fwriction : review

Lapels, by Rhys Leyshon Evans

Thu, 24 May 2012 08:51:21 -0400

For Luke F.

Winston never used to walk that much, but lately he found himself drawn to ambling around the city every Saturday and Sunday. It was the end of September. The two bedroom apartment Winston shared with an Australian lost in London was an organism that seemed to have regressed in size over the previous six months and forced Winston to locate some form of abstract solace on the city streets. Winston had not become a flaneur. He did not look for comfort in the orthodox and non-orthodox beauty of architecture, or tree lined streets, or magisterial squares. Nor did he turn to walking for fitness. No. Winston simply found it imperative to keep moving. Sitting at home could not offer such respite. Sitting at home could only provide a laptop pallor and a cloying headache.

Sunday unfolded all around Winston. Buses running on haphazard schedules. Families looking for something, anything to distract children. Winston wore a royal blue tweed jacket. The oncoming autumnal chill ensured that this would most likely be the last day braved without a substantial overcoat. Unlike the majority of those who endured university education, Winston somehow managed to gain weight whilst pursuing a degree in sociology and was unable to fit into the jacket for upwards of two years. Yet after a summer of nauseating heat and timid salads, Cosmo successfully shed his academic pounds and found himself able to don the blazer once again.

Winston strolled through Bloomsbury. Georgian facades smiled grandly. A long strand of silver blonde hair sat entwined on the lapel of the jacket. Winston did not notice the hair until waiting at traffic lights where he took a moment to inspect and admire his trusted garment.

The silver blonde hair belonged to his ex-girlfriend, Georgina. The couple had split-up over a year ago. At the time, the reasons for the parting seemed clear, amicable almost. Yet the enveloping humidity of summer decided to muddle and twist and fragment what at first appeared so relatively straight-forward.

Georgina wore Winston’s royal blue tweed blazer the night their relationship properly began.

They had been on two or three dates at that stage, and a number of half-dates where both parties thought they were acting more awkwardly than they actually were. Georgina later asked Winston what he meant by half-dates and Winston told her that he classified half-dates as the occasions when they bumped into one another at the library or supermarket and ended up dropping everything and spending hours together talking in exclamation marks and grammatically incorrect run-on sentences.

The night Winston and Georgina first kissed, they’d been drinking cheap, soapy beer in a dank apartment, wrapped in jumpers even though the heat was on full-blast. Caught by a restless fervour, they went for a walk. The March evening was warmer than Georgina’s accommodation but she still complained of a chill. Winston gave her his blazer. Georgina popped up both lapels and collar to insulate herself better. Winston wanted to tell her that he’d taken to reading horoscopes for the last three weeks in the vein hope they’d tell him what he wanted to hear. Georgina considered revealing that she’d written a poem for him, entitled ‘The Pope Won’t Care (It’s Not His Problem After All).’ The poem wasn’t really about the burgeoning romance but was inspired by the time she spent with Winston. Neither decided to say what was on their mind. The world slept gracefully, unaware of the romantic vignette developing on the naked streets, lit only by unsustainable lamps and diminishing beer.

Shivering, slightly, Winston paused beside Georgina.

They both laughed nervously, eyes darting this way and that, trying to be far more assured than their brittle confidence let on.

After what seemed like a decade, Winston delicately brought Georgina towards him by the lapels and kissed her.

Winston could not remember if there had been any more details about the prelude to the kiss. One minute they were talking nervously, the next they were clinging to one another’s arms for three and a half years.

Winston thought a lot about the relationship on his aimless walks. The more he walked, the angrier he got, and he was never sure whether the anger stemmed from missing Georgina, or his unstructured walking pattern, or the fact that he walked so fast and had nowhere to go. This inarticulate and inexpressible anger seemed to follow Winston every weekend. An anger that seemed so true, so real, yet so empty. The anger Winston felt was a cloying mixture of the past, present and future. A motley crew that ganged up and stifled him. The past offered Winston reams of regret and lost opportunities and a youthful energy which was now absent in his life. The present merely held up a mirror to a dead-end job Winston wasn’t sure he was over-qualified or under-qualified for anymore. And the future. Well, the future was something foreign to Winston now. He had long since stopped caring about it. The future involved dreams and aspiration. The future was only for young people. For Winston, the future was a child’s toy or hobby, wonderful in the first instance but in time viewed as something silly, something almost embarrassing.

Bloomsbury gave way to the dour frown of Holburn. Winston passed an over-lit pub. Busy. Smokers gathered outside laughing at jokes that were never finished. A drunk couple held hands and argued about an indecipherable topic. The sun was setting in the way a September sunset always did: exhausted, relieved, weary. Winston and Georgina always used to find drunk couples arguing funny.

“I know couples who only argue when they’re drunk,” Georgina told Winston one night as they sat in her post-university studio, cupped in one another’s arms. There was no television in the studio. The couch sat in front of a heaving bookcase. Georgina’s studio was sparse and situated on a street lined with bars that always seemed empty and restaurants and shops that looked like they were designed by the same architect. Occasionally, Georgina and Winston would sit at her window and smoke a joint, usually rolled with too much tobacco, and giggle at arguing couples and men with thick necks wearing t-shirts in the middle of winter.

“I was in an elevator today,” said Winston, flexing his arm and then placing it back around Georgina. “And this guy was having an argument on his phone and even when I got out of the elevator, I could still hear him yelling through the iron doors.”

“I’m not sure they are iron doors. Or maybe they are. I don’t know.”

“They’re pretty heavy doors.”

“Elevators are one of the loneliest places in the world.”

“You think?”

“Do you ever feel alone in an elevator? I do. I don’t know. Even when you’re surrounded by strangers, you’re so close to them, can hear them breathing; I once heard someone’s heartbeat. You’re so close in an elevator but so alone and the door opens and you’re gone and that’s it.”

Winston smiled at Georgina and her tangents. She also found the city at night lonely and that also made Winston smile. Everything was lonely if you thought about it hard enough.

Winston continued to head eastward, his worn out soles willing him to pause, turn around and find a bus stop and cheap food to digest poorly.

On a particularly dour street, Winston briefly contemplated the hair on his blazer that belonged to Georgina. He’d been forced to wear the blazer the first time he met her parents.

Winston and Georgina had graduated from university six months before the dinner in a homely Italian restaurant. Georgina’s parents were desperate to structure her post-academic career. They seemed set on figuring out Georgina’s life for her. Or at least that’s what Georgina told Winston after she Skyped her parents, or was sent an over-long email. At the time, Georgina worked as an assistant in a college library. Slowly chipping away at her student debt.

Winston sat on the couch in front of the bookshelf. He wore the only suit in his wardrobe: a moody grey teamed with a rich maroon tie. Georgina busied herself needlessly around the studio. She tidied and arranged and re-arranged assorted objects even though her parents expressed no desire to visit her ramshackle abode. At one point, Winston was forced to physically remove the hoover from his girlfriend’s hands although he’d almost allowed her to follow through with the act because he felt watching an anxious woman in a vintage dress, hoovering in heels, quite humorous. After observing Georgina flutter around for at least an hour and a bit, Winton felt compelled to do something himself. He stood and walked to the bathroom where he began searching through a cabinet for hair wax he’d never seen Georgina use but was sure she owned. In fact, the only time she’d gone near the product was to prop a hand-held mirror on the pot to offer the mirror a better angle. Winston never really used hair product. His hair was thick and tousled naturally. Even as he walked through the glass surroundings of the financial district, Winston was not quite sure why he felt compelled to use the wax. The action began smoothly. A pea-sized amount of wax was scooped up and rubbed in two palms until warm. The application to the hair caused problems. As Winston brought his hands to his head, he failed to spot a goblet of wax on his fingernail that escaped being rubbed in and fell onto the lapel of his jacket and the breast pocket. By the time Winston noticed, the wax had borne a snowy stain that water could not remove. After consultation with Georgina, Winston changed jackets.

Glass reflected glass. The financial district heralded a dramatic hush, as if there were signs up asking for a library quiet to be adhered to. Confused tourists, lost from the guidebook trail, searched desperately for the reassurance of some universal shop they recognized.

But everything was closed.

Street lamps flickered proudly.

Winston continued east.

The suit jacket remained hanging in the closet. It still needed to be dry cleaned professionally. Winston had no need for the jacket anyway so what was the rush? Work constituted an administration office in the corner of an arts council funded gallery. The only demand placed on employees was that they turned up on time and didn’t have too many shirt buttons undone; that is, if they in fact chose to wear a shirt at all.

Winston wasn’t sure if he liked the financial district. He wasn’t sure about anything he liked at the moment: friends, family, hobbies, London. At least the Sunday streets were serene and empty and filled only by the sound of his heels shuffling along, skulking like a moody teenager.

It was almost nine o’clock.

When he was with Georgina, Winston would always end the weekend by staying at her place. They would take it in turns to cook an ad hoc meal neither was very good at: lasagna, vegetable stir-fry, lamb shank. These meals often ended up being smothered in salt and pepper and whatever seasoning was available, diluted by numerous slices of bread and a burning odour; Georgina and Winston would smile at each other, smiling at their attempts to be adults and not eat junk food, smiling at the awful smell that would cling to their clothes for days, smiling because it felt purposeful and right.

Georgina and Winston broke-up on a Sunday.

Yet again, they’d spent the day huddled in numerous layers of clothing to save on Georgina’s heating, and had had a conversation about their favourite debut records by bands that were not necessarily their favourite bands.

And there were two empty bottles of wine sitting on the carpet by four in the afternoon.

At six, Winston suggested that they break their regular Sunday pattern and go out for a meal instead of eating a soupy risotto.

Georgina, head buzzing slightly, said “sure.”

Between seven and eight, Winston wasn’t sure what happened except that his voice had grown hoarse through shouting and Georgina’s face was strewn with post-impressionistic tears, rippling like a lake, flecks here and there, down her neck, mascara on her hands. The argument began with indecision about whether the couple should move in together or perhaps wait a little longer. And the conversation seemed fine. At least to Winston. But Georgina began to cry and wouldn’t say why. Winston tried to be understanding. Georgina’s reticence to get a place together irked him in a way he couldn’t fully pinpoint. At the time, Winston shared a house with three university friends, who were swiftly becoming ex-friends after nearly nine months as housemates. Winston kept pressing Georgina. He didn’t want to.

The tears cut up her sentences and spat them out nonsensically.

Georgina asked Winston to leave.

He’d let her down.

He’d hurt her.

Winston became more confused and continued to badger her. What was going on? Why did she feel let down? At this stage, the couple had haphazardly dressed for their postponed meal. Georgina screamed at Winston. She didn’t want to see him anymore. She didn’t want to be privy to his lies and fake laugh. Winston went to hug Georgina. To calm her down. Georgina pushed him away. His touch didn’t feel like his touch. It was someone else. Winston still refused to leave. And the next he knew he grabbed her by the lapels of her greatcoat and he shook with anger and they didn’t embrace like they did when they first kissed that cold night in March and they didn’t laugh when Winston smudged wax on his suit jacket. No. Winston shook Georgina and did not let her go. For a moment, Winston’s anger made his mind go blank, his conscience disappear.

For that moment he was no longer in control.

He let go of Georgina’s lapels.

They had only spoken once since that night.

The wind picked up.

Three women walked by smoking cigarettes.

Winston could still smell their perfume through the breeze.

It was time to go home.

Back at his apartment, Winston flopped down on the couch and sighed. Sighing was all that seemed appropriate as summer bade farewell to April memories of June frolicking, July excitement, August trepidation. The Australian was at work. Or so Winston thought. He didn’t really know what his housemate did at the weekend.

Winston continued to sit on the couch in silence but the silence reminded him too much of his walk around the financial district.

The words You lied to me spun around his head.

They often did on Sunday evenings.

Winston crossed the room and looked through his vinyl collection.

He took a Billy Bragg record out of its sleeve.

He didn’t notice the scrap of paper fall to the floor.

You lied to me.

The slanted letters were suggestive.

They were not written with Georgina’s delicate penmanship. They accused just the same.

Snapshot '87, by Sheldon Lee Compton

Thu, 17 May 2012 08:48:00 -0400

Huddled up to a split-end oil barrel half loaded with chunks of coal plucked from the belt, its insides on fire, George fought off the urge to take two more pills. Instead, he charged three coal scoops, stood and held two pills for more than two minutes, took a female connector to the mouth of the mines to a man everybody called Torch, loaded the barrel again and felt warm, even when the guts of the barrel went black and cold. If anyone came looking to steal cable or tools or batteries, he didn’t notice.

He felt nova-like, bursting in all directions. He could split apart and send flying a blast of blue uniform, arms, legs, a chipped tooth from a high school fight, a birth-marked left shoulder, a busted backbone sent careening into the night. He felt kinetic, the way Julie could once make him feel during an argument, the same way she could make him feel during sex, trembling with a basic emotion older than either of them and longer lasting.

The night sky mixed with the tops of the trees leading up and away from the mine, and George didn’t look at a clock until four hours of the shift had went past in a wave of coal dust and dizziness. While trying to keep his balance on the walkway crossing over the belt line, he felt the pill bottle pushing into his leg, reminding him that within that bottle was relief of some kind, and then, beyond that, oblivion. But it wasn’t oblivion George thought about when he shook two more pills from the bottle and stood thinking for more than five minutes about chasing them with two waters from the supply shack.

His little boy slipping behind the kitchen counter. Russell with his little hands fumbling with a drawing before it was time for George to leave for work. Coloring lightly in circles, adding two large ears and then two smaller circles inside for the eyes. A looping frown for a mouth. Russell holding the drawing up to him, the crayon face there dripping large, oval tears and crossing the looping frown.

His own father, standing in the doorway outside the bedroom he and Russell had shared for the past three months since everything that happened had happened. Then on the front porch where the two of them stood, shadowselves against the kitchen window, close to one another while listening to the sounds of winter floating there, a backdrop for their silence, the rattle of the warming truck off in the distance.

Julie smiling at him at him across the kitchen table, pouring them glasses of whiskey. Later the whiskey bottle between them on the bed, singing songs to one another. Julie hiding the pills after the second surgery, crying as he yelled, accused her while she begged him for quiet, begged him not to wake Russell, sang songs to herself while he slept in the living room floor.

Hours early, but George pulled another pain pill from his pocket, felt it familiar there like a cigarette or the handle of an old coffee mug. It would be a bitter thing to chew, but it would be all he could have until tomorrow. Three a day, no more. It had to be chewed. It wouldn’t take long for the medicine to mix with the rest, get into his blood and start working on his back, being chewed like that. So he chewed, choking down clumps of wet powder.

A muffled voice—hey, hey, you—upset but soft in sound, drifted like a flat whisper from the black mouth of the mine. But the voice was no more significant than any of the other sounds that slowly peeled layers from his skin. The hum of the charging machinery, the rattle of the bottle inside his fist, rats the size of beagle pups pushing empty potato chip bags across cracked and roughly poured concrete flooring. George was lost somewhere in the night sky and the tree-line. He perched himself on a hillside in the back of the main garage where night watchmen and outside workers pissed during the shift. He felt the pill bottle bite into his leg again, and then a single shining light emerged from the mine, the single headlight bouncing across jagged ground, pock-marked with tire tracks frozen in place like thick scars. At the wheel was a man covered in hanging chunks of thickened coal dust and sludge. When he passed under the conveyor belt line he didn’t have to duck or move his head an inch. He kept his eyes straight ahead to the garage, stopping abruptly and hopping off, an action as common and natural to him as stretching. Bowlegged, the miner pushed through the garage and made a quick path for George on the hillside beyond the swinging back doors.

“Hey! Jesus Christ!” Flinging of arms, slabs sludge falling from his shirt sleeves, drops of murky water. “First night, right? You want seven dead miners on your hands your first night out? Did you hear the phone? We’ve been trying to get you for ten minutes.”

“I started the fan when you all called out,” George said. His back muscles twisted together as he stood up, tense.

The miner stopped and squinted at George, then stomped across to the fan, dropping a switch. The fan came to life like a helicopter taking off sideways into the night. The cold void of winter silence was sucked into the fan and spat back out, changed, twisting everything different in the atmosphere. The miner took off his hat. The battery light flinted and flopped across darkness, a spear of bright dust splitting through the tree-line, the night sky. George climbed down from the hillside and pulled his coat closer around him.

