FWRICTION : REVIEW

Paper Bag Dragon, by Megan Paonessa

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:05:11 -0400

He smelled stale. Like––I don’t know what. An old paper bag maybe. Or I could be recalling the lunch sacks he used to hand me, full of odd gifts like a ceramic grinning cat, or a bar of Dove soap. I do remember that the smell of him left a taste stuck in the back of my throat, a chemical taste, like the one you get when you walk by an ethanol plant, and the taste sat there well into the evening, every single time after I left Paul. Things like that stay with a person.

I went to the nursing home twice a week to complete my community service. I had imagined myself picking up trash along the sides of highways, but I found out they reserve that job for a different sort of felon. Me, I was allocated to the old people.

“Harmless,” they called me, pitying me I guess. Maybe they thought I’d like talking with old people. I don’t. Not usually.

The first time I saw him, Paul was sitting in a wheel chair next to the front desk. There was a swinging door right there that opened and closed according to when the nurse pushed a button from inside the office. Very One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. I signed in.

“This is a nursing home right?”

The nurse thought I was joking; she thought it was a bad joke.

I turned the clipboard back around for her. “So what now?”

She slumped onto her left hipbone and looked at me with silent distain. When I didn’t speak, she did, “This is your first day?”

“Is that a problem?”

“No one said you were coming. Not a new guy.”

“I’d be more than happy to go if you want to sign my paper,” I said, smiling politely.

“Fat chance. Here,” she pressed a big red button and the double doors started opening real slow. “You can take Paul back to the rec room.”

I looked at Paul looking at me and nothing registered on his face. Not even a blink. “Just roll him?” I asked the nurse.

“He won’t bite.”

I told her to fuck off––hypothetically.

I swung old Paul around and wheeled him down a long, white hallway. I didn’t know where I was headed and the nurse didn’t seem to mind. She closed the doors behind me.

Everything was white, the walls, the floor, the ceiling. It smelled like bleach, and there was bad elevator music playing just below the horrible buzzing of florescent lights. It was a place I hoped I would never go to die.

“I slayed the dragon.”

“Excuse me?”

Paul turned his body around in the wheel chair. “I’ve traveled many months by land and sea to get to Libya and slay the dragon.”

“Really. Libya,” I said.

He searched my face with squinted eyes like I wasn’t someone to be trusted––which I probably wasn’t, but who’s to care if you’re telling fairy tales? Paul turned back around and huffed, crossing his arms. He slumped back against his seat. Then, for good measure, he sat up and slammed back into the seat again.

“Hey!” I steadied the chair. “You might tip.”

He was pissed.

I felt it was time to drop the guy off. At the first open door I stopped and peered inside for a nurse. The room was equally sterile. Like a hospital room. A cot, a sink, and a small TV on one of the walls filled the place out. There was a nurse standing over a woman’s hair.

“Hello, Marshal,” the sitting woman said to Paul. They were fixing on a wig.

“Phyllis, for the last time, it’s Paul. My name is Paul.”

“Okay, Paul. Okay,” the nurse said. “Phyllis is a little tired right now. Can I help you?”

“No,” Paul said.

“Yes,” I said at the same time. “I’m looking for the rec room.”

“There’s a double door just to the left,” the nurse said, pointing.

“To the left,” echoed Phyllis.

The nurse ignored her. “Just press the metal plate on the wall and the doors will open. You’ll go into the living quarters and take a right. The rec room will be straight ahead.”

“Left then right. Thanks,” I said. I wheeled Paul out of the room. She seemed nice, I thought.

“I could have told you that,” Paul said. He seemed less irritated.

“I should have asked,” I said.

“What time is it?” he asked.

I pulled my cell phone out of my back pocket.

“You’re not allowed to have that,” Paul said.

I fumbled.

Paul slapped the air. “Who cares. Time?”

“3:00,” I said.

“Exactly?”

I checked again. “3:02. Exactly.”

“Crap. The game started.” He pointed to the door’s handicap button. “Press that,” he said.

“Hurry up.”

When the doors opened a whole new world lay out before us. “Whoa,” I said. “It’s… homey.”

“What’d you expect, a mental asylum? Over there.”

Around the corner was a large-screen TV with three other old men lounging around it on a pair of couches. They were watching a baseball game.

“What’s the score?” Paul yelled down the hall.

“It just started.”

“What’s the score?” He said again as we neared.

Two men shushed him.

I pushed Paul up to one of the couches and he rose to get out of the chair, holding out an arm for support. I wasn’t aware I was supposed to take it. He looked at me, “Come on kid. Help me to the couch––the game’s started.”

I grabbed his elbow.

“What’s the score?” Paul said again, now standing, shuffling toward a seat.

The men shushed him louder.

“It just started,” the talkative one said again.

Paul set both his fists to his hips and glared down at the three old timers sitting on the couch, completely aware that he was blocking the TV screen. He waited.

“It’s zero, zero.”

“Thank you, Randy. That’s all I wanted to know.” Paul sat down, smirking. He waved me off.

I watched two innings of the game, Red Sox verse the Yankees, and my time was up.

“I can’t believe you left early. Tell me you went straight to a bar and watched the rest of the game. If I wasn’t in here, I’d definitely be at a bar. You went to a bar right?”

It was Thursday. Day two. I was dishing out soft-serve ice cream in the café.

“Hey, Paul.” I said. “Do you want some chocolate sauce?”

He tilted his head back. It was a slight tilt, but there was a tilt. “Jesus. You’re killing me,” he said. “No. No chocolate sauce.”

So then I felt like a schmuck. Here was an eighty-something year old twit with half a mind questioning my manhood. I wasn’t a baseball guy. I didn’t spend all my time in front of a TV. I had better things to do. Like drink entered my head. Well, I wouldn’t be doing much of that for a while. I headed over to Paul’s table once I finished twisting ice cream into semi-presentable blobs.

“Who won?”

“Sox,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he liked that or not.

“The Sox your team?”

He knitted his eyebrows together. “Are you serious?”

I got defensive.

“Wait, wait. Hold on,” Paul said. “You obviously have not been schooled in the ways of baseball.” He dropped his plastic spoon into the bowl of melting ice cream and pushed it out of the way. “I’m going to cut you a break,” he said. He brought a hand to his chest. “I will teach you how to watch baseball.”

“You’re going to teach me.”

“Yep.”

“I don’t really like baseball––

“Doesn’t matter. Not a bit. Baseball isn’t about baseball. It’s about war.”

I wondered if the crazy was coming back.

“Now. You’re a Sox fan. Remember that.” He watched the table as he told me this, probably thinking he had scored another believer in some conniving way. I let him have it. He continued, “Sox fans are the best sort of fans. We’re honest. We’ve got history. And we stick together. But, that’s beside the point.” He settled in now, pressing his fingers together in concentration. “It’s all about the pitcher,” he motioned to the fake pitcher’s mound in the center of our dining table’s baseball diamond, “and the batter,” he placed his other hand at home plate. “Forget all the chants, the guys,” he waved his pitcher’s hand over his head, “out in left field. What matters is what the throw’s gonna be, and if the batter can guess it right. It’s a war of intuition.”

“Didn’t you like the ice cream, Paul?” a nurse asked, picking up the styrofoam bowls. Our desserts were liquid, sticky white, and filled the bowls to the brim.

“This is important,” Paul said, sitting back to look at the nurse. “You’re interrupting.”

The nurse blushed red. She was the nice nurse. The one with good directions.

“Sorry,” I said. “He really likes his baseball.”

“Ah, baseball.” She understood. “Sorry I disturbed you,” she said to Paul.

He rolled his eyes.

“I’m afraid it’s time to head back to the rooms,” she said to me. “The doctor’s doing rounds.”

I would soon become familiar with Paul’s room as the weeks ticked past. It was a comfortable room, placed at the end of a hallway, which afforded it some privacy. The walls were yellow and he had hung a few Hallmark cards over his desk––they made the place seem more personable. Beside his bed, Paul had a stack of books on a nightstand. They were all covered in brown paper bags, just how the teachers used to make me cover my textbooks in grade school, and each book had its title neatly written in block letters down the spine. I noticed one of them was a children’s book: Saint George and the Dragon.

Paul the Dragon Slayer.

I tried it out loud, to test the reaction. “Do you remember telling me you were a dragon slayer?”

Paul was sitting in his wheelchair, organizing pills across his desk. He liked to take them in a certain order. Which he did that day, without looking up, without answering.

I changed the subject. “Do you need help getting into the bed?” I asked.

He mumbled, fiddling with the empty dixie cup the pills had come in. “Where’s my TV remote?” he said loudly.

I looked around the room and spotted it next to the books on the nightstand. “Right here,” I said, grabbing it.

“Leave it! Leave it there. It’s fine where it is.”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t like when things get moved around on me,” he said. He wheeled over to the bed and let me grab on to his elbow to help him up. “Sheet,” he said.

Still holding onto him, I tried with one hand to push the covers down the bed. The sheets were tightly fitted around the mattress.

“I can hold myself,” Paul said, witnessing my struggle.

And I still had a hard time of it. Never before had I encountered such tightly fitted sheets.

It got Paul laughing.

“I knew it wasn’t just me,” he said.

I helped him sit against some propped up pillows, pulling the covers over him.

“Just on the legs,” he said. “Thank you.”

I still had twenty more minutes until my hour was up, but I wasn’t sure I should stay. I felt guilty for bringing up the dragon. So I told Paul I’d see him next week and started for the door.

“We’ll talk more baseball next time,” he said. “If you come on Tuesday, we’re playing the Indians. Not much of a war, but––”

“I look forward to it,” I said.

Eventually, though, we did get back to the dragon. In bits and pieces. He seemed to bring the dragon up after long periods of silence, and he grew suspicious if you questioned him, usually giving the story up altogether. I waited for him outside his bathroom once; he had been in there a long time, and when he opened the door a crack he said, “It was my daughter’s turn to be sacrificed. I had no other choice.”

I was dumbfounded. I didn’t know what kind of sacrifice he was talking about. Like I said, he had been in the bathroom for quite a while.

“The hermit and I were good friends,” he continued. “I know that sounds strange. Hermits don’t have friends. But he was––we were friends.”

I started to catch on.

“He let us stay at his hut. It was small, and hermits live humbly, but somehow he found enough bread for all of us to eat, and he let my daughter sleep in his bed made of straw. In the morning, we dressed in black and marched to the dragon’s lair. Of course,” he added, “I was on horseback. And I wore my armor.”

Paul waited for me to comment and I wasn’t sure what the right response should be. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I sat quietly and nodded some. The silence seemed to break the spell. Paul closed the door, and I soon heard a flush.

“Need some help, Paul?” I was getting used to being called in, and it bothered me less and less to help a man clean himself. But Paul didn’t answer. When he opened the door, he was standing on his own, washing his hands. His eyes were glassy.

“I feel a little tired. Maybe you should put me to bed now,” Paul said. He attempted a small joke about getting old.

As I was leaving, Paul asked, “Why are you here?”

I leant against the doorframe. “I’m paying some dues.”

“Community service?”

I nodded.

“For how long?”

“Couple more months.”

“Good,” Paul said. “I’ll see you Thursday.”

He told me about his daughter, Deborah. She lived in California, a lawyer, and she had a baby of her own, Kieran. She lived near her husband’s family.

“Does she come and visit?” I asked.

“Yes! Yes, she does. Couple of times. It makes the other fellas jealous.” Paul smiled broadly, proud. “It’s been a while though. She has a busy life.” He nodded to the wall. “Those cards are from her.”

The three cards hanging above his desk, the cards I had once thought added life to the room, now seemed small. There should have been more cards for someone like Paul.

“Do you have kids?” he asked.

I shook my head. “It wasn’t in the cards.”

“Married?”

“Once.”

“What happened?”

“Dead––Died. She died.”

“Sorry,” Paul said. We were both silent for a moment, death being such a prevalent yet shocking thing, even in a place like this. Then, sheepishly, Paul asked, “That’s not why you’re here is it?”

I laughed. “No, Paul, I did not kill my wife.”

“Well,” he said smirking, “I wanted to know what I was dealing with.”

I sobered.

“What is it?” he asked.

“After she died––my wife––I drank a lot.”

“As we all do,” Paul said.

I nodded. I wasn’t ready to say more.

The next Thursday Paul met me at the entrance. “It’s Kieran’s birthday today. I want you to take me to get a card. I want to send a card.” He was agitated.

“I’m not sure I can take you outside,” I said.

“Why not? Walgreens isn’t far away. Do you have a car?”

“Paul, I’m not—

“Nurse!” Paul yelled. “Nurse! Can I go to Walgreens?”

The nurse glanced at Paul and continued working in her little office. She was looking over a clipboard of papers with a man dressed in flannel.

“Nurse!” Paul yelled again, getting louder each time, more frantic.

The nurse finally came to the counter. “No. You cannot go to Walgreens.”

“Why not?” Paul demanded.

“There are plenty of cards in the store here,” she said. Then she immediately turned back inside.

“I want to go to Walgreens!” He was struggling to stand. He hit the top of the counter with his fist.

“Paul,” I said, trying to steady him. “Listen. I can’t drive you.”

“It’s not far,” he said to me, brushing me off. Then he raised his voice, glaring at the nurse, “It’s a free country. I’m not a prisoner here!”

“No. You don’t understand,” I said.

“I want to go to Walgreens!” Paul screamed.

“Jesus, Paul,” the nurse said, flustered. “He doesn’t even have a license.”

“Liar! I want to go to Walgreens!”

“He can’t drive,” the nurse said, growing exasperated.

“Walgreens! Walgreens! Walgreens!”

“Look,” she said.

“Walgreens!” Paul shouted. It was the sound of the last straw breaking.

In a tizzy, the nurse yelled, “He got drunk and ran over a little boy. He can’t drive you. Get your damn card in the gift store.” She glanced up at me, red in the face, and then went back to her work.

Paul staggered, stunned, refusing to look at me. He took a seat in his chair. Then, quietly, he said, “You killed Kieran?”

“No! God no. Paul, Kieran is fine.” I squatted down next to him, trying to catch his eye.

“Not Kieran, Paul. Not Kieran.” I could have killed that nurse.

Paul looked off toward the windows.

“Come on, I’ll take you to the gift store,” I said. “Or maybe there’s a game on.”

Paul rushed me. He went for my neck. He started screaming again. “And the dragon rushed from his cave,” he said, “roaring with sound louder than thunder!” He scratched at my arms, my face, “Louder than thunder!” he cried repeatedly.

I couldn’t keep him down. At some point, I must have shouted for help. The nurse behind the counter was suddenly there, and two more men, holding Paul in his chair. “I am not afraid,” he said, glaring at me from his chair, violence shooting through him. “Saint George is not afraid!”

I felt helpless. Helpless like when Claire died. Helpless like the night that boy died. Just plain helpless––so helpless I forgot to be angry with the nurse.

They wheeled Paul down the white hallway and told me to go home early.

I did.

Not going back was a real option. A nurse, the nice nurse, called and told me Paul was asking after me, but I didn’t want to go back. Even in service––in atonement––I had managed to damage someone I cared for. I sat sleeplessly in my cold house, on my worn yellow couch, and I couldn’t escape my memories. The dull, hollow thud of the boy’s body against my car hood echoed continually at the back of my brain. It echoed as clear and real as it had on that evening, as it had in that courtroom. It felt like I had killed him all over again.

Odd though it seemed, the pain of the memories helped. Paul’s attack had helped. It was the closest I would come to real punishment. I wanted more. In the end, I told the nurse I’d be in on Thursday.

Paul had turned a corner while I was away. He was sick, and I quickly blamed myself. I vowed to be at his side as often as possible, for as long as he needed me. Some days, the nice nurse sat with me when I came to visit. Paul was in the sterile wing of the nursing home now, with Phyllis and her wig next door, so it was easy for the nurse to drop in now and then. Her name was Anne.

“Thanks for coming,” Paul said to me the first day I came back.

I wasn’t sure if he remembered what had happened, and I didn’t chance the subject.

“I saw the Sox won last night,” I said.

He hummed. “Good game. Yes. I heard it might be Wagner’s last season.”

I nodded like I knew who that was.

“He’s the pitcher,” Paul said, rolling his eyes.

I smiled. In the silence, I picked at my fingers, found a hangnail.

“My daughter, Deborah, is coming to see me.”

“That’s nice,” I said encouragingly. Alarms rang in my ears. Danger, they said.

“They called her, told her what happened between us,” Paul continued. He waited for me to look up. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it.” I waved him off. “I’m glad we’re back to normal.”

“Normal.” He snorted. “I’m 86 years old, John.” I looked up at the mention of my name.

“But I’m still not ready to go.”

There was something I missed.

He rubbed his forehead. “Something about a leak,” Paul said. “In my brain. It makes me think––differently. And it’s worse than before.” He touched his temples. “The dragon won, so to speak.”

As he spoke, I walked the extra few feet between my chair and his bed and sat down beside him. Paul took a long breath and let it out in a gust of hot, stale air. “I’m sorry about what happened, John.”

“It was nothing,” I said.

The nice nurse came through the doorway. She evaluated the mood in the room. “Paul,” she said, softly admonishing him. “Now don’t be so low. You have a visitor today.”

Paul and I grinned like good boys. We hid behind our good manners.

He died on a Thursday. I had arrived less than an hour after his last heartbeat, wishing I had been there to say goodbye. I had brought him a Red Sox cap, thinking if he didn’t want to wear it, then it would at least add a little energy to the room. Anne let me sit with him as long as I wanted to. So I did, for a while. He was more still than someone sleeping, but not cold, there was still some rose in his cheeks.

A woman came to the room, hesitating by the door when she saw me.

“Are you Deborah?” I asked.

She nodded, “Who are you?”

“John. I knew your father.”

I thought she was timid because Death was in the room, but I couldn’t place the sentiment shining in her eyes. When she stepped toward the cot, I left to give her space.

In my hands, out in the hallway, I discovered Paul’s brown-bagged copy of Saint George and the Dragon. I didn’t remember taking it. I didn’t even remember the nurse transporting it from Paul’s old room to his new cot, but I guessed, by now, Paul’s old room had been filled with someone else’s meager belongings. It made the book feel precious, like something accidentally left over because it had been hidden away. I thought of my wife. It was sad and good at the same time, to think of the dead with a clear head.

I stood against the hallway wall and tenderly flipped through the pages of illustrations, skimming the lines of the story. I saw, toward the beginning, where a man in armor rode on horseback, escorting a line of women dressed in black. They were leaving the hermit’s house.

When Deborah came out of Paul’s door, I was still standing outside, still reading. She recognized the book in my hands.

“He loved that book,” she said flatly. “He used to read it to me every night when I was little.”

“Would you like it?” I asked, holding it out. It was more hers than mine.

She shook her head. “There are some things I’d rather not remember.” She walked down the white hallway, into the light of the slowly opening doors. She quickly signed some papers, and then left without hesitating, without looking back even once. I stood there a little while longer, thinking of the weeks I’d spent with Paul, of his stale smell that was slowly vanishing from the room, from his body. Stale, like old paper sacks. I figured there was a lot of stuff packed into a life, a lot of stuff some people didn’t want anything to do with, hated even, and wouldn’t forgive you for. But maybe there was someone who didn’t mind just sitting. Paul sat with me. Things like that stay with a person.

