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[img_assist|nid=7435|title=Nature/Invention-Intrusion by Marge Feldman© 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=250|height=202]I find Maggie squatting on the kitchen floor beside the door to the garage. My eyes always go to her belly first, as if she has swallowed a globe. There’ve been two miscarriages, both early. Never have we gotten so far. Then I notice she’s picking something off the floor, putting it in her mouth. Get closer. They surround her. Hundreds of them. Ants. Maggie is eating ants.

A lifetime of sitcoms has prepared me for cravings—pickles, hamburgers. Running out in the middle of the night for a pint of Haagen Daz Vanilla Swiss Almond. Strawberry Frosted Pop Tarts. But insects?

Maggie looks up. She removes the finger from her mouth. “Must be the baby,” she says. Her hand follows the curve of her belly. “She wants bugs.”

“Really? They sell crickets at pet stores. I could get some.”

“Crickets?” She purses her lips, gazes up to the ceiling. Then nods. “Okay.”

The girl at Pet World brings them to me in a clear plastic bag, twist-tied at the top. She holds them up, dozens of them, hopping against the plastic. “You’ll have one happy lizard,” she says.“Yeah. That’s all one can really hope for in life, isn’t it? A happy lizard.”

She nods, a sign that we share some deep understanding. She tells me she threw in an extra dozen, then winks.

In high school Maggie wrote a piece about the opening of fishing season and the senseless slaughter of the earthworm. In graphic detail, she captured the wriggling on the hook, the oozing entrails, the practice of cutting them in half to double the bait. Together we collected money, went to bait shops, released nightcrawlers, earthworms, grubs back to the wild of gardens.

At home, in the garage, I hold up the bag. A cricket stares back; all eyes, bugs are. Crunchy. Gooey in the middle. Like pretzel snacks with cheese in the center.

 I picture the bugs skittering down her throat, at the bottom, a baby open-mouthed—a miracle baby. Dozens of times, the brown bleeding began, and we were told she was lost, only to see her on the ultrasound, hear the beat-beat of her heart. How useless and helpless I feel during these races to the hospital, as if there’s nothing I can do for them.

I carry the bag of crickets upstairs, find Maggie lying among the dozen flower pillows, her face the center, the cushions as petals. I swish the bag back and forth, imagine her sitting up, tossing cricket after cricket into her mouth, as if chomping on popcorn.

But instead the crickets bring tears. “What?” I say. “Beetles? You want beetles?”

The crickets pop in my ear.

“I’m bleeding again,” she says. “Heavier this time.”

A blur—the car ride, Maggie holding the bag of crickets, tapping against the plastic, then opening it, taking one out. “She’s still hungry.”

The breakneck drive, the crickets, the hospital waiting for our arrival—it’s all part of the blur, something to hide the truth from both of us, that nothing matters except the desires of Fate for our baby to live. But that’s nothing to tell Maggie.

“It has to be a good sign,” I tell her.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Maggie answers, then opens her mouth and feeds our baby’s desire.

Randall Brown directs and teaches at Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. His work has been published and anthologized widely. He is the founder of Matter Press, its online magazine The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and the blog FlashFiction.Net. “Little Magpie” appears in his flash fiction collection Mad to Live.

When the fog got in, the mothers were making the rotis for dinner. My mother, because she was younger and less important, did the harder job of rolling out the dough into perfect circles. Usha’s mother, who I called Other-mother, got to stand in the warm aura of the stove’s blue flame while she roasted the perfect discs on the iron thawa. Roll, roast, flip, next: I thought of the mothers as one joined roti-making machine. Usha and I were waiting for our usual treat, a fresh, buttered, sugar-sprinkled roti each. But then our grandmother bellowed from upstairs.

 [img_assist|nid=7421|title=Over the Hills by Liz Nicklus© 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=300|height=104]“Who let all the fog into my room?” demanded Ba.

Fog? There wasn’t any fog outside; it was a sun-shiny autumn day. The mothers—faces tight with fear—stopped what they were doing. We all ran to Ba.

 “Come and shut the windows!” yelled our grandmother. “Get the fog out!”

“Ba!” shrieked my mother. “What are you talking about? What happened?”

Other-mother took Ba into her arms. My mother said something about an ambulance and raced back downstairs.

“Oh Bhagwan, Bhagwan!” cried Ba, calling to God. She pushed Other-mother away. “I can’t see you.” Then, she curled up on the floor and rocked and keened, terrified that the fog would not leave her room. The fog didn’t leave. Her diabetes had made Ba blind.  

***

Usha and I were the daughters of Ba’s two sons, who lived together as they might have in India, dutifully, under one roof with their wives and children, a son and a daughter each. Except that, we weren’t in India. We lived in England, in an old Victorian row house. I knew that the children belonged to different parents, but it didn’t matter much. Less than a year apart, Usha and I were almost-twins.

Like everyone else in the family, we were afraid of Ba, even more so now that she was the first blind person we knew. Still, because it rained so much and we were stuck inside so often, sometimes we’d creep into her room to see how long it would take her to figure out someone was there. Once, during a long wet spell, we went too far.

“Who’s there? Speak!” called Ba. We sat quietly, out of arms reach. As she pulled the sheet around her, a strip of grandmother flesh appeared between the bottom of her sari blouse and the beginning of her petticoat. She began to snore. Usha and I looked at each other, a laugh threatening to expose us. But instead of laughing, the both of us reached out and at the same time, quick and sure and hard, we pinched Ba.

“Aarrreh!” she yelled.

We ran out and then, deviously, joined the general stampede of people coming towards Ba’s room.

“They came to suck my blood, what is left of it in my poor fragile body!”

“What happened?” stormed my father.

“The girls! The useless extra mouths we’re feeding. Who will take such she-devils off our hands, who?”

Suddenly a slap came so hard and so fast across my face that my ear began to ring. Usha’s father, who I knew as Big-Father, still had his hand raised in fury. I began to cry and braced myself for more. Instead, I heard a voice like cold water.

“Don’t touch her,” said my mother. “You have no right.”

It was an insurrection–words spoken out of the usual order of things. Big-Father said nothing, but he let his hand drop. Up until this single exact moment, I had never heard my mother speak directly to Big-Father. Ordinarily, when he walked into a room, she would fall silent and cover her head with the loose end of her sari, looking out at the world through a thin, cottony fog.

“Bas!” said my father, meaning enough. I knew my mother was in trouble and that I should stop crying for her sake. But I couldn’t. Worse still, I fell to the floor, and surrendered to the kind of tantrum I hadn’t had in some time. Ba spoke deliberately.

“Why complain about your wife when you can’t control your own daughter?”

My father pulled me up with a tug, his thumb poking into my armpit.

“Ask your grandmother for forgiveness,” he growled. “And show your respect properly,” meaning that I should touch her foot when I spoke.

I got very close to my grandmother’s sour foot and mumbled a near “sorry” but I did not touch it. The diabetes was so bad by then that she couldn’t tell the difference.

“Good girl,” said my father.

***  

When it was winter, they took Ba to the hospital. Baby-uncle, Ba’s youngest son who lived in Florida, flew in to see his mother. Soon after, a doctor called the house and said we should all come to the hospital. When we got there, Ba asked us one by one to forgive her. The oldest grandson sobbed like a baby, the mothers wept freely; noses were blown frequently. I was surrounded by the sounds of my family in grief. A witch-thin nurse came by and snapped the curtain around us.

            “Quiet, please,” she spat, and then muttered, “Pakis always bring the whole damn tribe.” She left in a huff.

“Hey!” Baby-uncle barked, but she was long gone. “We’re Hindus not Pakis!”

“Brown is brown. We’re all Taliban now,” said Big-Father.

“How do you stand this country?” continued Baby-Uncle.

“Please, you’re Al Qaeda to the Americans, too” said Big-Father.

“America’s different,” said Baby-Uncle.

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” said my father, meaning only that it was time to drop it. The nurse came back.

“I can’t move in here,” she said. “Some of you will have to leave.”

Being the least important, Usha and I hadn’t yet had our forgiveness turns. Ba lifted her finger to let us know she needed someone to move her breathing mask.

“Leave the monkeys here,” she said. Our mothers left us with the men and took the sons home with them. When it was my turn with Ba, I looked at her grey, unseeing eyes, and thought that I should ask for her forgiveness, too. But I didn’t and neither did Usha.

Big-Father began to sing a bhajan quietly and his brothers joined in.

“Govinda hare bole, Gopala bole.”

 [img_assist|nid=7422|title=Dia de los Muertos by Paul McMillan© 2011|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=250|height=203]Usha and I clapped along gently. Each verse seemed to take lines off Ba’s face. When we were done, she raised the mask herself, smiled, and said she wanted peaches. Couldn’t someone get her some peaches? The nurse said that the kitchen was closed, and that there were only canned peaches there, and anyway, rules were rules. She left us alone. It was January, damp and cold. Fog hung thickly between the streetlights. Ba wanted real peaches. It was impossible.

“We’ll go,” Big-Father said, and he and Baby-uncle left. Usha and I fell asleep sitting on a leg each of my father’s lap.

I woke to the stamping sound of feet trying to get warm. Usha was awake, too. The peaches had arrived! There was a whole wooden crate with the words “Product of New Zealand” stamped on it. My father got up, stood us on the floor, and offered the chair for the crate. The nurse stepped in to check on all the noise. Big-Father spoke to her in his most polite talking-to-white-people voice.

“May we kindly get something to open the crate?” he asked.

“All right,” she said, probably staggered by the sight and smell of fresh peaches to say anything else. She came back with a screwdriver and a paring knife. No one said anything for a while and Usha and I knew to be quiet.

“Ba, we have peaches,” said Big-Father, taking the screwdriver. I could smell their perfume. I knew Usha wanted one as much as I did but we didn’t dare ask.

 “I’ll get some tea, double sugar,” said Baby-uncle, leaving. My father took the paring knife and started to cut a peach into small pieces.

Baby-uncle came back with the tea. Big-Father began to read the Gita out loud.

“The death of the body does not harm the soul.”

My father started to feed Ba pieces of peach.

“From body to body, air into air, the soul moves freely.”