“Is that Torch’s coat from storage?” The miner asked. “Don’t you have your own coat? Jesus.”

The miner tossed three large chips of coal into the barrel. Flames popped up and then settled again. He took a long look back to the face of the mine and then took a cigarette from a pack left for later on top of a busted battery. George noticed right then that about the only part of the miner that wasn’t coated in black, sparkling dust was his hair. It was gray like white fire off the top of his head, springy and odd from being pushed down by his hat. His eyes were blue buttons trapped in ebony and they had a look about them that made George uncomfortable.

“Well, might as well take a little break while I’m out here. I’m Kelly.” He stuck out his hand and George shook it, making sure not to wipe his hands on his pants afterwards. “What’s that?” He pointed to the pill bottle still in George’s hand.

“Medicine.”

“Let’s see it.”

George hesitated. It was an awkward hesitation no matter how hard he tried. Kelly stuck his hand out again, shaking it and wiggling his fingers. “Jesus. Give them things up.” He turned the bottle into the light. “For pain?”

“Yeah. My back.”

“Your back.” He smiled widely, white fire, button blue and now the smile, sweat-stain yellow. “Your back, huh? Well, okay.” Kelly gripped the bottle in both hands so that the white label was left smeared a deep gray and bent over to look closely, buried up in thought. “I say okay. Let’s have us some, new guy.”

“Well, they’re for my back,” he said, but didn’t ask for the bottle back.

No chewing.

No need.

There were twenty pills and then there were fifteen, and then ten. George swallowed his with bottles of water from storage. Kelly crushed and snorted two and then chewed the rest but one. George snorted the last, gagging from it while Kelly laughed and drained another bottle of water.

“Goddamn, what a beginner,” Kelly said and laughed some more.

“Yeah,” George said. His voice fluttered, broken wings inside his head.

The night sky opened up and the hours clinked past after Kelly crawled onto his scoop and went back under the mountain. George didn’t feed the fire any after that. For two hours it was only the dead cold and the blurred vision and him stumbling up to the belt line and then back again, afraid to grab more chunks of coal, afraid he‘d get swept up in the belt and pulled apart and tossed aside, and he didn’t want to die tired. He didn’t want to die messed up. A couple of times he tried to burn a box or two in the split barrel to keep warm, but it was no use. And then it didn’t matter. Oblivion kept him warm. His laughter was out of place and even the rats even stayed away.

Across the porch, too loudly, through the front door, too quickly, George slowed himself to an easy glide inside the kitchen. He had pretended to be asleep during the ride home with the foreman and now, with hands thick numb slabs of meat and bone, he pulled at his boots until they fell to the floor. He made it through to the living room trying not to touch the walls with his dirty hands for balance and at once noticed Russell’s drawing from hours before on the coffee table, held to the edge with a school book, leaving the yellow page to flutter in the slight breeze of a nearby heater vent. He didn’t touch the drawing, not right away. He did not take one step toward it, but it made the frozen muscles of his wild-wired body tingle and brought feeling into his forgotten stomach. He saw every pill, one after another, running around inside him there, torturing him, grinding a fast path to his heart.

At the edge of Russell’s bed, a twin-sized thing tossed crooked in the corner of the bedroom, George watched the small smooth face lying still against the pillow, smiled when the soft lips puckered in sleep, smacked together, and then went slack again. He rubbed his fingers through the fine blonde hair, leaned in close and kissed the forehead. Shampoo and soap.

Outside, the world was waking up. Truck engines turned over stubborn and cold and started. Men, pulled from their beds for work, coughed into the stinging winter air, gripping cups of coffee like lifelines, moving through the thick and dark morning like tired fireflies, their light almost spent and gone.

George tucked his lunch bucket beside his feet in the floor. It rattled against his leg, empty cans of Vienna sausage knocking around inside. He put his fingers to his lips and hissed at the bucket. Dust was smeared across his face, blotching his hands and covering his fingers. A wedding ring that sometimes still held its shine shot occasional glints of pure yellow across the room. He still wore the ring but kept his left hand stuffed into his pocket most of the time, ashamed of the fact that he still loved a women who had hurt him so badly, had walked away from him and from Russell when they most needed someone to stay. Holding his hand close to his face, he stared at the ring, noted the deep scratches across its surface, scratches as long and deep as his own. His hands and clothes smelled of rust and grease, smoke and the faintest scent of gasoline. From his coat pocket, he pulled out a piece of yellow chalk used for marking tears in the belt line.

“Hey little man wake up,” he said.

Russell moved sideways in the bed, yawned once.

“Daddy?” His voice was broken and stuck against the softness of the pillow, sliding off the thick quilt pulled to his chin.

The room was stitched together in patches of black and artificial light. Headlights from a diesel garage across the street were scanning Calvary as drivers pulled in and out, backing up for repairs, pulling out for familiar destinations. George sat quietly beside Russell, his features dripping tiredly from the gaunt bones of his face. Russell smiled and reached out to touch George’s hand. George pulled his hand close and held it there, circling the knuckles with his rough thumb. Soon Russell’s eyes were closed again, flickering under the eyelids, searching for a lost dream or just darkness.

“Hey little man, let’s go outside,” George whispered. “I brought something back from work and now we can play. Now we have time.”

Russell stood weaving in the middle of the room and George took him by the arm. He could feel warmth from the bed covering Russell’s skin like the first hour of an easy sunburn. Russell wrapped his hands around his elbows and blinked several times, his chin lowered, lips pushed out. He then sat back down on the bed and fell onto his side, his eyes closing before his head was back into the pillow.

George allowed a long breath to ease from his lungs, patience slipping from inside him in a slow gush. His insides were turning on him now. Moving and shifting energy, an old energy, that nova blast that could create explosion from nearly nothing at all.That wild-wiring that had grabbed him away from the world once before. Only now there was nothing to hold it down. It spun and ran and shifted and did as it pleased. Anger management classes after the divorce had taught him only one thing – everybody was angry at something, just some more than others. But it was always something, and usually that something was small at first before it caught fire enough to burn entire towns, entire families, into heaps of ash. By then, it was always too late. Always too late.

“You sure was awful sad to see me going last night to be laying back down there now acting like you don’t even care what I brought home,” George said and coughed deeply, felt the film from the crushed pills crawl up into his throat, burn his nose. His voice was tanglevine and thorn, slashing out.

Russell quickly sat up in bed and when George looked at his son’s eyes it was the slow rippling surface of tears he saw floating across that sleepy blue. George held the drawing out in front of him like a bad report card. When he saw Russell looking at it, he dropped it onto the bed.

“Forget it. I’m going to bed. I’m tired anyway,” George said flatly. He started out of the room, wobbled in the doorway of the bedroom, caught his balance and rubbed the back of his neck. He was only trying to make things better from earlier when he rushed out to get to work, but it was only getting worse. He heard Russell plucking wildly at the floor behind him, finding his pants, tossing them out in front of him and pulling them up over his hips.

“What did you bring, Daddy?” Russell asked. “Let me see. We can play now. Okay?”

George turned in the doorway. He stood still, his hands down to his sides, and his expression changed from angry to hurt, a brief and passing moment of lucidity, a reprieve from last night’s high with Kenny. He saw his son, the sadness, the love, and then, building from another fit of anger fueled from fighting pain, it was gone again, replaced with dizziness and thickness of tongue and the old anger. The room offered only silence. It was only the two of them.

Bending to Russell, George wrapped him in his arms, smelling himself as he did so, the heavy scent of grease and rust and old sweat. And then George dug far into his coat and brought out the jagged chunk of yellow chalk.

“Remember what we used to do with sidewalk chalk, little man? This is the same thing. I brought it from work and it’s pretty much the same kind, I think. Let’s go.”

George’s face fell into a sloppy grin, transforming in no time at all from that hard granite, that volcanic rock and lava that could bubble just beneath the surface, and he took Russell’s thin, bare arm and helped them both get quietly out the front door into the dancing cold.

A thin frost coated the front porch and the tops of parked cars glistened and sparkled under the pole lights. George walked in circles in the street, searching for a section of pavement without oil spots that would be good for drawing. He searched the ground for the right spot and missed Russell’s shaking body and his tiny bare feet pushing into the chilled pavement and the cold splotches along his boney chest, the arms bright red and bluish in places. He circled and circled and spun in the street, stopping momentarily here and there and then moving on again, hand pressed firmly to his chin.

“I should go in and get something to put on,” Russell said, but the voice was lost, passing across George and moving away and up into the predawn cloud cover.

George dropped to his knees, clutching the piece of chalk between two gloved fingers. Writing frantically, dirty black hair springing out above the thick wrinkles of his forehead, he worked the chalk against the pavement in complete concentration, pressing down so hard flecks of broken yellow chalk fell to either side onto the street. He wrote in bold letters—BY RUSSELL AND DADDY—then stood up and sucked in a long breath, turned his head sideways to review what he had written and handed the chalk to Russell, watched as his son fumbled with it between his fingers, dropped it and then bent slowly to pick it from the ground.

“Go ahead,” George said.

George squatted and wrapped his arms around himself, bouncing gently, feeling the lack of pain in his back. The winter air rushed through him and he studied his son drawing circles and loops on the pavement. A chalk drawing on pavement. Scrawled symbols dashed off on the cave wall. Some promise at last made good between he and his son, and somewhere the blood of both tangled in that moment.

Fun and Games, by Sara Lippmann

Thu, 10 May 2012 08:55:51 -0400

I’m trying to tell him what it was like.

My brothers played foosball. In my mother’s closet among party dresses suffocating in bags I’d hide while in the basement rods spun and missed. Sometimes I’d carry a jar of olives, but usually I kept my hands free in case the KKK should happen to hop the porch and catch the wink of chrome on our doorpost and torch it all down to reach me.

That’s reasonable. The Ku Klux Klan in suburban New Jersey, he says, toothpaste foaming.

I vow to try harder.

It was a game, I insist.

He spits.

You mean Jehovah’s Witness, he says, coming out of the bathroom. I had a classmate once who wouldn’t stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Wore burgundy bloomers and smelled like canned spaghetti; now, there’s a home life.

The B&B from our honeymoon was run by Jehovah’s, I say, but it is a digression. That couple serving blood pudding thick as pucks, just how you like it, have you seen a happier marriage? Their pamphlets warmed our bedside, glossy faces slid carelessly in the tub. You said you could live there forever, with your currants and clotted cream, never leave the countryside.

That’s because I assumed everyone was Catholic, he says, working a water pick.

I slide over on the bed.

Later, I tell him, they left notes. My brothers had this painstaking script, they were at the arcade, they wrote on long yellow pads, they landed roles in All My Sons, studied Mandarin, or so they said. It was a matter of faith. Our house howled from poor insulation. After school, I’d dive beneath their covers, cradling division tables and lozenges encased in snappy metal, waiting as the hours collapsed, my brothers fleshed in Ronald Reagan masks from the Land of Confusion video blaring all night on TV while I dreamed between asteroid sheets, alone in their empty twin beds.

I didn’t sign on for this pity party, he says, peeling knee socks. They are gold in the toe.

Wait, I say, fluffing a pillow. Thing is, I was ready. Word travels fast. Soon as people found out they wouldn’t stop coming. The neighbor’s cat would curl up on the sill, lick his paws as the boy down the street beat the brass knocker; kids from the late bus ravaged beds of daffodils; my brothers’ friends drew deli straws.

Now we’re talking, he says, propping onto an elbow. Now I’m ears.

We’d camp out on the roof or fill the bath or trail off in the fields behind the middle school, where the sledding hill met Devil’s Creek and my brothers and I released tadpoles after they’d sprung legs. Leaves we would salvage from each other’s hair then string them up, tracking pine needles, tracing soft chins, my fingers smoked stiff and chitinous—

What?

I roll toward him. It is instinctive. I am a moth, searching for a glint of something. Who doesn’t want approval? Never once was I punished or caught. Picture me: Silent as a prayer, splitting chicken breast from its kosher waxy rib, as if I hadn’t just been fucked four ways in the mouth.

Turn over, he says.

I’m telling you, I say, but face the wall anyway.

He licks my neck as if it were ice melt. I think of that cat scratching glass. Life is easy. Already I’m elsewhere, coin in a slot, a mercury ball shot through a maze of other people’s belongings, but tonight once it’s done I keep going, long past the fun—Jane, you wouldn’t know love if it hit you.

from 'The War Beyond,' by Erwin Uhrmann

Thu, 03 May 2012 09:01:00 -0400

My great-aunt was murdered by a nurse, at some point in the 1980s where there was a hole, a glittering hole brimming with neon light, tragedy, and glamour. And there, in a house with dark drapes, emerald-colored wall fabrics, and sheepskins on smooth parquet floors, is the place where I grew up. Racks of books, where I slid along the top shelf and flew by, pulling them with me, and they came tumbling down upon me. Somber music, smoky glass surfaces, and beige and brown gave me a sense of comfort and shielded me from the fear outside. Everything was fear. Fear and non-fear were black on black.

I refused to eat. Out of a haze of apple-scented shampoo in my bath, I called for my mother. Emerging from the bathtub, my feet pressed their shapes onto the green tiles, the array of carpets in the living room, and the rustic armchair. The sound of the TV crime show was like white noise permeating the apartment. Mother always dried me under the arms first. And the steam from the bathtub hovered in the cold hall. The hot prints of my feet marked a path to my bedroom, where I lay sleepless.

Nenad wanted to meet me in Skadarlija, said to be the Bohemian part of town. Or maybe the nouveau riche area of Belgrade. Nenad and his face: The whole thing moved when he spoke, his cheeks riding up and down. His eyes shifted as he waved his hands around. He was talking about the city. The city was always the issue in Belgrade.

He was carrying a bag with yellow print, holding it away from his body, as if it were sticky. He was dressed in a long dark coat, a beret on his head. We didn’t recognize each other right off. He was different back then in Novi Sad. Different clothing, different movements, different city. We had met only briefly there. I had a slight pain in my joints from the long journey. I walked up and down Skadarska Street. Then we found each other.

Nenad spoke English. I walked up and down Skadarska Street with him once more, then to the café at the main square. My stomach was acting up. Then I was alone again.

I sat in Kalemegdan Park for three hours. The city smelled like rotten onion mixed with the warm steam of potatoes and old rubber. And a sweet element: the green twists in a multicolored spiral candy cane. Or dark chocolate when it’s cold outside. An aroma like Scotch, the kind where they say you can taste the spring that the water comes from and the rust from the bourbon barrels in which it aged.

It is as if just yesterday, something horrific had come to an end.

The way it had at other times in history. Grandma showed me the picture of the house she had lost. Three trees, the house in all its parts, and an overgrown patch of grass that tilted in the wind. I knew about the interior from her stories. The view from Kalemegdan probably bore a strong resemblance to the view from grandma’s lost property, except that instead of the sea, a river lapped the tips of your toes.

And then a day went by, and Nenad and I drove up to a big cemetery in Belgrade. The white lilies at the cemetery flower stall made me feel as though Aunt Helene was there.

I pictured the names in my head. I said: Nenad, then paused ever so slightly before coming out with what I actually wanted to say. When I thought of my aunt, I saw her name: Helene. I inhaled the purple-gray palette, which carried the scent of mothballs.

“Here is Djindjic’s grave,” Nenad whispered.

In front of us, a simple gravestone, roses, pictures in frames. My nose was itching. Nenad looked at me nervously.

“What are you doing?” he asked me.

“I’m taking a picture of the grave.”

“No,” he hissed.

I put my camera, which I was now holding in my left hand, back into my pocket.

“I’ll go ask,” he said. He turned around and went up to a policeman who was standing in the distance. I couldn’t hear the two of them talking. The cold bored into my feet through the gravel.

Nenad looked neutral as he made his way back from the policeman to me. I turned toward the grave and put my hand back in my pocket. Nenad trotted up, and in a whisper combined with gestures, said, “No, he didn’t allow it. Put the camera away.”

I took my hand out of my pocket. We were standing between the graves of honor, and I tried to make out the message someone had written in English on a slip of paper and placed next to the grave.