The Girl with the Missing Face, by Chris Tusa

Thu, 16 May 2013 06:48:00 -0400

The bomb had done its job. They said someone had hidden it in a package, and when the paramedics arrived, the girl’s ear was hanging off the side of her cheek. We heard they found her lips tangled in a mess of green shag carpet and had to put them in a bag of ice to keep them alive. While my teacher talked about The American Revolution, I imagined the Ziploc bag filled with ice cubes, fogged up, as if the lips were still breathing.

After school, my friends and I rode our bikes past the girl’s house. The yard was roped off with yellow crime tape, and the front of the house was missing. The room closest to the street, where the girl had been watching TV, had been nearly gutted, and part of the roof had been blown off. The crape myrtle in the garden near the front door was leafless, except for stringy pieces of insulation that looked like pink flowers blooming along the tangled branches. A dented gutter, shingles, and pieces of sheetrock freckled the lawn. That afternoon, letters cluttered mailboxes all over town, and when the brown UPS truck growled through our neighborhood, everyone held their breath.

After my father got home from work, we went to the hospital to visit the girl. When we got there, her mother was sitting in the corner of the room, her mascara dripping black tears onto her cheek. My father had gone to high school with the girl’s mother. They hugged, and he asked her how the girl was doing. As they talked, the oxygen tank sighed. The girl lay in the hospital bed next to them breathing through two little holes in her face, her brain a tangled black sky filled with dull stars.

The next day in History class, I stared at the girl’s empty desk. Her father was a judge, and we didn’t know yet that some guy he’d put in prison years ago had hidden the bomb in the package as an act of revenge. For all we knew there was some lunatic planting bombs in packages and placing them on random porches all across town. Before class started, my teacher said the girl had died at the hospital in the middle of the night, and that we should all pause for a moment of silence. We closed our eyes and wondered who would be next. We sat quietly in our desks. We listened to the sounds floating outside the open window of the classroom—car horns mingled with the cawing of crows, a police siren—and buried beneath the chaos of it all, the quiet tick, tick, tick of the clock on the wall.

Temple and Space, by Ashley Stokes

Thu, 02 May 2013 07:04:32 -0400

The thrumming on her hood merged with the clatter of rain on the vehicles’ roofs in what she realized now was a carpark. Her feet felt raw, slashed. Her suede boots had not been made for hiking, let alone sprinting on wet tarmac.

She couldn’t believe she’d remained calm on the hard shoulder, in the squall, with the black moor on one side and on the other hundreds of stranded cars. A crash had brought twelve miles of traffic to a standstill. The tailback would only slow him down for so long. She didn’t have time to stand and listen to the rain. Directly ahead was a service station called Pitstop. Someone would recognize her there.

Blinking, she pigeon-stepped into an octagonal atrium. All of the tables in a seating area were occupied. Travellers lucky enough to get off the motorway were standing in the aisles. Others perched on the edges of tables. At the tables, families hunched over burger cartons and sandwich boxes. Men in sleeveless fleeces huffed and fiddled with smart phones. Fat women jiggled babies on their laps.

If Rufus were here he would complain that fat women should not be allowed to breed. The universal right to have children is a dangerous fantasy. When Rufus arrived he would probably start by reiterating that in strictly philosophical terms no one has any rights anyway.

Only a tall, bald, bespectacled man in a leather greatcoat, three rows back had a table to himself. But he was scribbling in a notebook, and he was bald.

She’d not pulled down her hood yet. Its fur trim hid her face. Her parka was still zipped. She must look bedraggled, blitzed, crazy. No would realize that Temple was back. She must sort herself out. At least she’d had the sense to whip her bag from the backseat of the car.

The man in the leather coat had a tattoo of a circuit board on the side of his head. If Rufus were here he would describe a man with a circuit board tattooed on the side of his head as a “dangerous fantasist.” The world according to Rufus is full of dangerous fantasists out to get Rufus.

She followed signs that led to a ladies washroom. Rufus would no doubt describe the creature that stared back at her from the washroom mirror as a dangerous fantasist. With the hood still pulled up and her black parka sodden she looked half seal, half chimney sweep’s brush. She could imagine Rufus, back out there on the motorway, whispering into his phone that she’d finally become another Christmas cracker.

She took down the hood. Her hair was dry, thankfully, but sticking out in frightwig tufts. She tried on a few facial expressions: smart-curious Temple, ice-queen aloof Temple, throes of passion Temple. She’d perfected these for her most celebrated role: Angela Taki in Songbirds 2: Adventures in the Sex Capital of the World. She could hold any of them for as long as she liked. They were her Temple emoticons.

Turning her shoulder to the mirror, she tipped back her neck and fingered the underside of her throat. The balls of her feet stung. She was unable to stand on tiptoes to perfect the pose, so couldn’t quite imitate Rufus’ most famous photo of her, the one of her wearing nothing but a towel in front of a mirror in a hotel bathroom. The tops of her thighs had looked smooth and firm, the back of her blonde bob severe and her face reflected in that mirror devastating and insouciant.

It had been a fluke, that shot. She’d been making herself up for an agency interview. The camera’s flash startled her. She’d struggled to hold on to the towel. The look in his eyes made her shiver.

She’d seen that look in his eyes again this evening, in the car, after he’d finished tapping out a text message.

“Business,” he said.

It couldn’t be.

Temple had grabbed her bag then, opened the car door and pelted along the hard shoulder in the rain.

She rummaged in the bag and found her make-up case. She slipped a wipe from its packet and started to dab at the mascara congealed under her eyes. The door swung open behind her. In the mirror she saw two teenaged girls scamper past in glistening see-through raincoats. One of them paused in front of a mirror further down. The other one heaved herself up onto the rim of a sink.

“We can’t go back,” she said.

“He’s a Pastafarian from Planet Nando.”

“Che brutta cosa.”

“Is that how you say that?”

“He flashed me his gadget.”

The standing girl staggered backwards until her friend dropped from the sink to give her a hug.

They were not alone, those girls.

They still had each other.

When she was their age she was already working.

She was already Temple and practically married.

She wondered if these girls walked dogs for money. She wondered if they washed cars and mowed lawns and hung around a house afterwards.

She threw her wipes and brushes back into the case. She stuffed the case into her bag. When she tried to storm out in diva fashion her feet were so sore that she could only sway and hobble.

Outside in the corridor she counted to ten then to thirty and on to a hundred and forty-seven until her anger subsided. There might be a chemist here. She could buy plasters. Her feet might be bleeding. They were certainly blistered. She should call a taxi. Take it to a hotel. Any old shack with walls and a minibar. It crossed her mind like lightning in a horror film that she didn’t know if her phone was charged.

As she angled her bag to unfasten it, a tingle coursed across her shoulders.

Someone was taking her photograph.

She always knew. She had a sixth sense that she attributed to being the daughter of a professional photographer. As a child she’d appeared in dozens of catalogues and adverts. When she was eight she appeared on the cover of a popular psychology textbook called Inside your Child’s Mind. At twelve she had been placed in a white bath for the jacket of a collection of verse called Poem of the River.

When she was sixteen her father’s business partner noticed her. He took her in person to see Caledonia Deeks of The Caledonia Deeks Modelling Agency. He’d given her the name, Temple, made it up on the spot during the interview. Temple had been the closest tube station to Ms Deek’s office. Ms Deeks may have got her into Vogue and Dazed and Confused, but he’d pulled the strings that secured her the role of the girl in AroundThezePartz’s Slummer with Monika video. He then grappled for months with some longer and tougher strings, negotiations that involved much whining and dining, and lending and loaning. In the end she did get the part of Angela Taki in Songbirds 2.

Angela Taki had not appeared in the hit Brit teen comedy Songbirds, in which the girls of St Sexburga’s Convent School choir put on a production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. In the first film the girls want to put on Hair, but their buttoned-up, flat chested and virginal music teacher Hilderlith Sharples won’t let them, until they fix her up with Russell Brand and Russell Brand convinces Hilderlith to let them perform Hair.

In Songbirds 2: Adventures in the Sex Capital of the World, Angela is the new girl struggling to impress queen bees Imogen Middlemass and Threepenny Logan as the girls of St Sexburga’s head for Amsterdam to perform The Flying Dutchman.

Her longest stretch of screen time came in the Pink Domes bar scene. Angela knocks back a heavily moustached Dutch bloke with the lines: “Where are you going to take me, Everhart? South of France to ride white horses bareback? Or somewhere more you? Somewhere dreamy and romantic? Prague in the spring? Autumn in Paris? Klosters by moonlight? Why not, Everhart? Maybe because I can see in your eyes your tawdry little room, with its tawdry little mattress and tawdry little row of tawdry little dope plants. Your tawdry little winkle can sod off there on its tawdry little tod.”

She had gained a following. She had received fan mail, and some fan fiction. It was her own fault that Songbirds 2 hadn’t led to other roles. She shouldn’t have married so soon afterwards. She could have been in other films. She could have grown as an actor. It felt right to be filmed. It was a step up. Being photographed was normal. The only time she could remember being unsettled by a camera was when Rufus had caught her unawares in an en suite bathroom. She’d soon forgotten, though, after that devastating and insouciant picture of her had appeared in The Face.

Here, though, in Pitstop, the camera’s flash more than unsettled her.

She turned and scanned the corridor.

She couldn’t see Rufus.

It would be hard to miss him.

It was also hard to miss the man in the leather greatcoat and circuit board tattoo standing with a camera in one hand and his notebook under the other arm.

He was tall; when he loomed over her almost violently so. This close up she could see the circuit board tattoo, a latticework of silver panels and purple lines.

He offered his hand, but in doing so the notebook under his arm flew up into the air. Papers spun out from its covers.

“My glands, Pris,” he said. “They grow too fast.”

He was crouched on the floor now, sniggering as he grabbed at the papers. One of his papers had landed on one of her boots. It wasn’t a paper. It was a thick, glossy print of what seemed to be a film still. A still of what looked like a garage in a black and white film. A garage in the desert. A garage set against a backdrop of plains and distant, snow-capped mountain peaks. A garage decked out with red and white flags. At the heart of each of those red and white flags was what at first she thought was a spider. Then she realized that at the heart of each of those red and white flags sat a swastika.

Before he could look up, she tried to run back along the corridor but footsore she shambled, more shuffled than ran.

She crossed the front of an arcade that sounded like it was being bombarded by artillery.

She ducked in and out of Krispy Kreme and Burger King before she made it into a coffee bar called Bluto’s.

There were no free tables.

There were a lot of men.

These were men in baseball caps and thick ski jackets, not the mildly anxious fleecy men with wives and their children playing under the atrium. These were motorway veterans, road-grizzled men, probably the drivers of the juggernauts she’d seen in the carpark. She didn’t look any of them in the eye and dragged herself towards the counter.

The only other woman in Bluto’s was serving. She was Polish. This accounted for why she didn’t recognize Temple. Rather than ask for an autograph she merely filled a beaker with coffee. Temple edged along the counter so she could pretend to dither over a choice of pastries while weighing up her options.

She remembered that she had not yet checked her phone. For the first time in years it struck her that she could ring her dad.

Hi Dad, I know we’ve not spoken much lately, but could you give me a lift? Sure, baby, where are you? Don’t know. That’s not very helpful, angelkins. I’d better call the police.

It wouldn’t go like this anyway, would it?

Where’s Rufus? Where’s that dirty kiddyfiddler?

It’s your fault, Dad. All of this is your fault. You brought him into my life. You went into business with him. You went into partnership with him. You trusted him. You let him take me to London. You let him take me to a hotel. You let him photograph and seduce me and parade me in front of that crazy old lesbian Ms Deeks. You let him more or less walk me on a lead in front of perverts with money. You let him stop me working. You let him marry me. You made my friends pity me. You made his friends disown him. You made his business go bust. You made him sell his house and move us to the countryside where it’ll be cheap and quiet and no one knows who we are. You made me love him more. I love him. I still love him, and even though you were right about him, Dad, look where I am? Look at me. Look at Temple.

Don’t use that name with me, young lady …

“Excuse,” said the Polish girl, “get out of way if you’re not buying delicious pastry refreshment.”

Temple walked away, trying not to limp as she headed for the exit.

When she was almost at the doorway she hung her head and ruffled her hair.

She stuck out a leg and raised her thumb.

“Gentlemen, who wants to take me to a hotel?”

As she stood there fluttering her lashes and stabbing her thumb in the air the men shrank and receded.

She tried to dig in her heels but found herself sliding backwards. Out of the corners of her eyes she could see people whizzing by and hear again that barrage of bleeps and explosions from the arcade.

She’d stopped moving.

Someone was talking to her.

It was the man in the leather coat, the Nazi with the circuit board tattoo.

“I make friends, they’re toys, Pris. There’s something I need to show you.”

In the atrium seating area Space—this is what he called himself—drummed his long, sturdy fingers on the tabletop and watched for any reaction she might have to the pictures on his iPad. She looked up from the screen and tried not to be distracted by his tattoo. The atrium crowd had thinned out. Through the plate-glass windows she could see that the carpark was emptying. The traffic must be on the move again, the wreckage on the motorway cleared. This was a dangerous turn when she was sitting with a dangerous fantasist, a dangerous Nazi fantasist with a made-up name who had taken photos of her looking like a black ghost.

In all of them she was staggering among shadow-people in a misty white corridor. She appeared shapeless, disintegrating, made of soot.

If Rufus were here, being the ex-owner of the once-profitable ShutterSpeed Photographic Press Agency and Picture Library he would no doubt describe these images as a “prat’s eyeful’.

“They’re very beautiful,” said Space. “I thought you ought to see them.”

When he’d introduced himself properly, after they’d sat down in the atrium, he gave his name as: “Lowercase “h’ and “d’ hyphen uppercase “S’ uppercase “P’ forward slash uppercase “A’ lower “c’ and lower “e’.”

“Hideousplashpus?” Her feet hurt far too much for her to geek out on some fantasist’s PR tag. She was an old hand. She was established.

“Look, just call me Space.”

She shrugged. Up close, the tattoo on the side of his head was more elaborate than she’d realized. Tiers of wires and panels stepped down deeper and deeper into his skull the longer she looked at them.

“You’re not that guy who sent me all that S-Birds fan fiction?” she said. “I’m warning you that I have pepper spray and my husband will be here any minute.”

“You’re married? Sheesh. A touch of the star-crossed, eh? Betrothed at birth. Made for each other. Like Batty and Pris in Bladerunner. They’re made for each other, though not actually made for each other though they are made, if you see what I mean. You do look like her, you know?”

She adopted her liquid-steel android emoticon face and held it until he took out the iPad from his bag and started to show her the photographs.

There were eight images, all taken from behind her. In each one she grew smaller and less distinct. She was a hazy black blur among people who were hazy and blurred in a space that was white and fading.

She had never seen herself photographed like this before, so covered-up, so ungenerous with her body.

When Rufus photographed her he told her to think “available’, act “expensive’.

Here, she looked unobtainable, unreal.

She wondered if “un-naked’ was a word.

“What do you want to do with these, Mr Space?” she said.

“Space. Just Space. You’ve read it?”

“Am I in the news yet?”

“C’mon, Pris, don’t muck me about. All the Liquid Moderns read it.”

He took the iPad from her. He tapped at the keyboard and then spun it over to display a blog themed with the same circuit board design as his tattoo. It was called Asphaltlyrik, and subtitled: hd-SP/Ace: Psychogeographer and Temporal Architect. Glaring up at her was a posting entitled Gas Station Zebra: Timequakes/Non-Space/Irrevocable Destinies. The first few lines were crammed with long words that he could have made up for all she knew. More intriguing were the black and white images arranged throughout the text in a zigzag formation: photographs of motorway filling stations at night. Motorway filling stations at night populated by grey wisp people attending to spectral cars.

She used her finger to scroll down until, to her surprise the Nazi garage image slid up the screen at her.

“I know someone who would go out of his way to fill up there.” She shoved the tablet back at him. “What has this got to do with me?”

“Everything is to do with you.”

So he did know who she was. He must have seen her film, or that devastating and insouciant photograph of her that appeared in The Face when she was still young and the tops of thighs smooth and firm. He wasn’t so bad. He wasn’t that weird.

“Let’s dash,” she said, leaning in close to him now. “I’m telling you now though I’m a fifty-fifty-split-girl, but if we spark the spark you can have a new portfolio-moi.”

“But I’ve got all the photographs I need.”

“You’ll want more, yah?”

“I’ve done slipways and overpasses. I’ve done the Orbital as Stonehenge and Spaghetti Junction as the humming cathedral of big tech modernity. C’mon, you must have read those?”

“Those?”

“Essays. My essays on Asphaltlyrik?” He fiddled with his iPad again and showed her the Ghost Temple gallery. “I’m thinking of calling his one Autobahn UK: Counter-Myths of Tomorrow. It’s going to be the services special. I’ve been visiting one a day for the last week or so. I’ve got enough now, but you, these pictures of you …’

“Can we talk about this later?” she said. “I don’t like to do business in places like this. I’m not a Page Three girl.”

“I mean. Look, even bad guys get to see forever sometimes, right?” From his bag he produced the print that had given her the horrors earlier. “In the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz I found hundreds of these old Nazi propaganda films about what the built-environment of the Third Reich would be like after the war, Hitler’s plans to build autobahns to the Black Sea, an entire aesthetic of engineering and car culture, a poetics of concrete. These are not just boring documentaries about roads, Pris, these films mash-up Haussmann and Baudelaire and the entire American Fifties-Sixties On the Road hit, bait the Situationalists and then reverberate forwards to haunt this moment here, you and I drinking franchise coffee in this tourist disco. That building …” He stabbed his thumb at the print. “… contains this one. Every time you fill your car, you’re metaphorically using Nazi petrol.”

Temple slumped back in her chair. As she considered asking Mr Space to explain it all again she stared out at the carpark. Where before tall vehicles had blocked her view of the motorway now she could clearly see the lights of moving traffic in the distance.

When the Pitstop’s automatic doors slid open she felt them hiss in her skull. She slid down as far as she could and tried to dip her head under the table.

Rufus had wandered into the atrium, his grey mane quivering about his shoulders. From her low angle she watched him scan around, give a disconsolate shrug then stalk off in the direction of Bluto’s.

Now she could imagine him sat in the car in the moments after she ran. She imagined him taking advantage of her absence to browse his text messages at his leisure. He would have been casual in these moments; confident she would return when the full force of the weather hit her.

When she didn’t come back, he may have sent the girl who mowed his lawn a longer text. He may have sent her several. He may have tapped out a suggestion that he take Lydia Poulani’s photograph.

