity of the situation has begun to sink in.

Anything else you’ve forgotten to tell me about?

Mr. Diddle hesitates. Then he takes off one of his shoes. Opens a secret compartment in the heel.

Roger Moore gave it to me. He used these shoes in one of the Bond films.

Inside the compartment is a reel of Super 8 film. Bobby Alamo wants to put the film in the burn bag, but Mr. Diddle won’t let him.

That’s my meal ticket, Bobby. I’m gonna use it as leverage with the old man.

Tony Vega?

God.

In Providence, the wise guys walk Father Niko out to his Toyota. Father Niko’s a little wobbly on his feet. He’s starting to regret telling the wise guys about the film.

It’s just a rumor I heard in confession. Nothing to be taken too seriously.

The film is a collection of lost seconds. Those moments that slipped away without our noticing. Mr. Diddle said he found the film in Orson Welles’ secret vault at RKO. Welles invented a metaphysical technique where he installed a movie camera in his head so he could film Heaven after he died and project it back to the editing room.

Meanwhile, in the future, a white limo pulls up outside the titty bar. It’s a block long. Strobe light flashing inside. Throbbing music. Techno mix.

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard…

The archangels step out of the limo. They glide over to the projector. They load the film and begin to project it onto the white sheet.

It’s the film God plays us when he’s reviewing our lives.

Father Niko pauses for a moment, to let that sink in. The wise guys aren’t even listening. Something else is on their minds. Something pressing.

God doesn’t play our entire life. He doesn’t have time for that. Instead he picks out fifteen mundane seconds.

Father Niko belches. Tastes greasy pizza in his mouth. Yeasty beer.

Those fifteen seconds are actually our most tragic junctions. Moments where we could have decided to take a better path and didn’t. When you could have turned off the television and taken a walk with your wife. When you might have hugged your boy instead of pouring yourself a drink. When you could have stopped your car and helped out a stranger. We’re forced to watch the memories over and over and feel the regret.

Father Niko steadies himself against the Toyota.

Heaven isn’t what you think it is.

In the parking lot of the titty bar, the Orson Welles film begins to play. Images flash on the screen. A lost dog. A forgotten toy. An unattended funeral.

One by one, the people in the parking lot step up to the bright sheet. They see a familiar image, touch it, and then are consumed by a bright, holy light. The light turns them into dust. As each soul touches the sheet, the pile of dust grows on the cement. It’s as if all the lost souls that Bobby Alamo has cleaned over the years are once more filled with their humanity.

They exist again, briefly, in their loss. That pain allows them to die.

An image of a blue beach ball floating in a wading pool plays on the screen. Nursing School Ginger must recognize the backyard, because she walks up to the sheet, touches it, and is consumed. Brandy Moonshine sees a little league baseball game on the screen, kisses Bobby Alamo on the forehead, and disappears too. In a few minutes, the parking lot is empty. There is a huge pile of ash and dust next to the screen. The archangels hand Bobby Alamo a golden shop vac and make him clean up the mess.

In Providence, the wise guys put two bullets in the back of Father Niko’s head. The wise guys dispose of it in one of Stinky Muffin Top’s septic tanks, since Bobby Alamo isn’t around anymore to disappear the body.

David Hancock has received two OBIE awards for playwriting (The Convention of Cartography and The Race of the Ark Tattoo). He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Creative Capital grant, The CalArts/Alpert Award in Theatre, and the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. David’s recent fiction can be found in Permafrost, Interim, Wild Violet, The Massachusetts Review, Ping Pong, and Amarillo Bay.

Running Sneakers Store | NIKE

She’d repeated the story often, imagining it so clearly—the dark eyes of the boys, dusty hair and dirty fingernails, the heat like a fist. She felt like it had happened to her, though it hadn’t. It was just a story she told.

~

The street where she parked dead-ended in an expanse of chain-link that divided the river parkway from Delta Bend. A narrow gate led directly out onto the levee, where she usually began her run, overlooking the deserted backyards of houses where people must have lived but never seemed to be—cold barbecues, placid pools, empty patios.

The levee separated the houses from a hundred yards of riverfront. The top of the embankment was about as wide as a residential road, but poorly paved. On weekends, parents trailing small children on bikes, dog walkers, and the occasional park maintenance truck trundled in a steady stream along the ridge. For more serious cyclists, the cycling path below sliced through the floodplain about halfway between the levee and the river, and beyond that, a rough-hewn horse trail divided the land again, meandering through blackberry thickets and the deep shade of trees along the riverbank. Footpaths, worn by years of hikers and runners, wove among paths like tangled yarn.