“Now I’ll show you Željko Ražnatović,” Nenad gasped, “come on.” And he pulled me away.

The darker it got outside, the colder the gravel felt. I followed him. Nenad headed uphill at a rapid clip.

“We have to hurry; the cemetery is closing soon,” he told me with that same combination of a whisper and gestures, then wheeled around and led the way. I watched his whole face move when he spoke, just the way it had when we first met and when we got together on Skadarska Street.

On the left side of the path were graves from World War I. At the very top, I saw the urn grove, then Nenad turned left ahead of me and I continued to follow him. Almost impossible for the guards hiding behind the bigger graves not to notice. Nenad drew in his neck respectfully and disappeared in the collar of his coat.

“Let’s lower our voices,” he said, and put a finger up to his mouth.

Behind us, a branch snapped. He turned around, slowly, without changing the expression on his face. Then he glanced at me, and at the grave where we were standing. His smile faded, and he knitted his brow as the reality of the situation dawned on him.

“They’re here—right next to us—but we don’t see them,” Nenad said in a flat voice, without looking me in the face, while crossing his hands in front of his chest and letting them fall straight back into his pockets, as though he had said something taboo.

It made no difference whether I believed him.

“That’s not the police,” he told me, “those are his people. They have been guarding his grave since the cemetery was desecrated. The same with Djindjic; the state police are keeping vigil there.”

I had my left hand in my pocket. I pulled out the camera a little bit, and aimed the lens at the grave, trying to bring the bust on the massive gravestone into focus. Arkan the war hero, the criminal, turned to stone. Then I pressed the shutter and shoved the camera back in my pocket. The seam felt like cool gel. Nenad turned around, and with my hand still in my pocket, I pulled out a tissue and held it to my nose. He hadn’t heard the click.

“Can we go?”

“Yes, let’s.”

“The graves,” I asked Nenad, “why are so many dates of death left blank?”

I kneeled down at a grave to read the inscription on the stone. Once again, Nenad looked around frantically. The date of birth was engraved in red.

“They’re still alive,” Nenad said, and flicked around in his pockets. “The date of death is entered when people die. When a family member dies, the birthdates of the spouse, the father, or the mother are engraved on the stone.”

There were wedding photos, men who had most likely died during the war in the 1990s. And the relationship to a deceased person was inscribed.

“He is already waiting for her,” I sneered.

Nenad gave me a long hard look. Eventually he smiled.

“What happens if someone gets remarried?”

“Marriage is sacred in Serbia,” Nenad said.

“It’s like the Mafia.”

“During the war, tradition was important for many people.”

The stone in front of me was shiny black. All these wars set in motion, all across the world.

“Not for everyone.”

“Not for everyone. Some fought against the regime, others for it. And everyone was against the raids. I knew a journalist who lived here and kept going from Belgrade to Bosnia and the Republika Srpska. And he said that he no longer knew which side to be for.”

I gazed over the hill into the city; it was quickly growing dark.

“He was an American. He had lots of contacts, and when we were attacked, he said he didn’t know whether he ought to be glad.”

I just nodded.

“Is he still here?”

“Don’t think so. He was in Kosovo for a while, then I stopped hearing from him.”

We walked back slowly, through the rows of graves and over gravel paths. My eyes were itching. Tango-dancing children of war; grilling off to the side; untrodden graves on the path for them all: Željko Ražnatović and his first officer, the dead Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic and his wife—still alive and along for the ride. Behind the one-legged land mine victims, currants were wilting on a bush. And they were staring straight ahead, straining to see something, and wondering who the glamorous lady was. I recognized Aunt Helene. Light hair, slim waist, black skirt with a slit up the side. Every bit the diva. Like Marlene Dietrich, or Marilyn Monroe. She was the “blue angel,” and sang Lili Marleen. And she knew who she was dancing for. I knew that after her death, she had opted to be a young woman.

The small gravestones had canning jars with water, where people had placed angel’s trumpet flowers. At the bottom of the jars was sediment that had drizzled off the blossoms. The applause after the first notes rippled from the semi-circle up frontinto the back rows. The group danced the tango, with Helene in the center, making a show of tapping her feet on the floor, whirling in the tiniest of motions that were over in an instant, swaying with eyes and lashes wide open when the accordion struck plaintive tones.

And from the last beat, after the woman performed an elegant gancho with her long black skirt and the man’s legs, the cemetery turned back into Belgrade, the dead returning to their supine spots.

Nenad had parked the car near the cemetery. It was cold; you could see your breath in the car. His gloves made a loud crunching sound. The green seat covers caught your eye even when you looked out the window. We were driving to the Zemun neighborhood, where I was staying, in a room with a broken desk. The soiled white curtains bore the odor of the brown rug. Nenad left, and I heard people enter the hotel and stream into the ballroom, which was below my room.

After tucking in a pack of cigarettes, I ran down the stairs into the crowded hall, and went back and forth without being noticed.

Many of the visitors had full plates in front of them. It was the last day of the year, and they were all celebrating.

The beat of Serbian folk music and pop songs pulsed through the room, and sent sound waves to the clattering plates and people. All those heavily made-up women were my angels of death. They had all etched their way into the remains of Aunt Helene’s face, a face I saw before me. And I wavered between sympathy and adoration, feeling out of place in a room full of Serbian folklore. Men were kneeling in front of women with long eyelashes, their hands waving in time to the singer. The volume went up and down. Four in a row, four with their right arms raised. And the dancer’s movements, like those of the men, were severe. The woman went up to one of the men, and his eyes grew even wider; instead of touching her, he stepped up the movements of his arms and the volume of his voice.

People danced between the tables—less elegantly than the tango between the graves. The whole room was soon drunk to excess; they all grew sweatier with every mouthful.

I went to my room, the broken desk in front of me. And heard the singer down below being drowned out by men. Went to the bathroom and thought about whether to masturbate, then figured it wasn’t worth the effort. I lay in bed, a chandelier missing pieces of crystal above me.

Outside, in front of the window, was the street that led from the center through Zemun. Every once in a while, a car screeched past. I stared at the evening’s hotel guests, then at Nenad. He always wore jeans and his beret, and on cold days the dark coat over an unlabeled blue sweater. His grimace stretched from the corners of his mouth to the corners of his eyes and to his ears, back over his cheeks, and down to his neck.

Behind the curtain, something started blinking outside. I extended my hands and propped myself up on the cushion with my feet, winding up backwards on the bed. The cold air seeped through the cracks in the window. I couldn’t fall asleep. I got dressed and felt as though I had to get out of there. The noise throbbed like a swollen foot.

Hunched over from the cold, I ran down the street to the Danube, where the wind whipped my face. At night, the Danube promenade was dark, as if under water. After half an hour, the rundown Hotel Yugoslavia came into view beside me. The wind died down for a couple of minutes. The lobby was lit up. My face was frozen. A pack of medium-sized dogs down the street had picked up on my presence, and the dogs were following me at a distance. The small pubs along the waterfront, in moored boats, were dimly lit, and not a sound could be heard from them. I steered clear of everything: the dogs, the pubs, even the passersby. I had to go through a door with a gold frame to get to the bar. The dining room was steeped in dark fabrics, with bulky old wooden tables at the windows. The heavy dark atmosphere weighed on me like the pressure on a diving bell. The warm scent of dusty armchairs wafted over. I had been freezing.

My eyes soon adjusted to the dim light. Thick drapes on several rods covered the papered walls and offered a view to the outside by day and by night, onto a soggy meadow in front of the Danube, and the paved promenade with the strolling people and dogs. A panorama like Trieste—vast, windy, isolated—with a different motif. Whenever the door opened, the night air whooshed in.

I ordered black coffee and a brandy. While the waitress was serving me, she remained deep in conversation with the man behind the mahogany bar. She put everything down on the table and turned on her heel. All around me, specks of dust were dancing in the air, and the loudspeakers at the bar went back and forth between fast and slow music. One elderly man and four younger men were the only people in the hotel bar, besides me and the staff. I breathed in the pungent smell of the men’s leather jackets. The group was talking quietly; sometimes one of them raised a hand and let it fall back down onto the table. The older man had a well-worn deck of cards in front of him, with flags of the various Yugoslavian republics imprinted on the back. The ring on his middle finger was tapping against a shot glass; the focal point of his furrowed face was his left eye, which was squinting slightly. He seemed to be mulling something over when the waitress came and asked him a question. Even so, he gave her a hushed answer within what must have been no more than a second, and waved aside something in the conversation with the back of his left hand.

The young men laughed. I no longer felt the air of excitement that I had in my hotel in Zemun. I tried to conjure up the sights and smells of the people and their bodies. They were odorless, yet later I believed I could feel the sweat under their armpits and on their foreheads. They were dancing, but no longer moved in my memory.

Dead bodies wait, I thought. They live on in a hotel. They wait. Aunt Helene had waited, otherwise I would have forgotten her long ago. Today she is living in a room in Hotel Yugoslavia, one that I would not enter. Her faint voice, her legs, mottled by varicose veins, enveloped in white damask bed linens. She lay in a double bed, alone. She would think about the nurse who had once poisoned her body, long ago. With a liqueur in her hand, she would read a book—always the same one. Her favorite book.

She had waited, like the classmate who had shot himself at the age of twelve. I often saw him lurking about at night. Layer by layer, he slowly dug his way out of his grave, then headed to my parents’ house, to my room; he could climb up walls like an ant. And right in front of the window, I marshaled all my thoughts against him, and in one second he tipped back into his grave. And resumed his wait.

I have never been afraid of my aunt. I had forgotten about her for years. Now she had turned up in the age of her choice, vain as she was, just about twenty. But her scent had remained the same, and her color was unchanged. She was enveloped in the aura of popular songs moldering on a shellac record, crackling with dust, the voice of Caruso. Drinking wine in her hotel room, she raised a glass to her killer, crossed her legs, and winked.

“How does someone get so hostile?” Mother had wondered about the old aunt.

“How does someone get so elegant?” I thought about the young woman.

I didn’t see any guests going in and out; it was late, and the start of a new year seemed beside the point in Yugoslavia. The old man’s left eye was still squinting; maybe he was disabled. The young men were sitting around talking. One had stretched out his hands to the left and right and placed them around the backs of the others’ chairs. The bartender and the waitress were silent. Both were standing with their arms crossed behind the counter, and he was clutching a cloth. The dark carpets radiated the warmth of a bed, and I wondered if I should go back. A bowl with salted snacks was placed on his table. The waitress pulled a chair out from the table and sat down next to him. He began shuffling the cards slowly while the waitress reached into the bowl and took out pretzels and put them in her mouth.

I didn’t want to pay and leave. I looked at the two of them now playing cards. Even the young men were watching them. Whenever the waitress got a bad hand, she would gather up her skirt, then touch her nose.

Enough of this, I thought, and wanted to go back, preferably all the way back, away from the city. The bartender was asking everyone to pay up.

When Nenad came to pick me up in the morning, I had just been served a plate of fried eggs and bacon in the hotel dining room. The stale smoke from the previous day’s celebrations still hung in the air.

Nenad was upset, because his girlfriend had been attacked the evening before. My mouth full with the fatty meal, I asked, blushing with embarrassment, how she was.

“Nothing happened. She ran away,” Nenad said, as though that had been the only possible outcome.

“Weren’t you together?”

“She was home for a short while.”

The eggs had been fried in too much fat, which was swimming on the plate. I soaked it up and drank a sip of coffee after each bite.

“A couple of men saw her being pushed into a corner and came to help.”

Nenad was agitated as he spoke. Whenever he said more than a single statement about himself, his surroundings, or the city, he grew nervous and flustered.

I took a napkin and wiped my mouth, but the fatty feeling around my lips remained even once they were rubbed dry. The big breakfast made me feel like having a brandy, but out of politeness I didn’t. Why did I eat all that? I thought in annoyance, feeling bloated and queasy from my throat to my stomach. When I put the napkin back on the plate, Nenad had calmed down and was looking at me. A waitress was hanging up freshly washed drapes, and adjusting the ladder. The white fabrics stood out against the dark furniture in the room. I could see under her skirt while she was on the ladder. I briefly felt an erection, and tried to hold it back. I didn’t know Nenad’s girlfriend, and didn’t want to know anything else about the attack. I was worn out.

When we were sitting in the car, I didn’t know what Nenad had in mind for me. He wanted to show me interesting things in the city, he had said the previous day.

“Today the town is dead. Today is a holiday, the first day of the year. Tomorrow everything will be closed as well.”

I heaved a sigh.

“Under Milošević, anything was possible. Anything. We went shopping with other people’s credit card numbers. Everyone could do that, even old people who didn’t know how to turn on a computer. But they knew how to order from an American mail-order company and pay with a stranger’s credit card number,” Nenad told me.

“Did you do that too?”

“Everyone did. Back then, there wasn’t any network for international searches.”

“A rogue state.”

“A rogue state, as the American president would say.”

“It’s paradise to live in a rogue state.”

Nenad flashed a toothy grin.

We had driven by the Center St. Sava, and were heading over the bridge to the train station.

“We’ll go to Dedinje,” Nenad hissed, while making a sharp left turn, “where the rich people live.”

For a short time, he calmed down in the car. I looked at, and listened to, the other cars going by. Then Nenad honked the horn like crazy and, through the closed window, shouted at one of the drivers next to him, who was trying to change lanes onto our turning lane as he was approaching an intersection, and practically cut us off. At that moment, I couldn’t help thinking of the Danube promenade I had walked on the day before, and how calm it had been. And how odd that memory was always mood-dependent, and the way people recounted events a function of how things were at a given moment. Right now Belgrade was a noisy, honking, roaring city. Yesterday I had idealized virtually everything at the bar of a hotel I had connected to an imagined past. To people I had no way of judging, about whom I knew nothing, with whom I built up a way of seeing things that jibed with my solitary start to the new year. And I thought I would have to keep revising my opinion in this city, and everywhere else, perhaps so I could block out the memory of Helene.

Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch

Haunt, by Ethel Rohan

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:47:47 -0400

Once, Matt and I hitchhiked together from Dublin to Cork. Months earlier, he’d put my engagement ring on layaway and was paying off five pounds every Saturday. Matt and I stood on the side of the road in Chapelizod, our thumbs out, as if waiting for something to be hooked onto us.

“What are we going to do in Cork?” Matt asked.

I didn’t know. Ma always claimed she was born in Pittsburgh, America, but according to her birth certificate she began in Cork. Ma also said she had one brother, my godfather, but he disappeared like gray breath soon after I was baptized. Because of gambling debts, on the greyhounds, she added. Next time I said as much she slapped my face. Other times Ma said she had seven brothers, said they lived with Snow White. She never claimed any sisters.

Cars sped past Matt and me on the road. I felt their undertow, like a rip tide.

Matt said my mascara was running.

“Are you crying?” he asked, incredulous.

I punched the top of his arm.

Outside Kilkenny, an old man in a red Fiat agreed to drive us all the way to Cork city.

“You’re in luck,” he said.

His words made my stomach dizzy.

The man’s eyes matched his tobacco-stained teeth. Miles into the drive, he asked if the opera music from the tape cassette was to our liking. The only thing Ma ever told me about my father was that he loved opera music. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead.

I watched the cigarette smoke leave the driver’s shriveled mouth. Beyond the car window, the clouds also looked like ghosts.

Matt fell asleep next to me on the back seat. It didn’t feel any different, his being awake or asleep. Right then, I decided I’d never marry Matt, never wear that ruby engagement ring, the jewel like a frozen clot of blood. The rest of the long drive, I tried not to look at Matt or the bursts of smoke leaving the driver’s lungs. Tried not to think either about Ma back at home, waiting and worrying. The car engine had to be brilliant hot, going this distance. What if we drove beyond Cork, just kept going and going. I saw the car engine combust, saw the great gray billow.