Now and then, Big-Father wiped the juice from around his mother’s mouth; Baby-uncle gave her sips of hot, sweet, tea. Usha and I just held hands and watched and listened.

“Weapons cannot cleave the soul, nor can fire consume it. Nor can water drench the soul, nor can the wind, as breeze or gale, ever at all dry it.”

 It took Ba a very long time to eat her peach. I could hear the sound of soft fruit on gums, the drone of the machines, and the familiar cadences of the Gita, their poetry almost in time with Ba’s slow, scarce breaths. She finished her peach at the same time that Big-Father finished reading. A monitor beeped and a thin, straight line divided the screen.

***  

In the days after the funeral, I couldn’t stop thinking about Ba’s fog. Once, I asked my mother where Ba was now and she said that if she wasn’t with god, she was probably around somewhere.

“What do you think she came back as? A cat?” I asked.

“No. Eat your cereal.”

“A dog?”

“No. Put your bowl away, put on your shoes.”

“A person?”

“Too soon. Get me the comb.”

“Could she come back as fog?”

“No. It doesn’t work that way.”

“Why not?”

“Are your laces tied?”

“Is fog alive? Can a soul get into fog?”

My mother stopped trying to do three things at once and looked at me. Then she bent down to hold me.

“Sometimes we all live in fog.”

“Did the fog get out of Ba’s room?”

She didn’t answer and from the way she was breathing into my shoulder, I knew she was crying.

“Mommy, am I going to get Ba’s fog?”  

***  

It was summer when we moved. Once everything was loaded up into the truck and the moving men were ready to drive off, my mother and father stood waiting next to a taxi, the youngest boy from among us children standing at their side. I told Usha to hurry up.

“She’s not coming,” said my father.

“Not coming? Why is he coming?” I whined.

“How would your brother not be coming?” said my mother. Usha didn’t come; she stayed with her own mother and father. She was my cousin. Inside, my heart began to thump against my ribcage. Things were starting to go wrong.

I watched as Usha’s father came up to mine, waited for the familiar swoosh of my mother’s loose sari end against me as she wrapped it around her head. But the swoosh didn’t come. I began to tug at the sari’s end myself to remind my mother of what she was supposed to do but she just batted my hand away. That was when the thud in my chest began to echo in my head as I realized that she was neither going to cover her head or step away. The closer Usha’s father got, the faster the thudding in my body. Why couldn’t my mother do what she was supposed to do? I took a deep breath and waited for the shouting to begin. Instead, Usha’s father folded himself at the knees and took me into his arms. My father gave his brother a handkerchief for the tears that stood in his eyes.

“It’s a big move for her,” my mother said to Usha’s father, her voice quavering.

The thud and echo of my heart stopped and gave way to something else, a feeling so unfamiliar that I didn’t recognize it, couldn’t put words to it.

Standing back up, Usha’s father looked at his brother, then to my mother. “May God watch over you and yours.”

“And yours,” said my father, looking over to my cousins and their mother. Then he bent down to touch his older brother’s feet. It was the last time I saw him use that gesture of respect with anyone.

“I hear the weather’s always good in Florida,” said my uncle.

“They call it the ‘Sunshine State,” said my father.

“Just take care of everyone and keep in touch,” said my uncle, “and don’t become too American.”

Too American I wondered?

I saw that the sun around us was so bright and the air was so clear that my mother, my father, my brother, my uncle, my aunt, and my cousins were separate, lucid shapes. This was the absence of fog.

Nimisha Ladva lives in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. Her stories have been published in the Connecticut Review and Stand. She has been featured in Philadelphia’s First Person Arts Festival.

[img_assist|nid=7420|title=The Kuerner Farm by Annette Alessi © 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=250|height=187]Holly scrubs sauce pans and three-quart pots and centers her attention out through the kitchen window, across the driveway until he emerges from his house and mobilizes, punches his fists on his hips, elbows poking right and left, surveying in his usual way. Holly always wonders what. What is he looking at? What precisely does the world look like from his viewpoint?

At her back, the rustle of the local newspaper muffles her husband’s voice. “New cereal?” he asks, and then, like the path that their marriage has taken, he renders the question rhetorical with a non sequitur. “Still working on that artery project, if you can believe it.”

The python curled inside her stomach slithers to her throat and she smoothes her hair with her hand, though her neighbor would be unable to detect a stray strand due to his lack of proximity and his misdirected gaze. They existed as neighbors for years and Holly barely noticed him, but all of a sudden this summer, whenever she sees him, she can hardly breathe. All her organs pulse and squeeze their various rhythms into erratic backwards and opposites. At some point, she couldn’t say when exactly, she started watching for him. Every day.

As a housewife, approaching middle age, Holly maintains a youthful appearance, with pale smooth skin, strawberry blonde hair and a slight, fit figure. On the other hand, Mil, for whom she aches, resembles a well-aged Maple. His face, deeply grooved like gray bark, surmounts his skinny trunk. Limbs stick out at odd angles, and with their sprawling gangly grace, epitomize all the brave forbearance of a harsh winter before the promise of spring. In the midst of summer now, Holly reminds herself that the season delivered its potential, and she remembers her dentist, last summer’s crush, when she fabricated symptoms and scheduled unneeded extra appointments so that she could sit in his chair while he leaned close, spearmint-scented, gently touching her.

Earlier that year, in the spring, there was a young man at the deli counter with dark hair and brown eyes whose long thin fingers handled the meats and cheeses with a sexuality she found difficult to resist. That crush engendered an unusually high number of cold cut lunches – nitrate, sodium, and fat loaded meals eventually making her believe that her indulgences were killing her family. So she bought the meats and threw them away. Finally, the shame of wasted food drove her from the store and toward a moratorium on deli foods and cougar crushes. 

Those were playground romances compared to the intensity of her feelings for Mil for whom she wants to abandon her marriage and race across their driveways into his waiting arms where he gathers her to him, his long bony limbs against her back. He presses his thin torso to her breast, his leg between her thighs, their bodies crushing together in an embrace so tight that neither of them can know, can feel, where one body ends and another begins. He whispers her name.

“Holly…Holly…”

The sound emanates from behind her, the newspaper insinuating itself into her moment and denuding her pleasure.

“What.”   

Rustle, rustle, rustle, the newspaper speaks again. “Are you gonna pick up the invites today when you’re shopping?”

She asks, “How do you know I’m shopping?” A jarring metal screech followed by a thunderous reverberation represent all that remains after Mil disappears into his basement bulkhead and slams the doors closed. Holly swings around and faces Scott.

“You always go Tuesdays,” he says.

“How do I know what invites?” Her voice rises as the newspaper lowers. She knots her arms across her chest.

“What?”

“How can you just say invites like that and figure I know what the hell you are talking about. You just say invites with no preamble.”
Holly’s anger derails him. She watches as the tracks run out from under him.

Finally, he says, “Well, I ain’t no constitution, baby.”

She concludes that he is missing a gene, always confused by her anger, perpetually wondering what he’s done wrong, unable to comprehend why they argue, drawing no conclusions about it after all these years. It must be a genetic defect, like a thyroid dysfunction, to believe that all anger is the same and that he can mollify her with a pun or a joke.      “Okay.” Now Scott treats her to the slowed-down speech reserved for children and rabid animals. “Invitations for the fiftieth wedding anniversary party for my parents.”

“Fuck you, Scott. I know what they’re for.” From her angry words, she extrudes a calm clarity. The whole concept of a couple staying together for fifty years eludes her, especially her couple, mismatched from the very beginning. She’s going to have to tell him, crack open the sophistry of their union regardless of the consequences. She’s not sure when or how but Holly will confess Mil. And Brian, too. All of it.

Holly liked to party with boys. Fifteen years old, an average student in a small, conservative, blue-collar town that proved, for many, tough to leave. Holly overlooked the pool of insouciant teenagers from which she could select her girlfriends. She gravitated to football players. Lured by their doctrine of entitlement, she admired their matrix of fundamentals; assigned roles, hard work, inevitable pain, measurable points and savored victories. She loved their rough voices and coarse words. And their smell, like fields of spring mud, intoxicated her. When she got high with them, she embraced the out-of-control feeling, her power stretched before her without horizon. Tacitly, she shared their glorious dreams of fame and fortune, fast cars and freedom. In a sober moment, alone, she devised the plan that would fulfill those dreams. 

Phase One began with an unwitting boy, all too willing to accommodate Holly’s desire. Even if he was in love with her, he fell to Holly’s plan in a strafe of collateral damage. Her first time – was it his too? — they abandoned only enough clothing so that their bodies connected. Years later, Holly would forget his name and all the ancillary events of the evening. But memory of the sex imprinted; the stinging pungency of cheap cologne, his initial struggles, telling her to relax, just relax, then the brief, ripping pain, surprise when his body jerked and shuddered against hers, and finally, probably only minutes later but seeming much longer, his belt buckle digging into her thigh. For days, she wore the bruise from it, an odd shape that made her think of getting a tattoo there. She stopped at every mirror, examined her reflection, and the C student congratulated herself. “That’s an A, baby.”

Fortune delayed her deployment of Phase Two because her frequent absences from home alarmed her parents and drove them to search her room. There, they unearthed an old baggie with a few joints Holly had neglected because there was something better to smoke. Infuriated, her mother flaunted her discovery at Holly, herbs trembling inside the murky plastic. Her father imposed the strictest curfew ever; home directly after school, no TV, no computer, no music, no, no, no, no…no! Okay, whatever. Holly didn’t waver. Her resolve deepened. The week of her eighteenth birthday, she met Scott.

Scott, green eyed, thick lashed, dirty blonde, halted, at Holly’s request, outside Dave’s Liquors on Main Street. While she addressed the stranger, he stood by, his towering six-foot plus, muscled frame stuffed into a fresh off the rack business suit. “Hey,” she said. “Buy me a six pack?”

“Name’s Scott.” His low strong voice reminded her of a Great Dane.

“Scott, buddy. You’re over twenty one?”

“Twenty six.”

“Yeah. Buy me a six-pack. I’ll owe you big time.”

“And you are?”

She hesitated. “Well, I am twenty one. It’s just I left my ID home.”

He smiled a goofy, white-toothed grin. “I meant your name.”