On her way through the gate onto the levee she passed three loud-talking boys coming out, sun-washed and maybe a little drunk, two of them shirtless. They were all a head taller than she was, as boys of that age are, and their bodies filled her vision as they came, flat nipples and thin muscle, ribs and skin so close she side-stepped to avoid brushing against them. She flicked her wrist and wrapped the leash another turn around the back of her hand, pulled her dog close to her hip.

The boys passed behind her, and one of them whistled low. She pretended not to hear. She knew who he was whistling at, but she was alone, and they were boys, more than two. She tried to be flattered instead of afraid. She’d worn a new athletic skirt with quick-dry fabric and shorts underneath, and the summer heat rose from the asphalt, warming her legs, strong and tan from daily runs. The boys were laughing, the doors on their pickup thudding shut as she passed through the gate, remembering days when rowdy boys whistled more often—days when she might have gone swimming all afternoon with boys like that, instead of stealing a quick run before spaghetti night with her husband and two kids. A low-slung camp chair in the shallows near the shore, the current flowing round her calves, bikini straps slipped off her carefully oiled shoulders. And a beer, of course. A cold bottled beer sluicing the back of her throat, watching boys show off on a rope swing nearby.

~

What happened in the story was this: a college friend had traveled to Guatemala. He’d left the bus in the first village he came to between Guatemala City and Atitlán, intending to hike overland to the caldera. He’d walked alone for miles over steep and dusty trails, climbing into the heat of exposed ridges, descending into the cool shaded hillsides, admiring distant villages where undulating lines of colored washing danced on lines outside low-slung houses.  He heard something behind him. Thunder? But almost immediately he realized no—the sky overhead was painfully blue, and he recognized the sound of running feet a split-second before three boys overtook him in a pounding wash of noise and motion. And then gone. The power of their passage reverberated in the quiet left behind, and her friend stopped for a moment, his heart pinging in his ears. But then he kept walking, feeling the crunch of dry earth under his boots, the sweat gathering on his skin, wondering if he should turn back because some boys ran by. He was in a foreign country—but hadn’t he come to experience things he didn’t understand? There was surely a logical explanation—they had lost a goat, or they were running a traditional footrace. They were late for some mid-day celebration he didn’t know about. He was still turning the possibilities over in his mind a short while later, still thinking about them when he rounded a bend and found them waiting, clutching knives and asking politely for his money, his backpack, and his boots.

~

“Com’on, Dogg, we’re up. I’m hungry.” The younger one opened the pickup truck door while the mean one looked down the levee after her. He looked back at his friends. “You see them cakes on her?”

The yes-man said, “Yo, how old was Betty, you think?”

“Who gives a fuck?” He came back to the truck, walking fast, and climbed in, forcing the younger one to draw his knees up and scoot to the middle. “Drive up to Western.”

There was another entrance to the parkway at Western Avenue, about a mile upriver. Sometimes kids drank beer in the weedy parking lot there. The young one ran a hand through his wet hair and said, “I thought we were going to eat.” The yes-man gunned the engine up to the main road, jerked a rolling turn through the stop sign towards Western Avenue, driving fast.

~

The light was gold and low as the boys came off the levee, tumbling through the gate nipping and snarling at each other. There were three—one ropy and bare-chested, two with baseball caps. She couldn’t say which two. One or all of them might have had wet hair. They were white boys—not teenagers, exactly, but not much older than that. Or maybe they were skinny men pushing thirty. She couldn’t be sure; she’d looked away quickly, trying not to draw their attention. One of them made a noise at her. A vulgar sound.

She wanted the dog out of the car. She gripped the key, focused on sliding it into the lock without dropping it, fighting the urge to steal a glance at them across the street. The hatchback rose with a hiss and she ducked under it, clipped the leash to Diva’s collar and stood to one side as she dropped to the asphalt in a two-part thud. She controlled her breath, moving deliberately, even obliviously. Convincing them—she hoped, should they be watching—that she wasn’t concerned with them in the least.

Now that she had Diva out, something shifted on the street. The boys turned away, went on about the business of packing up to leave. But as she crossed to the parkway gate, one of them said something to the others she didn’t quite hear. Didn’t matter. She wasn’t looking at them, why would they be talking to her? But he repeated it, louder, tossing it after her into the street like a challenge: “Hey, Breezy, you’re looking fine, Girl. Come on back here with them goodies. Why you high sidin’?”