Five Senses: Terracina to Rome, by Eva Sandoval

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 09:58:00 -0400

A crinkled old man working the train station bar: leaf-skin delicate hands, shriveled nicotine-yellow lips, an indifferent shrug—Who knows?—when asked if there’s a transit strike tomorrow. Espresso in a tiny cup, black and spattered with pools of sepia bubbles. Torn plastic train seats, graffiti on the windows: Quanto 6 bella, Riccardo + Valentina, Larvetta Mia! Claudio 6 vecchio. 20/4/09. Do not throw anything out of the window. Dust and fat, clingy raindrops on the glass like a Jackson Pollack. Green fields, blades of winter grass parted in the breeze like hair. Orange trees, bulbous with fruit. Houses dotting the landscape: small, red and square. Rolling ochre hills and, hazy blue in the distance, the jagged, witch’s profiled Circeum Mountain.

Sheep and cows, lanky-necked horses. Bewildered skinny lambs. The gray remains of a castle, flashing through the trees. The crumbling ghosts of aqueducts rising up from the grass. Blue rectangular station signs blurring past and then drifting into focus, like a waking dream: La Fiora. Capocroce. Priverno-Fossanova. Sezze-Romano. Latina. Blinking fluorescent lights overhead; make everyone look plastic. An African man sleeping, curled up against his jacket. A middle-aged woman in a knock-off Burberry coat; short blonde hair and deep lines framing her mouth. A slim brown hand, slipping a small white card onto seat rests: I am poor and I have three brothers. We have no parents and no real house. We live together in one small room. Please find it in your hearts to give us a little money or something to eat. An engineer’s report, shot through with red pen marks. Il Messeggero: Nationwide strike 27/1/2012. A paperback book, folded in half: … istante, quando questi, all’arrivo del treno di Napoli, era andato a prendere in consegna il cadavere…. The same slim brown hand—empty, plucking the card away. Sleeping college students: her scuffed white Converse sneakers, his arm around her shoulders, their fingers laced together. Train aisles packed and more packed, faces bunched together like grapes. Standing room only at 07:45.

Chiming train doors, chugging open and shut. Whirring train wheels. The superior, slightly mocking tones of Wind voice mail: You have no new messages. Attention: the 4624 train from Napoli Centrale to Roma Termini Station is now in arrival at Campoleone, twenty minutes late. We apologize for the inconvenience. Snores, snuffed out by jacket-sleeves. Wind voicemail: You have no new messages. Raspy coughs, honking noses, rustling cellophane tissue wrappers. Raindrops like drumbeats on the metal train roof. The bubbly accordion section from “Ai se eu te pego” drifting out from someone’s cell phone. You have no new messages. You should see Chiara —she’s perfect, only fat in the belly and the rest of her looks unpregnant; These strikes have broken my balls for the last time; Good morning Dr. Spezzaferro, it’s Claudio Bonaventura. I’m going to be late for my appointment because the train is delayed; Remind me to go to Accessorize when we get to Termini, I need to pick up a new pair of gloves because I hate the ones I have; There’s that concert this weekend, that Rino Gaetano cover band, but Mary mother of God I am so sick of Rino Gaetano cover bands, can’t we let the man rest in peace; You just upload the file, it isn’t that hard, don’t be a baby; I don’t give a dick if he works late, I mean, I seriously don’t give a cauliflower; It’s the gas vendors, taxi drivers, trains, metro, and fruit vendors that are on strike tomorrow—you should still be able to ride the bus; Is this door broken? Oh hell. What a toilet this country is.

Mother: What would you like to give grandma for her birthday?

Daughter: A kick in the ass.

Train bathroom: piss and sex. Someone’s sour tobacco breath, someone’s banana-coconut shampoo. At Termini, train track exhaust, big city garbage rot. Bitter, heady espresso. Creamy Massan curry from W.O.K. A familiar cologne in Sephora, citrusy and warm. Pungent, earthy homeless man on the Linea B metro. His heady patchouli. Her Victorian rose perfume. At the bus stop, everyone’s vile cigarette smoke. Toner in the teacher’s lounge, alkaline and sharp. Children in the classroom, salty and sweaty like puppies.

I’m sorry, kids, I’m a bit sick: menthol-laced honey cough drops. Enough! Enough! Enough! That’s the last time I’m going to tell all of you to be—briny blood. Fresh mozzarella-studded eggplant parmigiana, a slice of delicate rosemary-flecked potato pizza, fatty red sliced prosciutto. Mandarins from the neighbors’ garden, sweet and perfect. Yogi peach nectar—syrupy thick.

Prickly hoarse throat. Sharp nails in dire need of a trim. Chilly street corner, stinging needles of rain in the face. Standing-room-only on the 14:30 bus to the Metro Station: aching feet in too-tight shoes, the abject misery of twisted underpants. Sleepy. Damp. Sore back, sore neck, sore bitten tongue. Twisted underpants. Sleepy. Twisted underpants. Cold, damp, cold, damp, cold; bumps and bangs on the road, someone’s jagged elbow, why did he never call back? Sleepy. Sad. Twisted underpants. He never did call back.

Empty pocket, fingers poking down into featureless fleece. Leather and canvas and slippery sales receipts. You can’t do that. The metro ticket machine doesn’t take credit cards. Heart pounding, pulse fluttering, a trickle of sweat beading up, pendulous, threatening to drip. Then: Here, take this. Smooth stiff bus transfer, pressed gently between fingers. And: I couldn’t. But: I don’t need it. Take it. Go, go. Make your train. Tighter grip. An ominous rumbling underfoot, hair lifting in the breeze. So: Thank you. It’s extremely kind of you. Heels pounding through turnstile, thudding onto metro platform, landing firmly in subway car. An electric twinge in the right ankle. Fingers tight around cold metal pole. Warmth in chest. Lips wavering into smile.

Bridges, by Walter Bjorkman

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Sometimes I want to scratch the skin of a thousand tears off my body and awake in swaddling clothes in your arms. My weeping holds no legacy, no shrift for the poor or helpless, they are only shed for me. We awoke to beastly sounds above Death Valley, got happily lost in the California coast mountains; you gave me refuge years later when my mother died. I could not return it to you in the Caribbean when you came to me for one last chance. You settled for years of abuse at the hands of an anti-Semite lover, wanting and being beaten for misgivings that were none of your own, on Atlantic five blocks away from our place on Clinton—where years earlier we read poetry to the box sized courtyard below, walked over the bridge to Yonnah Schimmels for bialys brought up in a dumbwaiter from the basement kitchen, watched old Italian men roll bocce on the island of Canal Street and saw wonders in the botanical’s of Brooklyn never seen by anyone before. Was it so hard to accept the kindness I showed—you travelled on your own to parts of the world at a time no woman alone, let alone man, could travel. The wanderlust I instilled in your heart forever there. Tony Prince stole one of my sneakers when I got fired from the children’s home in Staten Island, because he wanted part of me to remember. He asked about you in tears on the stairs because we were the ones that gave him the hope that you could not give yourself.

What Naomi Says, by xTx

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 09:15:32 -0400

They didn’t find the body until weeks later. Its hands chewed off, the rest of it torn through like an old sheet. Naomi said it smelled exactly like death should.

I ate the peach just pulled from the fridge. Its juice ran down my chin, cold, like, “Wake up chin! Wake up!”

My silence, my chewing, just made Naomi talk more. I learned things I didn’t want to. Things people reading the newspaper would never know. I thought of a giant mother hiding the eyes of its thousands of children. I thought, my life should have so many hands.

It didn’t.

I was left to see everything, thanks to Naomi.

Especially thanks to Naomi.

After all the facts and peach meat were spent, she stopped me from throwing the pit in the trash. Instead, she pulled me, pit-fist first, out the back door through the garden she’d left to die and back to the trees that lined the creek.

“There. Throw it there,” she ordered, pointing.

The morning paused while I wished for a giant mother with matching hands. Then, taking a breath full of how death should smell, I aimed at the thing, threw.

Reminders and Remains, by William Henderson

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:08:48 -0400

I’d find you in the center of a labyrinth and I’d outsmart the minotaur and I’d tell you that the journey was easy and that I’d make it again and again, if only to reach you, where we’ve learned—or will learn—how to separate love from not love and love from tears and tears from everything else that doesn’t contribute to filling rivers and oceans when Zeus—or Thor, if you swing that way—pouts and takes away his toys.

After finding you in the center of a labyrinth, I’d find our way out by following a trail made of thread. I’d use red thread, because red is your favorite color, and I’d ask Ariadne for the biggest spool of thread she has because I promised you, back when you are I were making promises to each other, that I would find you no matter where you were. All you had to do, have to do, is say the word. You know I will find you.

A lyric. One of the muses, whispering to me, here, now, when you are not here, now, but there, still now, and will be there later, and later, and even later. Tomorrow. Next week. A lyric. One of those songs you and I talked about separately liking before we knew that we would like the other. Before we knew the other existed. This muse, whispering, tells me to honor her sisters, because her sisters, the nine of them together, is how best to define love.

Clio, history, what came before for you and what came before for me and what came before what came before leading to what is, or what was—what is, has to be is—present tense, because I love you and you say you love me and you say you adore me and I do not know how to be adored, and I don’t know if I want to be adored, and I ask you, each time you tell me that you adore me, what your reasons for adoring me are, and you say, as you have said each day for the last—how long as has it been?—that you adore me for the same reasons that you adored me yesterday.

The package from Pandora was wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine and addressed in black crayon. Our names, nearly illegible, paired, with no to and no from, but the package from Pandora arrived and we opened the package and we saw what had been left inside and we felt what had been left inside because at the beginning of things, how can you feel anything but hope.

Pandora has brown hair, and when her hair is not brown, she has black hair, and sometimes her hair is red, and Pandora swears she doesn’t dye her hair, but I think she dyes her hair, but who is going to call Pandora out on something as negligible as hair color?

She carried that package around with her for centuries, carries, still, she says, despite having left it—thanks a lot, USPS—with us, wrapped in brown paper, tied with twine, addressed in black crayon.

Should we open it? you asked.

I was on the couch, reading, always reading, when you asked me if we should open the package that Pandora sent us—Pandora, who was more your friend than my friend, despite her addressing holiday cards to both of us, your name first—and I suggested we wait and see what happened when we didn’t open the package, because you and I knew what was inside, or what wasn’t inside, the package Pandora sent to us, wrapped in brown paper, tied with twine, addressed in black crayon, your name first.

Euterpe, flutes and musical instruments. Sing me a song, you asked me one night, early, maybe a month after I met you—interesting choice, right, how I met you, not how you met me—and I told you that I didn’t sing or that I couldn’t sing and you told me that you still wanted me to, if only so you knew that you could get me to do things that I wouldn’t regularly do.

Thalia, comedy and science, with her silent H. Comedy, no rules; science, all rules.

I can hear someone crying, somewhere that isn’t here, when you and I sleep together at night, legs entwined, most nights, and where I expect to hear crying, sometimes, even at night, when we’re together, legs entwined, because I’ve been taught to expect crying.

But this crying I hear is not here, where we are, together, because I will be Zeus and you will be Leda and you will be Zeus and I will be Diana (because from this pairing came Aphrodite, and love is already here) and we will not have the dozens of children that Zeus fathered, because no matter how often we practice, procreation is not in the cards. But let’s promise to never be Hera, because she was kind of a bitch and clearly didn’t make Zeus happy. Or maybe she simply ignored what Zeus did behind in front of around her, and I will never ignore the things you do behind in front of around me.

I don’t want you to ignore anything, you tell me, or told me, early, when we were still learning each other’s back story. Middle names and last names and the places on our bodies where scar tissue was forced to form. My knees, and my right ankle, and my heart, or, not my heart, but the skin above the place in my body where my heart is, because my heart has been torn out and put back in, and I am Atlas, going uphill, burdened by the burden of love. At the top, where I should stop, the heart comes out, and I am undone, at the bottom, starting over, or not starting over, because sometimes even Atlas gets a night off.

I don’t want you to ignore anything, you tell me, or told me, and I believed you when you told me, tell me, that you don’t want me to ignore anything, so when you ask me if you are gaining weight, I tell you that you have.

You left that night, and that night we didn’t sleep with our legs entwined.

Melpomene, tragedy.

Morning, you not there, still, and I take a shower hot enough to fog the mirror, and on the mirror, in letters made of steam and my exhale, I write: I am not your Pygmalion. Do not ask me how you should change, and do not ask me to make you into anything other than who you are, because who you are is enough.

Uphill always seems harder than downhill, though downhill, separately, not together, because relationships downhill are never experienced by more than one person at a time; or, really, are experienced differently by each person inside the relationship, slaloming downhill.

Terpsichore, dance and poetry. Well, if you want me to sing, then you have to write me a poem. And you said you would—or, then, you said you will—and here we are, now, later, and you haven’t.

Erato, lyre and love poetry. Would have settled for less than love, or, would have settled for less than a love poem. Isn’t that what I meant?

We may have been born without wings, because we would not be welcome in Olympus if we had wings, but when I am with you, I feel like I am flying, or that we are flying, or that we are headed somewhere, together, because together, and no other way, is how we should end.

Why not Olympus? I’ve never understood why the gods don’t want anyone to fly excerpt for them. Not like we’re any competition. Zeus is the Wilt Chamberlain of gods, each of them, in their way, their godlike way, is the someone famous of something.

So why not flights? Feathers and wings held together by and with wax.

But let’s not fly too close to the sun, because if you are Daedalus, I would expect more than a warning of don’t fly too close to the sun, and if I ignored your warning of don’t fly too close to the sun, I expect you to follow me down, my descent replacing your ascent replacing our arrival elsewhere everywhere other where.

We don’t fall downhill. We only fall down.

Urania, astronomy. Yes, I gave you that, as you gave that to me. Constellations. Supernovas. Black holes.

You are not Narcissus, courting mirrors and reflective surfaces, and I am not Echo, parroting back the things you say, and I will not be your mirror and I will not be your echo and I will not be the thing you do when you have nothing else to do. The gods might be crazy, but I am not crazy, or I am no longer crazy, and I told you I will not cry about another boy again, and I will not fall in love because falling is something only Icarus does well, and I’ve already said that if I fall, you better be falling right behind me.

But you wouldn’t be falling right behind me. You’d continue. Wish me well. Tell me that you swore radio silence if one fell without the other. You’ll go your way; I’ll go my way. Wings and feathers, tied by wax. You and I, undone. Paper dolls. Cut in two. Halved.

We’ll eat pomegranates without worrying about the repercussions, and we will make a fort out of blankets and call it our Trojan horse. You will ask, and I will answer, fleet, like Achilles, without the flawed heel and without pride and without a sea nymph for a mother.

Helen of Troy might be the fairest, but I think you’re a close second.

I told you that I thought you were a close second to Helen of Troy, and you asked me why I didn’t compare you to Achilles, and you asked me if I wanted to play swords. No. You didn’t ask me if I wanted to play swords. You asked me if I wanted to fuck, and I wanted to fuck, and we were in an elevator, and I thought about pulling, or pushing, the stop button, because I have never pulled, or pushed, the stop button in an elevator, especially not to make time for sex—fucking, your favorite word—but I didn’t touch the button, and instead I pushed you against one of the walls in the elevator and I pushed my body against yours until the space between us was nothing but breath.

Frantic, moments like this one, an elevator going eleven floors to a place where we were staying. We had eaten pizza, before, and I smelled sauce and cheese and I liked smelling sauce and cheese and you were delicious, there, in that elevator. Eleven floors. Going up.

Polyhymnia, sacred songs and mimicry. I promised you that I wouldn’t change and you promised me that you wouldn’t change and when I asked you to stop reading in the bath you said you would, and I said, later, that you didn’t have to, and you said that you would, and I said that, in time, if you stopped reading in the bath, because I knew how much you liked reading in the bath, that you would resent me. And you said you wouldn’t, and I said that we would see. And you asked me if everything was all right, and everything was all right, and I told you that everything was all right, and that was the end of that, and I don’t think you read in the bath again, or, if you read in the bath, you read in the bath when I wasn’t home.

Thanatos came to dinner last night. He likes red wine and strawberries, and sometimes he likes cheese, and you always like cheese, and I never like cheese, and so you and Thanatos ate cheese sticks—and chicken fingers—while I didn’t eat cheese sticks and chicken fingers, and we finished three bottles of wine. He and his brother, Hypnos, aren’t talking right now, which is bad, because the four of us belong to the same club and during the summer, when the weather is nice—and, really, when is the weather not nice when a god wants to play?—we play doubles tennis.