“Uh. Barbara.” She should have waited. All of a sudden, this guy seemed really extra tall. “I’m kind of in a hurry so if you – “

“Sick grandmother?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.  I’ll do it if you keep your word.”

“My word?” 

“You said, you’ll ‘owe me’. So that’s your word.”

Holly’s instinct said run, but something about his tone sparked her anger and she glared at him instead. “That was just a figure of speech, you know.” Plus, she would have liked to commission the job to someone else but he was the only guy anywhere near the store in the last half hour who didn’t know her. “Look,” she said. “I’m not gonna sleep with you.” Although he did have a nice ass and all those muscles in just the right places. And when she saw her comment actually made him blush, she softened and considered the possibility.

He said, “I meant I’ll buy your six pack if you have one with me.”

“Is that all?” Holly couldn’t help but feel a bit of disappointment over not at least being forced to choose.

“That’s all. I mean, if your plans can wait.”

“My plans?”

“You said you were in a hurry.”

“Oh, yeah. Okay. Deal.” Holly realized suddenly that she wasn’t exactly showing off a spectacular vocabulary. 

A few minutes later, mission accomplished, they walked along the street. Scott reached into the bag and handed her a cold one. He unleashed the Great Dane voice. “You always drink Rolling Rock?”

Holly struggled for something to say that would seem witty or, alternatively, sexy. “I’m usually a Bud kind of gal.” She pictured the horses with their regal white booties.

“Ever try Magic Hat?”

Holly gave up on wit and squinted at him. “You’re not from around here.”

“I was. Um, from here.”

Then he said it. Medical school. Scott’s name preceded by the title, “Doctor.” 

She said, “You know, my name’s not really Barbara.”

“Didn’t think so,” he said.

Three months later, when Holly missed her period, she celebrated alone with a Thai stick and a bottle of Jack Daniels that she lifted from the same store where she’d met Scott. He didn’t hesitate with his proposal. She didn’t hesitate with her response. Holly didn’t know if the arrangement horrified her parents or bewildered them. But they probably preferred their daughter’s chances in a loveless marriage to a doctor versus single motherhood. On the other hand, Holly envisioned her plan miraculously unfolded. She pictured herself in a big house with a swimming pool, enjoying a pedicure while she lounged with a frosty drink and socialized with her wealthy friends.

Then Brian was born.

What a surprise, after waiting out an easy pregnancy in their tiny studio in Western Massachusetts while Scott, absent mostly, interned for barely enough pay to cover the rent. How unprepared Holly was, equally for the pain of childbirth and for the even more painful joy of intense love that she immediately felt for Brian, a love that torched in her a mortal fear for his well-being. The baby in her arms immolated all remnants of her plans and dreams, giving way to a steadfast devotion to every aspect of her family’s sustenance.

She discovered a diversity of banal talents working nights on the computer at the library, clipping money saving coupons, haunting Salvation Army stores for used housewares, purchasing in bulk from BJ’s Wholesale and cooking to stock her freezer. Scott wore GAP while she wore K-MART. Brian got Bauer skates and football camp and Holly got This End Up furniture, in southern yellow pine. “That’s the same wood they make floors out of. It’s guaranteed for life,” the sales clerk assured her.

Long after it was necessary, Holly practiced frugal ways. When Scott suggested a cruise to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, Holly funded Brian’s college education instead. When Scott wanted to trade in their southern yellow pine, Brian’s budding musical talents warranted drums and lessons and his teeth required braces. And when Scott surprised her with the sparkling diamond anniversary band on their tenth “for the diamond I couldn’t afford back then,” he said, she snapped the box shut. She hugged him and insisted she’d be afraid to wear such extravagant jewelry. Besides, she needed a new refrigerator and she wanted Scott to buy that convertible sports car from the brochures he’d collected and studied for the past two years.

Now, seventeen years later, Holly looks at Scott look at her and she sighs. Scott folds his newspaper and drops it on the table. He stands, strides directly to her and, inexplicably, he kisses her gently on the cheek. One soft, brief suck, Scott’s lips and Holly’s skin, a meeting arranged thousands of times before, now the incontrovertible truth of her life enfolding all of the dirty diapers and scary fevers, ABC’s, PTA’s, Little League and MCAS. Math homework and meatloaf. After years of Scott’s affection, the steady performance of all of his obligations – all the qualities that drew her to him – she feels it only as this shabby, relentless taunt. She hates Scott for her own complicity in her privileged, even life, a life marked neither by great joy nor by great tragedy. Only Brian.

When she sits across from Brian at the dinner table, Holly can still visualize her beautiful new baby burping formula all over her only fancy holiday blouse. But she recognizes her son, now licensed to drive, as a tall, athletic blond occupied with researching schools in California and Wisconsin. Brian’s presence obliterated her teenage dreams, what would his absence do to the rest of her life? Does she really have to tell Scott? Can’t he see for himself, the crumbling after-effects of a Brian-less house? 

“OK, honey. I’m on call tonight. Don’t forget.” Scott reminds her of his years and years and years of Wednesdays – half a day at the office with light morning appointments, on call all day and night, swapping with the other doctors in the practice only for vacations and emergencies. Holly clenches her body as Scott withdraws silently. She pictures the bruise on her inner thigh from when she lost her virginity at age fifteen. She wonders how it could have faded, how she failed to notice, how first the pain left, then she gazed at her skin one day and the bruise had vanished.   

Mil and Scott converse outside in the driveway. Inside, Holly chops celery, peppers and cucumbers into three-inch strips for the fiftieth anniversary party. Her preparation of appetizers is a holdover from her frugal years, doing for herself when she can easily afford catering.

She hasn’t told him yet.

Tree leaves flutter in an eastward wind, and simultaneously Mil’s gray hair and Scott’s blonde hair lift in the breeze and now settle. In spite of their disparate appearances, their relaxed demeanor, side by side, makes them seem like brothers, as if they share a long history, not just the street. Mil gesticulates his description of some phenomenon; the fingers on one hand form the “O.” He pokes the index finger of his other hand in and out. Besotted by Mil’s innocent illustration with a lewd gesture, Holly momentarily perceives the heady, slightly rancid aroma of sex. At the same time, she embraces the solace that her lust for Mil offers.

“Ma, where’s the keys?” Her son’s voice surprises her, not by its interruption of her thoughts, but by its tone. She often forgets how strong he has become, how his strength has carried along with it a new voice, from flute to tuba.

Holly turns slowly and raises her eyebrows. Brian, a tall, lanky teen sports all of Scott’s features, as if Holly’s genes weren’t involved.

“Ma,” Brian says. “The car keys.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m in a hurry.”

“I didn’t ask for your state of being.”

Finally, he looks at her. “You’re so bizarre.”

“Nevertheless…”

“I’m meeting friends.”

“Where?”

“Ma…”

Holly reaches into her pocket, withdraws a set of keys, and jingles them, playing the music of his independence. Brian swipes them from her hand but at the last moment, Holly clenches her fist around the keys.

“Call me and let me know where you are.”

“What for? Isn’t the tracking chip implanted in my head working right?”

He kisses her cheek and runs out the door as Holly calls after him. “It’s not you I worry about.”

She stretches over the sink and peers out of the window trying to track Brian’s progress, but she sees only Scott. Mil has disappeared from view. Before Holly can return her attention to washing snow peas, slicing broccoli and to her dilemma, she sees Scott’s eyes widen. He jumps and shouts. Holly hears him through the glass. “Not in my car you don’t!” Brian trying to sneak away in his Dad’s sports car again. 

How will she explain to Scott that all this is just a lie behind thickening smoke and mirrored glass that Holly positioned long ago? The time Brian fell off the ladder and broke his finger, the afternoon Scott wrecked the car jockeying for position on Beacon Street near Fenway, the Thanksgiving Holly celebrated in the hospital with double pneumonia – none of it really happened. Insert Scott’s pun here.

Holly arranges the hard, crisp vegetables on a platter. Green vegetables on a green platter. Torpid and green. Green, all green. Holly breathes deeply and musters myriads of magenta, violet and chartreuse, striped purple and orange eggplants, luscious swirls of royal blue and neon pink tomatoes. She giggles aloud. And that damn lifetime of southern pine will be the first to go.

Through the window, the sun strikes the green plate, and ignites a blinding emerald glitter. The harsh light intensifies and explodes into all colors. She concentrates hard on this bright anomaly as if it is a gift, useful but complicated and without instructions. Don’t stare at the sun! Don’t stare at the sun! The warnings Holly delivered to Brian all through his childhood. He was eleven years old for the eclipse and they constructed an elaborate pinhole device for an indirect view.

But Holly stares and stares directly for so long that the light and the power of the light, all the power of the colors radiate inside of her, dig through her cells molecule by molecule. When she finally cuts away, her sedition cracks open the kitchen walls. From the cracks, the blood of her house oozes, a green slime, the blood of open circulation, insect blood. It streaks the walls with color, pools in the serving dish, runs in a jagged path down to the floor, snakes across the linoleum, and stops, finally, just before it reaches her feet.

Well into the eighth decade of their lives, Scott’s parents celebrate fifty years together, along with a meager gathering of friends and family still alive and more or less ambulatory. From the kitchen, Holly spots Brian fading into a corner of the living room where a battalion of canes stands ready. He mopes, absorbed by his only companion, an overflowing plate of food.

Holly sees him, and not for the first time, as Scott must have looked, before the burdens of life crossed his path, medical school and the family Holly forced on him. Over the years, Brian brought lots of friends by the house but she can’t recall one particular girl – or one boy for that matter – in whom she suspected a serious sexual attraction. Music inspires Brian’s passion and in that also, she sees his counterpart in Scott. She envies both her son and her husband in a way that reminds her of the boys she envied in high school. Whatever they accomplish, however they succeed or fail, they begin at the rim of their lives and fearlessly eye the roiling fire of their potential. Mil is finally Holly’s very own desire, not one she borrowed from someone else. All she has to do is tell Scott.