She could imagine him sat on the side of a bed next to Lydia Poulani and sorrowfully describing his wife as a Christmas cracker. He’d labelled his second wife, Susanna a Christmas cracker. He’d sorrowfully described Susanna as a Christmas cracker on the day he’d invented Temple in Caledonia Meeks’ office, after he’d taken that photograph in the en suite bathroom, after the towel had dropped, after it happened and they had sat side-by-side on the bed. Temple had been about the same age as Lydia Poulani is now.

No red-blooded man, according to Rufus, wants to pull a cracker after the twenty-fifth. Temple was now twenty-five and eight days, and although he’d never yet called her a Christmas cracker to her face she could sense the phrase forming on his lips whenever they argued. She would not and should not have to think of herself as a Christmas cracker, not when Mr Space had showed her that she could be un-naked and arty and still devastating and insouciant.

She popped up from under the table and adopted her European Sophisticate Temple emoticon.

“Mr Space, look, I can’t call you Space, can I? What’s your real name? We can’t do business unless we’re on first name terms.”

“It is hd-SP/Ace,” he said. “Changed it by Deed Poll.”

“Let’s go somewhere else, take more pictures. We can do hotels next.”

“I’ve done hotels, but strictly airport hotels. A homage to JG Ballard and his love of the Heathrow Hilton, as well as the psychic-channelling of the referendum on the closure of Tempelhof in Berlin.”

“We need to go.”

“Look, I don’t take professional photographs. It’s spontaneous, what I do. Moments in time snatched from the daydreams of architects.”

She reached out and took both of his hands.

“Let’s go to your car,” she said. “We can talk about it there.”

“To be honest I’d rather not,” he said, flicking the iPad to display the Ghost Temple gallery. “These photos’ll seem pure if you’re just a glimpse to me. Someone only the camera saw.”

“Why did you find me?” she said. “Why latch onto me?”

“You’re the only other person here who’s alone.”

Even if this had been true, it certainly wasn’t true anymore.

In her mind’s eye she could picture Rufus scanning for her in the arcade and in Krispy Kreme and Burger King and Bluto’s. In Bluto’s those veterans of the road would no doubt size him up as a right ponce, with his silky paisley-patterned scarf, his houndstooth check trousers and cowboy boots, his shoulder-length grey hair that wasn’t a lion’s mane, no, it wasn’t. It just made him look like he was clinging to something he couldn’t have anymore, that no one gets to keep. The veterans would sense this straightaway, but when he asked them if anyone had seen his wife – cute blonde, black coat, about so high – they would nod and point him back this way.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Rufus barrel along the front of the KFC, his lion’s mane flickering against the white edges of the menu displays.

For a split-second she hoped that he would miss her completely and head on back to his car and the house and whichever sixteen-year old girl glittered her moments for him now.

Rufus’ turned to face the seating area.

Temple adopted her Geisha seduction emoticon face and stared Mr Space right in the eyes.

“Where are you going to take me, Space? South of France to ride white horses bareback? Or somewhere more you? Somewhere dreamy and romantic? Prague in the spring? Autumn in Paris? Klosters by moonlight? I can see in your eyes your tawdry little room, Space, with its tawdry little mattress and tawdry little row of tawdry little dope plants. Why don’t we winkle back there on our tods?”

“I must be experiencing accelerated decrepitude, Pris. I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Take me to your car, please. I’m in a great deal of trouble and you’re in a great deal of danger. Please.”

“I don’t have a car. I do this on foot. Walk all day, station to station. Sleep in them at night. Helps me soak up the vibrations.”

“Walk then, walk with me.”

She squeezed his fingers. At first she assumed he was playing with her, teasing her. Of course he had a car. Of course he was going to take her to a hotel. Of course he was going take more photos of her. But that circuit board tattoo seemed so stretched now that it was a gaping hole in his head, and his eyes were wide and staring not at her but through her.

Following the line of his gaze, she turned.

Rufus was sauntering through the chairs and the tables.

There was no one else here now.

No one to notice: no fans, no following.

Rufus shuddered when he recognized her. He quickened his stride, fighting through the chairs like a swimmer against a tide, that pained and sorry look on his face he always faked before he told a dirty great lie.

“Oh God, darling, there you are. I was so worried.”

Temple tried to squeeze Space’s hands even harder. He sharpishly withdrew them when Rufus put his hand on her shoulder.

“Promise me, promise me you won’t do that again. You gave me a heart attack.”

She shrugged off his hand to inform him of her new situation.

“We need to go,” she said to Space. “We need to go right now.”

“Oh, is this you?” said Rufus. He picked up the iPad, blinked and then drew it closer to his face. “These are good. Did you take these?”

“I wonder if you’d mind, Mary-Lou, if I rested now,” said Space. “I don’t want to intrude.”

“You can’t leave me,” said Temple.

“What camera you using?” said Rufus.

“Don’t listen? He always does this.”

“You look so lonely in these, honey. Why do you keep doing this to yourself?”

“He’s lying,” she said.

“We need to have a proper chat. It’s my fault. I’ve been neglecting you.”

“He’s lying, you’ve got to believe me.”

She tried to adopt her butter-wouldn’t-melt emoticon she’d last used when playing Heidi in the school play.

She couldn’t find it, distracted by Space’s circuit board tattoo. The effect was of a pattern within a pattern that would go on forever if only your eyes were sharp enough to see forever.

“I hope you’re going to pay her for these,” said Rufus.

Space sprang from his chair and snatched the iPad from Rufus. He must have realized that he was going to have to abandon the Nazi garage print and spun around with a loose-limbed grace that reminded Temple of a spider monkey or lemur.

She swiped the print from the tabletop. She must not be left with it. It belonged with him.

He was loping towards the Pitstop’s doors. His bag swung around his waist and thumped his hips. Rufus tried to get in front of her, tried to embrace her, old man’s tears in his eyes and his lion’s mane ash-grey under the spotlights.

“Wait.”

Her feet were too sore to run. She limped to the door. She must lose Rufus in the rain and the dark and follow Mr Space and see forever.

Through the plate glass a smudged figure flapped away in the rain.

She made it through the door, into the sodium lights, into the spitting glare. She froze. Her feet felt peeled, burnt. She found herself on her haunches. She’d dropped the print. The wind scooped it up and whirled it away into the night. Her hair fell into her eyes. A voice. More voices above and beyond her. Someone put a hand on her shoulder. Someone was down at her level, trying to look her in the eyes. Someone said her name. Maybe he’d said her name out loud, the first time he’d said it in years, spoken her name softly and kindly, as if it were still her name. She felt the wind blast her shoulders. She couldn’t be sure that the wind hadn’t spoken. She couldn’t be sure what had happened to the wind.

Drawing Farther, by Róbert Gál

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 06:50:00 -0400

A tautology is a statement that is always even-handed.

The space for our own self-destruction appears boundless, but it’s not.

What is more frequent? Question marks or exclamation marks?

A trap is interesting. It’s beautiful. It’s fragrant.

An internal exile into the external world.

Socially intelligent machines.

A slipping inward.

Knocking on the gate beyond which there are no guard dogs.

The cage named joy. The joy named cage.

Brilliant comes from “polishing,” and yet, for example, we don’t say about the sun it’s polished.

Disjointed beings.

A vacuum is the hope from which ideas are born like tadpoles.

The defencelessness of a rain drop.

Merciful forgetting.

Always assembling the always disassembled.

The back-bone distributed accross the weight of the load.

If sensitizing kills sensitivity, then sensitivity can kill sensitization.

Serrated good.

Sometimes it’s not a matter of saving a life but of saving from a life.

Hammers convince wedges that holes exist. Holes convince hammers that wedges exist. Wedges convince holes that hammers exist.

Having one’s brain in the right place.

To know one’s own language, but only as far as the next sentence.

Contra-apodictic retro-spectacularity.

As long as we search for criminals, we cannot be surprised when we find them.

Limbs of the mind and limbs of the feeling.

Tautoapology.

Jump into your own steps. Step into your own jumps.

To the cage or to the nest?

An echo hands over the word, but doesn’t shout above it.

Silence cannot sublimate in the thickening air.

The radicalism of love or the love of radicalism?

Romanthropoid.

To bear pain admits that pain is bare.

Barring one truth through the statute of limitation of another.

A door unhinged, so it can neither be opened nor smashed down.

Life is a permanently persistant support of the existence of a yet unborn chicken.

The words by which we don’t understand.

Dosaged judgments.

Dysparallel.

A monologue is a form of storytelling, where each chapter is a capitulation.

Ladders thrust into the heavens.

Caution when traveling to the past, implies not tripping over one of the futures.

Verifalsity.

Even the bark of the tree believes in its pulp and therefore protects it.

The umbilical string of pearls.

Empty handhold, the flywheel and its flight.

Horizontal yearnings correspond to vertical ideals. And vice versa.

Can something torment us solely out of solidarity?

Degenerative declamations.

The words by which we won’t be missed by anyone.

An aphorism is an alibi.

Laws exist because being obliged to feel something is obvious nonsense.

Denouncing drifters while adrift.

Excessive need doesn’t necessarily breed excessive satisfaction.

Grave thrones.

Anthropomantra.

Translated from the Slovak by Michaela Freeman

The Chinese Girl, by Vladimír Havrilla

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 06:59:00 -0400

I unstuck my upper eyelids from the lower ones and kicked around a bit until the duvet fell on the floor. I had my flute on the side table. Still partly asleep, I opened the case and before I pulled myself together, I played my favorite theme—Ellington’s A Train.

The morning was cool and I quickly pulled on a coarsely-knit sweater and switched on the Sony tape-recorder. My father bought me the Sony a long time ago. Father doesn’t live with me anymore. I watched the two large reels as they smoothly unspooled and found a rhythm. At about sixty beats, I was in the bop mood.

Although I played quite loudly, I did hear the doorbell ring. Not because of my musical ear, but because of my oversensitivity—I get frightened like a doe. The doorbell rang once more and I had no make-up on! There was no time for make-up and I wore nothing but a sweater! I pulled on a skirt and ran to the door. I opened it.

Dr. Adler was standing in the doorway and before he managed to say anything, I said: “Now? In the morning?” He began to talk and then he boldly walked through the dark hallway into the partly open room at the back of the flat, past the big canvases and stood by the window.

He mumbled something. Neither of us realized the reels were still spinning, on speed nine. A long talk was ahead of us and, because of this, I obtained a recording (like some secret agent), which I transcribed and shortened.

Adler’s statements were incomprehensible, in some parts naïve, but sometimes unbearably truthful. He often got up and sat down. In between tea, he drank rum, pouring the rum into the tea and calling it “grog.” He drank coffee and then tea again.

“I have a cat’s tongue,” he’d say when drinking the very hot tea. He searched his pockets and found a matchbox, shook it and put it back in his pocket. He wanted to smoke a cigar. I wouldn’t let him because I can’t stand cigars. He knew that and didn’t bother to persuade me.

Adler stood in the doorway, the door ajar and a cold draft coming from the hall. I asked, “Now? In the morning?” And thus the recording begins:

“I didn’t really sleep. I didn’t drink that much… Grrr, my head is splitting, but I didn’t drink that much.”

“C’mon in, old man.”

“You know … I’d like to confess to you. There is a girl walking around someplace in China. She has a braid. Narrow eyes, she’s the embodiment of shyness. She’s tiny, and if I were to embrace her, she’d disappear entirely. What a fool I am! On my wide chest.”

“Don’t stand in the doorway, come on in.”

“It’s fantastic when a girl looks at you, from below, with a shy, quick look.”

“Adler, I’m cold, come in.”

“But that Chinese girl … how am I supposed to know where she is? The one who’s supposed to become my wife.”

“Take off your coat, you’re frozen. Let me make some tea. Where have you been wandering, you little nutcake?”

“I walked along the Danube, then in Petržalka around the carousels. I had a hip-flask with me. I was thinking about that little fox, about that Chinese girl. But how am I supposed to know where she is?

“If I get married, I’ll never learn what could have been. Genetic matching and so on. Any girl can adjust, but you know that only one exists. The second one is just an emergency solution. Excuse me, I’m talking nonsense. What, can’t I have my own opinion? I’ll never lower myself … to whisper in bed while knowing … just to sigh and moan! No, no, I won’t fall for that. Well, that’s just degrading. Where are my cigars? Make that tea little one, I’m cold. The genetic match is at stake here. There just must be the best!

“Oh, am I boring you, little one? Belonging to the elite is a tough way to make your daily bread. It is. Understand, this is a matter of perfection! I’ll never lower myself. It’s useless. I hate half-ass solutions. Beautiful paintings. And when did you paint this one? I like to be here, but I have to solve my issues myself. Only one is the best. But where do I find her? China has a billion citizens and I don’t even have a passport. And I have a feeling that the girl travels about in China. Still, I can’t give up on her. Understand, it’s a matter of genetic matching.

“I like to be here with you. I like your paintings. It’s nice that you are an abstract painter now. I love art above all. To see a good painting or to visit a performance, for me is like a healing potion. Other than that, I’m entirely falling apart. I need to pull myself together somehow.

“When I was young, I had a girlfriend. Ha, ha, that was a long time ago. I was poorer. We tried all kinds of things. We ran out of breath. We started to have a sense that we’re reaching unexplored territory and it tremendously attracted us. Somehow we sensed we were not supposed to do it. I don’t know why, but we were all the more attracted. I still love to remember it. How it captured us. Everyone thinks it’s supposed to be that way. You must build civilization. You must go to work and I’m supposed to applaud you for it. Oh no, that’s not how I imagined it. My girl is walking around in China. She has a beautiful voice and speaks in a language I will never understand. That’s absolutely fine with me. What do you need talking for? … When you’re in harmony, you don’t need to talk. Sit in a pavilion and watch bees. See how nicely they work? Animals don’t work anywhere nearly as hard as people and still, everything works out for them. I have yet to see bees build their beehive wrong. A man must work in order to forget. He doesn’t want to know anything about himself. And I’m supposed to applaud you for that? Work is nothing but a drug nowadays. Give me some cognac, little one. Most people work only so they don’t have to think about themselves. Believe me, I have some friends. It’s a disaster. Give me some cognac, I can’t sit here dry like this. And put on some Chinese music.”

I listened to his words spill and busied myself with mixing yellow and white paint on a palette. I applied the yellow to the partly painted canvas and cast a yellow female face with slanted eyes. The large canvas lay on the floor and I knelt down to reach over and apply the yellow paint with a thin brush. Adler squatted next to me and picked up a bit of paint from my palette with his index finger. He smelled it and suddenly didn’t know what to do with his finger. I pointed to a single spot—here. Adler looked at his finger and then applied the paint somewhat clumsily to the back of my hand. I got up and said: “I’ll make tea.” I filled the kettle and turned on the gas. Adler was alone, talking to himself and then began singing something.

The tape recorder hissed, thumped, and then reeled in silence until a clinking of porcelain.

I turned off the gas and brought the cups, filling them to the brim with tea.

“Indian?” Adler asked.

“No, Chinese,” I replied.

“Too bad, I wanted an Indian tea.”

I swallowed and said quietly: “Forgive me,” but Adler paid no attention, as he slurped the hot tea, blew on it, wrinkled his forehead, said something in Latin, then switched to Slovak and began to recite: “One thousand nights, one thousand embraces … yet one colonnade.”

I blew on my tea, sipped and tasted its bitterness. I don’t sweeten my tea. I leaned over to the doctor and straightened the lapel of his jacket that stuck out. “Can I loosen your tie?” I asked, but did not wait for the answer and loosened the knot on his dark-blue tie with a silver stripe. Then I opened a button on his snow-white shirt. I wanted to ask him who washes his shirts, but it would have been inappropriate for the moment.

“Adler,” I said softly, “would you include me in those nights?”

He sighed, got up, walked about the room and spoke, “I … I feel everything … but what am I supposed to… who should I know?” and didn’t finish the sentence. “I like to remember it. I had my share of suffering. One shakes when a taboo is being broken. Even a thief shakes as he’s opening a safe. When you’re doing the right thing, you don’t shake. Believe me, little one, you just don’t shake.”

I jumped up and in the entry put on a pair of black shoes with very thin high heels.

“What do you say about these heels?” I turned my back to Adler and lifted my foot, “My highest!”

“I like the clacking of high heels, but I prefer the shuffling of feet” and added, “High heels were in twenty years ago.”

“So?” I said.

“No thank you, no, really.”

“But it’s ready.”

“Oh, I’m not talking about the tea! Everything is a risk. A lottery. The girl is alive and walking about in China … in an unknown location. Consider the size of the country. The minimal probability of our meeting. Probably zero.”

I tossed the shoes aside. Adler called out to me to make more tea. Before serving, I put on rough, black rubber gloves and similar black galoshes. I was able to move about only by shuffling my feet, the galoshes allowing no other motion. I set the teapot and cups on a tray and took them to Adler. The doctor asked which tea I had brought.

“Indian,” I said eagerly.

“Oh, now that I’ve gotten used to the Chinese tea,” the doctor shook his head.

I reached for a cup, but my foot got tangled and I fell.

“Come help me.” I hugged Adler around the neck and together we got up, “Ouch, your face is so scruffy!”

Adler reached into his chest pocket and pulled out a silver cigar-case. He pushed on the side and the lid popped open to reveal nicely aligned cigars of the La Flor de Cano brand. He said nothing, closed the lid and put the cigars back in his pocket.

I went to the bedroom and rummaged in the closet for a while. When I was sixteen, I was trained in judo and had a kimono stored someplace. I pulled on the pants and tied the jacket with a double knot. I returned and sat next to the doctor, the kimono noticeably opened.

“It’s a bit small, but I still like it.”

“What matters is that you feel good in it,” Adler said.

“Would you like more tea?”

“Yes, with a bit of cognac. I’ll make myself a grog.”

“I have Jamaican rum.”

“Good.”

Adler did not pour rum into the tea, but drank it from a glass and poured some more. The cup remained untouched. He pulled out matches and laid them on the little table. He raised the teacup, said it was hot, drank the rum and poured himself another glass. I took it from him and spilled it on the floor.

“You are no hostess. I don’t want any tea!” He picked up the bottle and drank a bit.

“Adler!” I said.

“You won’t erase a genetic code. There’s chaos here. Understand, little one, this is about genes gone haywire.”

The kimono has a V-shaped neckline. I looked down it and observed a little dark dot. I put my finger on it and quickly looked at Adler.

“A birth mark,” he said, looked out of the window and pulled out the cigar case. He took out one cigar, put it in his mouth and shook the matches. Then he set the cigar on the table.

My eyes wandered from object to object, from scissors to clock, from paints to the telephone.

“I don’t intend to try balancing something,” Adler said.

I ran into the bathroom and cried. It had snowed that night and there was a quite a lot of snow on the window-sill. I opened the little window, grabbed some and rubbed it into my face. I poured the rest of the snow on my head and went back to Adler. He was listening to jazz, the canvases scattered on the floor. He sat in the armchair and watched thoughtfully. Little streams of melted snow dribbled down my forehead and cheeks, my arms hanging along my body, I stood, the recorder turning idly.

Adler approached and lifted me. He was a strong man. He snuggled his face against mine and I no longer minded his stubble. I felt I was in an elevator. I could smell tobacco and I didn’t mind that either.