What happened? Shouldn’t someone be able to tell me what happened, because something happened, is happening, transforming around behind beneath us. I’m transforming, despite my promises that I would not change.

But we are not transforming into animals into rivers into trees, though if you were Daphne, I’d make sure no one came to cut you and I’d make sure you had enough to eat and enough to drink and when your leaves turned to yellow red orange and then turned brittle and died, I’d remind you that you look good naked, and I’d ask you to tell me what being a tree is like, and you would.

And when we get married, we will compare our day afternoon night to the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, when gods last ate with mortals, and when the ties between Olympus and the world we call Earth were severed, and when we were cast aside to make legends of our own about journeys and triumphs, loss and love. And when we get married, I will remind you of these days, when I didn’t think we would get married, when I thought me with you would fade into the next pairing that waited for me to enjoy it. Never going to happen, you told me. We’re here, now, and we will not be anywhere but here, now, always happening, always together.

And I said I hope so.

Calliope, epic poetry and eloquence. We rode on a carousel one afternoon when we were courting, before we said I love you, when we still said I like you and I like you, a lot, and you were on your horse and I was on my horse and we laughed and we laughed and we laughed and we were the oldest people on the carousel, on horses, side by side, laughing, and Calliope, now, whispering, reminds me of this carousel ride, and I should be grateful for the memory, but, instead, I want to ask you if everything after was just a continuation of a ride that wasn’t meant to stop.

The package from Pandora, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine and addressed in black crayon. Our names, nearly illegible, paired, with no to and no from, but the package from Pandora, empty of anything but hope, when I am empty of nothing but hope, and I continue waiting for you to come home so we can open the package from Pandora, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine and addressed in black crayon, no to and no from, our names joined the way I thought we were joined. The way we should have been, should be, joined. Here, now. Not you there and me here, now, and later, and later, and tomorrow.

Two Poems, by Liz Minette

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 09:33:13 -0400

Parking in Central Hillside

After work, back to my car, parked
in front of the chipped, red triplex.
Summer’s six p.m. outlines only
his sunglasses and voice as the man
says to me through blowing fan in the
first floor window: “Say I’m Rising Sun
yeah Rising Sun and you’re a fox.”

Yes.

I always see foxes.
Red bodies silk along the wood fence
across the street from where I live
as dusk smoothes everything’s edge
to its sky.

Or at night, in front of my oncoming car,
three foxes try to cross the road.
One makes it while the other two
afraid shadow back into trees.

The fox that’s made it
goes back for the others.
I stop my car roll down
the window say:
“Say I’m Liz and you’re a fox.”

Its eyes are spaceships hovering
their dark pupils windows maybe
Rising Sun’s and he’s gone to bed.
The foxes walk dreams that web
the corners of his eyes.

Moon To Cornucopia

Tonight on Highway Thirteen,
semi-trucks, like fast elevators,
clatter and whine past.
They barrel their frozen track
and lean into every curve.

Ahead of our oncoming car,
four deer, their eyes shining
like inside abalone shells,
hover headlight roadside.

The farmer’s field they’ve crossed,
its season blessed gone and
everything turned to dream,
borders a treeline.

Branches like ragged skirts
slowly dance back and forth
to the moon in its rise,
its rhythm with all movement.

Round bright signals become
the shape of each of us.

David and I stop for coffee to go
at the Sundown Cafe which is half
general store. Walking through the
friend chicken and gravy suspended air,
we head straight to the back where
two pots of regular coffee sizzle
on double burners next to a sales rack
of gloves and axes, matches and dish soap.

We wait in line to pay.
In front of us, two quiet hunters,
buying gas. And one guy,
in front of them, whose patch hangs
over his belt, who has a toothpick secured
between thin lips. He slowly thumbs out
ancient ones and some change to pay
for his dinner.

When it’s our turn, the clerk looked
at us crazy, waved us away when we tried
to buy road coffee.

Later, Dave and I stop for beer
at the Kro Bar. A sea green cinder block
building off the highway, its dance floor,
shabby empty, waits for Saturday night
when cars sardine its gravel lot.

The bar is dented, scratched, sticky.
From the postage stamp-sized kitchen,
the cook ambles out, moves
the ketchup to whoever needs it.

Our bartender, whose dragon tattoo
arced above her t-shirt, said
she was paying for its design in tips.

David told me then, during one lean
winter for extra money, he bandsawed
signs for the side of this place:
Grill Off-Sale Food Music.

III

Our car wheels navigate again
this mattress of snowy road
as the full moon draws us closer
on its plane of light.

The same light it lays like hot white
track across iced Lake Superior.

Perhaps this could be our path,
moonlight straight to Cornucopia.

We would dance along like astronauts.

We could, like our friend Lee did,
one frozen, windy day, skid across
Chequemegon Bay, sitting tight
in his saucer sled, kite in hand.

The wind like a wild horse, like love,
pulled him along, kite’s red nylon snapping
heartbeat against the sky.

An Encounter, by Brent McKnight

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 09:15:00 -0400

I ran errands at the Galleria to kill time on my day off, wading aimlessly from store to store through the tide of shoppers. It was an awkwardly arranged upscale strip mall—Barnes & Noble, Anthropologie, Apple Store, a nicely maintained decorative waterfall surrounded by wrought iron benches. For the first time in over a week, the sun was out, and it was warm enough that I got away with just wearing a t-shirt, though I carried a jacket with me. The light exhaust of incoming and outgoing traffic caught in the back of my throat.

It was my day off. If I had my way, I would have preferred to work every day, but my manager threw a fit when I tried. I even worked three Christmases in a row because I couldn’t figure out how else to fill my time. Like most alcoholics I knew, I did whatever I could to keep from drinking. No matter how desolate it seemed it was better than the alternative.

I should have used the time to visit my dad. The shopping excursion was a poorly justified attempt to avoid it. He wouldn’t miss me. Besides, anymore he wasn’t the person who took me to the beach as a kid, taught me to skip rocks instead of throwing them at birds.

“Barrett.” It was a voice I hadn’t heard in a while calling my name, and I stopped. In fact the last time I heard it, I was being told in no uncertain terms to fuck off.

I turned around, a picture in my mind of what I was about to see. My speculation wasn’t far off. Her hair was longer than it had been, down past her shoulders now, deep brown still, but with new highlights, and she used more dark makeup around her eyes. Everything else was essentially the same. She even wore what could have been the same grey zip-up sweatshirt over the same plain white t-shirt, with the same faded blue jeans and sandals as the last time I saw her. Her eyes were still the same, too. They still made my stomach drop. I swallowed hard.

I stuffed my hands in my pockets, cocked my head, and looked at her.

“Shelby,” I said. She scampered up to me, stopped and smiled, just short of breath. When I said I hadn’t heard her voice in a while, I could also add I hadn’t seen her smile in even longer. The better part of six years, a string of ruined friendships, and a brutalized liver.

“I thought that was you.” She inhaled deeply one last time. It was an over-exaggerated gesture. “You still walk the same.”

“And I still have the worst posture in the northern hemisphere.”

“That too.” She laughed. Quickly, thinking I didn’t notice, she scanned me up and down. “How’ve you been? You look good. You look big. Big in the good way, I mean.”

“It’s all the steroids I’ve been taking. I’ve been good, well.” I shook my head and looked to one side. “There isn’t a whole lot to tell. Been working, stopped drinking, living life.” I shrugged and asked about her.

We kept a collection of mutual friends. So it wasn’t as if she had disappeared off the face of the earth. I accumulated scattered bits and pieces. After a year or two, no one bothered to whisper her name when I was in earshot. I had a vague idea of her life, and I made conversation even though I wanted to move along, or come to some sort of point. I shifted from foot to foot like a boxer.

“I’d heard you quit drinking.” She kept her hands in her pockets.

“A little over three years.” I said it like it was a baby, and nodded, scuffing the ground with the sole of my shoe.

“Probably for the best.” She looked like she wanted to say more, but didn’t.

I thought about my last drink. It would have been our anniversary. I made a special point to celebrate especially hard on that particular day of the year. It was an occasion after all. I downed a double Jameson then threw the glass through a window to emphasize the point I was making about Neil Diamond. Something about being pummeled and dragged into the street by my collar, kicking and spitting and demanding another drink, set off an alarm that I might have a problem, like nothing else ever had. I was surprised I remembered it the next morning.

We stood on the sidewalk in front of a maternity store as a hurried lunchtime crowd flowed around us like we were boulders. They had their heads bent forward, bags in hand, not a second to waste while they crammed errands in on their diminutive lunch breaks. I felt exposed, like being set up on a hidden camera show. A woman with a bag in each hand bumped into me and continued on her way without acknowledging the contact. I rocked lightly back on one heel and watched after her.

“Aren’t you supposed to track me down and apologize for all the misery and suffering you caused me? Or something like that?” Shelby asked.

“I’m not that kind of… No higher power for me, thanks all the same. Besides, I remember quite a bit of the pain and suffering going both ways.”

She beamed mischievously at that. She only had one dimple, on the left side. The iris of her left eye was flecked with hazel, and there was a scar on her left eyebrow from an ill-conceived piercing that caught on a sweater and tore out.

“I’ve been good, busy, but good.” She moved on without missing a beat. “Dylan and I got married. And I got a promotion. Now I have an entire floor to service my every whim and desire, or feel the sting of my wrath.”

These were all things I knew. She was in charge of graphic design for a coffee chain. I knew the whole story. I even knew she wanted kids, and he didn’t. That had been a point of contention with us, too.

“You are full of wrath.”

She laughed knowingly. “I can be. You still work at that one place?”

“I do.”

“That must be a personal best.”

“It certainly is. Some damn fool even went so far as to make me a supervisor, now I’m generally there every day. Remember when I barely had a job, and even less of a work ethic? Sometimes I miss that guy, he was fun.”

She had always managed to make it to work on time on a regular basis, while I left a swath of wrecked jobs behind me. Crashing a forklift drunk got me fired once. Simply not showing up for a week did it a couple of times. I even antagonized my foreman into taking a swing at me so I could justify choking him out. Shelby did her best to keep up with me on the weekends though. I had a shallow divot of missing skin on my forehead from where she clocked me with a pint glass. I’d asked her best friend to sleep with me in front of her.

“He definitely had his moments. Your dad must be proud, if he …” she trailed off. “What are you up to now?”

“Killing time.” I shrugged. “I found out that a nasty side effect of doing nothing but work, is that I find it difficult to do anything but work.”

“I know how you feel. So much of my life is wrapped up in work that I start to get a little stir crazy when I have to be at home for more than a few hours.” She shook her head and looked at the window display. “Let’s not talk about the home life,” she said. “What has become of us?”

“Sounds like we both grew up somewhere along the line. It happens.”

“Yeah, well it looks like it suits you,” she said.

I couldn’t tell if it was a backhanded compliment or not, if it was supposed to sting.

“Kill some time with me?” she asked. “Get a cup of coffee, my treat?”

My mind tried to wrap around what she wanted from me. I couldn’t come up with a reason to decline.

The coffee shop was flustered with people striding back and forth, grabbing drinks, sugar packets, napkins, and to-go lids. Thick, plate-glass windows magnified the heat of the bodies. Damp and close, the room sweated like a terrarium under a grow light. It was confined mayhem. I swallowed the garbled air and sat down at the lone open table in the corner and rolled my right shoulder. It started giving me trouble a few months earlier; a genetic quirk of men in my family that I had hoped skipped me. Three generations all wore zipper like scars next to faded navy tattoos. At least with the marvels of modern medicine my eventual scar will be a fraction of the size when it happens, and I’m the first with no military service to wear proudly on my sleeve.

“You still take it the same?” She pointed at me, backing through the mess towards the counter, her eyebrows arched. The crowd split just for her.

“Black like my heart.”

She groaned and spun with a bounce, rolling forward and back, from the ball of her foot to her heel, as she ordered. I waited for her. It surprised me, little details she remembered about me, but then I remembered what kind of lip balm she used, and that she only drank hot chocolate in the summer because she thought it was funny.

The first time she spent the night at my house had started like this, with me waiting in a booth at Schopen’s. It must have been more than a decade ago. Schopen’s was the bar I went to when I wanted to fight. The bartenders all knew me and let me play bouncer on the weekends. One night a guy threw a pint glass at a waitress from across the room. He was still laughing when I kicked him in the back of the head. I was four or five stiff drinks into the night by the time she showed up. I’d turned a coaster into a pile of tiny squares with rough edges.

I ordered her a vodka tonic and we closed the bar. At last call, when I looked up, and the words “I want Jäger” poured out of my mouth, the next morning was destined to hurt. I didn’t even like Jäger.

I didn’t remember paying. I had a vague image in my head of us leaning against each other in the parking lot, of it being unseasonably cold. We made it the six blocks back to my apartment, and tried to watch a movie, but passed out in each other’s arms on the couch.

Sun filtered in through the blinds when she woke up with her face against my throat, shoes still on, legs pulled up under her body. She rotated her ankle to work some life back into her left foot, kissed me on the cheek, and ran to the bathroom to throw up.

My apartment smelled better after every time she’d been there. I could smell her in the room, a mixture of fruits and trace scents I couldn’t identify. Whenever I happened across that scent now, it brought back memories of her I had fought to suppress.

I picked at the edge of the table with my thumbnail as she sat down with our coffee. She leaned forward, elbows on the table, resting her chin on an upturned palm. Exhaling, she made a low hmmm sound; I realized it was the same sound she used to make at four in the morning when she couldn’t sleep and rolled over to bury her face where my jaw met my neck, the fingers of one hand twisting my beard.

As if reading my mind, she said, “You shaved.”

“I got tired of looking like a crazy person. I frightened too many children.”

I could tell she wanted to say it looked nice, but she chewed her lip instead, a long time nervous habit, less visible than chewing her nails.

“You look tired, my friend.”

She sat back, straightening. “Are we friends?”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “Probably not. Friends do things like talk, and spend time together.”

“What are we doing then?”

“Touché. But you know what I mean.”

What happened happened, neither of us could change that. She didn’t want to talk about it any more than I did. We’d both scraped on with our lives for the most part. I hadn’t beaten her, or fucked anyone else. I tried a few times, but I may as well have for all the attention I paid her, all the shit I talked. One time I tried to get her evicted by calling her apartment manager and telling him that Shelby was keeping a dog against her lease. It made sense to me at the time. A lot of things made sense to me at the time.

“So the question presents itself,” she said. “Can we be friends again? I’d like that.”

I took a drink of my coffee and wiped my bottom lip with my thumb. “Since I was under the distinct impression that your husband never really liked me that much, he might have something to say. That and we haven’t spoken in half a decade.”

“Six years, actually.”

“Sorry, we haven’t spoken in six years. You’ll forgive me if I’d pretty much given up on the idea of us ever being too close again.”

“Now what makes you think Dylan doesn’t like you?”

“I don’t know, something about him coming after me with a tire iron. Maybe I got the wrong impression and made something more out of the situation. I’m willing to give it another try if he is.”

She smiled and cupped her mug. “Yeah, he’s still bitter. The teeth you knocked out were his favorites.”

“Well maybe he shouldn’t have come after me with a damn tire iron. There isn’t much on my side most of the time, but I’m not bad in a fight.”

“I always felt safe with you.” She examined the back of her hand.

“Anyway, I don’t know what his problem was. He won. You left me for him. I couldn’t have been all that bad, could I?”

“You were an asshole. You were worse than an asshole.” She threw a sugar packet at me. It hit me in the chest and fell to the table. “I was seeing him for a while when we were still together.” She said this as if it were an A-bomb, like I had a pocket-knife and she had a shotgun. All she wanted was to have something over everyone else.

“This I know.” I launched a minor salvo of my own, though I didn’t find it necessary to pull out the big guns and recount the time I drove by her house after I got off work early and saw them kissing at the front door. It didn’t feel practical. I was so stew-housed to notice anything was wrong in the first place.

“Really? How do you know that?”

“Word gets around.”

“Was it Bethany? Mathilde? Jeannette? Gossipy bitches.” She laughed, and smiled at me. “No more unpleasantness. It’s well in the past after all. How’s the love life now?”

“Oh, way more pleasant.” I sipped my coffee and pretended to contemplate. “I don’t know, someone once told me I needed to learn how to be in a relationship, and I’m not so sure how far I’ve come.”