Stationed in the kitchen Holly avoids the party and observes her elderly guests. Aunt Greta, a widow for decades, always wears a frown. She readily and competently debates any political issue and Holly could serve drinks off the old woman’s stooped back. Cousin Fred loves to flirt but Holly wonders if his viscous, clouded eyes can still deliver the distinctions between male and female. Cousin Harriet, the faded party girl, spills more than she consumes and insists on wearing fancy pumps in spite of swollen ankles and puffy feet. Brian catches Holly’s eye and she suppresses a smile. When she confesses to Scott, a celebration like this won’t factor into her future.

Holly turns her back on the party and pirates a moment for her kitchen window fantasy. Mil’s red pick-up is parked in his driveway. Beyond it, on his side porch, he stands over his wife who smiles up at him from an orange plastic chair. Animated, he explains some mysterious concept that utilizes a full repertoire of his awkward, beautiful gestures.

“Everything okay, Hon?” Scott interrupts. “Have we got any more toothpicks?”

He opens and closes a few cabinets, hunches over the utility drawer and rummages.

Holly says, “You should invite Mil and Dot over.”

“Huh? Toothpicks…”

“You should go over there right now, Scott, and ask Mil and Dot if they want to come to our party.”

“Mil and Dot?” Scott straightens from the toothpick quest.

“I’m sure your parents won’t mind a couple of extra guests.” Holly opens the drawer at her hip and from the clutter, produces a box of toothpicks, multicolored plastic spears with miniature sword handles.

“Well, all right,” Scott says awkwardly, taking the box.

He won’t go.

She can picture Mil in her house, in her white house, sampling her green vegetables, sitting on her southern yellow pine. His cigarette ash falls to the floor and she drops to sweep it up, hesitates at his feet. He pulls her to him.

But Mil is two driveways away, and might as well be continents away as likely as she is to convince Scott to get Mil over here. And before she absolutely explodes with her desire, she pulls Scott to her meaning to say, “In seventeen years, I’ve asked you for nothing. Now all I want is for you to bring Mil to me.” Instead, what comes out is, “Brian wasn’t a mistake.”

“What’s that?”

Desperate now. “It’s Brian. It’s about Brian.”

Scott pulls up, still in her grasp. “My god, what? What?” Scott guides her into the bathroom and searches her eyes so deeply that it blinds her. She composes herself by concentrating on bathroom fixtures, porcelain anchored to the linoleum floor, toilet tissue gripped by a cheap plastic holder and guest soaps molded into seashell shapes. She represses the urge to smash it all to unrecognizable bits, all the porcelain and plastic, especially the seashells.

She says, with measured calm, “Brian wasn’t really a mistake. I never told you. Brian wasn’t really an accident.”

“I know that.”

He shrugs, inscrutable. Perhaps he didn’t hear her.

She begins again, “I said…”

His voice is hard. “I heard what you said.” His eyes release her. For the first time that she can ever remember, he seems angry and she can’t reference why. “What’s this all about, Holly?”

“I just told you…”

“I mean, what are you trying to say?” Holly remains silent. He shakes his head. “You want out? Now? You’re telling me now?”

She tries to respond, stammers a few beginning syllables and trails off.

“I was twenty six for chrissakes. I knew what I was doing.” Pale and shaken, he sinks down to the rim of the tub. He drops his head heavily into his hands. His voice is softer now, distant. “I stole your youth, your chances in life. You think I didn’t know? You think I didn’t know how much your parents hated me for it? Well, I didn’t care. Holly, you were so wild, unattainable. I was so damn in love with you.”

His words linger, regroup, grab her by the neck, and choke off her air. The floor undulates and vanishes. Walls warp, twist, and jet away. The ceiling swirls, presses down, and crumbles. For a moment everything slams and crashes and in this one moment Holly sees her entire life burn in an unexpected way, caramelize sweetly.

Scott looks up at her. His eyes glisten. “Please, don’t leave me. I don’t know what you want, but I’ll do anything. Don’t leave me.”

“Shh, Scott.” She ventures toward him.

“Don’t leave me.”

“Shhh. Shhh.” She reaches out, cradles his head against her breast. She feels Scott’s body pressed warmly to hers, her eyes open wide, not wondering, just feeling all of it. The thought makes her laugh aloud, a genuine laugh that climbs her like a vine. She says, “What more could I want?”

D Sprung Kurilecz grew up in Middletown Township, New Jersey. She frequently visited her mother’s family outside of Philadelphia including Grandparents in Conshohocken who owned a candy factory nearby in Norristown. Currently, she lives on the South Shore of Massachusetts where she teaches creative writing. Her fiction and nonfiction have received international award recognition and been published in numerous literary journals, including most recently, North Atlantic Review, Willow Review, The MacGuffin, American Letters & Commentary, Oyez Review, Blue Earth Review, The Jabberwock Review, The Broome Review, and West Wind Review. She has a Masters in English/Creative writing from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

            A couple old as mud wobbles to my counter. He scowls like he’s just stepped into dog shit, slaps his check down on the counter, [img_assist|nid=7087|title=Milja by Loren Dann© 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=284]and slides it toward me, message-side up. In a phlegmy voice he growls, “What the hell’s this supposed to mean?”

            The back of the check reads, “You are dead already!” Of course I recognize my Marigold’s arcane, Euro-trash scrawl immediately.  

            I say, “We choose our waitresses carefully from among the graduates of the finest waitressing school in Paris.” I lean closer with my secret. “Many of them have read deeply in philosophy. I assure you this is obviously a philosophical statement.”

            The old woman at his side sneers. “Well if this is philosophy, somebody should tell her parents.”

            I respond, “They are as heartbroken as you are.” The couple finally leaves and I’m relieved we’ll never see them again. Neither them, nor their family nor their friends nor their professional colleagues. In fact, a whole army of greedy, gaping, chewing, and drooling mouths now will never darken our door. I restrain myself from running to tell Ron the happy news. 

            My Tiger Lily moves in a nimbus of pale yellow light. Water glasses glitter in her presence, French fries glow at her touch. “Too late already so much.”

            She’s come from one of those countries I’ve never heard of, and I’m not embarrassed to admit there are a lot of those. I assume her English will never get any better, which is just fine with me.

 

            We all work together at the Kitchen Knook on 4th Street close to the shopping mall. I’m the late-shift cashier, a very demanding and responsible position, which is why I’m paid so little. Ron, the night manager, explains that the low pay discourages frivolous people who lack the drive and determination to take the job seriously. And he promises me that with another year of this responsibility I could go anywhere, do anything. Smiling he says, “Even president of, like, General Motors, or something.”

            Of course I’m impressed, even if I can’t remember who General Motors is. I’ve told Ron we ought to have cool military uniforms. I remind him that people love uniforms, and they love to have their food brought to them by persons wearing uniforms. I explain to him that basically, this uniform wearing is the wave of the future, and we need to be part of the future if we expect to succeed. I remind him that I watch the news, so I know what’s going on. I tell him that from what I’ve seen, eventually all the people feeding us will wear uniforms and this will make us all really happy.

            A young, attractive woman places her check on my counter, but she is not smiling. “You know,” she says, “this sort of thing usually indicates serious psychological difficulties.” On the back of her check my Little Petunia has scrawled, “The surface is without substance.”

            I respond, “We try to help those who are in difficulty.”

            “That may seem noble to you, but you should not inflict such darkness on those of us already entombed.” A tear sparkles at the corner of her eye. She turns and leaves, and my regret follows her like a thick snake. 

            My Buttercup waits tables, from 4 PM until Midnight. What she does is what waitresses do, and her customers bring their checks to my cash register, a cash register of which I am proprietor. They slide their checks across my counter accompanied by either a fist-full of cash, or a shiny credit card. We don’t take checks, that’s our policy.

            Our three other waitresses are named Camille, Ellen and Brandy. Hoping to pump up their tips, each writes a little message on the backs of their checks. Ellen is in law school, so she just writes “Thanks so much!” with a little diamond at the bottom of the exclamation point. Maybe she should change it to a dollar sign. Brandy writes, “Have a Good Day,” and puts smiles in the middles of the “O”s. The horror is that she earnestly means it. I tremble at her glance. But Camille is the worst. Camille writes, “Smile, God Loves you!” and she uses little hearts to dot the “I” and at the bottom of the exclamation point, and in place of all of the “O”s. It must take her ten minutes to draw the thing out. But my Squash-Blossom is different. Where others are mesmerized by the surface, she sees all the way down.

            “Stop touching yourself and start touching others,” is written quirkily on the check slid onto my counter by a young man whose acne will be with him until he’s collecting Social Security.

            He says, “Women these days are so fucked up.”

            I shrug. “Estrogen’s been leaking into the water supply.”

            His eyes get large. “You’re shitting me?”

            “Drink bottled water,” I say. “It’s the only way to be safe.”    

            My Rose-Petal always shares her shift with at least two of these other waitresses, along with a revolving door of dark, foreign-looking busboys who pass through so fast I never learn their names. So we have four waitresses for a three-waitress staff. Ron makes up the schedule. He says the task will make him crazy. Apparently, doing the schedule is the hardest thing he’s ever done, even from high school, figuring out how to cover from day to day, week to week. He begs me to pick up the bus-tray whenever I can. These women will drive me nuts, he says, and I’m sure that would be a short trip. But I remind him that busing tables is beneath the responsibilities of the cashier, who must handle money. After all, what is more diseased-ridden in our society than cash, filthy cash?

            Ron does not like me and never agrees with anything I say. But he does not want to hire another cashier. His cashiers tend to steal, and he tells me I’m the first in half a decade not robbing him blind. All Ron wants to do is sit in the back-office at the computer and download porn from the internet. He burns the porn onto CD’s and takes them home with him every night and does god-knows-what thereafter. I’m too nauseated to ask.

            “The brain atrophies before the penis,” is followed by a smiling sun-face with X’s over the eyes. The middle-aged guy belonging to this check grins as he leans across the counter. “I just took my pill,” he whispers, “and I’ve got a woody like a sequoia. What time does she get off?”

            “She doesn’t,” I assure him. “Our evil manager keeps her shackled in the basement. He’s the only one gets to see her.”  [img_assist|nid=7088|title=Out Building Walnut Hill: Pagoda of Weeds by Dae Rebeck-Sanchez © 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=225|height=225]

            He frowns sympathetically. “Any little thing I can do to help?”