When he left, he took his hat off the hanger and pulled it a little more over his eyes. Before he closed the door, he said, “I held you up a bit.”

“I’ll catch up,” I said.

I heard a click from the bedroom, ran in and stopped the reel with my hand. The only thing left was to rewind the tape and sit down at the typewriter.

I sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the abandoned flute and disassembled it into its small silver parts. The flute case lay open. The number of dark blue velvet inlays matched the number of flute parts. I slowly put them back and closed the case.

Translated from the Slovak by Michaela Freeman

Preparing to Use a Fork, by Laura Musselman

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 07:17:24 -0400

When I dream of my mother, she is hiding in the farthest corners of dimly lit rooms, bewildered and pale-faced and all bold, brown eyes. This is not unlike the real image she inhabits, sitting in her walker or on a paisley-cushioned bench at the end of the hall as she tries to piece together the portions of my face, my hair, my body into something that falls just short of familiar or safe.

My mother looks small sitting there, every day smaller than I have ever seen her. Frail, and barely there. The clothes that used to fit her snugly hang from her shoulders, sleeves like a tent meant to house the loose, wrinkled skin that hangs from her frame. She is my mother, of course, made up of the same cells that webbed into the bits and pieces of her that used to swab my dirty face with saliva and rub my back when I was sick. Conversely, she is not my mother. She is a ghost. And I am her daughter, and I am not her daughter. I am a stranger most every day she sees me.

Each time I see her, there is less to see. When people ask how she is doing, this is what I say. She is disappearing, and one day I am afraid she might fall through the space between the bench cushions. One day, maybe she will. One day, there will be nothing left. I know this, and yet my visits become less regular, less dependable. To see her is to see the formidable truth that soon she will no longer be there. And I am not that brave.

My mother does not remember how to use a fork, but she taught me how to identify one. How to use it to stab, and pry, and shovel. This is the sort of thing I do without thinking. It is an instinctual skill. When I feel the weight of this utensil in my own palm, I know what to do next. I do not often consider forks, but my mother studies them curiously, fumbling her fingers around this end or that in a solid attempt to make any sense of the thing. Most days, someone has to use her fork for her, to spear the slabs of meats and vegetables swimming on her plate. It is impossible to get her to eat. She doesn’t know the meaning of this activity, but I can tell she doesn’t like it.

In my baby pictures, the edges of our faces blurred into the background, it looks as though my mother is singing as she feeds me: her chin up, her lips slightly parted, her eyes bright and singsongy. My eyes fixated on the utensil coming towards me. I am not this gentle with her. Not this patient. I imagine her delicately scooping food onto my baby fork: tender. Me, I stab the potatoes, wait with an elbow perched on the edge of the table for a spare moment in her confusion, wait for a window through which I can thrust the fork toward her: convincingly. With rigid, forceful purpose. Like I know what to do next. Like I know what’s best. Like I don’t know why it should be this hard.

My mother doesn’t know why it should be this hard either, I suppose. Doesn’t understand why I need so badly for her to complete this one, meaningless task. I answer her questioning expressions with phrases like: You need to eat. You are too thin. You are too confused. You are disappearing.

Her use of a fork was methodical. She scraped food with reckless abandon, metal against ceramic. The two materials resisted each other; they produced a stinging, chilly sound, not unlike the sound of worn brake pads. It was silencing. My grandfather, her father, was brusque about how much the sound disturbed him each and every time we found ourselves seated around the same family table. He is a man that does not like to be silenced.

But she is silent, as we sit here. Because I do not consider forks, I cannot consider the way the thing must look to her, or the presumptions about its use, or the barely-there memories of times that she has used one lingering like the notes of a song not heard in years. Sometimes I wonder if I should do this, if it’s just a way of putting the inevitable on the back burner. It’s a strange thing to become her, to become the feeder. It’s a strange thing to mother my mother. To watch this thing eat away at her. To try to sate her hunger.

Once, I watched a documentary in which a man traveled to Switzerland to end his life because he was just as confused as she. He was beginning to forget how to use a fork. He was beginning to forget how to survive. Before he dies, he drinks tea and signs papers. He chats politely with his wife, and she feeds him his favorite little chocolates. She rubs his hands to put him to sleep. He has gotten used to the idea, he says. He feels he has little other choice. We don’t have much of a choice either, I think, because these are things my mother no longer knows how to do. I have reconciled myself to this regression, as she has, the way we reconcile the use of forks.

Three Poems, by Kathleen Roberts

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 07:09:33 -0400

The Musician

Winter 2010, you crashed the Civic
into a semi during a blizzard.
I met you that summer. You pulled up,
trash bags ruffling in the windows like pennants.

Even walking alone, you always seemed
to have sounds about you, as if it was you
carrying the whir of traffic or
the rustle of leaves, like a halo.

Eventually, I came to think
that without you, the world would fall silent.

I am a drummer. I assign pitch
and rhythm to the day’s small sounds.
I put my feet into the pile of cans
on the passenger floor and wriggle them
playing the music of your wrists, your neck, your eyes,
flicking back and forth in traffic.

You-wake-me-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night Love Song

You’re falling out of bed, dear,
give me your shoulders.
Give me your arms, dear.
Give me your hands
and I will haul you back
up. I couldn’t bear
to see you lying on the carpet
when I awoke.

You’re falling out of bed, dear.
Give me your shins.
Give me your knees and your
ankles and your heels.
Finding you on the floor like this
is one thing, but I can’t
bear to think it was me who let you fall,
watched you roll down,
tumble away.

I wake up early Sunday morning.
I peel your fingers from my stomach
and knead them, sticky,
and rub my thighs, sticky.
I stumble through the house and
take a piss, the same thing
every Sunday. But today, when I
forgot my coat, I came back
and found you by the foot of the bed,
eyes shut, crawling.

You’re falling
out of bed, dear.
Give me your chin.
your nostrils
your teeth.

Compline

Wandering lost through
a church basement,

I find them, at last
in a long, empty room.

The oldest sits dead still,
her eyes closed.

II.

I have practiced silence
to solve every problem.

Silence so I will not hate them,
to protect me from their hate.

I feel my eyelids
always twitching, unsettled.

III.

I read the story of the wise men.
The monk that wrote it

called them ‘simple.’
It seemed odd, but the oldest said,

‘you would have to be simple
to run after a star.’

Tuesday, by Mel Bosworth

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 07:05:17 -0400

I’ve just swallowed a spoonful of warm mashed potato when she slinks into the room. She’s wearing a dress she made herself from paisley curtains. The dress is awful. I ignore her and her dress, focus instead on my Dinner plate. I am easily mesmerized by the greenness of peas. I am easily mesmerized by good china. And she’s nearly through it, too, the kitchen, and on her way to the deadbolt safety of her bedroom when her mother, my wife, stabs through my plate with a steak knife, partly to get her attention and partly to make sure I’m giving mine. I look up. The noise of my wife’s violence is terrible, sobering. My plate thump rattles in half—two jagged moons. The knife, perfectly upright, sticks into the maple and I anticipate, perhaps childishly, an accompanying cartoonish sproing sound as the handle vibrates. It doesn’t come, though, and I wonder what my reaction should be to this and to our daughter’s latest crime. It’s been three months since the dog incident. The knitted bones in my right hand ache when it rains, and I’m certain they’ll continue to ache for the next twenty years—the next ten (five! four! one!) if I’m lucky.

Tonight, however, I have more self-control than my wife. The CDs have been working. I’ve always done well with repetition. Besides, the fresh, fist-sized plaster plug to the right of our daughter’s bedroom door still needs a second coat of white paint. I see the outline of the hole when I drunk shuffle to the bathroom. I still catch glimpses of Buster’s tail slapping around the corner as he leads me like a four-legged Sherpa along some horizontal Everest. It’d be just as hard to traverse, I imagine. The foamy pink blood in my lungs wouldn’t shock the coroner. What altitude! What danger! But Buster. Oh Buster. He liked the steam from the shower. He liked the calm. He liked being close to me is what it really was. But that’s all phantom now. Sense memory. Our daughter is the new fascination, always has been, now pushing beyond the room, the air, splitting it, us. She’s too big for this house. And I know she’s going to wash her hands, the water hot enough to pain but not to burn. Good girl. I want to tell her to shake off the guilt. I will tell her, eventually, when the crying is over.

But now there are other things. My wife, for instance. With her left thumb, she presses into the palm of her right hand. Her right hand is somehow misshapen, wrong. Her mouth now, too. I close my eyes, rip the room into my lungs through my nostrils. I cough it out chunky. I am empty of answers, of soft. The cat went missing this morning. And it’s not the silence that worries me; silence can be filled easily enough with bass drums or pointed flutes or hard sex. No, what worries me is my desire to steer our daughter toward bigger things, things that will create real holes, holes deep enough to permanently blacken this sour chicken that’s flopped and wheezing on the center of the table.

City Girls, by LiAnn Yim

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 07:07:38 -0500

We are all afraid of the man we have read about in the newspaper.

This city, which is all we’ve ever known, is a strange place. Chainsaw attacks in the subway. Acid thrown outside apartments; fires set inside elevators. Cranes topple off half-built buildings. But this is different, this is worse. This is the most terrible story you will ever hear.

Here is what we have learned from the newspapers: The man goes into hair salons, takes hold of a woman’s hair, usually after it’s been washed and lies lankly like an oily seal pelt, and cuts off a great hank of it. He leaves. He takes the hair with him. What does he do with this hair, we wonder. We don’t know. People guess about it at dinner parties. Late night show comedians make jokes about it on TV. What is going on here? This guy’s got some kind of hair fetish; he’s a bald guy, he’s angry at the hair. Bedbugs ate away his mattress so now he stuffs the bedding with human hair because a Chinese acupuncturist instructed him to do so, if he didn’t want to have a crooked spine. Perhaps he has in his possession an egg, white, and speckled, that must be placed in a nest of fleece and hair before it can be borne.

A new city beat reporter stumbled across this story by accident. He was on a police ride along in Spanish Harlem, nearing the end of the shift. When the cops went to answer a dispatch, he sat in the backseat and through the open window he heard two women, smoking on the sidewalk, talking about a crazy man. This was the first interesting thing the reporter had heard all night. He got out of the car, interviewed the women, and eventually found the all black hair salon where it happened.

The reporter pieced together his story from three angles: the unfortunate and overwrought woman, the owner of the salon, and the stylist who had washed the woman’s hair. They remembered: The man sheared off a woman’s knot of hair, a thick ropey coil she had nurtured since she was twelve and became a woman. The woman was reading a magazine and listening to her friend, the lucky woman beside her who did not have her hair cut off, and she hardly noticed the man behind her, but then there was a sawing, thumbs touching the secretive skin of her scalp, until a weight was gone from her head, so abruptly banished that her neck sagged for a moment, bowing forward and then released. The owner of the salon assumed he was a customer and had seated him in a chair to wait. He was wearing a somber blue suit “like he worked in a bank.” He sat for a while, then got up and walked over to the woman sitting with her back to him, and he cut her hair off just under the ears. The woman’s stylist had her hands full of rollers; she dropped all of them when she saw what had been done to her client. The woman’s hair had been taken in swift closures of his scissors, and there was a spray of thin hair sprinkled down into the collar of her blouse, down her back, and the spiky ends of her hair prickled her neck.

The journalist’s story ended up occupying only a square space the size of an advertisement, published last month. Yesterday in the school computer lab, we crouched in the corner and looked up his new story, a follow-up to the original, published this week. Since the first reported incident, this man has severed and stolen the hair of twenty-one women. The journalist’s second article is much longer this time and includes photos of all the women, before and after photos that show what they have been left with: wisps and spare ends, hair that doesn’t flatter their faces at all. We keen with grief at these photographs. Noses look bigger and hooked, brows protrude more, chins and necks are fleshier, a bottom lip is much thinner than the upper.

This man is clever. He only goes inside a hair salon when it is at its busiest. No one pays attention to him. Last week, he snipped off the hair of two women in the same shop. It happened in Midtown this time. They were both sitting near the door, that’s probably why. He was able to come in, scissors already in hand, thumb and forefinger hooked into its silver loops, turn from one girl to the next, and then take his leave like a ghost. Nobody mortal has seen when he appeared and where he disappeared. One was a girl with particularly lovely hair in skeins of white blond. The other was a dirtier blond girl. They both had very fine hair, sleek pools of silk; hair ties were always sliding right out; they were cousins. Sitting in adjacent chairs, they had been looking at pictures of celebrity coiffure. The prettier cousin felt fingers penetrate the veil of her hair and then a sting—in the man’s haste, his finger had scratched the hidden part of her neck, just under the hairline. They glimpsed the image of the man through their gilded mirrors, perhaps one or both of them made a rising movement out of her chair, certainly one of them screamed, and the man ran out of the room. Afterwards, the cousins, interviewed individually by the indifferent police, described two different strangers.

This is not uncommon. His victims have been unable to agree on what he looks like. Eyewitness testimonies are notoriously unreliable, and the reports of his appearance have differed greatly. We comb through the papers carefully for any description of him—his height, his age, if his fingernails are dirty or uncut. We are constantly disappointed by the lack of sketches. And there’s that he might have started disguising himself. We don’t know. One woman said she felt he had rough hands, calluses like sand, but then another—no less credible a witness—said he had hands like a baby, with the slenderest fingers and cute knuckles, dimpled with little dents.

The third woman in this string of attacks said she thought he was a swarthy man “like he spent time at sea or worked as an olive grove picker.” She had taken off her glasses while her hair was being vigorously shampooed and washed, and she placed them, folded, on a stack of magazines in front of her. She couldn’t make out many of his features, but she was certain he had dark skin. But another woman said she saw his hand when he swept her hair from her forehead, and he gathered it in a hand that was pale and freckled.

Someone ventured the opinion that maybe there is more than one man; maybe he has an accomplice. But we find this is too terrifying to contemplate, so we try to put it from our minds.

In math class we estimate that there are about two hundred and forty-five hair salons in the city. This number should reassure us, but then we realize he has visited salons in all five boroughs, four times in each borough.

We do not want to encounter this man. Fear of him curdles in our stomachs like an ocean of spilled oil. We laugh and joke but privately agree that he is a sick fellow. We say we will cut each other’s hair. We prick our fingertips with a needle, taste each other’s welling blood, and swear an oath that we will not deliberately sabotage each other. We will hold the scissors with careful hands.

This man frightens all of us, but surely it must be Jane he frightens the most, though she pretends bravery. Jane has hair like mink. She likes to pull her hair into a sloppy knot, lopsided at the top of her head, like a puffy cloud. She arranges it this way on purpose, so everyone can see how little effort she puts into looking beautiful. This knot of hair keeps slipping free, so she has to reach up with both of her slender white arms, pull the tangle apart and redo it. She arches her back, pushing her breasts against her shirt, bows her elegant neck, graceful and enticing. Her neck looks too delicate to support the wild thicket of her hair. When we swim in gym class, all the girls’ heads look shriveled and small, their shoulders hulking in comparison, their necks like rhinoceroses, all except Jane, whose swaths of hair is obsidian rich, newly washed seaweed, combed by mermaids.

Jane is the kind of girl whom boys and other girls covet. We need her more than she needs us. It’s always been this way, ever since we all met in first grade. At first we followed her around the yard because she had the best ideas, and she somehow managed to get everybody, even the boys, excited about them. One year, both third grade classes got a new pen of rubber kickballs to share between them, black and clay-red and orange colored ones. At the end of recess, we would return all the balls into the two containers, and in this way, they got shuffled back and forth between the two rooms quite a bit. But there was one little yellow ball, the size of a grapefruit, that Jane took for her own. It had to be protected, it could never be kicked, and there were certain people Jane didn’t ever want to ever touch it. They weren’t allowed to play with it, though whether they were aware of it or not, we never knew. We suspected they did.

Soon everyone got involved in the game of protecting the yellow ball. We cantered around with it for a month, coddling it and passing it around carefully. One day, we were playing with it and somehow Marta gave it a funny sideways kick at the wrong angle and lobbed it over the fence into the fast-moving creek. We were all aghast, Marta most of all. Jane rushed to the chain-link fence, but Marta stood where she was, her stout face splotched. The rest of us quickly fetched a teacher and other students to try and retrieve it. Rueven even climbed the fence. We never got the ball back, Rueven was Jane’s first boyfriend, and Marta was kicked out of our group. Not right then, but over time we talked less when she was around. We still invited her for birthdays, but only because it was a class rule that no one could be excluded from birthday parties. Eventually Marta started making excuses for why she couldn’t follow us out to our spot on the playground or eat lunch at our table. At first she would hide in the library and eat where the librarian couldn’t see her, and later on she joined another group.

So Marta was out. Rueven and Jane got married at one lunch recess. We were bridesmaids, sweeping the ground behind us with creek bulrushes. Her ring was something from the vending machine, the silver tab off a soda can, threaded onto a plastic lanyard taken from Art. Eventually they had a “divorce,” as we understood it, but Jane was allowed to keep the ring.

Jane is Lysistrata and Héloïse. Jane buys her prom dress first out of all of us and forbids anyone else to buy a dress like hers in any way: We cannot choose dresses spun from pools of midnight, nor dresses with folds like origami paper, or dresses with little sprigs of pink flowers painted into the silk, it is all forbidden. We choose, instead, pale-colored dresses that make us look lovely, but not too much so.

Jane wants her hair cut and permed. She wants a sable spill of it down her trim back, the soft curves of it to call attention to her dress and its lines and sharp-angled creases.

In school we learn about the English Civil War. We read in our books about the followers of Oliver Cromwell, who cropped their hair in defiance of the curls and ringlets of the king’s men. In English, we read a story by Fitzgerald, about a girl named Bernice who bobs her hair and is ruined because of it, and in our Drama elective we take turns reading aloud scenes from The Rape of the Lock.

At lunch we learn it has happened to a girl at our school. A sophomore, who used to have curly hair the color of an exotic nut. Her sister was getting married and she was going to be in the wedding, even make a toast, so her mother took her to the hairdresser’s. Now her hair has been fixed into a severe, chin-length cut. None of us girls want to make her feel worse than she does, so we avoid looking at her. When she walks into the lunchroom, we shift our eyes to the floor, even Jane, like we are all in mourning and this girl is a funeral procession alone. When she passes us in the halls, she cowers back as a nocturnal animal retreating from sunlight.

After school, we go to Jane’s apartment because it’s the weekend, and we’re all sleeping over. We do this often, taking turns. Corrine’s home is probably the best though. Her apartment building, with its deep gabled roof and balustrades and niches, occupies an entire block. Famous people lived there, though we hardly ever see them coming and going—Corrine says there is a private entrance, which she isn’t allowed to tell us about, owing to the fact that a resident was once gunned down at the entrance and died in the lobby.

We’re supposed to stay at Jane’s, but Corrine volunteers her apartment, which isn’t fair, or right, since we have only just stayed at Corrine’s. We don’t mind—true, Corrine has the better apartment, although Jane has the superior housekeeper who makes desserts we like—but Jane insists on following the rules.