~

“Why doncha step off that girl?” The youngest one opened the pick-up truck door. The mean one stood at the gate, watching her walk away. He looked back at them. “Bitch was fine, wasn’t she?”

The other one, his sidekick and general yes-man said, “I dunno, Hoss, I seen two car seats in the backa that wagon. She’s somebody’s mother.”

“Who gives a fuck?” The mean one stepped through the gate and out onto the levee. She was moving fast along the top of it away from him, shaking her ass under that little skirt. The dog trotting alongside. Maybe college, he thought. It might not be her car. You could be sure a girl like that went to college.

The youngest one said: “Roll up,” but the mean one stayed where he was. He tried again. “Com’on, B, I’m hungry.”

The mean one patted his pants pockets. “I think I left something down at the river. Gimme my shirt, I’m a go see if I can find it.”

“What’d you forget?” said the yes-man, tossing him a damp t-shirt.

“Aw, hell no,” said the young one. “I’m starving, yo.”

“I said I forgot something, Motherfucker. I’m going to get it, and you two assholes stay here and wait for me.”

He took off over the levee, walking fast.

~

She didn’t have time to wait them out. Colors were deepening, darkness bleeding along the horizon, her shadow long and thin beside her. She should turn around, maybe come from an unexpected direction. And if they were behind her? If they were behind her on the trail she could turn and cut through the brush closer to the river—maybe get behind them. If they had gone ahead, up toward Western to intercept her, then she would have outsmarted them. She turned impulsively and took the footpath down to the water, looping back through the trees, Diva panting, every flickering leaf and snapping twig unnerving. She moved quickly. Those boys were probably off having pizza somewhere, probably on the couch in someone’s apartment playing Xbox. Her life was not a paperback thriller. Talking about “goodies” like she was something tasty, something sweet. He’d called her something—what was it? They so fully occupied her thoughts that by the time they stepped out on the trail in front of her, she felt like it had already happened.

~

A fine girl. It had been a while since anyone referred to her as a “girl,” and even longer since she’d been considered a fine one. How fine would she look if they had seen her as she usually was—pushing a stroller, buckling a grubby toddler into a car seat, cradling the baby in her arms, nursing at her breast? She crossed the street from her car to the levee gate, letting Diva lead the way at the end of the leash, her tail high. They were only boys. Just young, not criminal.

She’d read somewhere it was important not to act like a victim—behaving like prey made you more attractive to predators. Or something. To show herself unafraid, to prove the innocence of the situation, to them, maybe—to herself, surely—once she reached the gate she smiled and called over her shoulder, “And way too old for you!”

A confession of her age would make her immediately less attractive. If she said she was old, then they would see that she was, and she’d slip beneath their attention. She imagined their disgust at seeing her body up close—her soft stomach, deflated breasts, the cellulite on the back of her thighs.

Never too old for a nine-inch cock! one yelled.

Mine’s nine-and-a-half! said another. It’s tool time, baby!

She pulled Diva closer to her hip and resisted the urge to run, though that’s what she’d come to do. Running suddenly felt like an invitation to get chased. She looked out across the field below the levee and to the cycling path. A lone cyclist spun past far below, 40 yards off, and a pair of ponytailed joggers bobbed in the distance, lit in the final glow of the lowering sun. Up on the levee, a breeze lifted her hair, the cooling shadows rising up to meet her. Where were all the people?

~

“Leave her alone, why doncha?” The youngest one opened the car door. The mean one stood on the levee, watching her walk away, whistling low. He looked back over at them. “Breezy was fine, wasn’t she?”

The yes-man watched her, too. “I don’t know, Dogg, she might’ve been old.”

“Shut-up, Cletus,” said the mean one. “She was fine.”

“Where’re we going to eat?” said the younger one.

The mean one climbed in the truck next to him, squeezing him to the middle, making him draw his knees up. “I’m all outta cream,” he said. “Let’s go to Giovanni’s and you assholes can buy me some fucking pizza.”

~

As they came through the narrow gate, pushing and shoving each other and talking loud, she immediately wished she’d brought Diva. She felt them noticing her, alone in the street next to her car, as they gathered around their truck. She busied herself at the car door, trying to decide whether she should just get back in and leave. They’d think she forgot something. And who cared what they thought, anyway? Maybe they wouldn’t even notice. She was confident, practical. Getting back in the car was s