            In fact I keep all of these complaints from Ron. He likes my Little Dove even less than he likes me. He thinks she thinks about him. If it wasn’t for the fact that she can carry six filled platters in the middle of a rush, she’d have been long-gone. At closing I count the register while she helps clean up. I lose count every time I look up to see her bending over. I lose count a lot, so this usually takes the rest of the night. Ron comes over to me after firing another busboy. He likes to keep in practice. “Stupid little shit,” he says looking at nothing in particular, and it takes me a second to realize he’s not talking to me. “Any of your creepy friends need a job?”

            I tell him my creepy friends are all over-booked. I tell him it seems like people will only hire the really creepy ones. He looks hard into my eyes. “You don’t like this job, do you?”

            “I love this job,” I say. “I gave up being General Motors just to work here.”

            He looks at me a moment and then he smiles. “My bet is you’re going to be here a good long time.”

            I ask, “Is that a promise?” I finish counting, or actually just give up and write down the amount on the slip that I already know is supposed to be in the register.

            “Oh yeah,” he says, “that is my promise to you!”

            As he walks away I say, “Thanks! Mom will be so pleased.”

            I time my departure to follow her out the door. Half a block from the restaurant I say,

            “Listen, you have to stop writing that shit on the checks. People get upset. They say things. They think things.”

            She shrugs without turning.   

            I say, “It seems they are not grateful for your subtle generosity.” She has gorgeous shoulders. I say, “If you don’t like gratitude you should be happy every day.” 

            Finally she turns, her arrogant frown thrills me.   

            “Do you ever have a good time?” She stops at the corner, her bus is already pulling up. She shrugs as she brings a token out of her pocket. Climbing the steps she does not turn. “Misery is underrated,” she says.

            The doors fold closed, her sweet butt framed sweetly in the folding bus-door windows. 

Nothing left for me to do but sigh, which I do louder than the bus.

           

            Two women. Young, secretary-types. The taller, older one slides the check toward me like we’re conspirators and this is grade school. On the back of the check my Dumpling has written, “A penis in the hand – better two in the bush.”

            “How was your meal today?” I ask with the blandest look I own.

            “Funny,” she says, and the two leave giggling. I spend the next ten minutes figuring.

  After closing, my Nightingale leaves without a glance back. I hustle to catch up, pull up just behind her right shoulder. Her profile fills me with something I cannot name. “Tell me? Was it the Freud that didn’t sit well, or the Kafka?”

            With her firm, long-legged gate she steps on the gas. I hustle double-step to keep up. She turns to face me without losing a step, her grin vicious and wise. “You!” And she says, “You!”

            At the corner she turns. A guy is just getting out of a cab. She strides faster, has her hand on the closing door, slips inside and is gone, all before I can say, “Me! Me! Me!”

            Two little girls, maybe twelve years old between them, timidly place their check and cash on my counter. On the back I read, “Death is your friend!” I shove the cash back toward them

            “Hey!” I say kind of loud and I’m smiling. “It’s your lucky day. You’re lunch was free! 

Hope you enjoyed it. Come back again soon!”

            I’m relieved when the little girls turn to each other and smile. The one girl says, “Thanks,” as she grabs the cash. The other says, “Yeah,” and they’re laughing together before they reach the door. And I’m relieved nobody is making a big deal.

            An hour and a half later and it’s slow. To my Dandelion I say, “We have to talk.” I take her by the elbow to lead her to the back. She shrugs me off, gets to the office door before I do, stands arms folded across her generous chest, and watches me approach like a hot dog watches mustard. I stand as close to her as I can without fainting. “Please leave the kids alone. If you aren’t about to say something nice to a kid, just shut up. How about it?”

The fire in her black eyes roasts my scrotum no matter which way I turn. When I don’t say anything she sneers. “Pot-licker,” [img_assist|nid=7091|title=Dinner by Kathleen Montrey © 2011|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=225|height=189]she says and then she moves past me like I’m a can of dead flowers. People want to know why I hate my life. 

            Back at the register Ron comes over smiling like his whole face’s shot with botox. He calls out, “Brandy, cover the register a minute?” He signals me to follow and we walk back to the storeroom. He flicks-on the light and closes the door behind us. He paces back and forth like he’s been constipated for a month. Watching him is about to wear me out. I sit down on a case of catsup bottles. He looks like he’s trying to think about something, and then he steps close and leans forward. “We have a problem.” Then he freezes, stares into my face like whatever I do next will twist my future absolutely. So I do nothing. “We’re missing a can of mayonnaise,” he says. Then he watches me like by knowing this I will now change into something.

            “A whole can of mayo, you say?” I squint and dip my head as if I know what he’s getting at. I ask, “Any ideas?” Because I don’t like having-to-think forced upon me. I’d rather that it sneak up on me, like a toothache, until finally I have to do something about it, but all along I’ve been sort of dealing with it in the background.  

            “One or two,” he says with cultivated inscrutability and then takes a step back, “one, or two.” 

            He sits down on boxes of canned soup and sighs, rubs his hands together and then along the tops of his thighs. The aura of defeat hovers over him as miasmal as a fart.

            To move things along I ask, “One of the gallon cans?” I’m incredulous because it is incredible, and I want to be certain before I continue with this thinking-thing. He nods.

            “And you’re sure it’s not misplaced?” I ask. “Because you looked everywhere?” Silence in this case is assent.

            “Well,” I say still not grasping the magnitude of our situation, “it wasn’t like it was a can of the good stuff. Can’t be more than a few dollars a can. I mean, we’ll make it up in tips.”

            Suddenly he looks at me in a way that I had never expected him to look. As if his face was a box of tools, and this expression was just not included. “You don’t get it, do you?” Suspicion tightens his eyes. “Can you be so fucking self-centered and naive?” He stands, slowly steps forward to bring his face right up to mine so that I have to lean back. “This isn’t just about the fucking money. It isn’t even about any fucking principles. The question I can’t answer is why? And even worse how?” His own suspicion turns to incredulity. “Pick up one of those fucking cans. How you going to sneak one of those out of here? Where the fuck you going to hide it? How you going to carry it so nobody guesses? What kind of fucking bag you going to put it in so nobody says, hey, where you taking that gallon of fucking mayo?”

            Before I can venture any stupid guesses he says, “And why? How much goddamn mayo can one family eat, for Christ sake?” He begins to pant, his voice is getting louder, and I’m wishing he brushed his teeth more often. “You can’t put this shit on goddamn breakfast cereal, for Christ sake!”

            Ron looks around the floor like he’s surrounded by scorpions. “And if somebody’s snatched the mayo, should we maybe put an armed guard on the tuna?” His face has become very red. “I defy anyone to explain to me why any normal human being would steal a gallon of goddamn mayonnaise!”

            Who could imagine Ron is a passionate philosopher? But he’s already given-up trying to find anything out from me. He’s turned and is already reaching for the door handle. So with hardly a twitch he’s opened the door. And there stands my little Flesh-Bulb.

            She’s looking a bit cowed though she’s easily a head taller than Ron. He stares up at her a long time. My Sweet Onion cannot return his look. He steps around her and returns to the restaurant. She stands another moment looking at the floor and then she returns to the restaurant. And me? I’m still sitting on my ass, Brandy covering the register for me, and I’m waiting for this head-thing to stop, so much like a blender running filled with steel screws. 

             A priest comes to my register smiling, slides his check toward me with his cash. I see her handwriting and tremble. I turn it over to read, “Sleep with God!”

            The priest says, “Your staff has a rare and subtle sense of the world behind the mask. I shall return often.”

            Panic grabs my throat, I suppress the scream and manage to whisper, “That would perhaps not be wise.” The priest’s smile disappears, as his eyes get large. Leaning closer I say, “Our manager is a Satanist, and he would say anything to corrupt you.” I drop my voice to add, “He would even lie to you.”

            The priest is about to turn. I touch his sleeve and add, “Pray for our souls.” The door closes and he never looks back.

            About a second later Brandy steps up smiling. “Let me know if you need me to cover for you.” Her voice is so bright I put on sunglasses.

            “That’s generous of you, but I can’t possibly burden you with this enormous responsibility.” 

            I pull another girly magazine from the rack and lean back as I open it.

            When I look up again I’m surprised to see Brandy still standing there. She cranks her smile up another level. “I hear Ron’s got you on some kind of inventory duty or something. About the tuna, I mean. It’s a little slow today. Maybe I could give you a hand.” Now I’m looking for the hidden camera. These places always have hidden cameras even though they usually don’t work, but if we have them, they must be really well hidden. So I ask, “Did you wait on that priest?”

  Brandy experiences a panic entirely out of proportion to the question, which relieves me completely. “No,” she says, “that’s what’s-her-name’s table. Why?” As if she doesn’t know. 

“Did he complain?”

            “No, worse. He was so impressed he threatened to bring all his priest-friends here. Does that make any sense to you?” I look at her real hard, a sort of highlight and underline to the point.

            She turns and scans the room as if help might arrive any second. She shrugs before she turns back again. “I guess some old guys find her type charming. Don’t ask me. Old guys are always so obvious.” There’s nothing to that with my name on it, so I let it drift. After another minute she drifts too, and I’m relieved.

            A withered and old woman about four feet tall staggers to the counter, slides her check

Across and says, “What the hell’s this shit?” My Little Cauliflower has written, “Sex is death.”

            “Words to live by,” I say hoping that if I don’t look at her she’ll evaporate.

            “Know anybody needs to get laid, give ’em this.” Then trembling, she scribbles a phone number at the bottom of one of the take-out menus stacked on the counter. She doesn’t wait for me to answer, but it takes her four minutes to walk to the door. When she’s gone I fold up the menu and shove it into my back pocket. I know that one never knows.  

            A heartbeat later Ron’s standing beside my shoulder. “You know who that is?”

            “Don’t know who she is, but I know what she wants.”

            “She’s maybe old and crazy but she’s rich as they come.”

            “Then, here!” I say and pass him the menu. “She’s waiting for you to call.”  

            He looks at the menu with widening eyes. “You shitting me?”

            “Would I shit you?”

            He grins. “That’s why I let you work here.” He walks away lips muttering the phone number like he expects to remember it.

            Walking behind my gorgeous Petunia as she makes her way to her bus I say, “Your English is getting so much better.”