Jane is unbending. In the end, we have to abide by the rules. Corrine, whey-faced, comes with us. That night we dream the same dream, of not being able to leave a table until we finished an unending bowl of porridge. The porridge congeals in our mouths, clumps in our stomachs. Perhaps it is because we spent the afternoon on the roof, braised by the sun and city smoke. Or maybe it was the housekeeper; the chocolate cake we gorged ourselves on was too dark and raw, practically bloody with chocolate; it unsettled our bellies and made us sleep poorly.

In our dream, wolves interrupt us from finishing our meal. We flee through the city, and wolves hunt us in packs. They drive us up avenues, root us from subway stations. Occasionally we catch sight of one another, spy the banner of Jane’s hair weaving through buildings ahead of us. Our lungs seize up with burning. One of us screams. One of our hands stretches out towards Jane, grazing her hair, which coils around our wrist like a lash. Our skin there starts smoking.

When all of us tunnel from under the covers, Corrine stays curled, snail-like, eyes closed. We pounce on her, thump her with heavy pillows. We grab her arms and wrists and wrest her up. Wake up, we say, wake up! What’s wrong with you, we want to know. Then we see the soiled sheets. No odor, just a copper red stain, a bloom shaped like a swan’s egg.

Jane cannot forgive this trespass. She simply cannot. Jane recoils from Corrine as if she holds a translucent centipede out in her palm. We do not ease Corrine from our group like we did with Marta; this is a true divorce. The separation is immediate and absolute. So Corrine is out, and here our hearts are riven with sorrow because we liked her and her apartment so much.

Jane urges us to throw ourselves into the weekend as if nothing has happened, as if Corrine is not out there alone in the city with her hair unbound. We have all brought along our old dolls: Barbies and Cabbage Patch babies, even American Girls. We wet their hair—plastic and Kanekalon and yarn—with fine-tooth combs to make it orderly. We sit them on pillows in our laps. The scissors are gleaming, winking at us. Our fingertips sting where we pricked them.

This is for practice, Jane reminds us. So we are taking this seriously, as if we were doing this for one another.

We are a sober trio, a golden triangle of grim faces. Straight lines elude us. We try again. We try this time to cut a little bit of a curve, but the curve is uneven. We rush to fix this. Waist-length hair becomes shoulder-length hair becomes chin-length becomes a crew cut. Jane proclaims our efforts as terrible. We will try again tomorrow. Today we try on our dresses. Jane’s housekeeper brings in the full-length mirror from her parents’ bedroom. We strip and put on our dresses, zip and hook and tie each other. We practice dancing because, of course, we will be asked. We will swallow all the light in the ballroom. Other girls will be desirous of us.

Jane rents a movie for us. It is a romance, one our parents surely would not allow. It takes place in Renaissance Italy, about a woman who wants to become an artist but can’t because she was a woman. Instead, she is raped by her tutor. There is a scene where dark-faced magistrates discover the loss of her virginity and lop off her hair while she writhes on a bloodstained table. The movie disturbs us, especially Agnes, who has to leave the room at one point. We make fun of her for doing so.

There are three bathrooms in Jane’s apartment, so we take our baths at the same time. We brush each other’s hair and practice our French braiding. We fall asleep with our hair bound in crowns that wreath our heads. And the shower caps, to keep our heads humid and damp.

We awaken in the morning to take off the caps and unbind our hair. Ours is mostly flat or unevenly waved, but Jane’s plume of hair, unbraided, is an inky glory. She strips off the cap and casts it aside like it offends her. Bareheaded, she looks as if she should be holding a sword in her hand and wearing a shift of silver armor, stamping her foot and calling for heads.

Over breakfast, we start to play a game. It has to do with a blindfold and several tall glasses filled with different liquids: fresh squeezed orange juice, papaya juice, soda, water, and one is left empty. One at a time a scarf binds our eyes, the glasses are shuffled, and we dip our fingers inside. Once we’ve wetted our fingers, someone takes our arms and moves our hands over the table where we’ve scattered sea salt, black peppercorn, and sweetener. We touch blindly; the grains stick to our fingers. Which glass we choose predicts who our first boyfriends will be—if he will be prosperous, handsome, impoverished, ugly—and the salt and pepper tell us if we’ll stay a virgin until after marriage or not, the sweetener if we’ll die a spinster. The number of grains tell us at what age we’ll get married.

Agnes says, “This game is stupid, it’s for children.”

We tell her, “Do it anyway.”

Agnes almost knocks over the glasses before touching the papaya juice. She shudders as she brushes an ice cube and when she withdraws a finger, a little bit of pulp still clings to the tip. We turn her towards the spices. Her hand hovers and then jabs at the salt. Agnes wrenches off her blindfold with one hand and stares at her finger.

Fifteen spots of salt fleck her finger. We make woo-woo sounds. This means Agnes will sleep with a boy sometime this year. Agnes wipes her finger on the table, leaves behind a shiny smear. She tells us to shut up.

Jane’s eyes narrow, become cat-like. She says in a threatening way, “Don’t be sore, Agnes, it’s just a game.”

Poor Agnes is unhappy. She says again, “It’s stupid. Who ever thought of such a stupid game?”

We are all quiet. Then Jane says, “If it’s just a game, why are you getting so mad? It isn’t as if this will come true. Right?”

“Right,” Agnes says, her voice tight and wrathful. As if she is speaking through the end of a tin can and some string pulled taut.

“Anyway,” Jane says, “Even if you did, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Right, but if you did, it would be okay. If you really loved him.”

“Can we please stop talking about this,” says Agnes.

“Come on, tell us who you like, Agnes. We shared ours.”

“I don’t like anyone right now.”

“You have to, everyone does. Why won’t you tell us?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

Jane’s eyes glitter, marbled and dark like an antique doll’s. Sometime during our game she has done her hair up again in a thick braid, so heavy it is immovable against her back. “You’re not being fair. If you don’t trust us, then we can’t trust you.”

Agnes’s tongue is still, her teeth firmly clicked together. We sit in the kitchen and listen to her walk upstairs and collect her things, and we listen to the front door open and close and we think we can even hear the chime of the elevator arriving and then carrying Agnes away, releasing her into the city.

And Agnes is out. Jane’s housekeeper comes in and looks at us. She asks if we would like some cake with our breakfast; it’ll be our secret, dessert at breakfast. Our stomachs roil and pitch as if we have just drunk an entire sea inside of us. I look at Jane. Jane looks at me and says, Good riddance, we don’t need prudes. The city is bad enough without prudes. The two of us aren’t safe in the city, Jane insists. Just look at what’s happening in barbershops. Stealing hair is half a step away from slashing throats; that’ll be the next step. Hm-hm, I say.

We go upstairs to her bedroom again to look at her gown, which is still covered under a soft sheet of plastic. It lies flat on the bed like a skinned creature.

Jane brings out an array of silver instruments—a comb, a brush, clippers, three different types of scissors, one pair with gnawed teeth for an edge, one that is straight, and one which is curved. I feel as though I have swallowed a mouthful of pennies. They plink against one another down my throat, swirl into the sea in my stomach. Everything is salt and copper.

“I trust you, Annabel,” Jane says to me.

But I am consumed with how I loved the swishing of the scissors opening and closing, the tension of bringing the blades together. I think about how all my dolls have hair cut so close to their scalps that the tan plastic is showing through, and all the holes in which the hair was rooted can be seen, and how their hair can never grow back.

I hear myself saying, “We should go. To a salon. Let’s go where your mother goes, and I’ll keep watch for you. That place is sure to be safe.” My voice sounds like a frog’s. I am prepared to stand guard for Jane, her solitary knight, the one handmaiden who hasn’t abandoned her. I will carry the train of her hair downstairs, all the way to the salon. And later, at the dance, Jane and I will whisper secrets to one another about everyone else, while everyone leans in closer to us.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Annabel!”

Jane kneels on the floor, her spine straight, hair swinging down in a sheet. I take up position behind her. I card my fingers through the fine filaments of Jane’s hair. This is what we had practiced on our old dolls. Just trim the ends, take off the split and crooked parts. There’s an itch in my fingers. I twitch up the scissors. Standing above Jane, I can see the parting of her hair, which I never could before because she is three inches taller, and it looks like a fracture of bone, a river of milk, unspooling.

Refinance Letter, by Guy Choate

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 06:50:49 -0500

I own a house in Arkansas that I’m trying to refinance, and I’ve been trying for about a whole year now. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to refinance a house when you’re unemployed, and you’ve been unemployed for three straight years, so I’ll just tell that it’s hard. The banks have been under the microscope on home loans, of course, and so they, in turn, push the microscope onto their customers. Which means, I’ve gone back and forth with my refinance manager, a woman named Detra, about many details from my past. Finally, Detra told me she needed me to explain some of the addresses she found associated with my name. It seemed to me like my bank was concerned I might be trying to hide something. I was afraid they were going to need me to explain why my name was associated with the address belonging to the Horseshoe Casino in Tunica or the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Those would have more to do with what they’re probably concerned about than the addresses they’re paying attention to. I tried to clear some things up for her.

Dear Detra,

Regarding my residence history:

I currently reside at 928 Conti St., New Orleans, LA 70112 and have since late October 2011. I am at my present address while attending graduate school at the University of New Orleans. Upon completion of school, estimated December 2012, I plan to move to Richmond, Virginia, but I don’t have that address available to me yet. I’ll let you know when I do. But for the time being, I make my girlfriend egg sandwiches in New Orleans nearly every morning and we eat them on our balcony and live the best life I’ve ever known. Lately, I’ve wondered if all those eggs are bad for my cholesterol level, though.
August 2010-October 2011—1428 Chartres St., New Orleans, LA 70116. This is where I moved to go to school. One night I heard someone get robbed at gun point outside while I was sprawled out in my bed, trying to get some sleep. After, I walked outside in a pair of shorts to latch the shutters and a drug dealer told me that he knew the guy wasn’t going to shoot, so he just ran. He was apparently correct. That house was a shotgun, though, and my roommate and I eventually needed our own space.
July 2007-August 2010—I lived at 245 Goshen Ave., NLR, AR 72116: the property in question. I bought the house because I had a job and a wife and those types of things. However, my wife and I decided to divorce and my job decided to lay me off, so I went back to school to try and relive my college days while also bolstering my resume. I have no hard feelings toward my ex-wife, nor my former employer. Everyone involved made the smart move, I think.
Summer 2006-July 2007—I lived at 80 Talbot Ave. #203, Memphis, TN 38103. I moved there after college to teach high school English in the city where my sister was planning to start a family soon, but I got asked to pass students who were failing so that my school could get more funding. I refused, so my boss stopped paying me. And then I waited tables until I got tired of tourists, at which point I started looking for another job.
December 2005-Summer 2006—I had a terrible landlord at 3317 Markham Avenue in Little Rock, AR 72205. My girlfriend and I moved in together pre-maturely and ending up getting in lots of arguments over petty things. Later, we got married and divorced (See #3).
November 2003-December 2005—I lived with my dad and step-mother at 610 E. 6th Street, Little Rock, AR 72202. Those were good days. I was finishing up my undergraduate degree and the three of us were as close as we’ve ever been. Downstairs, my step-mother had a law firm and sometimes I would wander down in my boxer shorts only to realize there was a deposition going on.
January 2003-October 2003—I lived at Eagle Base, Bosnia-Herzigovina where I was a NATO peacekeeper and Army journalist. My last day there, I was sat down and told, officially, that I was a veteran and would have a VA home loan waiting for me, as well as health care for the rest of my life. However, I’ve had diarrhea since June 2010 and when I asked the VA to take a look at my bowels, they denied me health coverage because I made too much money at the time ($11,000/year). And if I would’ve ever gotten that home loan, I wouldn’t have come to you guys. But having a mortgage drag me down and occasionally crapping my pants at 30 years old isn’t so bad since I’ve got a few medals to pin to my chest, is it?
Fall 2001-January 2003—I lived with my dad and step-mother at #2 Oakwood Dr., Little Rock, AR 72205. They traded a condo (See #9) they had and some dollars to a girl for this house. The girl wanted something smaller, we wanted something bigger. It all worked out. Except then she got an even smaller place at an Arkansas Correctional Institution after she stabbed her mother with a kitchen knife 74 times in the house a couple of doors down from the house on Oakwood. I wrote her a letter last year saying I thought she seemed like a nice person when we’d met and I suggested we become sort of pen pals, which might be fun. She never responded, but I like to think she enjoyed the picture I drew her of what I looked like on that day we met in the hopes that she would recognize me. Maybe she never responded because my drawing probably didn’t turn out accurately. After all, I’m not a stickman.
March 2001-Fall 2001—I lived with my dad and step-mother at 2400 Riverfront Dr., Little Rock, AR 72205. I had just come back from learning how to be an Army journalist/soldier. My dad and new step-mother bought the condo when they thought it would just be them, but then I moved in because it was cheaper than dad getting me a place to live while I was in school across town. And then my oversized fourteen-year-old step-brother moved in because his dad wasn’t making him do his homework. We had to share a room. I thought he was slobby because I was used to things being neat and precise, having just been to basic training. He was a large boy who roamed the house with a block of cheese he’d made from those individually wrapped Kraft cheese slices. That might’ve eventually done me in, if he hadn’t knocked over my DVD tower first. Long story short, we ended up dividing our small room with a line of Post-it Notes placed down the center of the carpet. He could eat his cheese on his side, and I could alphabetize my DVDs on mine. Dad and my step-mother realized very quickly we needed a bigger place (See #8).
October 2000-March 2001—I lived at Room 116, Student Company, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, where I learned how to be an Army journalist. I had a roommate named Bell who was a really nice guy from St. Louis that I thought had a funny accent. And then when we went home for Christmas, we came back to find we had a new roommate, who decorated our room with plastic Army men, so we called him GI Joe Boy. I miss those guys.
May 2000-October 2000—I lived at Fort Jackson, South Carolina where I had to stand at the position of attention for so long in the sun one day that my head expanded until my hat wouldn’t stay on it any more. I resided at the infirmary for a few days after that, but I won’t include a separate entry for that, unless I hear back from you to do otherwise.
January 1990-May 2000—I lived at 000 N. Main St., Beebe, AR 72012 with my mom and dad and sister. The house had been my great-grandmother’s until she died, which is when we moved in. My sister and I loved the long, thin hallway. There was a string that hung down from the attic door with a plastic handle on it. We used to run and jump up and hit it so hard that the plastic would smack against the ceiling and break apart. I was sad when there was no more plastic. When I get homesick, this is the home I am sick for.
January 1982-December 1989—I lived on Red Hill Road in Floyd, Arkansas with my mom and dad and sister. I don’t remember the address, but we were way out there, down this long dirt road. I used to have trouble sleeping because of a recurring nightmare about these Doberman Pinschers that would chew on my legs. I would knock on the wall just north of my headboard sometimes and if my mother was still up, she would come get me out of bed and we would sit in the dark of the living room and drink hot chocolate. She still drinks hot chocolate at night like that, but I don’t have that dream very often anymore. I think Doberman Pinschers are very nice dogs.

I hope this clears up what needed to be cleared up. If not, let me know and I will try to be more thorough.

Sincerely,

Guy Choate

So Then Pam Wakes Up and Bobby’s in the Shower, Acting Like Nothing Happened, by Emily Koon

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:23:28 -0500

A few months ago, I started taping things off TV, just in case I’m ever hit by a bus and both my legs are broken and I need something to do all day. Right now, it’s Dallas. It comes on the rerun channel, two or three episodes a day, so I’m making pretty good progress.

Sunday is just thrilled. In college, she would have encouraged this kind of waste, the tapes stacking up in the living room, forming a stockade around the couch. We’d have lined them up like dominoes just to follow them around the house as they collapsed on each other, just to hear that nice clacking sound. These days, she cites the mess something will involve. She sits at the kitchen table, grading composition papers into the small hours most nights. I can hear her in there talking to herself, doling out judgment to the not-up-to-snuff. The kids aren’t applying themselves, aren’t buckling down. For all I know, she’s talking about me.

Taping a TV series is a tricky business. Sometimes I’ll forget to unpause the tape after a commercial, and the story will roll on without me, affairs, illegitimate children, hostile takeovers making TV history all over again while I’m nuking a Hot Pocket. Some episodes are a minefield of plot holes, like most of Season Three, Sunday likes pointing out. I never said it would all be perfect.

Today, she comes home from work with one of those fancy DVD player things under her arm and a bag of discs. Dallas, Knots Landing, the works. She suggests I give it a try. I throw Falcon Crest at her. She hauls off and slaps me like she’s Sue Ellen Ewing, and then her face changes and she looks like she looks when she’s about to cry, like a few years ago when we had that close call and I said it was all for the best because the timing was off (look at our life, that apartment with the schizophrenic living next door, thinking the Rapture was happening) and she said she felt that way, too, but I wasn’t sure.

My face stings. I sting on the inside a little bit, too. She says maybe I could start looking for a job again and then maybe she’d have a chance at having a baby someday. She doesn’t want to be a single mom, go to one of those clinics. She’s not sure she could do it on her own. I tell her I think she’d be just great.

Cody, by Jessica Dur Taylor

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 07:14:26 -0500

If it were any other teenager, I’d just laugh. A black diamond? You must be crazy. But it’s Cody, whose shenanigans I know by heart. Who listens in class, does all the assigned reading. Who still blushes like he did when he was eleven, still thinks his English teacher is cool.

It’s a glorious, frozen wet Wednesday on the mountain, peopled sparse as the desert highway, and we’re on our sixth snow trip together. Cody and I have done countless runs over the years: Cody getting stronger, fitter, braver while I coast, a steady plateau of green and blue runs. These trips are part of what make Nonesuch School true to its name. The first year I couldn’t believe it: all fifty students in one house, the staff too, in Tahoe, in the snow? But once we were there, the kids unfurling sleeping bags in closets and shouting dibs on the hot tub, I knew it would be just like our school, the best kind of madness.

Surrounded by redwoods, meadows, and a spring-fed creek, Nonesuch looked more like a summer camp than a school. Each classroom was retrofitted with its own quiet hysteria—some had worn leather couches, others (like mine) had built-in bookshelves and angled ceilings. The students (grouped by skill level, not grade) were mostly brassy public school rejects, too smart to believe adults. They startled me with their knowledge. As a teenager, I ate Twinkies and watched Saved by the Bell after school; these kids turned their noses up at high fructose corn syrup, would rather play bongos than video games.

I started teaching when I was twenty-six and fresh out of grad school, excited by my heavy load of five English classes, from junior high Basic Lit to upperclassmen Advanced Comp. When I assigned homework the very first day, the kids were dubious. The new English teacher doesn’t take shit. Not as nice as she looks. But by the second semester, most of them had started to appreciate my high expectations, were glimpsing the joys of play-acting scenes and writing sestinas. Only the littlest ones—sixth graders, rascally and unafraid, new to the school just like me—were still unsure.