“Sounds like a wise person, very sage-like.”

“Wise, but oh so full of wrath.”

She giggled then excused herself to the bathroom. I amused myself with my cup and glanced around the shop, wondering who all of the people were. Each dressed with some purpose, like they had someplace to be, a few ties, button-down shirts, briefcases. I speculated about their lives in a general sense, and why none of them were at work either.

“How’s my Bert?” She smiled as she sat down. “He always liked me best. Is he still…?”

“Dad’s, well, he’s all right.” I didn’t want to get into it. “He has a pet gorilla. They like to have ice cream parties with all of the kids in the neighborhood, only when he can let it out of its cage though, otherwise it gets sad and sulks in a corner.”

We both smiled to ourselves, despite ourselves.

“That would almost be cute if it wasn’t so sad. So he’s getting worse still.” Not a question, an affirmation.

“Sometimes he asks me how little Barrett is. I gave up trying to explain that I am little Barrett.”

Neither of us said it out loud. No one ever wanted to say it, the word was too brutal to be spoken, but it lingered in the air between us.

The first time Shelby met my father he was shirtless, in floral print shorts, flip-flops, and a four-alarm sunburn. It was one of his famous backyard ragers, complete with a drunken badminton tournament and keg packed in ice set in the middle of a kiddie pool. Amidst plentiful drinks, uncles and aunts, and my father’s buddies who were more or less uncles and aunts, spent the afternoon regaling her with stories that made me look like a jackass. It was like a contest. Every one of them tried to outdo the one before. Eight years old when I burned off the front of my hair and most of both eyebrows attempting to roll a cigarette with notebook paper and scotch tape. Thirteen when I dyed my hair, and in the process managed to stain my entire body a pale blue; I looked like a severe hypothermia victim for two days until the last of it finally washed off. Fifteen and caught joyriding in the car of my girlfriend’s father was the highlight of the storytelling competition; we were drunk, father was a cop, she was a delinquent in the way only a cop or a preacher’s kid can be, it was his cruiser, she was sent to Catholic school, my father randomly got pulled over for years as a result. I couldn’t let them win, though, so I finally I told a story of my own, one that involved a ski trip at seventeen, a hot tub, and two snow bunnies. It wrapped up as I sprinted naked through the drifts back to my own cabin.

As my father did a keg stand, I reminded Shelby that this man was an accountant responsible for the financial well being of a large corporation. She laughed at that. Later he briefly forgot my name, and that it was his house. Quiet little details like that had so much more volume in retrospect. I couldn’t figure out if he drank to compensate for his mind slipping away from him, or if it was a symptom.

Shelby read all of this in my face. She let go of her coffee cup and reached out across the table. Her fingertips quietly brushed the back of my knuckles. I felt the ridges that would leave fingerprints at a crime scene. She smiled and looked into me, the look she used to wear when she was trying to comfort me. Her eyes still tore into my stomach.

The sky turned gray as I left work—partly from the creeping night, partly from the creeping clouds of an impending storm. A wind picked up across the concrete. Periodic raindrops slapped my cheeks and left dark spots on my pants. It wasn’t even a drizzle yet. The real rain was still half an hour away. Shelby leaned against the front fender of my car. Her hair was tucked behind her ears, her legs crossed in front of her, with her hands in her pockets. She smiled when she saw me. It had been two days since the coffee shop, but I wasn’t surprised.

Without taking her hands out of her pockets, she took a step forward and pressed her face into my chest. I didn’t know what else to do, so I wrapped my arms around her.

I stepped back. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” She looked up at my chin. “You didn’t shave this morning.”

“I was running late.”

“I wanted to see you. Are you hungry? We should get some food.”

The idea of my house, dark and empty and too bleak to consider, concealed any reason to decline.

I wasn’t certain what she was doing, or what I was doing. Desire? Desperation? I was amazed how easily we fell back into the familiar banter and patterns. It was like I hadn’t seen her for a week, not six years.

We went to a hole in the wall Thai restaurant by my old apartment. There were barely ten tables, and we sat at what had been our favorite, the one furthest back and to the right. I didn’t even look at the menu. It felt so much like the first time I ordered a beer. It was that natural, that if she was there, of course I should have a drink in my hand. The scene didn’t feel complete without one. The picture was of her, me, and a tall glass of something.

I didn’t even realize what I’d done until the waiter left.

“Did you just?” she asked.

“I did, didn’t I?” I pinched my eyebrows together. “Holy shit.”

The waiter returned with our drinks, and set an open Heineken and chilled glass in front of me. The bottle was covered in condensation. I touched the glass and left fingerprints in the frost. My stomach kicked up and I started to sweat.

“I’m really sorry,” I said to the waiter. I didn’t look at him as I spoke; I just looked at the bottle. It seemed appetizing in the way only possible in a beer commercial. “I didn’t mean to order this. I’ll still pay for it, but if you could take it back, that would be great.”

“No problem, sir.” He was obviously annoyed.

I ordered a diet soda with no straw. I touched the tips of my fingers, still cold from the bottle, to my lips.

Shelby watched me from the other side of the table and didn’t say a word. She reached out and touched my hand.

We started spending time together again. We would go see a movie, or she would meet me at a restaurant for dinner. Was this all just a distraction from a bland and stagnant, slightly neglectful home life? Was she trying to re-grow something that was long dead, like some sort of compensation for her plans that didn’t quite turn out? I didn’t know why I kept agreeing to see her, but I did.

At one point, years ago, the scars still fresh and healing, I would have done summersaults for a chance like this. Now, I wasn’t sure. I had half-convinced myself that it was never real to begin with. Admittedly it was nice to have her around again, to have someone excited to see me. It had been a while, but it all felt familiar, comfortable.

It was a natural continuation. The six-year interruption and her marriage and everything else about our separate lives faded into the background until none of it existed at all, until we were just two people enjoying each other. I even thought that in spite of everything, I might still be in love with her. I just wanted to see it through to the finish, and this felt like an end a long time coming.

Nothing romantic or sexual happened, but she never did tell her husband where she was spending her time.

I couldn’t help but feel that somehow, from somewhere, this all sprang out of revenge.

Tuesday was visiting day. Invariably, it was overcast. The planters outside were fastidiously maintained, though a lone cigarette butt stood in the dirt like a pillar. Nervous adult children chain-smoked and drank coffee to put off entering for a few more minutes. I always felt like I was going to throw up. I paused in front of the plate-glass door and watched her watch me in the reflection. She gripped my arm with both hands. She meant to reassure me. This was just a crumb of my weekly routine. When I told her what I was doing, she called out sick to work and invited herself along.

The cravings were the worst after I left, so heavy, like my body physically needed liquor. It was all that I could think about.

One long exhale and we entered.

Plastic flowers jabbed into foam hidden in vases stood on strategically placed tables next to strategically placed chairs upholstered in restrained floral print. A bowl of cellophane-wrapped candies rested in a cut glass bowl on the nurse’s desk, waiting for impatient grandchildren to timidly grab between two fingers on the way to the car—a reward for good deeds. The path to the elevators was carpeted in an arrangement of purple, pink, and maroon triangles, the whole design intended to comfort, to ease, to feel familiar. I nodded knowingly to the nurse at the desk, who nodded back. I couldn’t decide if she recognized me individually, or just recognized what I was.

“How did he wind up here?” Shelby asked, still loosely attached to my bicep.

“He went out to get the mail one day. In the car for some reason. He drove to the end of the driveway, and wound up in Tacoma at a gas station asking about Susan.”

“Who’s Susan?”

“Me, had I been a girl.”

“Little Susie.” She shook her head and smiled. “Doesn’t suit you.”

Elevators weren’t my favorite places. I never felt claustrophobic except for when those doors slid shut. I closed my eyes and reminded myself to breath, that it was only a few seconds to the third floor. This one smelled medicinal. Inside contrasted with the almost normal décor of the hallways and waiting rooms: it was linoleum and formica, easily sanitized nonporous surfaces, and big enough to fit a gurney or one of those rollable stainless steel hospital beds.

“This is much nicer than the first place he was in.” I went on, talking to fill the quiet. The last place smelled like a diaper. It may as well have been a hospital, white tile and blue green scrubs. The hallways echoed. There was always someone moaning in the background. I never knew if it was the same guy time after time or not. No one seemed to care. It was eerie.

The people here were friendly. Each Christmas, they bought everyone a bathrobe and a new pair of slippers. It was more like a place to live than a place to die. “He’s been here since I cleaned up long enough to see how wretched that place was,” I said.

The elevator let us off and I guided Shelby along. Our footsteps whispered into the carpet. It smelled dimly like synthetic, aerosol-propelled flowers. Serene landscape paintings dotted the deep green wallpaper. I could almost forget where we were for a second. We passed a door that was slightly ajar and it reminded me. The room beyond was brightly lit and sterile, stocked with a defibrillator and medical supplies I didn’t know the name of—an oasis of hospital in a desert of pseudo-reassurance. Reality poked through the façade.

“He has his good days, when he remembers his name, and who he was, and me. Then, he has his bad days.” I trailed off.

“That’s when he has his gorilla and ice cream parties?”

I coughed lightly into my fist and tried to chuckle. “Now it scares me every time I can’t remember something I know I know,” I said. “I have to ask myself if this is where I’m headed.” I saw him in myself, the parallels in our lives and behaviors, and it scared the shit out of me.

We rounded a corner and stopped in front of an open door.

He sat in a wooden chair looking out a window, wrapped in a pale blue bathrobe. His window faced the Warren Avenue Bridge in the distance. He liked to watch the traffic. The continual flow of cars reassured him. His hands endlessly shuffled a well-worn deck of cards, an absent habit that carried over. It felt like all of my childhood memories involved him shuffling cards in an attempt to busy his hands. His face was loose, and it looked too big for his skull. The hair on top of his head was white and thinning uniformly, and I could see his spotted scalp. At the crown, a wisp stood up and twirled like smoke.

“Hey, Dad.” I knocked on the doorframe as I stepped through. Shelby stole in behind me.

He stilled his hands and looked at me. “Well hello, yourself.” I could tell by his smile that he recognized me, at least faintly. He may not have known my name, or who I was, but he comprehended that I was important to him. His voice shook, and it struck me that I had grown used to it. Shelby’s presence made me notice it anew.

He looked from my face to Shelby’s. The heavy lids around his damp eyes popped open and his lips pulled back in to a smile.

“Shelby.” He grinned and stood up, shambling over to hug her. “I haven’t seen you in months, how have you been? Oh, you really should visit more often. Come in, come in, have a seat.” He scooted a chair next to his and patted for her to sit.

Mostly he talked. We just let him. Shelby held his hand as he told her how he’d always thought she was good for me, how he knew she’d straighten me out. He looked over his shoulder and winked at me as he said this. I sat on the end of the bed and chewed my thumbnail, watching.

After, Shelby grabbed a butterscotch candy from the nurse’s desk. She clicked it against her back teeth as she rolled the cellophane into a tight ball and slipped it into her pocket. Her eyes were red and they smiled at me. She threaded her arm through mine. As we left, passed plastic and planters, I caught our reflection in the plate-glass doors. I’d only ever walked through them alone.

Two Poems, by Amber McMillan

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 09:11:17 -0500

Our Wedding Day
for Matt

When you forget, I’ll remind you.
I’ll describe something about the flowers,
or the leaves on the trees.
I’ll tell you something about the weather,
about what that means. Do you remember now?
When you took my face in your hands,
firm where you stood, as soft as you could
(I think you remember now) you said,
“My name means Clearer of the Woods.”
I whispered back—only you could hear—
(for the rain and the thunder clap were near)
I said, “My name means the place between,
my name means the trap.”

You remember now.
It was a lovely ceremony.
No one we knew was there.

Peace

I can hear the blown-out tire
on the 401, the coon fight where
the smaller one lost an eye—the
good one—the renovations on
the neighbor’s upstairs rental unit,
cicadas, still the goddamn cicadas,
unbelievably, into November,
all those catholic school kids—
twelve and thirteen years old—
colliding into one another,
into the street, into the air,
your voice, “I meant what I said,”
three times in three minutes, I
heard you, but you mistook the
silence for peace (either mine
or your own), my shoulder too,
throbbing for weeks, maybe months,
that neighbor and those guitars,
he hangs them on the only wall
completely visible from the street,
as if he isn’t inviting jealousy,
alarmed when he is robbed blind
two and half weeks later. It’s true
there’s a war, and those kids,
at least some of those kids have
grief, more than they should,
have an indefensible father, or
a deal in the works, the consistent
buzz of your still running engine,
air through the ventilation system,
there are my big plans, too, and all
the money I have or don’t have,
that my grandfather is dead, died
in the spring, eaten by a cancer
of the body—not the other kind—
for a year he was dying, and then
finally he did, left his wife,
his kids, left his house, left me—
The trick is the shift, progress,
otherwise the whole thing, this
and everything else, is a disaster.

Woe Lung, by Kenny Mooney

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 09:18:00 -0500

I breathe in this dust of concrete and plaster, this mist of fiber that floats through my apartment. I suck it down into my lungs and I let it grow there, a furry fungus lining my chest. In my sleep, throat filling with liquid, I choke. Black and thick, like ink, spitting frantically at the walls, vomiting into the bathtub in the flickering white neon. The slack air of night moves in cold currents around my sweating skin.

I walk from room to room, over bare floors, ragged carpet chewed on, nylon sting at the back of my throat. I shine blue light into the bathroom; I run from lurching shadows that throw angles down the hallway. No voices reply to my calls. Only the flat response of sick walls. Walls raked by fingernails, dirt and sludge ingrained. My pores weep in the heat of the night as I thrash on the floor in the white light of the television hiss.

A blue mold grows here. It marbles the walls and the floor like an old cheese. I pick at the seams daily, thick blue-black cracks that seem to threaten to open up into huge crevasses. I put my ear to them, listening like I listen to the blood thumping through my veins. I hear them growing and stretching. I hear the stone of the walls aching.

Some days I see you in the shadows, I chase you into rooms, kick and throw things into the corners to herd you. You make noise. You hum and you throb and you make all the lights go dim so my eyes grow weak.

I will burn you to keep warm. I will burn you and stuff you into the wall cavities. You will line my apartment, the reds and blues of flashing lights strobing suddenly through the halls and I will twitch, I will shiver, I will fumble through broken openings in you, falling through your mouths and eyes. I will wake up sweating on the floor, holding you close to me on dirty carpets. I will taste you in my mouth. At the back of my throat, I will feel your itch.

I have been shut in amongst the walls and mold for; I have been dreaming of halls and corridors and swinging light fittings for; I have not heard another human voice. I wonder what mine sounds like now. Some days I feel like shouting and screaming, banging at the windows streaked with dirt, throwing them open and being heard for.

But there are monsters out there, and monsters have skin when their words are given air. They have claws when language takes form. I long for a world of the dumb; amongst the speechless, I will make my home.

I eat that mold when the food runs out. When the plaster and carpet are gone; when the bath water has dried up. Large, slick slabs of sweating mold, sliced from the broken walls, it runs with a faintly blue grease that makes my hands numb. It tastes chalky, old, but is soft and fills my belly, and I sleep such that I barely hear you banging the doors and rattling the windows.

The mold spreads through the apartment, growing every day, feeding me, nurturing me. I lick the blue liquid that runs down the surface of the walls, feeling its cold seep deep into me, numbing. It deadens my muscles, progressively over days, my limbs growing thick and heavy. But I crave that moist blue-black. I salivate for its soft.

My skin, livid bruised marble, I devour these walls and floors. I leak ink in night-flushes of sudden terror, caught in my throat, locked in the joints. Veins thick and purple, risen over pale, yellowing skin.

I feel my breathing, like that of the building, as hard and brittle as crunching concrete. I feel my chest full of white plaster chunks, coughing up carpet into my hands. Feeling that sting. This collapsed lung.

You will burn me to stay warm. You will burn me and build walls from my ash.