            Walking fast she shrugs without turning. 

  Perhaps my little Artichoke is a secret poet. Her way with words is so elegantly awkward. 

Or perhaps she simply speaks as she thinks. Thinking and speaking so rarely coincide, but perhaps my Apricot Jelly has discovered some secret. And perhaps if I’m earnest and determined she’ll share that secret with me. We reach her bus stop and I’m about to peel off toward my apartment but she turns to me. “Every day is coffee. How is that? How is that?”

            I’m stunned. No words, her eyes are black icicles in bright sunlight. And for the first time ever, she smiles. Her teeth are bad but her smile is brilliant. By the time my brain remembers I have a mouth and the muscles in my jaw unlock, she’s already climbed the steps to the bus and has gone. When I get home I make a note on my calendar, it’s that sort of thing.

           

            Later in the week we’re really busy, a convention or something, I only find out after the fact, but ninety percent of our customers are female and almost all of them are young, some sort of convention. For the entire evening rush, Ron’s running in one direction and looking in the other. Beaming with his natural-born idiocy, he can’t get to these tables fast enough. He’s even carrying platters and busing tables, an explosion of activity that demands to be commemorated with a photograph it’s so unlikely. It’s Brandy’s day off, just Camille and Ellen and my Sweet Plantain, and we’re all stunned by Ron’s enthusiastic participation, though for different reasons and to different degrees. Ron’s one of those hiding-managers; don’t bother him unless the register’s short or there’s blood on the floor. My little Star-Light maneuvers around Ron like he’s a pile of dog shit. Even Camille finds his participation remarkable, so she makes a remark.

            “What’s he doing here?”

            “As little as possible.”

            “Doesn’t he know even how to carry dishes?”

            “Like the rest of us, he knows as little as he can get away with.”

            “Something’s going to happen,” she says.

            “Something always does.” I know I’ll be proved right, but I’m surprised at how soon.

            The collision happens when I’m not looking, but the sound wakes even the comatose. And before the last glass shatters, the stream of venom from my little Buttercup’s sweet lips is terrifying Ron shields himself with his server tray. Fortunately, my Sugar Cube has reverted to her mother tongue, so no one understands what she’s saying, but none of us needs a translation. Women at the tables giggle and point, terror, and embarrassment alternate in Ron’s eyes like lights on a billboard. 

            My little Lollipop’s pale face is red as a sunset, and then to all of our surprise, big, bright tears appear in her eyes. Its then my heart shatters like another dropped glass.

  In the next instant Ellen appears with broom and dustpan muttering about lawsuits. My little Nectarine is sobbing, tears glide down her cheeks, and I struggle to resist running over to lap them up with my tongue.  

            But Ron suddenly recaptures his self-importance and sense of disproportion and explains to my Love-Doll that she’s fired.

            Without a thought beyond a determination to spare my little Pop-Tart any more embarrassment I decide to tell Ron that I quit, and then describe to him how deep into Hell I know he’ll fall. And I’m ready to do this. And I promise myself I’ll do this, just as soon as I can step away from the register.

            But somehow my hands have become cramped around the edge of the counter. Somehow they’ve escaped my control and have conspired to hold onto the counter-edge. Do they know something I don’t? Do they understand something that has completely escaped me? Do they recognize something about me that I ignore at my own peril? Have they learned something from working here that I’ve forgotten, or worse, never even recognized? Just clamped onto the edge of the counter, and I can’t make my hands relax.

            Suddenly and to my surprise Ron’s standing immediately beside me. “You put up with this shit every day, you deserve a raise.” And then he mutters into my ear a number.

            He’s breathing hard so I’m pretty certain he’s serious. Frozen by greed and cowardice, perhaps, my left hand, the faithless hand, the treacherous hand, the hand that can’t be trusted, devious, cynical, and cruel remains gripping the counter. I call upon my trusty right hand, but clearly it has entered into a conspiracy with the left. My hands in remorseless grip of the counter are listening to Ron and they like the sound of his number. My hands are thinking about my landlord and my checkbook, and how good it feels to wrap themselves around a mug of cold beer. And thinking this they begin to think how they would miss all this. So my devious, treacherous hands betray me. As they so often have in the past, they do as they wish and not as I want. My hands are content to watch my little Pudding-Cup tearfully gather her things, exchange her apron for her overcoat, and then walk to the door. But worst, most dreadfully, most terribly, my hands smile derisively as my Tulip-Blossom steps out the door without even a single, vicious glance back.

            When Brandy comes in the next day she makes it clear to Ron she believes my Succulent Rasinette was dealt with too harshly. Ron fires her before her coat’s off. She looks hard at me as she leaves, but no tears for her. She’s tougher than I’d guessed. By the dinner-rush two new waitresses are plying our victuals; women who’ve been yelling at cooks and filling water glasses since Nixon was president. A reassuring stability has emerged, refreshing in its inconsequentiality.

            My hands are ecstatic with money play, but my heart remains unemployed.

In addition to the novel Master Siger’s Dream, recently published by What Books Press of Los Angeles, A. W. DeAnnuntis’s fiction has appeared in: Silent Voices, The Armchair Aesthete, Timber Creek Review, Lynx Eye, Los Angeles Review, Yemassee, First Class, Pacific Coast Journal, Short Stories Bimonthly, Luna Negra, CrossConnect, Mind in Motion (where he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize), and many others.

The first thing is we smell smoke.

            ‘Annie!’

            The Living Skeleton – Isaac to his friends – is the only one still stuck upstairs with me. He’s got one foot on the fire escape, skinny ribs slipping between window and sill, and he’s shrieking at me. ‘Come on Annie!’

            My legs are not my best feature – never have been – but now they’ve rooted like winter wheat and I can’t move. Panic seals up my throat. I have to rip my tongue from the roof of my mouth.

            ‘Come where?’ I gasp. ‘Through a slit of a window or straight through the wall? That fire escape’ll never take my weight. Get help. Just try Isaac, try.’

            It’s the most I’ve ever said to him.

            The Museum is both work and home to me.  The top floors accommodate many of the live exhibits but Isaac and I are the only ones still upstairs today. He’s having trouble with his digestion and has taken the morning off. I’ve been getting ready for the afternoon show: taking as long as possible and wanting to be left alone. There I am, all dressed up as Lady Macbeth. Out damned spot: even larger than life.

            Isaac’s face goes red and I know he’s about ready to wash his hands of me. He opens his mouth but then closes it again as his impossible bones slide away through the gap. Shoes clatter on the ironwork. Then my legs buckle and I hear the hiss of a hundred steam trains as the blackness threatens.

            Smoke stings my nostrils and brings me back, sharp. A squeeze of real fear sends me scrabbling across the floor toward the window. I put my hands on the panes of glass, find my knees, and hoist myself up enough to look out.

            Broadway. The circling crowd on the street below tip up tiny doll faces and point. Blood pumps noisily in my ears, competing against the wail of bells outside and the roaring fire behind me, eating its way up the stairs.  I manage to stand. Then I take a firm grip of the window sash and pull it up as hard as I can. Pain streaks down my shoulders, my toes grind against the wooden floor. It lifts a little. The window opens enough for a normal person to crush their ribs through, but impossible for me, for the giant, Anna Swan.

[img_assist|nid=7084|title=Nature Photography by Michael Morell © 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=250|height=129]

             ‘Just look at you, Anna.’ Mother used to shake her head over the sight of me with all the wonderment of a child surprising a butterfly out of a rose bush.

            My parents weren’t for Barnum in the beginning. His agent came down the track to our weather-washed house near Tatamagouche Bay and ran the gauntlet of all my brothers and sisters marauding about the yard. Mother and Father listened to him with arms folded and Scotch wariness glinting in their eyes. I hid behind the pantry door; caught a sight of tweed, of shining shoes, of a waxed moustache. Out there, he was almost a match for me in freakery.

            New York City. Piano lessons. Books to read. An exhibit, but a prized one. The second time the man came with his offer, hands were shaken.

 

           There are so many people down there on the street. They’re pointing, calling, running back and forth crazily between the fire trucks. They’re pouring out of the buildings opposite and from around the corner on Ann Street. I have to keep the fire away. I run to the door, slam it: push across a display case with a two-headed calf and a threadbare push-me-pull-you. I tug at the table – that won’t budge – but I strip down the drapes and push and poke them, wadding my makeshift barricade like a pastry-chef trimming a pie. Then I back away to the window and hunch beneath it, clutching my knees, balled up in prayer. These are bad minutes.

            ‘Get away from the window! Now!’

            The voice shocks me. My shoulders lock up. I have time to think – Irish? – and then one look at his grim face, one glimpse of his axe, sends me scooting away across the floor as the fire fighter smashes through the window.

            ‘Don’t be afraid!’ he calls. When I don’t move: ‘There’s no time for this.’

            ‘But the fire escape won’t hold me.’ Stiff, but suddenly calm, I get to my feet and watch his eyes track upwards to my face. That stops him.

            ‘I’ll be back,’ he says. Tears burn my eyes as his footsteps follow Isaac’s and I’m alone again.

 

          Barnum looked me up and down like a prize sow, made a few notes in one of his books and put me on a stand next to Colonel John Nutt. The Colonel stands about as high as my knee. I’ve got nothing good to say about him, yet I’ve stood next to Nutt and smiled till my lips dried up. Every night, from my very first night in the Museum, I’ve lain curled in my bed, picturing my mother’s tearful face as I waved farewell. I’ve cursed myself as the greatest fool of a girl there’s ever been.

            They say I was just born large and kept right on growing. That it happens that way with some folk. But my family loved me. They took no more notice of my size than it took to step over my legs when I sat on the floor to eat my dinner, or when they had to wait while I stooped and twisted my way out of our cottage door. I went to school and loved it. I thought I’d make a teacher, a good one too. For that I had to go to Truro and board with my aunt. I figured that the children would stare at first but that they’d soon settle to me and I’d do fine. I hadn’t bargained for the adults. Not for the staring on the street, or the sniggering and name-calling from the men as I walked home from school. It wasn’t like the Bay where everyone had watched me grow, year after year. Father came to take me home.