That first year we piled into half a dozen rented vans and SUVs in the middle of February and headed east, to the rugged slopes of Lake Tahoe. For me and the other newcomers, it was our first Nonesuch snow trip. For Cody, who had just turned twelve, it was also his first time in snow, period. I’d spent six months startling at his antics—a mayonnaise-coated stapler, boo! out of the classroom closet. This was my chance to win him over. I’ll take you on an easy run. It’ll be fun.

I was on skis, he a snowboard. The snow drifted down thick and heavy. I’d never been skiing in Tahoe, had no idea this run would be so flat. It took us two and a half hours to get down. Sugar N Spice my ass. He grabbed my poles and I pulled him up, along, promising hot chocolate in the lodge. He fell: backwards, forwards, sideways, again, again, again, again. And again. The wetness seeped through our coats, making us shiver. We both had long hair then, frozen against our cheeks.

Years passed. Cody’s voice changed and that’s not all: he buzzed his hair short, grew out of his old sweatshirt, became a better speller, found pleasure in unassigned reading. The snow trips started to blend into each other. Remember that time the hot-tub overflowed? Was that the year we had that epic snowball fight? When Cody got new snow pants, he gave me his old-school blue overalls. Here, Jess, I bet these will fit you.

Now, Cody is a junior obsessed with Greek and Roman history, loves politics.He says things that make me blush with pride. I loved Brave New World! I agree with Neil Postman that Huxley had it right, not Orwell. Even his pranks have evolved. One chilly morning, I found a bowl of Jell-O waiting for me in my classroom with a gift tag that read In case of emergency, eat me. Inside, of course, was my stapler. But his handwriting, like drunken ants stumbling across the page, stays the same. So does his shy laugh.

As for me, somewhere along the way, I grew into an adult. Thirty-two years old, more lines, more tolerance, less angst. I married Michael, who teaches music and math, who loves the kids almost as much as I do. I’ve learned not to assign essays due on Mondays. Grammar does matter.

We get used to things. I thought I’d never leave Nonesuch. How could I outgrow a school where I’m allowed to teach whatever I want, the same kids year after year, all of us growing into family? It’s been around since 1970, long before I was born; I assumed I’d be there until the end. But I’ve watched so many graduate—afraid at first, then radiant as they bloom anew. Is it wrong to want my turn?

Next year, Cody will be a senior. After six years, he’ll have a new English teacher. New books, new rules, new jokes. He couldn’t realize it yet, but I think he will like her. Or him.

For now, we enjoy the cold mountain. I don’t think about the students—half as many as when I started—crammed into the smallest house we’ve ever needed for the snow trip. The school shrinks, a shell of its former self. I don’t think about what my classroom will look like next year, giant light window, graffiti-filled walls, tattered paperbacks, someone else’s writing on the board.

The snow lands and then disappears into the sop of my coat. Everywhere I look I see pine boughs bent heavy with their snowy burdens, the occasional plaid or neon of a boarder’s baggy new snow-pants. I catch a glimpse of the shiny mirror of Lake Tahoe, ringed with green. The same scene, still dazzling year after year.

Deep in the pit of me, I feel warmth: half-thrilled, half-terrified. This is the steepest run I’ve ever done. A black diamond. I fit my goggles on over my soft pink hat, look down at my thighs, already burning hot inside those tight blue overalls. I point my skis downhill. All right Cody, let’s do this. He’s still strapping in when I plant my poles and take off. Soon, he will be soaring past me—Nonesuch’s top snowboarder this year. I can’t go that fast, but it doesn’t matter. When I get down the mountain, he’ll be waiting.

Three Fictions, by Emily Cementina

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:14:10 -0500

No Such Thing

Bring me back chapped lips, skin that flakes at your temples, and thighs scooped out on the sides. We will separate the artifacts from your body, lay them on the apartment floor, and take photographs to memorialize the ways you changed.

Reassemble.

I want to smell Mexico in your arm hairs.

I fall in love with your bed sheets while you are away. I kiss the fabric and hope the fibers become human cells and grow into you. I wear your t-shirts for dresses, sit in your chair, and wonder what you do with the light when it hits the wall in squares. Shuffling yellows. Slides stacked and filed in your desk drawers.

Bring me tumbleweed, too, I say when you call.

Your voice is two-dollar beer looping across the country.

I organize your books and try to reconstruct your hands from fingerprints left on the pages. Microscopic rings lifted and layered in my palms. I move dust to make room for the tumbleweed and hide the piles in your cactus pots.

Bring me back air inhaled from other states. The entire Texas sky transmitted through your tongue.

At night, I hold your sheet-self, lick the creases, and tuck you between my legs.
I want to be as large as your mattress. I want your arms. Your chin on my shoulder. I want to undress you when you return and find that you are still inside.

So-Called

I don’t want anyone to see. Every morning, I scoop glittering pieces off the bedspread. I search folds of cool fabric, check behind the headboard and beneath the mattress until I discover all the tiny metallic bits. I swallow a few and push the others up.

Men come over to try to find the parts. If I asked them, they wouldn’t be able to tell me what they are looking for. They use their fingers first and after a little while, they lay me down.

I listen to my creaking bed while they work. Popping springs and shifting slats. I look out the window at my neighbor’s lights, orange strings across our backyard, and wish on each winking bulb that none of me comes out. Then, I think of accidents. Crumpled cars on a highway. A man on a gurney with streamers for guts and confetti for blood.

Inside me, the sparkling pieces vibrate against my throat, my stomach.

I wait for the men to give up, to realize that it is not possible. I wait for them to leave something instead. A warning, maybe, to the next one.

After the men go home, I sit in the bathroom and feel what they left drop into the toilet. My neighbor argues with her boyfriend behind the wall. My neighbor takes a shower. My neighbor cries. Every time the same flush drowns her.

I am waiting for someone with fingers like soft waves and skin that slides instead of beats. A man who slips into my body words that speak to the glittering pieces. When he moves, I will pull myself open.

Choosing

I go for walks when you are away. Today, I follow my street towards the edge of the island and find green buds sprouting from the limbs of my favorite tree. The tree lives in a garden populated with tin can art and its branches drape over a surrounding fence like hair over a woman’s back. I touch the chain links, dip my fingers in the spaces, and grab hold. I pull myself on tiptoe and pretend to be tall.

I am queen here. I rule over insect bodies, matted leaves, and dirt piles that will soon grow flowers. I speak to the koi and they move for me, swim in circles at my feet, and sometimes even jump.

Behind the tree are suggestions of summer activity. Toppled watering cans, rusty pinwheels, lawn flamingos, and splintered patio furniture. We would sit in these chairs if you were here. We would preside together, controlling seasons with our moods.

I let go of the fence and continue east. I watch my own dark cut-out move beside me on the ground. I would grasp her hand if I could, carry identical bones with my bones, finally sure of the skeleton I inhabit.

Men flick ashes and gobs of spit from apartment stoops. I notice the wear of their sneakers, frays in the toes, and stretched nylon laces. Their skin grows in miniature folds, indications of limp dicks hidden beneath trousers. Still, they notice me back.

A sign reads, Road maps sold here, and you become a dot gliding across one of the arcing red lines. You intersect states. You dodge one river and traverse another. Here, you move away from me only in inches. A distance I could cover.

You have been gone for three days and what I miss most of all are your shoulders and the way they fit in the cups of my hands.

I come to a path that bridges the highway and takes me to the shore. I start climbing the ramp as a cyclist rides down and in the moment he passes I reach for what I sense is inside him: something that feels like you.

At the bridge’s apex, I stop for the traffic. I lean against the metal railing and listen to machines louder than the ocean beside them.

This road connects to another that connects to another that connects to a street where you drive. Maybe with one hand on your knee. Maybe with one hand on the knob of the radio because a song you like has just come on, and the song reminds you of me. You want it to fill you. You want it in the cavity where I am supposed to be. And if I dropped into the movement, if I fell into all these mechanical parts, I am certain you would feel the ripple of my crash.

How to Talk to Children About Death, by Andrew Roe

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 07:27:55 -0500

Try to make it sound like you are confident, like you know the answers even though you do not. Realize you will probably not know what to say. You will stumble and fail and get everything wrong and make it more complicated than it has to be and cause greater misunderstandings, both short term and long term. You will say dumb things, very dumb things. But you will have to say something.

When you’re asked questions like “Where is heaven?” understand that you will pause. You will pause mightily, significantly. You will curse yourself for not having come up with a ready-made, soul-satisfying answer. And you will start to ramble, prefacing what you’re about to say by pointing out that, well, not everyone believes in heaven, because people believe different things and have different ideas and different, like, conceptions and interpretations, and then you’ll go on to say that heaven, if you believe in it, and it’s OK either way, if you believe or if you don’t—heaven is supposedly way up high in the sky, past where airplanes fly, above the clouds and not there when you look, it’s something you can’t see.

“What if you have binoculars?” your four-year-old son asks.

He’s a master of the follow-up question, lawyerly inquisition, the eliciting of deeper information that, increasingly, you are unable or reluctant to give.

“With binoculars,” he continues, “would you see heaven then?”

“No,” you say. “Not even then.”

Do your research. Hit the Internet. Type in your searches (“death children coping understanding advice parents help”). Click on the links. Read the articles. Print out the good ones for reference later. Comb through parent message boards. Dissect. Filter. Re-evaluate. Rub your blurry eyes. It’s late, past Letterman, past Conan, and you have to work the next morning. Toss and turn for hours until you finally fall asleep.

Because death is on your young son’s mind. Your aunt died four months ago. And then: your mother-in-law dies. There is the funeral, the coffin, weeping, reckoning. More goddamned questions—about Nani, Nani’s body, about death. Plus your son watches Scooby-Doo. There are ghosts. The dead rise. He’s into ancient Egypt, too. Mummies. Sarcophaguses. Death is suddenly everywhere you look. The pirate flag: skull and crossbones, grim connotations.

He wants to know when he’ll die. He wants to know when his mom will die. He wants to know when you’ll die. These are all good questions. And you wonder if you asked these same things when you were his age, if you were similarly death-obsessed as a child. You don’t think so, but you can’t say for sure. So you call your mom.

“Did I ask you about death when I was four, five?”

She waits, then answers: “I don’t remember.”

Check out books from the library. One of them is written by Mister Rogers. It’s about a pet dying. Close enough, you figure. There are pictures. It’s an old book, from the 1970s. The pictures are faded, some pages torn. One family buries its beloved pet in the backyard. Mom, father, son, daughter—they stand somberly in the suburban sunlight, the dead animal in the ground, already transformed into memory.

Know that, because you are not a believer, things will be much, much more difficult.

After you read the book, your son asks about Mister Rogers. He says he wants to meet him.

“Maybe someday,” you vaguely say.

You don’t tell your son that Mister Rogers is dead, too.

Prepare long, articulate, fatherly speeches on the subject. Prepare to also forget everything you plan to say.

Another book from the library is called The Three Birds. It’s about a bird family: mother, father, baby. The mother gets sick. She can’t fly anymore. She dies. The baby bird asks, “Where is my mother now?” The father bird explains it this way: The mother bird is living in the sun, a place where it’s warm, and she can fly again. But this confuses your son.

“She can fly? Or she can’t fly? I thought she was dead.”

Good fucking point.

You’re stumped.

“Well,” you start, “she can fly in the sun, the place where she is now, after she died. Which is like heaven. If you’re someone who believes in heaven. Some people do, some people don’t. Like I’ve been saying. The whole book is… predicated on the assumption that you believe in heaven, the afterlife. It’s a POV thing, really.”

Your son doesn’t say anything for a while. Then he repeats the question: “She can fly? Or she can’t fly?”

10.

You once wrote a short story about a father and son talking about death. The son was pretending to be dead. He’d close his eyes, not move, and say see if you can see me breathing. The father was worried. The father did not know what to say. This was before you had a child. The story had been completely imagined. Now you’re living the story. It has strangely come to life. The story ends like this: “He breathes and closes his eyes. I hold my breath again. He doesn’t move.”

You also once heard a story about a poet who wrote a poem about a little girl dying. Then the poet’s own young daughter died. When you heard that, you made a mental note to never write any stories about children dying.

But.

What about stories in which children deal with/confront/try to understand death? Did those count as well?

11.

He tells your wife, his mother, “I’m never going to die, Mommy. I’m never going to ever die, not even today.”

12.

Seriously consider giving in and just saying there is a heaven and that’s what happens when you die. Leave it at that. Put an end to all your vague phrases and awkward pauses. He’ll figure it out for himself later, just like you did.

13.

“Will I ever see Nani again?”

“No.”

“What about in heaven?”

“Maybe.”

“When am I going to die?” he asks.

“Not for a long time.”

“Thirty days?”

“No. Much longer. Not for a very, very long time.”

“Sixty days?”

“No. Much longer,” you say. “Much, much longer.”

“OK,” he says.

He seems, finally, for the moment at least, satisfied, and you are relieved.

What We’ll Keep, by Brenda Rankin

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 07:12:53 -0500

“There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.” —Rebecca Solnit, “The Blue of Distance”

When my grandmother was moved into a retirement home a few years ago, my father encouraged me to take her cedar chest, her secretary desk, remnants from her pantry. I refused, as politely as I could. I lived in a tiny college apartment. I hardly knew my father’s mother, and all of her belongings reeked of cigarette smoke. And I never felt the same attachment to family history that my father could conjure up for every photo, spoon, or fishing hat that would link him to a previous generation of American history. Sometimes, I wonder if my dad thinks he can create the close familial bonds, ones that never really existed, if he can just possess these possibly meaningful objects with enough reverence.

In spite of his passionate pitch about my grandmother’s cedar chest being in amazing condition and the secretary desk having belonged to his grandmother, I left her condo with an old cat carrier, a box filled with a small teacup collection, and a grocery bag of extra office supplies my dad said she no longer wanted.

In taking these things, I reasoned, I had helped eliminate some of the extra clutter my dad had to deal with as her thirty-day’s notice ended. Since I had two cats and only one carrier, I felt I was practical. The office supplies I would have bought eventually, and the teacups I would have liked even if I had merely seen them in a thrift store, regardless of connection to their previous owner.

The day after our afternoon in my grandma’s old condo, my dad called to tell me he understood why I couldn’t take the furniture. My mom called, however, to tell me he was hurt that I wouldn’t make space in my apartment for his mother’s things, but he never said those words to me. He reasoned that we could think of the cedar chest and the secretary desk as being on hold until I finally had space for them: put into a storage unit my grandmother had rented for all the stuff she couldn’t take with her but didn’t want to get rid of, which was everything.

A few days later, my dad told me that my grandma had not been able to pay for the storage space, which had been cleared out by the storage company, and the things inside had been taken as payment.

After that, my dad said my grandma wanted the cat carrier back, since she needed to take her cat for walks in the hallways of her assisted living home, so I gave it to him.

Since then, I’ve moved and I’m in a bigger apartment, with space for real furniture. I have yet to wish for another chance at the cedar chest, but I’ve been searching Craigslist for a desk to replace the folding table I’ve used for the last four years, and I keep coming across ads for secretary desks that look very similar to the one my dad had wanted me to take.

I try to feel sad over the loss of that piece of furniture and family history. I attempt to conjure up a scene of nostalgic reflection, the sort of epiphanic scene in a movie where a young woman realizes how much she has in common with her grandmother, and how much said grandmother really means to her. I set about imagining possible hints of my grandmother or her mother that may have been in that desk, if I had only taken the time to look—a shopping list or a note from a best friend, perhaps, pushed to the back of one of the drawers. Or an inconspicuous stretch of wood on the bottom with smudged tally marks, one line for each day spent waiting for the next letter from a beloved soldier. But with no genealogical truths to guide me, even the imaginary artifacts I place inside that secretary desk are vague and cliché. Sometimes, I try in vain to picture these strong American women sitting there, working. Perhaps a great-grandmother I never met, whose name I’d have to ask my father for. There’s no accurate image I can place there, on a chair pushed up to the small oak secretary desk, littered with objects vital to running a life I know nothing about. The figure I seat at that desk is a generic young woman with dimples and tight, bobby-pinned curls, a blurred image in gray scale, lifted off the pages of my high school history books.

That woman’s daughter, who owned the desk next, was the woman I learned to call Grandma June while, to my cousins, she was simply, affectionately, Nanna.

Grandma June was not the grandmother I heard my mom refer to as Ama, so I called her that, too; I thought it was her name until I was five and learned it sort-of meant “mom,” and then I struggled through the word abuelita, which I heard my Torres cousins call her. At some point, I settled on guelita because it just rolled better from my mouth. Grandma June lived in the same town we did, a hundred and fifty miles closer to us than Guelita, but she still wasn’t the one who stayed with us to take care of me when I was little and my mom was sick for long periods of time. I never took walks with Grandma June around my neighborhood, where we could stare at the house with hundreds of birds in a backyard cage on the corner. She never helped me make peace with the yard-full of six-foot-tall sunflower-shaped monsters I was terrified of by telling me they were her favorite flower and the happiest things she’d ever seen. She never pulled her teeth—all of them, perfectly white and shiny, with gums attached—out of her mouth just to prove a point when I was six and desperate to eat the whole chocolate Easter bunny.

Grandma June was not the grandmother I ate push-up sherbet pops with on afternoon trips to the corner gas station, and not the reason I still feel grown-up and fancy when I choose cherry—in a cone—over every other ice cream option in the store. As far as I know, Grandma June never had the option to sit in a rocking chair by my bed at night, making up stories she seemed to know by heart about the niñas qui viven dentro de la luna and the mariachis que tocan en las bodas (que nunca terminan). To Guelita, I have always been Brendita, or hijita, or muñeca, every time I’ve ever called her on the phone, and I still do, regularly, even though my Spanish isn’t what it used to be, and she has to remind me of words and correct my grammar mistakes as I update her on my life, interrupting her to ask her what things mean as she updates me on hers.

I can’t think of a single nickname Grandma June ever had for me—I can’t even picture her saying my name. Maybe, after a while, there wasn’t anything to say.

Sometimes I can’t help but consider what it will be like to lose my mother’s mother, Guelita, and every time I do, my brain doesn’t even have a chance to address the issue before I feel nauseous and short of breath. I get pummeled by the knowledge that, when she is gone, I will get crushed by a combination of grief and frustration over not having best used my time with her. I will be grateful for any of her belongings I am allowed to keep for myself—I will make space, no matter what it is. At first, I thought there was nothing in particular I wanted for my own, but then I remembered the rusted white-shellacked vent cover from the hallway of their house on Bear Mountain Boulevard. When this object enters my mind, it is a perfect embodiment of my Guelita’s sweet little house, with ornate eccentricities and decorations that never seemed to change—a house I’d really like to be able to pick up and put in my pocket for eternal safekeeping, but when my abuelito died, the house was sold in a hurry and my guelita moved next door to my uncle and his family. All I could do was go back to the little white house outside of Arvin, one day when the new owners weren’t home, and creep around outside, taking digital photos of every inch of the house’s exteriors and the vineyards that surround it.