Cera, by Sian Cummins

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:06:00 -0500

The North Sea heaves, and Cera stands behind the sea wall and won’t go down. Don’t be an idiot—obviously she’s been down there before. Last year she and Lott walked from Margate to Westgate along the beaches, but she forgot about the rocks and slipped and became frustrated and pissed off and cancelled their night at the Chinese buffet. Lott had been looking forward to it because she lives in London and the buffet overlooks the sea. She forgets the charred shell of Dreamland just behind. And all the shit on the beach.

Cera’s become preoccupied with the anorexic’s ideal—the condemned man’s last meal. Hearty, and never digested. She’s wondered why it exists as a tradition. In films they bring in a plastic tray heaped with scran like Grandma used to serve. It’s perfunctory, almost an extra kick in the face because it’s so actively pointless. Feeding a person before you kill them seems a waste, and she feels the people of Thanet would resent the cost to the taxpayer if hanging was brought back.

But—too dark. This is the sort of thinking the group would want notes on. Her best friend Lott is what they call “fun-loving” and she danced along the beach, barefoot the full three miles. She’s been to Cape Town and claims she has soles like bear hide. Cera envisioned microfibres of glass easing themselves into Lott’s feet; poison darts tipped with effluence from the Kentish towns. Tubular worms pushed deeper into the skin with every step. Dog shit and ship’s oil. Her best friend is twenty-six, but she skipped across the shingle like a crazed kitten. They reached rocks, a headland blocked their way and Cera suggested the road. But Lott started climbing the three-foot stone outcrop that would take them round it. For Cera in her T-bar plimsoles the rocks were too slippery. Seaweed and grime started to get on the fabric uppers. They’d be wrecked. Lott shouted over her shoulder that it would be quicker if Cera took her shoes and socks off and Cera shrieked back that there was no way, and—there—the mood of the holiday slanted, never to right itself.

Cera grew up in Herne Bay, will never live far from the sea these days, and has never taken her shoes and socks off on a beach. These are among the reasons Lott doesn’t come to Margate anymore. She lost patience, and just as well. They’d have been doomed forever to haul themselves up this coastline having the same conversations they had at university; subject matter atrophied to stumps. Lott flourishes in London and has started to realise that Cera doesn’t read The Mirror ironically. Cera can’t explain why she’s no longer engaged to be married.

When they reached the Esplanade at Westgate, Cera had managed to get her smile back a bit. But back at the flat she saw Lott looking at her housewife kitsch, fridge magnets with clever slogans, and felt defensive.

How did she end up back here? It’s savage. She’s tried—so hard—to be elsewhere but in the end her sensibilities were too delicate for it. Wherever she sees an endless horizon or the 2p pusher, her heart flounders, but it’s home. The seaside is reliable in spite of its own, many problems. Tubeworms. Tampax. Yellow foam beating against the groyne. She grew up here and that’s why she knew better than Lott and wasn’t going to let the shale grind into her skin.

Even when she was six and it was already just her and Karen she’d kept her jelly shoes fiercely on. Karen, divorced before she was thirty, sternly upbeat for the benefit of her little Tri-Sarah-Tops, tried to entice her child from scowling beneath her sun hat with a big ice cream full of windblown beach grit. Cera remembers the fishy taste of the ground glass squeaking between her teeth until she spat it and got the smack that ended Karen’s efforts to be cheerful. They rarely went to the beach again, or before that—the beach was for tourists, always there to be seen but not visited. The unexpected helping of grit in the ice cream proved them right and to the present day they work together, Karen and Cera, to avoid any pretence of cheer… too close to each other for comfort, a family unit of two prudishly single women.

Whenever sick burns in her throat, it reminds her of Graham and the long car journeys strapped in the back to see him, then back in the evenings with Karen quiet in the front, both of them in private tears and Killing Me Softly low on the radio. Cera was always carsick. Karen told her to read or focus on a distant landmark like Reculver Towers on the clifftop. When Cera once came to, knees to chin, vomiting onto her denim jacket in a toilet cubicle in a dying Manchester night dive, she won back a buried memory. How she’d once pebbledashed the roadside on the Isle of Sheppey approach with Karen smoking and, still ahead of them, Graham, waiting.

Cera actually lasted in Manchester two years longer than Lott; two years Lott knew nothing about and believed had been spent in the same crazed way as the previous three. Cera didn’t feel she had to tell Lott everything. Had never told her anything really. Cera and Lott had kissed once. It was Lott who’d initiated it. Lott wasn’t in love with her—idealised her, yes, but her sexual ambiguity was too boringly expedient for it to be more. She loved all that sort of thing, Lott did. Got ratfaced on vodka sours and hung off Cera like a fashion accessory, groping for the hand-holding Cera herself had made a feature of their nights out; before it got too boring, and sad. Lott pretended they were fucking, for the benefit of friends, until she was almost convinced of it herself. She would have shat herself if she thought anyone really believed it. But once they drank all day in O’Neill’s then Lott kissed Cera in a club toilet. Cera was crying—those days before she realised why—and Lott played the right part, told her she was better than any man, and kissed the tears off her cheeks. Then, as suddenly and out of time as it happened with any broccoli-breathed boy they were kissing, properly, like Cera kissed anyone those days. Meaninglessly, with a lot of tongue.

A bland, offally taste, the last in your mouth before the executioner’s work. Would they make real gravy, or would a blotchy-armed dinner lady pummel a vat of granules with water in the prison kitchen?

They didn’t break apart in any dramatic way; they were too drunk and just drifted apart. Lott chose to continue the same attitude the next morning when she woke on Cera’s bedroom floor. It had been nothing more than drunken high jinks, it was a good story, why was Cera getting so wound up? It was uncool of Cera to question her sexuality after such a minor incident. Lott had to work hard to get back in Cera’s graces after that. Two rare E.P.s and a full month of not phoning until she was phoned.

Lott thought Cera’s return to Margate was a defeat… couldn’t hold down a life in the big city, so it rejected her like a bad organ. The truth is that no one here seems to mind if you live alone and don’t go out much. You can have your place as you want it and they don’t badger you senseless about moving into some cramped sharing arrangement because you’ll have more fun. Not many people question the shoes and socks on the beach thing. The way Cera insists the seaside is in her blood, but never, ever on her skin.

It was easy enough not to tell Lott about the memories that called at her hall of residence at night, or why it really was she visited the health centre more than anyone Lott knew. After a few rebuffs to her gentle concern, Lott stopped asking. Cera tried a few times in their last year at uni to tell Lott that she’d started to slide somewhere dark but Lott glossed over it because she’d had enough of Cera’s half-tales. The time had been when Lott worried herself sick and informed hall security that Cera had gone missing for eight days. When Cera turned up and found out what Lott had done she’d screamed at her to fuck right off. A week later, she popped a Forever Friends card through the door of Lott’s scratty shared house, with a note to say she was sorry but she just didn’t feel like talking to people at the moment.

When Cera did get back in contact, Lott had started out touchy, then thawed until their in-jokes and acrylic fur coats were back as if they’d never been away. But she refused to get into Cera’s problems anymore. So, three years later, Cera didn’t tell her much about Julian and that he’d proposed to her in Brussels instead of Paris and that she’d barely heard what he was saying, so dismayed was she with herself for thinking the whole Continent a bit unhygienic. She’d made it all the way to Canterbury for two years cohabitation with him, Julian. But that wasn’t far from the sea either, was it?

Julian threatened to kill himself when she told him in a few curt words that she didn’t want to get married with him any more. A click on the mixtape, and the song ends.

It wasn’t any one thing, and it wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. It wasn’t only that he wanted to talk about her past and she didn’t think there was any need. She’d got used to her own company in the flat full of kitsch. But it wasn’t only that. He wanted too much engagement with her, he wanted to get his hands dirty on her inner machinery. Just because they were getting married didn’t mean anything was any of his business.

Oily mussels, chips and mayonnaise. A black fly hopping in albumen at the edge of the brushed chrome table. Isn’t it funny that the Judge never asks God for mercy on his own soul?

She heads inland but sticks to the canalbank. The sun’s come out and she feels better for turning her back on the fat sea between herself and Brussels. She crunches on the gravel. Past boats, some with people living on them permanently, a man with Silly Putty for skin sunbathing topless in a deck chair.

The woman in the basement flat hung herself two months ago and now there’s a new tenant but the same dark green walls visible through the bay windows. Crushed black shadows to greet Cera before the glare of the bannister up to her own desirable flat. “Move out,” said Lott in her mindless way. The she edited herself: “I mean you’re brave for still living there.” Lott knew that Cera did not consider herself incapable of taking her own life. There had once been a conversation about volunteering for medical research. Lott’s urbane older friends had it that you got thousands for amputation and reattachment of a toe, and the big Billy Bonus for a big toe. Forty thousand if you let them stop and restart your heart. “Forty thousand isn’t enough for a human life,” said Lott, naively. Cera disgusted her by saying it didn’t matter—if it works you get the money and if it goes wrong, well, you’re none the wiser.

After a bend there are lads, fishing, poles right across the towpath. Cera gives a frustrated sigh, more or less out loud then realises there’s a curve in the path that takes her around where they’re sitting. She keeps her head down and goes round them. One of them smiles and starts a passing conversation so she scowls and speeds up and then thinks she hears bitch behind her.

She shouldn’t be so unfriendly, but sometimes people just want to talk. There’s another lad now; ahead of her, sat there giving her the eye when she’s ten metres away. It’s shameless! Then she feels bad: he’s in a mobility scooter, and as she gets close he manages, with effort, to pull his trembling head back to where he wanted it—the job in hand, threading a maggot onto a hook, probably one of the few pleasures he has.

How the hell did he get himself down here and is anyone keeping an eye on him? His scooter is terrifyingly close to the water. Then she understands that he probably values his independence and is capable of getting wherever he wants to by himself, however slowly.

She spends some money in Coffee Republic and reads their Mirror. Lott doesn’t “do” the Mirror any more. There’s a woman in there, confident, a tiny fleck of croissant hanging from her shiny bottom lip. Cera estimates for her a BMI of 24.9. She looks happy, but could be teetering on the brink of abnormality. Like Cera; more than one meeting to attend. A croissant now haunting her digestive transit.

Cera heads back along the towpath.

Through a cloud of greenfly she sees commotion at the place where the lads were fishing. The mobility scooter is now some distance from the water, and empty. The lads are in a cluster. No sign of the trembling fisherman but a pair of thin legs splayed and still among them. Cera gets a feeling that should be fear but is already more like boredom. They hear her and one of them looks up from what they’re bending over. He’s sweating, eyes panicked.

“Miss,” he says, “notation?” But that isn’t what he’s said, she’s just misheard. Does she know resuscitation.

She does and yet she’s a breath away from saying she doesn’t. When she was on the Eurostar with Julian he went on and on about whether he was going to get to use his GCSE French or if the Flemish would take issue with it. Whether it was true that “you have to be really careful what you say.” She’d snapped at him over the plastic champagne glasses; “just pretend you don’t speak either!”

She sinks down with the lads behind the mobility scooter. Even now, she doesn’t kneel like she’s always imagined she would because the ground is dank and covered with discarded maggots. He’s damp but not soaking, sparse hair stuck down, eyes shut, mouth hanging half open where the last one tried.

“I can’t be doing it right,” gasps the lad on his knees. “I been trying but he isn’t breathing!”

She pinches the guy’s nose and leans forward. As her mouth clamps round his she hears oblivious seagulls creaking out on the front and smells fish and rot on the guy’s airless passages. She never was very good at blowing up balloons and her first breath is tentative, collecting mostly in her mouth, unlikely to inflate anything.

And for a moment she thinks it’s coming back at her, bouncing off an obstruction she should have thought to clear but then it’s not just air it’s a tongue and soon it’s much more and it’s her own breath she’s fighting for as her mouth is crammed. Carrion risotto with trampled grass textures, and moving, forced wriggling and wet up to the roof of her mouth. The guy’s mouth is full of maggots. She wrenches herself up but pinching hands hold her down until the laughing starts and she breaks free and runs. One laugh behind her is louder and more rhythmless than the rest, the intractable muscles gathered hard to make sure he doesn’t miss her retreat.

Home above the suicide pad, Cera wails with her forehead on the furry toilet seat cover. She’s impressed by the star turn, his ingenious use of his gift and the effort it must have taken to keep the maggots under his tongue until the golden moment. Surfacing, she notes a razor lined up nicely beside the toilet but instead she goes into the lounge and turns on her laptop. She reads about the fist-sized boulders on the beach at Brighton.

She’s gone in the morning, her underpacked Fiesta hugging the coast roads, avoiding the belligerent tentacles of London. The new flat is dirty, squalid in a way she couldn’t have imagined and much smaller than what she could afford in Margate. A tiny skylight overlooks a brick wall six feet away; colicky toddlers scream in the night. She couldn’t get a transfer from work, so she microwaves chips in a bar. She begins to see that she’s made a mistake with Julian and there will be nights she cries until her throat is sore. But on the fourteenth day, she walks down to the sea wall, takes off her shoes and rolls her socks together in her bag. Cera walks slowly down the steps and carefully, one smooth boulder at a time, to the sea.

Candy, by Marcus Speh

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 09:09:59 -0500

The fire-man cometh, the children cried and began to dance as their parents had danced and the parents of their parents before them. He’s coming, he’s coming, hizzah huzzah, they sang cheerfully. The moon-faced fat mayor smiled and his triplicate chin wobbled. His thick rose- colored hand lay on the head of a child, who wasn’t dancing but reading. “What’re you reading,” asked the mayor’s spouse. The girl cast down her eyes and said: “I’m reading the bible.” The woman nodded approvingly and thought how pretty the little one was. The girl nodded solemnly. Just perfect, the woman thought. “Leave her alone,” said the mayor, who was arduously bearing his stateliness, “she should do whatever she likes to do.” He thrust a candy into the girl’s half-open mouth. When the glow grew in their midst, the crowd gasped as one man. “Look at his purple cloak,” cried the wife, but the mayor put one of his plump hands across her eyes, pushed the girl towards the flames, turned away and shouted hizzah! huzzah! while the children madly danced around the blazing lake of fire, their unseeing eyes mesmerized.

Two Poems, by Ben Nardolilli

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:30:22 -0500

What They’re Trying to Tell Me

You were here, last night,
And this morning, I feel the trickle
Down of rain against my feet
And think you are crying, still here,
You never left, and my eyes cannot get up,
Crying, yes, but with me,
Your sadness stitching you to this room,
Brown eyes wet and rolling,
Your face gone for a swim in the sea between us.

Most Celebrated Work

Separate with some repeating symbol,
A gris-gris lacking contours
Where subtleties can hide away,
Cavities are the leading threat to icons,
Better to leave everything simple
And straight or else the gates of signs
Might decline erecting communities,
By these you can conquer, or at least
Merely endure as cryptic rivals,
Look at some of the best successes,
Six-pointed stars and crosses,
Hammers, sickles, and swastikas,
Avoid the repeating weaponry
Laid out over open blank pages,
What is needed is an emblem to badge
Up great masses and filter them,
Words are not enough, despite
The powerful appearance of calligraphy

The Bruise, by Zoe Dzunko

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:31:00 -0500

This is what I did not tell you about those early hours of Christmas morning. We were sleeping on the basement level of that guesthouse on West 20^th Street, our window a porthole to the feet of passersby and us, left gazing up in anticipation of those flashes of shadow. They appeared to pass at regular intervals, somehow, we below the skin of the city, seizing little more than mere impressions of it. As if it were—that city and its people—a spinning zoetrope, we were captivated by its movement enough to forget its repetition, those bustling silhouettes seemed exceedingly alive in contrast to us, very still and engaged in little else but the act of watching. Bushmills, bodegas, Chinese takeout, morning, Seinfeld: a cycle that was to be broken only with a museum visit, on occasion.

Witnesses. Perhaps it was the cold, but there was a certain fissure between us, and our surroundings, as though we were peering into a scene but never quite stepping inside. Like the snow, remember? We were often surprised that despite the muddy layer icing the concrete outside, we could never see it fall from the warmth of the bed. It seemed to elude us and we often lamented our unfortunate location within the towering brownstone.