            Barnum’s man arrived three months later. Of course my parents said a straight-out no, but Barnum doesn’t deal in nos. And I was seventeen, desperate for a life. I wanted to learn. I wanted to see, and if that meant being seen, well, I thought it was a price I could pay. Thought it right up until Mr Barnum gave me a quick once over and then sent me up to meet the rest of the inhabitants of the American Museum.

 

             That fireman said he’d be back but I know it’s impossible. I’m trembling. The noise and the heat of the fire are coming for me. Perhaps the best thing would be to just open the door. To let it in. To get it over with. I’ve thought about death. But I’m swaying back and forth and a painful splinter of laughter climbs up my throat because I’m beyond counting the number of times I’ve wished I was dead. I’ve longed to be away from these gross bones and distended limbs, my drooping face, my hands, my- Lord! – There isn’t a particle of flesh on me I don’t despise. Yet here is death coming for me and suddenly I’m screaming inside, “I want out! Let me out! Get me out!”[img_assist|nid=20518|title=(null)|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=300|height=385]

            Something’s happening. I’m aware of a change and it takes me a moment. Then I realise it’s the sounds from the street. The bells are not ringing. The crowd is subdued.  There’s a thin mist of smoke in the room now, but if I keep low the air is still clean enough to breathe. I crawl back to the window. Glass scrapes my hands and knees but I feel nothing. I look down again. Everything’s stopped. From building to building every particle of road and sidewalk is taken up by men and women staring up at the fire consuming the Museum. Directly below I can even make out people I know. There’s Isaac and little Colonel Nutt. There’s that Josephine with her hirsute son. Next that girl – the Circassian Beauty – I haven’t even troubled to find out her name. And Millie-Christine. Although both twins gave me shy smiles, I’ve ignored them and tried my hardest not to stare. I’ve kept myself apart. I couldn’t stand to look at them. I couldn’t bear that they were looking at me, or that we were all so different, and yet our difference was the very thing that made us all the same. But now? What would I not give to hear the Two-headed Nightingale sing, to watch men scratch their heads and peer at the Feejee Mermaid, even to stand next to ugly old Nutt while he winks at all the pretty girls passing through our halls.

            People are pointing at something on the ground. I squint trying to see what it is. The something is moving upwards. There are two men. There is a crane. The men in the crane are waving. One is tall; one is shorter, fatter, with a high bald dome of a forehead. Unmistakably Barnum. The crane grows up past my window on the fifth floor. Barnum and the firefighter are in a cage, still a floor below. But they’re rising all the time. Hope slithers into the gaps between my ribs.

            ‘Here!’ The firefighter climbs in the window. He winces as the smoke catches his throat. Barnum holds a large white handkerchief over his face. His eyes bulge meaningfully toward me but I can’t understand a thing. I stand rigid, a dumb mannequin, as the firefighter winds thick ropes around my waist and under my arms. He binds in my skirt to my ankles. Then he somehow plucks from the sky a green blanket, slung with ropes like a hammock. He pulls me towards it and I see what they mean to do.

            I don’t hesitate. I lie on my front in the hammock and it’s tied up like shoelaces across my back. The firefighter climbs back into Barnum’s basket. I hear them shout. Ropes creak. Air slips between me and the floorboards. It feels…wonderful.

            And it is wonderful. I’m fearful: slung like a sausage, five floors up, swinging out of a window over a crowd of hundreds. I’m afraid: the ropes might fray, something could rip, I could slide from my casing and plummet into the ground below. But beyond that, it feels wonderful. I’m weightless, a feather. I am nothing and everything. I’m the great proud figurehead of a galleon setting sail from her harbor for the very first time. It’s the longest, shortest, coldest flight any Swan has ever taken. As I bump down amongst the hands and hollers of the firemen I’m gasping and laughing and coughing and shaking and smiling. I’m alive.

            ‘Annie!’ ‘Anna!’ ‘Anna!’ They’re all here. I’ve never felt this way. It’s as if everything inside me is broken and mended in the same moment. The others clutch at me and I cling to them. I’m beyond thought, oblivious to the fire and the work going on around us trying to save the building.

            Someone puts a blanket across my shoulders. One of Millie-Christine’s hands holds mine. A scalding cup of tea is pressed into my

other hand. Hot and sweet, it settles me back to earth.

[img_assist|nid=7085|title=Soon Forgotten by Kristen Solecki© 2011|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=249|height=166]

            Then: ‘Hush up, girls.’

            We all turn at the sharp sound of Isaac’s voice. Only a step away I see the pale balding head framed by baby black curls. His back is straight, his arms spread wide. A press of reporters leans in to hear him. Barnum lets them have it in style.

            ‘Here’s your headlines, boys. Here’s the news. Just write the name Barnum. P-H-I-N-E-A-S, T. Barnum. And ask your readers this boys! Ask them who else could find a crane so fast in New York City? Who else could set that crane to winch a girl measuring seven foot tall and weighing too many pounds out of a burning building? Who else boys? Why – nobody else, that’s who. Only Barnum!’

            Then he strides off into the crowd, crushing hands and nodding, balling his fists on his hips and shaking his head.

            Slowly it comes to us that we have nowhere to sleep, no work, no American Museum and yet we know we’ll be all right. We have Barnum.

 

 

Kate Braithwaite was born and grew up in Edinburgh. In 2010 she won the Random House Canada Student Writing Award and a novel excerpt, Charlatan, was published by the University of Toronto.  Her current project is a novel about murder and terror plots in 17th Century London. Kate and her family live near Kennett Square.

It was mid October when Stan found himself on the move again, towing a U-haul trailer through North Carolina and on to Virginia, destined for Maine. He had driven through the night and into morning, enjoying the calmness of the empty highway as it bent and bowed by small towns and hilly fields. These were the drives that Stan liked best. He felt unrushed, free to go as slow as he pleased, to savor what he suspected to be the last of such journeys. In Maine, a woman waited for him and for the ring he had promised her.

 

The Virginia border was an hour behind him when the traffic emerged, a body of short temper and patience that Stan felt no desire to be a part of. He ate breakfast at a diner in Richmond and watched the stream of work-bound men and women through picture frame glass, a cup of coffee in his hand. They seemed too young, like children who had wandered away from their parents’ grasp only to find themselves running libraries, selling cars, answering phones, too frightened or cowed to admit that there had been a mistake. Stan wondered if any of them would see him through the window or if they’d only notice their own reflection, their eyes shining with prospect. It had been men and women like them who had forced him to retire, their talk sweeter and outlook brighter, their presence too encompassing. From his forties into his late fifties he had managed a small brokerage firm in Atlanta. Now he did nothing.

The food was a disappointment. The eggs were overcooked, the bacon under, but he ate them without complaint and tipped well. This was his idea of grace. He drove on through the morning and into the afternoon, making a lunch out of a couple granola bars and a handful of cashews from a can he kept in the glove box. It felt good to make good time, and he admired his own restraint, though he could feel the beginnings of a shake in his legs, a touch of weakness in his grip. Pulling off now would be too costly; another hour lost to waitresses, booths that were made for two and people who would only look at him as long as he wasn’t looking back. No, at this rate he’d be in Scranton by evening, and that’s where he wanted to be. It had been there, more than forty years ago, that he and his first wife, Rachel, had wed, and thirty six since he’d been back.

The thought of visiting her had come to him as he had driven through South Carolina, the stillness of the night having given his mind ample room to wander. At first the idea had seemed impulsive, crazy, but he hadn’t been able to deny its appeal. Something had stirred inside of him, the itch of curiosity, and it was this compulsion that drove him as he steered onto the exit for Scranton. As his truck coasted down the ramp, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was a bug being sucked down a drain. That, even if he turned around now, the current was going to draw him back to this place and swallow him in its depths.

Stan didn’t recognize the town. He remembered flatness, simplicity, but all around him buildings rose into the evening sky, their shadows long cast. They weren’t the skyscrapers of Atlanta or New York, but the burgeoning offices and apartment complexes were enough to make him feel smaller than he had felt as a child. Every now and then he’d see something he remembered: the street corner where he had won his first fight, the one where he had lost the second and third, but these memories, once momentous, now seemed like marbles cast on the sidewalk. He turned down Lackawanna Avenue and drove past what used to be the Thrift Discount Center, now a Rite Aide. It was there he had had his first job and kissed his first woman, a girl named Debbie who chewed peppermints and had refused to call him anything other than Stanley. She meant nothing to him now, but there had been a time when he was convinced he would marry her, a time before he had known Rachel.

The sheer unlikelihood that Rachel still lived in town didn’t faze Stan. Though he could feel the sweat on his fingertips and chin, a calmness overtook him as he drove past the water tower and vacant lots. He recognized more and more, driving by the old homes and neighborhoods, the houses of friends he had used to know and women he once loved. He mused that, in his young life, it must have been his lot to love every woman. He had adored all of the girls in his high school, their differences in countenance and body thrilling him. Some even returned that affection, and it was times like those where he felt he had discovered a great secret, something dark, too great for any one man. It had scared him.

The house sat at the end of a long, oak-lined cul-de-sac. It startled Stan to see that it had grown, an addition sprouting from the left side, a two-car garage from the right. He had remembered it as quaint, cozy even, but now it appeared lifeless, its red shutters perfectly level and aligned. The lawn was as trim as the neighbors’–better than the neighbors’–and the rose bushes had bloomed brighter. Even the sun seemed to favor this house above all others, the gentle light of the early evening cradling it in its arms, the house that Stan had once called home.

He parked in the street. It would have been too brazen to park in the driveway, especially if it wasn’t Rachel who lived there now but a family he had never met. To him, it seemed impossible that the house could be Rachel’s. She had been simple, liked simple things, and the house spoke of complication, sophistication even. This house was not Rachel. Still, he decided that he would knock, to be sure that his suspicions were correct, and then leave.

The man who answered the door was lithe, skeletal, but tall. Stan had never considered himself short, had in fact been as tall or taller than any of the people he had worked with, but this man towered over him, the top of his head almost grazing the door frame. Opening the door seemed to be a struggle, and Stan watched the muscles of the man’s forearms as they tightened, as if the door had been hollowed out and filled with lead plates. He couldn’t have been older than fifty.

“Hi, sorry to bother you,” Stan said. The man now looked down at him.