When I imagine the death of Grandma June, the reaction occurs only in my brain—I grow pensive, analytical: Shouldn’t I feel just as sad over this loss? Why have I never thought it strange or heartbreaking that I have no connection to her, and no desire to create one—does an unshakable ambivalence about their own grandmother make one a bad person? I haven’t thought so before but, really, I wouldn’t want to advertise that part of myself. Shouldn’t there be some internal force that explodes with attachment to her as a member of my family, as part of where I come from, as my link to American history? Communication-wise, it should have been easier all along to grow close with my dad’s side of the family—the white, English-speaking side that lived nearby—than it was to spend time with my mom’s family, who moved from Mexico to a Spanish-speaking town in California when she was eleven. My dad has never learned any Spanish, so whenever we visit my mom’s family he sits off to the side, reading the paper, while everyone else talks for hours. My dad has never quite fit with my mom’s family, but that’s never stopped me from working to fit in with them.

A few months after the Bear Mountain Boulevard house was sold, my mom and I were reminiscing about the place on the phone, and I mentioned that rusted white air vent. To my surprise, my mom burst out laughing in response to my mourning for the vent. “I have that vent,” she said, “because I’m the one who loved it. Way before we knew the house was going to get sold, I made sure my whole family knew that that vent was mine, no matter what.”

I was stunned, and kept trying to interject things like, “Are you sure I didn’t have any particular reason to feel attached to it?”

“You can’t figure out why it was so special to you, because it probably wasn’t special to you for any particular reason,” she said. “But you must have heard me talk about how much I loved it at some point. I grew up looking at that thing every time I came out of the bathroom, or waited for my turn in the shower in the mornings. It’s sort of like a symbol for the whole house, and growing up there.”

“So you’re telling me the vent couldn’t have been meaningful for me?” I felt hurt, and a little defensive, hearing her tell me that I would have had no legitimate claim to the vent. I had spent years thinking of it as my own quirky mental souvenir of that house, and everything the house meant to me.

“I’m not saying that,” she replied. “I think it’s probably true that you’ve loved it since you were little. But I think you probably first took notice of it, back then, and decided it was special, because of me.”

Of course, I can see how my mom is right. My dad and my brother both remember that vent as being a special fixation of hers. Over the years, my memory revised the vent, and the house, and Ama, as my own special, larger-than-life, always-been-there loves. Really, they were all cherished hand-me-downs, from my mom, and a lifetime of seeing how she valued them, and experiencing them with and through her.

I wonder at what point her history became mine, in my mind, and how much of my memory and identity is really just an extension of hers. Then again, I suspect that this is simply the way the generations move from one to another, and that we begin this inheritance process from our parents from the moment we’re born. What makes the situation unusual, even difficult, is how uneven the scale is, between what I’ve inherited from each parent. And how impossible it is for me to tell, at this point, who or what is responsible for the lopsidedness.

Hush, by Andrew Stancek

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 07:13:00 -0500

Every toxicology test known to mankind is what Paula underwent. She was healthy, went to the gym, ate well. She could have been on the cover of the What A Healthy Twenty-Five-Year Old Should Look Like magazine. Of course the doctors ordered every test. Their eyes narrow with the certainty that I must know more than I’m telling. They are prepared to buy the undetectable poison from the old mysteries. Their furrowed brows wag that I brought it about, even if it wasn’t poison. Her father’s pushing, convinced he misjudged me, that I’m a murdering monster. My eyes are vacant when I look at him. I’m just the zero who married his daughter, ended up surrounded by silence and decided to leave her. He’ll never know that, though. Nobody will.

I trip over our cat in the middle of the night. At supper I put kibble in her dish and she seemed fine. When I almost fall on top of her in the hall, she’s dead. No idea why. I don’t wake up Paula to tell her. What would be the point? She could not resurrect it any more than I could. So I move Fluffy into a corner and go back to bed.

That morning I break a cereal bowl. I walk around Paula, open the dishwasher, give a little smile. A clump of granola is stuck to the edge and I rub it with a fingernail. Her eyes widen as the bowl bounces on the hardwood and then crunches into pieces. “The first one,” she says. “Almost two years married…” She trails off. Two sentences, parts of sentences, is the most I’ve heard from her in a week. She looks but does not speak.

I’m set to apologize but the blow of silence puts me on edge, again. “Plenty more where that came from,” I say, knowing that’s the wrong thing to say. I’m sure she doesn’t mean to make me feel guilty but I’m only too aware the dish set is from her parents. Most of the wedding stuff we got was crap: a toaster that catapults bagels, a pan eggs stick to, sheets that wore through in a month. Her parents were the only ones who bought us good stuff. The red spot on my cheek itches more; I think I should call Dr. Zlin to have a look. As she bends over to pick up broken bowl pieces in her pale blue nightie, she looks sexy as hell. I wish I wasn’t already late for work, wish I could grab her hand, come into work an hour late and think nothing of it like I used to when we were first married but that was eons ago. She cries out, holds up a finger with a spot of blood.

“I’m late, Paula,” I say. “Can you get your own Band-Aid?” She slams the bathroom door but I don’t grovel. “Have a good day. See you tonight,” I call out. I squish a black ant underfoot just inside the door. Can’t get rid of them no matter what we do.

When your wife stops talking, you’re sunk. Everyone wants to tell you how to better talk. Clear those lines of communication. Talk it through. I used to give the same wonderful advice myself. But when the words dry out, what are you supposed to do? Talk, all by yourself? Talk to yourself maybe? Takes two to talk, you know. Oh hell, maybe I’m full of it. Maybe I’m the one who stopped talking. Who am I to set myself up as being in the right and her in the wrong? We aren’t talking, I know that. I stew. Then I decide to just tell her. No back and forth necessary. Only one person talking. I’m going to tell her.

When Paula first brought me to meet her parents, her father twirled his Courvoisier in a big tumbler and told me hunting stories. With his cronies no doubt he talks about women. He knows about trophies. Their house has three sets of antlers, big bucks. A rhino head. I expected him to hand me a pygmy head but he probably saves that for a special occasion. He puffed his cigar, patted his gut, rolled his eyes when I told him what firm I work for. I’m not good enough for their princess; he made that clear. I’m normal, ordinary, going nowhere. Why would she give me a second look? Her father wouldn’t, if I wasn’t sitting at his dinner table, being repulsed by the rawness of the thick steak. She turned down doctors, lawyers, all the better matches they brought her. Her mom smiles. Trim platinum blonde, her own tennis pro. No doubt talks somewhere but at home, at least when I’m around, she never gets beyond offering me a drink. Looks like a secret boozer, but what do I know?

I can’t explain why she chose me anymore than they can. They had to accept. So when one day they’re on the phone with princess and not a cloud is in the sky, and the next day they get a call that she’s dead, I can see why they figure there must be more to it. These football players you hear about, you know, healthy kid keels over at practice, they always find an enlarged aorta, a strange virus or some other ticking time bomb. But with her, nothing. No heart condition, no aneurysm. She did not travel to some damn place where she could have contracted Ebola or something.

On the drive to work, I see three raccoons killed by cars. The field workers look up as I drive by at forty, sniff the parched fields. Usually it’s only the farmers that deliberate, shake their heads as they examine the crops; everyone else zooms by. In spite of what I said to Paula about being late, I’m in no hurry. Nobody checks on me. My head is swimming with muck: words I don’t want to say, dishes breaking. You can’t be happy, Paula. Someone else will make you happier. A cop-out, I know.

I twist the radio dial. Great Pretender, for God’s sake. Pop. Static. I turn it off. A hawk circles above, looking for a better meal than road-kill. A crack of a shot somewhere at a distance, the hawk keeps soaring. She doesn’t even like me, I’m sure. Did she ever? Must have at one point. She married me. I pursued her for the obvious reasons: she was cute, bouncy, out of reach, not just the girl-next-door but the perfect girl next door. Her friends snorting, her parents looking down their noses, made her more desirable. But it wore off. Does she love me even if she doesn’t like me? Her face sure does not light up when I come home. She goes to bed early, pretends she’s asleep when I turn in. I stare into the darkness, listen to the creaks of the house, scurrying of little feet. One night the moon was full and its light filled the bedroom as Paula snored. A long-tailed mouse scampered into the middle of the floor, stood on its hind feet, looked up at me watching, ran back. I should get poison. But they’re doing no harm. We used to talk, to laugh. It can’t just be me. Maybe she’s seeing somebody, maybe that’s why she pays me no attention, says nothing. But I don’t smell a man. She does not act like a woman in love. She has tired of me. Her parents were right.

I park in front of Gillies, Saro, Faulds, my home away from home. The paralegals do all the work; the rest of us are window dressing and billing machines. I’m a junior partner; my name will never appear on the nameplate. I show a lot of elderly clients where to sign. This town has not had a murder, a crime of passion, in twenty-five years. Divorces are expensive for the husbands but not when the marriage is short-lived with no children. Old Mr. Saro insists on doing all the hiring for the firm, so all our paralegals are pretty. I compare them to Paula and she always comes ahead. It’s a firing offense to carry on in the workplace, as well as foolish but I’ve not been tempted. The paperwork I do puts me to sleep but is enough to keep me from brooding. The walls are thin and I hear excited yelling from the next office, must be a pro bono. Our regular clients don’t raise their voices.

When the yelling stills in the next office, I drop in on Mr. Saro. He can be my guide. He has African masks and artifacts on his walls and filing cabinets, an Ecuadorean arrowhead tipped in curare even, or so he claims. His wife died on safari and tongues wagged about them not getting along. Nothing came of the investigation, of course. I could tell Paula I’m going to travel, bag a tiger. Maybe offer to take her, see if a new setting makes torrents of words gush. But that never works, does it?

A five-minute pep talk with Mr. Saro is all I need. Clean slate. Buck up. Courage. He shows me how to put on a Zulu warrior’s mask, which straightens the spine. I’m ready when I open the door to our house. It takes me forever to find Paula. The mask is heavy and hot on my face. She is scrunched next to the bed, still. My hands shake when I touch her, but she has no pulse. I place the mask next to her. For the first time, I notice the red glint in its eyes. I don’t have to talk after all.

Three Poems, by Simon Perchik

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 09:09:29 -0500

Blurred yet something with wings
tucked in its eggs and your skin
swollen for a single cry

to feed on a morning close by
with a warm bowl held out
dripping the way flowers

still blossom in pain
careful not to leave the ground
—it could have been

some hillside, after a long flight
carrying your arm as a stronghold
for rain not yet dying down

between strangers and shelter
—it happened so fast
there’s nothing left to pull back.

This door slams easily now
though in the dark
it remembers more

reaches around and the rain
returned to you as lips
pressed together

weighs almost nothing
keeps both these hinges
from drying the way a deathwatch

night after night anchors
against the splash
and makes from your hand

a mask to ward off the Earth
tightening around your cheeks
two shadows, two mouths.

III

You weed the way these two lions
were carved, half strong box
half where the graves

are kept safe so step by step
you can count the names
taking hold place to place

the only Deed left
that will never have a home
—these cornered beasts

outnumber you—just to start
though your fingers spend their time
heated over a small stone

could calm these dead
and the tall wet grass struggling
not yet the riverbank they need.

Two Poems, by Amanda Valdez

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 07:54:10 -0500

Signal Fire

In midday I watched the children play
outside my classroom window
on the west side of town.
I thought how bright the paper is inside
with blues and limes and how proud
the colors stand within its skin—
a pioneer for the small and tender.

With the last of the spiders wiped
with pencil textiles I could hear
tiny howls, a gathering of five boys
throwing around a football,
invisible behind thumb-greased glass.
Surely children’s beady-eyes, bright with hopes
for gutted knees and grass-filled mouths
are a life lesson of their own.
But, outside is a war and I am watching
against a patchy globe rondure, the blur
of a boy beaten down around the ball;
the white lace blazing,
a sunlit fire pit of loss.

It was like watching nerves of growth
as moving ocean current; the ripples carrying
them along onto island sand.
The red-shirted boy holding onto himself,
clenching for breathe while the others like flies
surround the pig, hover over meat
raw and stiff.

Dear Corbeet
for Megan

I may be trapped
between the toxins of the
mountains; the smoke

may cloud my vision.
I would scream from the roof
of my neighbor’s home,

or on the top of my mother’s,
or on the top of any house
that will never feel

like my own. I suffice.
I dream of cutting out
images of your knuckle-

sized socks, a knitted shield
from the sun, your small black
thickness covering dents.

You would hold onto it
until having grown in size
you begin to learn

meals on the granite, your feet
stretching on the maplewood,
the smell of cinnamon you like to

light to unravel my knotted
spine. Yes, I would still
be married to the man I love

and we would blow bubbles
against the railings of our balcony.
Messages filled with humility,

and how to be fair with the weather,
and to the young woman
who fills your heart to the brim

in a small distant room with two or three
strange beds and books that I have
managed to scrape together loosely

when you grow old and put them
on a white shelf. A child
embracing the new curves she bore.

Oh, there is lavender shining as they
bounce, circular and traveling
away from me. I am lonely

in every language but ours
these little notes I wish
to send to you, wherever

you are, really, no, not
even the deepest ocean
could writhe in me, only

the distance of water is already
my morning tears and the chills
that never leave my bedside

since the day when I put you
in a boat and sailed you off.

Power Shop, by Pat Rushin

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 07:51:08 -0500

FADE IN:

EXT. SUPERMARKET - DAY

Between the automatic door and an ATM near the entrance, the FREAK, 40s, squats on his skinny haunches, back against the wall. Auschwitz thin with shaved skull, he stares out at the busy parking lot, eyes hollow.

A HORN BLARES and he suddenly stands, lips tight.

A heavy young STOCKGIRL muscles a train of shopping carts to the entrance, breasts straining the buttons on her uniform blouse. Pretty face, pretty big, pretty much in charge. The door opens, and she pauses, eyeing the Freak warily.

STOCKGIRL
Easy, sir. No trouble today.

The Freak stares past her, his voice low, raspy, robotic.

FREAK
… trouble today…

The Stockgirl shakes her head, pushes the carts inside.

EXT. PARKING LOT - CONTINUOUS

A worn but waxed min-van speeds down a nearby row, barely missing a woman with a shopping cart—HORN BLARES—and swerves to a SCREECHING stop in a barely-vacated spot.

The driver’s door opens, and GARDNER JONES—tall, fit, 30-ish, a bit haggard-looking—steps out, all business.

He strides around the van, yanks open the sliding side door.

GARDNER
Let’s go, girls.

TAMMY, 8, light and frisky, jumps out, grabs Gardner’s hand.

Gardner peers into the van.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
Laurel. Power shop.

INT. VAN - CONTINUOUS

LAUREL, 11, dark-eyed, dark-spirited, seat-belted, sits on the far side, studying her reflection in the opposite window. It’s not clear if she likes what she sees…

TAMMY (O.S.)
Laurel!

Laurel slowly turns, unfastens her seat belt.

EXT. SUPERMARKET ENTRANCE - MOMENTS LATER

Gardner leads his daughters to the door… past the Freak.

His burning eyes stare straight at Gardner.

Gardner meets those eyes for a moment in passing, then, uncomfortable, looks away. Tammy is already bounding through the automatic door, and he follows her.

But Laurel lingers, gazing at the Freak. He stares back at her. The automatic door closes… then opens as Tammy comes back out and grabs Laurel’s hand. She tugs her inside.

INT. SUPERMARKET - CONTINUOUS

TAMMY
Don’t talk to strangers!

LAUREL
I wasn’t talking to him.

Gardner is selecting a cart, deep in thought. He snaps out of it, looks around in a sudden panic.

GARDNER
Girls?

Tammy is at his side in a flash. Laurel hangs back, twisting the knob of a gum-ball machine.

LAUREL
Can I have a quarter, Gardner?

GARDNER
Don’t call me Gardner.

Gardner tests the wheels of his cart. They squeak. He pushes the cart aside, pulls out another.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
Let’s move it.

Tammy stands ready. Laurel saunters over.

Gardner checks his wristwatch.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
Shop, pay, and back to the van in—How long was it last week?

Tammy closes her eyes, calculating.

TAMMY
Seventy-eight minutes, Dad.

GARDNER
Whoa. Personal worst.

LAUREL
The first time was worster.

GARDNER
(distracted)
More worst. First time doesn’t count. Pre-season.

Gardner eyes the store critically. Crowded. Lots of slow-moving mothers trailing cranky kids. He steels his resolve.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
Ladies, today is the kind of day Olympic shoppers train for.

Tammy stares at him, rapt.

Laurel gnaws a fingernail, studies it.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
Weather’s optimal. Track’s in excellent repair. Team’s in peak condition. What’s our record?

Laurel shrugs.

Tammy closes her eyes, calculating.

TAMMY
Fifty-two minutes, Dad. Three Saturdays ago. That’s a fact.

Laurel shoots Tammy a dirty look.

GARDNER
Today we beat it.

TAMMY
(excited)
No way!

GARDNER
Way. It’s gonna take hustle. Guts. Determination. All that and
more. But if we break our record, you get ice creams at check out.
We don’t, you get dog shit.

TAMMY
Dog poop, Dad.

GARDNER
Sorry. Poop.

LAUREL
Shit.

TAMMY
Laurel!

LAUREL
(slowly, deliberately)
Shit. Shit. Shit.

Gardner’s jaw tightens. He closes his eyes, opens them.

GARDNER
Time keeper.

He takes off his wristwatch and gives it to Tammy. She loops it around her forearm, checking the time.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
Coupon keeper.

He pulls a stack of coupons from his pocket, gives them to Laurel. She shuffles through them, indifferent.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
Let’s hit it, ladies. Power shop.

AISLE 1 - DAIRY, JUICES - MOMENTS LATER

Gardner hustles his cart past the cheese display, grabbing a couple of packages on the run. He veers around a parked shopper, then stops, consults his list, frowning.

GARDNER
Tammy, gallon of skim. Laurel, cottage cheese, small curd, and a six-pack of yogurt.

Tammy speeds off down the aisle.

Gardner picks up a pack of fruit juices.

Laurel stalls.

LAUREL
Can I get Yoplait?

GARDNER
You got a coupon?

LAUREL
No.

GARDNER
Then no. Get the cheapest.

LAUREL
The cheapest tastes like snot.

GARDNER
It all tastes like snot. That’s what makes it good for you.

LAUREL
Mom always got Yoplait.

GARDNER
Mom’s not here.

Laurel’s eyes harden, and Gardner looks away, sorry.

Gardner spots the Freak behind him, at the far end of the aisle, just standing there, leaning on an empty shopping cart. The Freak stares at him.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
Get what you want, hon… Just step it up.

LAUREL
Whatever you say, Gardner.

GARDNER
I asked you to stop calling me Gardner.

LAUREL
Mom called you Gardner.

GARDNER
That was Mom. You’re my daughter.

LAUREL
Tammy’s your daughter. I’m your step-daughter.

Gardner sees the Freak slowly wheeling his cart toward them from the top of the aisle. The Freak gives him an empty-eyed stare. Gardner stares back for a moment, then… suppressing a shudder, quickly turns away.

GARDNER
I’m the only dad you’ve ever had.

He speeds down the aisle, girls catching up as he corners.

AISLE 3 - CANNED GOODS - LATER

Tammy ranges ahead of Gardner and Laurel, heading straight for the Spaghettios.