We had been married for three weeks, then. Twenty-one days. Three nights earlier, fingers contracted from the cold, my rings slipped onto the pavement below the front stoop. Clamping the railing like a crutch and swaying with whisky, impatiently I begged you to leave them and for us to go inside. Instead you crouched, brow furrowed doggedly, and pawed the new snow until the narrow bands encircled one another in your palm. That was the night the bruise formed. I slipped on Mulberry Street and you had already stepped off the footpath. When we woke the next morning, it was black. Incontrovertibly black. Without even the slightest dappling of red, it sat against the pale skin of my thigh like a warning. You mused that it looked like a plump spider floating in a glass of milk, and I had to agree. That will teach you, you said, and I nodded solemnly.

Often, I would catch it in the mirror as I stepped out of the shower. A spectre, it floated as a black spot in my vision, as though it were something lodged in the corner of my eye and not, instead, nestled malignly below the skin. Against the white of the sheets it shocked me, like a puddle of blood marring the clean cotton. I would sneak glances at it, trace its uneven border with one outstretched finger, as if a child on the brink of discovery.

After some days it began to transmute, like a landmass over great spans of time. Its barren blackness eventually giving way to spots of green and blue; the great undulating pastures of my parent’s farm, a gleaming ocean cushioning a coast. Before long it was no longer a sphere at all, but a jagged heart-shaped mark, coloured with the browns and yellows of a desert plain.

But on that Christmas morning, it was still black and round as a fist. It was then that I disappeared for a long time and left you lying, pressed below four layers of blankets like a wilted flower, distilling with rage. When I vanished from some time between two and returned shivering, just shy of the dawn, limbs corrugated with cold.

I had only intended to have a cigarette on the front steps, you should know that. Half of me—the diplomatic half—felt that our argument might dissolve were it afforded an intermission. I witnessed the nascent antagonism, how easily it was coming to the both of us, and was clutching at enough sense to know that I also couldn’t possibly be that furious with you. I loved you. Through anger, I saw the flush of your cheeks at the altar and remembered why we were there, after all.

I never meant to leave for as long as I did. The wind was whipping the snow around, shaping it into those small pellets of ice that crunch underfoot like brittle marbles. I only moved off the stoop because there wasn’t enough cover and, in fleeing the room as I did, had left my coat hanging on the hook behind our door. With eyes tightly closed, I remember gripping my palms around opposing biceps and thinking of it fondly, its high collar and thick down. So, I had crossed 20^th to take shelter in a doorway and that was why I met him and the only reason I was gone so long.

At first, I supposed he was doing the same as me, taking shelter from the wind. Well, that was what he was doing, but I thought that he lived in the building, if not one of the row houses on the street. I can’t remember how old he was. Thirty, forty, he may well have been fifty.

His face had a gentle wear, like a child that had fallen down. I remember he had a scar from the corner of one eye to the base of his nostril, it seemed like a strange place to have a scar. It split his face into quadrants, like a torn mask. When he smiled it crept towards his lash line, glowing angrily in the cold air. After some polite conversation, he put his coat over my shoulders. I had tried to brush it off but he wouldn’t hear it. It smelled of grease and smoke. He offered me a sip from his bottle of bourbon but I said no. I feel like he was offended, maybe, because he kept offering as though I were too polite to indulge. So we stood there for a time, and after a while we sat.

At some point, two people exited the building and stepped over our legs. The woman glared at us, her face seemed all the more enraged when cosseted by the wool of her scarf and hat, but her male companion brushed her arm and said, in a hushed voice, don’t let them bother you, it is Christmas. I was wearing a new dress and had done my hair nicely for our dinner earlier that night, and even now I remember wondering why she had looked at me that way. As she passed, I glanced up at her and smiled. I suppose that I was imploring her to corroborate, know that I was just like her and not, instead, a stranger crouching in her doorway. Which was, after all, what I was. She frowned and descended the stairs.

He looked at me and smiled. Don’t let them worry you Mami, they got a warm place to sleep tonight, we got nowhere else to be but here. I nodded in agreement and thought of you in the bed. I thought of how cold I was and how I longed to press my back into your warmth. How I missed you and how wrong it was that I wasn’t with you on Christmas morning. Our argument, by then, already seemed quite trivial and my conscience had revived itself. I dreaded the thought of your silhouette appearing at the glass double doors above the stoop, opposite. Your apology or your relief at having found me abruptly snatched away by your contempt for having done so under the current circumstances. This thought alone nearly impelled me to rise to my feet, to walk away without word or explanation. But I wondered why you hadn’t at least come outside to look for me and so I was also suspended in a state of mild annoyance for your apparent lack of concern. It sustained me, every time that I felt as if I would stand up and cross the street towards home. So, I just sat there, near frozen to the concrete, and listened to him talk.

He had gotten out of prison that morning. That day, it was Rikers Island and before that he had been somewhere in Ossining. I asked him why he was there, in prison, and he shrugged. The first time, he said, was because of what happened here. I followed his finger to the Rite Aid across the street. The pharmacy, I asked? No, no pharmacy. The deli, he said.

It was 1986 and he had been sent by his mother to pick up an order. No, I don’t remember the order, or why he was carrying a suitcase full of coins. I know that sounds absurd, it really is strange. He collected them, all quarters, for three years. From the street, the pockets of trousers in the dirty washing, the change slots of ticket machines and candy dispensers and vending machines. I’m not sure that I believe him, but I’m dubious as to why anyone would fabricate such a detail. Anyhow, the deli manager phoned the police, suspecting the money was stolen, and he was apprehended. When his mother couldn’t afford the bail or representation, he found himself in prison for the first time, until the early nineties, without any visitors. I frowned at him then, and he said, as if knowing what I was thinking, my mother, she was very ashamed. When he came back to their home on this street after his release, his family had left. I nodded my head because it seemed unbelievable and there weren’t any questions I could ask to dispel my doubts. Maybe it was just really horrible, the idea of returning home to nothing. I wondered why you would continue to put yourself through it, coming back each time to a haunted street. To a deli, a bank, a coffee shop, a Rite Aid.

I asked where he was staying that night and he said, with you Mami and I smiled at him, but said that I had to go home now. I was really cold. His brow dipped and he leaned forward, where you got a home? I said that I was staying across the street. I emptied the notes from my purse in his hand, and he just stared at me, hurt. Under his breath he spat, why you sitting out here with me when you got family inside? Partirse el alma.

I undressed in the dark, dropped my snow-sodden underwear and stockings to the floor, rolled into one like dough. In the grey of the mirrors reflection, the bruise seemed to have spread further across the skin—the curve of my thighs and buttocks tracing a line against the frost white windowpane—nestling itself like a plump tarantula; the gaping open mouth of cave. In the bed, anger allayed by sleep, you pulled me in and I let you, the heat of your body felt scorching against the wintriness of my own. With one large insentient hand, you caressed my hip, my thigh, and came to rest upon the dark, as though you would cover it and render it invisible. But I could still feel. Its restless pulse throbbing importunately, like the two hands of a clock.

The City From a Bridge, by Robb Todd

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:54:00 -0500

I dove into piles of leaves in a park because it was my last chance before the snow and if my friend and I were going to enjoy the city properly on the holiday, unbound from obligation and other people, we had to do whatever everyone else was not doing.

Birds flying in flocks circled above the streets and between buildings, black outlines against a bright, clouded sky, and they landed on ledges and rested and did the same thing over again.

My friend and I walked across a bridge into another state to see the city moving slowly on a day most people stay indoors with their family and open presents that have been stacked under a tree with blinking lights and strands of silver. There were memorials on the bridge for a boy who jumped and newly erected suicide prevention signs. On the other side, I took a photo of the bridge and another of a sign that said “CAMERA USE PROHIBITED.”

The best thing about the other state is the view of the city we came from and we walked through a park and stood on a rocky ledge on the other side of a fence we were not supposed to climb and we watched boats float down the river. There was hopeful, corny graffiti on a rock: “I’VE SPENT ALL MY LIFE IN SEARCH OF YOUR LOVE.” Broken glass, empty drug baggies, and ancient beer-can pull-tabs littered the ground. Stay-tabs, which are on every canned drink now, replaced pull-tabs decades ago. There was a party on this rock before we were born and we were not invited. A whitetail deer with tiny horns stepped out from behind a tree just a few feet away from us. My friend chased it.

We walked back across the bridge into the city and saw an old woman drop a wrapped gift out of a fourth-floor window to a young woman on the sidewalk. The young woman unwrapped the present and threw the colorful paper on the ground and it blew across the street. We walked past the building and my friend held out his hands like he would catch a gift if the old woman tossed one and she laughed and smiled. We walked through a neighborhood we had never seen before, past a building surrounded by flashing fire trucks, and into a park with frozen waterfalls.

The path home was down a steep wooded hill and it was covered with thick ice. A tangle of red plastic tape that said DANGER and DO NOT ENTER was frozen inside the ice with brown and gold leaves. We decided the best way to get down was to run as fast as we could and dive face-first onto it and slide to the bottom. That plan did not work very well.

We were hungry when we reached the bottom and not much was open because of the holiday. My friend called a pizza place and the guy did not speak English well but he was able to let my friend know that they were open.

“Yeah, we open three-sixty days a year! Delivery?”

“No, we’ll come there.”

“Delivery?”

“No.”

“Okay, I wait here.”

Corn pizza for dinner—do not doubt it. We ordered a beer but he shook his head. While our slices melted, we went to a deli and brought back a six-pack imported from his country. We gave him and the other guy behind the counter a couple bottles and their smiles did not need translation. They gave us brown paper bags to drink out of and after we finished our slices, they also gave us free pasta and garlic knots. We were stuffed and took it to go. We gave them our last two bottles and he invited us to ring in the New Year with him at a cantina nearby.

Snow floated in the next day, early in the morning, like a sifting, and the dark hill framed by my window slowly turned white behind the twisted black veins of barren branches and the wind rose and the snow got bigger and did not stop.

Two Hands Are Better Than Four, by Nathaniel Tower

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:55:00 -0500

My son was born with four hands. I suppose it would’ve been okay if he had four arms, but he’s only got two, so there’s two hands coming out of each. It looks more than a little odd.

He’s starting to preschool next week. We’ve kept him sheltered for the first four years of his life, but now my wife thinks it’s time for him to become part of the world. When he learns about ten fingers and ten toes, he’ll wonder why he has ten on each arm when nobody else does. My wife tells me that it means he’ll be better at counting than the other children, but I think he’ll become too dependent on those extra fingers. It’s like he’s got a built-in abacus. Not that anyone uses one of those anymore.

We named him Deuce. We had the name picked out before he was born. When he came out and I saw his four hands, the first thing I said to my wife was that we had to change his name right away. She said we couldn’t because her sister had made a quilt with ‘Deuce’ stitched on it. She used some fancy stitching that couldn’t be undone. I said that fancy isn’t always sensible. We also had a big white ‘D’ hanging up on the wall of the baby’s room, right smack in the center of the powder blue wall. I said we could always give him another name that started with ‘D’ but she said that wouldn’t solve the quilt problem. Couldn’t Deuce be a nickname I wondered. That would just be cruel she told me.

I thought about putting something else on the birth certificate, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was funny to watch the kid latch on to his mother’s breast. With all those hands swinging around, it looked like my wife was in some sort of horror film. Or a really sick porno.

I asked the doctor if there was anything we could do about those extra appendages. He said it’d be best to leave them. Might they fall off eventually I asked. No, they’d have to be surgically removed. But he didn’t advise it. He thought it best to let things play their course. I wish we had used a different doctor, but insurance wouldn’t’ve paid for the surgery anyway. It was just cosmetic they told us on the phone. I told them that they’d hum a different tune if they had four hands. They told me that a pair of extra hands can often come in handy.

I was embarrassed to take Deuce home. I could tell that all of the nurses and doctors at the hospital were whispering about us as we walked out of the hospital. Not one of them told us about how cute he was. I can’t blame them. Even without the extra hands he probably wasn’t that cute.

Whenever we took Deuce to meet anyone, we made sure his hands were hidden. At first, we always swaddled him, but some people started to question us when we were swaddling our two year old. They told us it was dangerous. And weird. Imagine what they would’ve said if they had known the kid had four hands.

The first person to notice that he had four hands was our neighbor. She asked if we couldn’t get that fixed. We told her what the doctor and the insurance company said. She said it was a shame that people weren’t more understanding. I think she meant that the insurance company should have understood what we were going through, but maybe she meant that people should be more understanding of people’s differences. It didn’t really matter though. I could tell she thought the kid was a freak.

My wife had to quit her job to stay home with Deuce. It hadn’t been part of the plan, but you can’t very well find good childcare for a four-handed infant. They’d probably want to charge us double anyway. I could just imagine the jokes about how Deuce was such a handful.

I begged her to home school Deuce. She said he was weird enough and didn’t need to be more of a social outcast. He had to learn to deal with his malformity at some point. I could see her point but I also think she was just tired of dealing with all those hands all day.

On the first day of preschool I took the morning off work to accompany Deuce and my wife. We hadn’t told the school about Deuce’s extra hands. There wasn’t any good place on the enrollment form to indicate such a thing. We didn’t really view it as a special need. I thought about writing that he needs to wash his hands a little extra but my wife thought that might be misleading. The less information the better she said. We didn’t want them to turn away our kid after all.

We showed up very early so as to beat all the other children there. We were there at least fifteen minutes before start time. Unfortunately, since it was the first day, everyone else showed up very early, so we were the last ones there. So much for our sly introduction.

I could hear the whispers as we led Deuce through the hallway. We decided it best not to cover his hands. We would hang it all out there and let whatever happened happen. I wished his hands had been more discreet, like maybe one on top of the other instead of having them side by side. I decided I would try to tape them that way when we got home, and I cursed myself for not thinking about it earlier.

“Who do we have here?” the overly excited teacher asked Deuce when we entered his classroom.

Deuce looked at us. We nodded our approval and then he told her his name was Deuce. She told him that it was an interesting name and that he was the only Deuce she had ever met and that she was happy to work with him. She didn’t even look at his hands, but I did notice a bit of hesitation before she reached out her own to shake his. Deuce managed to return the handshake quite well. His second right hand really didn’t get in the way of things at all. For the first time in my life, I was proud of Deuce and thought that maybe things would be okay.

With a lot of reluctance we left Deuce behind and went about our daily lives. On the way home my wife and I discussed how things seemed to be going well and we wondered what they would do in class that day. Then I went to work and I even thought about telling one of my coworkers about the morning. A few asked about Deuce’s first day and I just told them that he seemed to be adjusting well. They asked if I wasn’t super excited about his first day of school and I told them that I had been a little nervous but everything was fine. But I didn’t tell them about the hands.

My wife picked up Deuce on her own before I got home from work so I didn’t get to hear the firsthand account of his first day. When I got home she had tears in her eyes. I asked what was wrong and she told me nothing, that everything was perfect. I asked what she meant secretly hoping that Deuce’s extra hands had fallen off during the day. I looked at the kid expecting to see a normal two-handed boy, but there he was sitting on the floor playing with his toy trucks, one in each of his four hands. The hands and trucks seemed to be everywhere. The sight almost made me sick.

Then she showed me. Deuce’s finger painting picture had been voted the best in the class. I looked at it and was pretty impressed myself. I don’t remember what my first finger painting looked like, but I’m sure it wasn’t half this good. For the first time in my life, I was proud of my son. I went over and ruffled his hair and then picked him up. I asked if I could play with one of the trucks. He handed me both of the ones from his left hands. One was a fire truck and one was a dump truck. They were the most beautiful trucks I had ever held.

Two Poems, by J. Bradley

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:43:39 -0500

Leaving The Silver City

I’m terrible at painting. You can tell
from the way the bulls-eye shifts
based on her name.

I look for the red flags, burn
the ones I can’t live with, fuck her
on top of the ones I’ll tolerate.

The ending constantly revises itself.
Mondays, she gets bored of my
fingernail biting. Thursdays,
I catch her kissing light poles.
Saturdays, her patience erodes
when for the fiftieth time I’ll fend off
the economic benefits of abandoned
surnames in Vegas.

The good news: not being around
when only one of us can wake up.

Tiny Vessels

I used “I love you” to unthread
your clothing, prepped the walls
to handle the primary color
of your hair.

I presented to my friends
the synonymity of you
with “forever”. My ring finger
pretended to ache.

Study the way your neck
blackened, then yellowed
after my teeth; it matches now
how I feel about your name.