Laurel waits at Gardner’s side.

GARDNER
Soup coupons.

Laurel thumbs through the stack of coupons, bored.

LAUREL
We don’t have any.

GARDNER
No cream of mushrooms?

LAUREL
Uh-uh.

GARDNER
I need cream of mushroom for all my casseroles. Pitiful.

Laurel picks a couple of cans from the shelf, deposits them in the cart.

LAUREL
Tammy wet the bed again last night.

Gardner’s mouth tightens.

GARDNER
I know.

LAUREL
She stuffed the wet sheets under her bed.

GARDNER
She stuffed them in the hamper in the laundry room. I washed them this morning.

LAUREL
I stuffed them in the hamper. She always tries to hide them.

GARDNER
And what were you doing snooping under her bed?

LAUREL
No fair. I need my own room. Mom said we were moving this year.

Gardner rubs his eyes. He pulls another half-dozen cans of soup from the shelf, plops them in the cart.

Laurel picks up one, idly peels the label off.

GARDNER
Stop.

LAUREL
How come you never say anything?

GARDNER
I don’t want to embarrass her.

LAUREL
Duh. She’s already embarrassed.

Gardner consults his shopping list.

GARDNER
Get me four cans of tuna, the cheapest money can buy.
Let’s move it. Power shop.

Laurel moves up the aisle just as Tammy returns with several cans cradled in her arms. She drops them in the basket.

Gardner rearranges the cans.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
(softly)
I understand you had some trouble last night.

Tammy’s eyes widen.

TAMMY
She told you!

GARDNER
I already knew. It’s OK. I’m just saying. In case you want to talk.

Tammy’s face flushes crimson.

TAMMY
Dad, there’s people around.

Gardner looks around to see the Freak barely ten feet behind them, just staring, staring at him. Gardner freezes.

GARDNER
(to Freak)
Can I help you?

The Freak’s hollow eyes focus on Gardner, and he MUMBLES, his voice a SCRATCHY WHISPER, as if he hasn’t spoken in years.

FREAK
… help you…

Gardner notices that the contents of the Freak’s basket are identical to his own prior to this aisle, item for item.

GARDNER
What’s this about? What’s with you?

FREAK
… with you…

Gardner’s brow furrows.

GARDNER<
Look, I don’t know what your problem is, but you don’t want to make it mine.

FREAK
… make it mine…

The Freak’s gaze shifts as Laurel returns with her tuna, dumps it in the cart. She looks at the Freak with curiosity.

Tammy tugs on Gardner’s sleeve.

TAMMY
(timidly)
Dad? Power shop?

Gardner gives the Freak one last threatening look, then, motioning the girls ahead of him, wheels down the aisle.

LAUREL
Why were you talking to that man?

GARDNER
No reason. Just being friendly.

LAUREL
You didn’t look friendly.

GARDNER
Hush. Power shop.

AISLE 6 - PAPER PRODUCTS - LATER

Tammy heads for the paper towels and napkins.

Laurel, consulting her coupons, goes for toilet paper.

Gardner deposits a pack of paper plates in the cart, then, moving down the aisle, swings past the tampon display, absently snagging a box.

He stops, looks at the box, eyes misting.

He spots the Freak, who eyes him from the end of the aisle, then moves on out of sight.

Tammy and Laurel return, dump their stuff in the cart.

Gardner returns the tampon box to the shelf.

Laurel looks at him.

LAUREL
Who killed Mom?

GARDNER
I told you. The police don’t know. Nobody knows… Nobody knows…

LAUREL
Why?

GARDNER
I ask myself that every day, honey.

Tammy sidles up to Gardner, touches his leg.

TAMMY
People just die, right, Dad? Everybody dies. That’s a fact.

LAUREL
Stop saying that.

TAMMY
What?

LAUREL
“That’s a fact.” Mom used to say that. You can’t.

TAMMY
Why not?

LAUREL
I don’t like it.

Tammy smiles sweetly. She raises her eyes to Gardner.

TAMMY
Can we have hamburgers tonight?

The Freak appears at the end of the aisle again, staring.

Laurel squints up at Gardner.

LAUREL
How come every time you see that man you get this face?

GARDNER
What face?

LAUREL
You know. Your funeral face.

Gardner stares back at the Freak, silent.

Tammy nervously consults her watch.

Gardner pulls his gaze from the Freak, pushes his cart forward, determined.

AISLE 7 - MOMENTS LATER

Cereal aisle, colorful boxes stretching down both sides.

Gardner wheels the cart past the Stockgirl. She squats down, shelving boxes of oatmeal, the back of each box facing out.

Gardner pauses.

GARDNER
(to Stockgirl)
Why?

STOCKGIRL
Sir?

GARDNER
Why backwards?

The Stockgirl stands, brushes her apron.

STOCKGIRL
I’m featuring the nutritional info. Nobody ever reads it.

GARDNER
But you can’t tell the brand.

The Stockgirl CHUCKLES indulgently.

STOCKGIRL
It’s Quakers. Anybody could tell. But isn’t content more important?

Gardner shrugs, pushes his cart ahead. Laurel and Tammy are already looking at the cereals.

GARDNER
OK, you know the drill. You each get one pick, but no Cocoa Puffs.

LAUREL
Why not?

GARDNER
It’s a hyperglycemic nightmare.

The girls separate, both eyeing the rows and rows of cereal with connoisseur scrutiny.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
And pick something you both like. No fighting this time.

Gardner glances over his shoulder, spies the Freak at the end of the aisle, staring at him. The Freak has added more items to his cart… the exact same items Gardner has in his…

Except for a single box of tampons.

Gardner leaves his cart mid-aisle, marches toward the Freak.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
(shouting)
Hey!

The Stockgirl jumps from her crouch, startled.

The Freak turns the corner and disappears out of sight.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
Did you see that guy?

STOCKGIRL
What guy?

GARDNER
Bald, skinny freak. He was right behind you.

STOCKGIRL
Is there a problem, sir?

GARDNER
This guy’s been following us around, staring at me.

STOCKGIRL
Staring at you…

GARDNER
Yeah, and buying whatever I buy… And saying stuff I say…

The Stockgirl bites her lip, looks away.

STOCKGIRL
This is what I’m hearing, sir. An individual is staring at you,
buying what you buy, and saying what you say. Am I correct, sir?

Gardner rubs his eyes.

GARDNER
Maybe I should talk to a manager.

STOCKGIRL
My manager called in sick today. If there’s a problem,
I’m in charge of solving it. Has this individual threatened you
in any way?

GARDNER
Look, I’m just saying. Strange guy following your customers around,
could be a pedophile, you might want to keep an eye on him.

STOCKGIRL
Oh, we keep an eye on everybody. We have cameras all over the store.
Parking lot, too. This is what we do now. “Please return your cart
to the designated drop-off zone.”
(laughs, then serious)
I can see you’re upset, sir, but—

Suddenly, Tammy SHRIEKS.

Gardner spins around.

And there’s Tammy, eyes shut tight, a box of Cap’n Crunch hugged to her chest, SCREAMING at the top of her lungs.

TAMMY
Shut up, shut up, shut up!

Laurel, unfazed, stands a few steps away, toying with a box of Golden Grahams.

People up and down the aisle stare at the commotion.

Gardner hustles over to them, grabs Tammy by the shoulders.

GARDNER
Easy! Chill, child.

Tammy opens her eyes.

TAMMY
She started it!

LAUREL
(quietly)
Did not.

TAMMY
Did too!

LAUREL
Not.

Tammy raises her tear-streaked face to Gardner, working her way into a sobbing jag.

TAMMY
She picked Golden Grahams. She knows I don’t like them.

LAUREL
She likes them. We got them last time. She ate them.

TAMMY
I hate them!

LAUREL
I hate you.

TAMMY
Shut up!

LAUREL
You shut up.

GARDNER
Enough! I told you no fighting.

LAUREL
She started it. Not that you care.

TAMMY
I did not!

Gardner takes a deep breath, sees all the people staring at him, waiting for his next move.

GARDNER
That’s it. Put the cereal back, girls. Both of them.

Laurel rolls her eyes, tosses her box on the wrong shelf.

LAUREL
Mom let us get anything we wanted.

Tammy still clutches her box.

TAMMY
(desperately)
I’m sorry, Dad. It’s OK. She can get what she wants.

GARDNER
Too late. Put it back.

She slowly shakes her head no.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
Unacceptable, young lady.

LAUREL
Mom never cared what anything cost. Mom just wanted us to be happy.

Gardner closes his eyes, breathing heavily, at his wit’s end.

When he opens his eyes, he sees the Freak at the other end of the aisle, staring, staring.

A look of panic crosses Gardner’s face.

He pulls the cereal from Tammy’s grip, puts it on the shelf.

Tammy bursts into tears.

GARDNER
That’s it. We’re out of here.

Gardner grabs the cart with one hand, takes Tammy’s arm with the other, moves up the aisle.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
Let’s go, Laurel.

Laurel follows behind, frowning: Nothing’s ever fair.

CHECKOUT - MOMENTS LATER

Tammy is still crying. The only open lanes have long lines. Gardner eyes his choices with a desperate look.

The Stockgirl approaches.

STOCKGIRL
Sir? I can take you over here.

She moves to an empty lane, keys on the register, raises an eyebrow at Gardner. He stares back, eyes shell-shocked.

Tammy tugs his sleeve, and he moves his cart to the open lane, the girls following.

Gardner unloads groceries.

Tammy and Laurel stand behind him, staring through the glass of a small ice cream cooler at the head of the checkout lane.

Laurel looks at Tammy. She puts her arm around her.

Tammy takes a breath, looks at her watch. Her eyes widen.

TAMMY
Dad! We beat our record!

Gardner stares at her blankly.

Laurel smiles, lifts the lid of the cooler a crack.

GARDNER
(sighing)
Knock yourselves out.

Laurel opens the lid all the way and motions for Tammy to go first. Tammy pulls out an ice cream bar. Laurel reaches in and pulls out an ice cream sandwich.

They lay them on the checkout belt, and the Stockgirl reaches over the rest of the groceries to scan them first. She hands them back to the girls with a smile.

Gardner bags groceries, eyes faraway.

The Stockgirl scans items. The girls unwrap their ice creams.

And there he is, though Gardner is too busy to notice.

The Freak stands waiting in line behind the girls. He has no cart. Instead, he’s carrying two boxes of cereal, Cap’n Crunch and Golden Grahams.

He places them on the belt behind Gardner’s items.

The girls eyes widen.

The Stockgirl scans the cereal, slides the boxes to Gardner.

Gardner grabs one, puzzled.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
Hey! Wait. Slow down.

FREAK
… slow down…

Gardner sees the Freak, and his eyes burn. The Stockgirl takes a deep breath.

GARDNER
That’s the guy!

Stockgirl
Sir, please, I know you’re upset—

GARDNER
Upset? I want you to call the cops. This freak’s been stalking us, harrassing us…

As Gardner is talking, Laurel looks at the Freak.

STOCKGIRL
He’s harmless, really. Just… troubled.
(voice lowered)
His little boy was killed last month in our parking lot…
Run over… He… he just comes here… No other family…
He just watches…

TAMMY
Our mom was killed too!

Laurel gazes up into the Freak’s eyes, then holds out her ice cream sandwich to him, offering it.

Gardner is raging.

GARDNER
Then call a shrink! Call a hospital. Call somebody! Just keep him
away from me and my kids!

The Freak takes the sandwich, stares at it, puzzled, and then takes a bite.

He smiles, hands it back to her.

Gardner suddenly spots the exchange, and he leaps forward, roughly pulling Laurel out of the way. The ice cream drops to the floor.

GARDNER (CONT’D)
Stay away from my kid!

The Freak stares at him blankly.

FREAK
… my kid…

Laurel’s eyes cloud, her lips quiver, and suddenly she takes off running for the door.

TAMMY
Laurel!

Gardner freezes in surprise, but suddenly the Freak barrels into him, knocking him out of the way, and chases after Laurel, who is just running out the door.

Tammy SCREAMS.

STOCKGIRL
Oh my God!

Gardner runs after the Freak.

EXT. PARKING LOT - MOMENTS LATER

Blinded by her tears, Laurel runs between two parked cars and into the street. A car speeding by hits its brakes with a SCREECH, and suddenly The Freak is behind her.

He grabs her shirt from the back, yanks her off her feet in one smooth arc, and cradles her to his chest, eyes closed.

Laurel wraps her arms around his neck, crying.

Gardner bursts through the door… and stops, just staring at the scene: the stopped car that narrowly missed Laurel, the Freak comforting his sobbing daughter.

Tammy and the Stockgirl come up behind Gardner.

Tammy takes his hand.

TAMMY
Dad?

She holds out her melted ice cream bar. He takes it from her, takes a bite, swallows.

TAMMY (CONT’D)
Let’s go home.

EXT. PARKING LOT - LATER

EXT. PARKING LOT - MOMENTS LATER

Gardner slowly walks to the van, his daughters cradled in either arm. He hugs them close.

Behind them, the Freak follows, pushing their cart, smiling, smiling, smiling.

FADE OUT.

Two Fictions, by James Claffey

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:48:43 -0500

The Scrap-iron Man

The silver-black lamppost is safety. As long as you touch its peeling paint the tinkers who come up the road on their donkey and cart can’t take you away. The Old Man says they’re great men for the old trades—silverwork, smelting iron to fix buckets, blacksmithing. Mam complains that they’re only interested in stealing healthy children and making them their slaves. They come on Thursdays, in the afternoon. The driver of the cart is always the same man with the ginger hair and bowler hat with a big green feather sticking out the top. He has a tattoo on his neck of a skull, and sometimes he has a fat woman sitting beside him with a cap like the Old Man’s, who sing-songs, “Mend your pots! Scrap iron! Scrap iron!” Mam says the pair of them must be crawling with fleas, and tells me not to get near the cart.

There’s a steel mattress with broken springs on the back of the cart, like the one up the lane we use for a trampoline. I wonder what they do with all the junk they collect. The man catches me looking at him and rubs the fur-like hair on his neck. “C’mere, son. D’you want a gobstopper?” He holds out a paper bag to me. I want one, but I shake my head and grip the pole tighter. He turns back to the cart and swats the poor donkey on the backside with a broken tennis racket. “Suit yourself,” he says, and phlegms orangey gobstopper juice into the street. I so want to ask him for one, but I can’t do it.

Emer and her friend, Catriona, are walking up the avenue, swinging their schoolbags and laughing loudly. “We’re having pizza pockets for dinner, Anto!” she shouts across at me. I say nothing, and swing myself around and around the lamppost, my fingers interlocked, the sky turning circles above me. Sometimes she’s real bratty, especially when she wants to show off to her friends. That’s when I ignore her and concentrate on the way a seagull glides in the breeze, or count the coins in my pocket, or roll my belly-button lint into a small ball. The tinker woman smiles at Emer and says, “You’re an angel! Would you ask your mammy if she has any pots need mending?” The poor ass pulling the cart drops lumps of shite on the road and steam rises off it and the smell is poxy. The girls pay no attention to the tinkers and go into the house, shutting the door with a bang behind them.

I want to shout, “Litterbugs!” at the tinkers, but I’m scared they’ll make a grab for me. Mam says if they’re forced to they can be vicious curs and have no problem abducting bad boys and girls. This is why she wants me to be an altar boy, to be closer to Jesus, and the Holy Ghost. But I’m not great at religion class, not like Eoin Summers, who is bound for heaven according to the priest. The Old Man says the parish priest is a real creeping Jesus and would say Mass for sixpence. He also says the tinkers are descendants of the Puritans who left England and Scotland hundreds of years ago. I said they went to America on the Mayflower and he clipped me on the ear for insolence.

When the tinkers’ cart turns at the end of the avenue and disappears, I let go of the pole and go inside. Mam is sitting in the kitchen with her sewing kit, surgically hemming a pair of the Old Man’s breeches. The smell of flapjacks fills the air and for a moment I wonder if the tinker man will swap me a gobstopper for a week-old flapjack when they come back next Thursday. When Mam puts the sewing stuff back in the Singer box under the stairs, I’ll sneak a hot flapjack into my pocket and hide it under the loose floorboard in my bedroom.

Kidney Trouble

The silver wheels of my misshapen kidney no longer work. The doctor says there’s a problem with my spine, too. Mother’s eyes are puffy and she dabs at her shrinking tears. They help position me in the bed, my body lighter now than before; the boy I was, ripped from the present and replaced with some shrimp-like version of a weaker self.

He would be here, too, if it weren’t for the drinking. She says if she had a gun, she’d shoot him, but I know she’s not serious. Serious is the blood in my urine. Serious is the rubber sheets I sleep on. Serious is the possibility I’ll enter the gates of heaven before either of my parents. In any case, she kisses me and tells me everything’s going to be all right.

While the doctor ties a rubber tube around my arm to take blood, his knuckle grazes my cheek and the skin is rough. And when the thin steel needle penetrates my vein, I grab hold of the bed-sheet and grit my teeth. A plant sits in a terracotta pot on the window-ledge and the sun strikes the plastic leaves as the glass tube fills with dark blood. My tonsils are missing and if I open my mouth to scream he’ll be able to see my stomach in terrible knots of fear.

His hands trace the outline of my kidney and when he pushes in suddenly, it rattles. Not a good sign, he says. Extended stay, the doctor tells us. A month. Maybe longer. I want to go home, to sleep in my own room, with my soccer posters and stuffed bears. The doctor insists. He calls it acute nephritis. He says I’ll have to be restrained at night. I don’t know what he means, but when the nurse ties the straps around the bed-frame I begin to shake, and she gives me the magpie-eye.

Mother returns with my pajamas, toiletries, and a bundle of comics. The nurse brings me a slice of gammon ham with a pineapple ring and mashed potatoes for my tea. Mother kisses me and says she’s got to go home to get Dad’s tea ready, but I’m not to worry, because he’ll be in to see me after work. As she walks toward the glass double-doors of the ward, I open a comic and try to forget my broken parts.

Dad arrives later with the other fathers visiting their sick children. Raincoats and the evening newspapers are everywhere and the smell of damp and cigarettes makes me want to get sick. He ruffles my hair and says I’m to be a good soldier for the doctors and nurses. His thick fingers feel like lead weights on my head and he gently kisses my cheek. After he goes home for his tea I cry into the pillow for a while.

In the darkness of the ward, the faint click of shoes on tile mingles with the breathing of the patients. I dream of capturing insects in jam-jars by the banks of the river, my skin set with sweat from the rubber sheets. I’m woken twice during the night by the metal knocking coming from my kidney. The noise reminds me of the way the corrugated iron roof of the garden shed flaps on a windy day. I mimic the sound.

As the clicking of nurse’s shoes draws nearer I hush up and press the pillow to my side so she won’t hear my kidney’s metallic groans. Maybe it’s the pressure of the pillow, but I piss my pants and my pee spreads daffodil yellow on the bed and smells awful. I can feel the shape of my kidney through the skin, and the way it vibrates from the broken pieces.