“It’s no trouble. Can I help you?” the man said. His voice surprised Stan. It was gentle.

“I don’t think so. I used to know somebody who lived here but I think they’ve gone,” Stan said.

The man’s brow furrowed. “Are you looking for the McCafertys? They’re next door.”

“No, no. Her name was Rachel.”

At the mention of her name the man’s face began to sag. The corners of his mouth drooped. “So you don’t know,” he said.

The words came out quietly, somberly, and Stan could feel a rushing in his ears. All around him the world rustled in the breeze. The trees were swaying, the roses crumpling under the soft press of the wind, but all Stan felt was the concrete under the soles of his shoes.

“She died,” the man said. “Two years ago.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” Stan said. The words felt empty, an offering of something he didn’t have to give. Stan felt detached, as if it had been he who had delivered the bad news. His back ached, but his heart did not, and it was this coldness that bothered him as he watched the eyes of the man in the doorway. How dull they looked.

“Come in. I was just about to open a bottle,” the man said.

Stan followed him inside. The house was neat and clean, obsessively almost, as if every surface had been scrubbed and sprayed. Pictures hung on the walls but none were of Rachel. They were of young, smiling faces that bared their teeth at Stan as he passed through the foyer and into the living room. When the house had belonged to him, it had been a dusty, dimly lit place, but now no shadows hid in the corners. There were lamps everywhere. All of them were lit. The man pulled a bottle of whiskey and two tumblers from a glass cabinet in the dining room and motioned for Stan to have a seat in a large, overstuffed recliner.

“How did you know her?” Stan asked as he sat.

“She was my wife,” the man said, placing the bottle and tumblers on a glass coffee table. He poured the drinks with a steady hand, though the weight of the bottle seemed to be pulling him over.

“I’m sorry,” Stan said.

The man nodded. “ It’s Paul, by the way,” he said and handed Stan a glass.

“Stan,” he said.

Paul paused for a moment. “Stan Richardson?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Stan said. At first he had considered giving a fake name, to pretend to be an old friend, then excuse himself as soon as possible. But he was stubborn and unwilling to anger the dead. He had decided to face this head on, but he felt the first twinge of regret in his chest.

“So, you’re the boys’ father,” Paul said.

“That’s me,” Stan said. He didn’t want to think of his sons, Greg or Daniel. In his mind they were still nine and seven, watching him pack his truck, sobbing.

“Ain’t that something,” Paul said. He stepped toward Stan, as if to take the chair next to him, but instead walked across the room and sat down on a couch.

“Are they all right?” Stan asked. It was the wrong question, he knew, but he didn’t want to appear uncaring. He didn’t want to see himself in that light.

“They didn’t take it well,” Paul said.

“Of course,” Stan said.

The two men sat quietly for a moment. Stan could hear the barking of a dog and the wind whistling through the shutters, the hum of a dishwasher in the kitchen. All he wanted was to be out of there, driving into the night where no eyes watched him and nobody knew his name.

“You really screwed them up,” Paul said.

What surprised Stan was the lack of anger in the man’s voice. There was no outrage, no condescension, just sadness.

“It wasn’t supposed to be that way,” Stan said. He wondered why he had come, or rather why he now stayed. There was no retribution to be had or wrongs to right. It had been far too long for that, time burying it so deeply that he would never be able to reach. Paul downed what was left of his whiskey and got up to get another. Stan filled his glass.

“It was cancer, if you wanted to know,” Paul said, returning to his seat.

“Jesus. What kind?”

“Ovarian. They didn’t catch it until it was too late,” Paul said. He smiled. “Well, obviously.”

Stan didn’t know if he was allowed to laugh. “I wish I could have been there,” Stan said. Two years ago he had been wrapping up his divorce with Michelle, another chapter of his life he would rather have kept closed.

“It was better this way,” Paul said. “She went quietly.”

“Yeah,” Stan said. He knew he would have had nothing to offer, no words of comfort, or a kiss on the cheek. All it would have been was more pain, memories of the life she was about to leave behind.

“So, where are you headed with that?” Paul asked. He pointed a thumb out the window behind him, towards the truck and trailer. Stan explained his trip. The twenty years in Atlanta and the woman he had come to love in Maine. Her name was Trisha, a masseuse he had met while on vacation in Augusta.

“Well, she prefers ‘physical therapist,’” Stan said. He left out what would be considered less savory: that he had been married at the time. That she was almost twenty years his junior. That he had lied about being married before. He didn’t know how he felt about getting married again. It just seemed like the thing to do.

“You’ve been driving all day?” Paul asked.

“For the most part. Was hoping to spend the night somewhere around here and pick up again tomorrow,” Stan said. He realized how presumptive that would have sounded if it had been Rachel he was talking to now. How see-through and wrongheaded.

Paul seemed to study him for a moment, swirling the whiskey in his glass. “ You can stay here if you want. Not many nights I have a drinking buddy,” Paul said.

Stan wanted to say no. He felt like an intruder, barging his way back into a life he had no business being a part of, but there was a sincerity in Paul’s voice that made him feel responsible, a tired look in his eyes.

“All right,” Stan said.

Paul seemed to brighten at this and downed the last of his whiskey before getting another. They finished the bottle and Paul went down to the basement, returning with a glass jug of moonshine.

“Rachel loved this stuff. No idea why,” Paul said, but Stan knew. Her grandmother had told him in a faraway kitchen, almost half a century ago, about how she used to rub Rachel’s gums with moonshine while she was teething. She had boasted about how quickly it calmed her down, and Rachel had blushed, admitting that she still had a taste for it. He took a strange sense of pride in remembering this, as if in some way it vindicated him.

“We’ll do shots,” Stan said.

The night disappeared along with the liquor, the two of them going back and forth, shot for shot. Paul, despite his slight build, held it well, and Stan worried that he might lose the unspoken contest between them. He wanted to believe that he was made of strong stuff. That he was a real man’s man, but he could feel himself slipping, sinking deeper and deeper beneath the waves.

 

It was only when he was on the road again that Stan could begin to make sense of the night before. He had awoken around noon to an empty house and Paul’s car missing from the driveway. There had been no note or keepsake left behind for Stan’s benefit. No empty gesture to bring him comfort he didn’t need. It appeared as though Paul hadn’t thought about it at all, but had just returned to his routine. There had been some cold coffee in the pot and the last bit of eggs in the pan, but other than that, no indication that he had been there at all. At first Stan had thought about wandering about the house, to rummage through the rooms that he vaguely remembered, but realized that there was no memory of him left there, that forty years had swept him from the stoop like dust. It would have been a desperate act, to dig through the closets and crawlspaces, and so he decided to leave. All he left was a scrap of paper on the coffee table. “Don’t tell them I was here.”

The sun was shining as he left Scranton, just as it had the day he left thirty six years before. He hadn’t thought of turning back then and he didn’t now, content to disappear just as suddenly as he had come. There was nothing left for him in this town, and so he would forget it, just as he had forgotten so many people, so many places. By nightfall he would be in Maine, unpacking his life into a new house, though he doubted it would be his last.

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Hicks was born and raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He is a senior at the University of Pittsburgh and is working on his first novel.

Letti gasped when she saw a realtor’s lockbox on the door to the townhouse. Would her key still work? Yes, but inside, the [img_assist|nid=6822|title=The Johnstown Flood by Rachel Dougherty © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=225|height=300]darkness reeked of carpet shampoo and fresh paint. She turned on the entryway light and rushed into the empty living room. Then she raced up the stairs. At the top, each door opened onto slices of inanimate space once inhabited by her mother, her stepson, and her husband. She clutched the banister. Unsteadily worked her way down. On the floor by the front door lay an envelope.

Dear Ms. Ferenz:

I write at the behest of my client, Mr. George W. Luciano, who wishes to inform you that he has filed for divorce. Copies of his court papers were provided this morning to your attorney of record.

Your mother is lodged at the Treetop Suites on West Pearson Street. Your dog is kenneled with its vet, Dr. Sandman. Your personal possessions have been stored with Closet-Away-From-Home on Anderson Avenue. Mr. Luciano’s son has resumed residence with his mother, in accord with the terms of custody contingent on Mr. Luciano’s marriage to you. A buyer has made a bid on Mr. Luciano’s townhouse, which remains his exclusive property pursuant to your prenuptial agreement. Please leave your key when you depart the premises.

My client does not wish to speak with you, but he has asked me to convey to the attached note.

Sincerely, Thomas Metzger, Esq.

 

Letti turned the page.

 

Letti:

You have been away sixteen of the last twenty-five weeks. I cannot take care of your mother and dog another minute. I cannot even take care of my flesh and blood son. I’m through with this charade. You can’t make me what I am not. We are terminally alienated, but you of all people will know how to survive this disaster. This time focus on yourself, not me or anyone else. George

*

As George intimated, Letti was trained in disaster response. She’d coped with everything from famine to chemical spills to violent conflicts. Her specialty was providing shelter for the dispossessed, and her basic recovery sequence was built on The Four D’s: denial—despair—dialogue—decision. Getting from denial to decision could take a while in places like Bangladesh or Somalia. It was tough in the U.S., too, where, after twenty-six years overseas, she had settled to focus on her own life and the lives of those dearest to her. That meant her elderly mother, Mom-mom; her third husband, George; George’s teenage son, Tony; and Norton the dog—but it progressively included the people she helped as a part-time FEMA disaster response specialist.

These past ten days she had been in southern Virginia, where a storage tank containing two million gallons of jet fuel collapsed[img_assist|nid=6823|title=Bronze Light by Brian Griffiths © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=249|height=166] and overflowed its containment pond, sluicing down local route 460. The red-hot catalytic converter of the first car that drove over this slithering liquid ignited it, causing an instant backflash through the gates of the tank farm. Another jet fuel tank and three liquid fertilizer tanks exploded, sending flames a thousand feet into the air and shattering windows four miles away. Total combustion: nine million gallons. Seven people dead, fifteen injured. Nine houses lining Rte. 460 destroyed. The groundwater that fed the wells of another thirty-one houses compromised. So she had her hands full. The only fun had been a helicopter ride she’d finagled for an overhead tour of the disaster site. Fires of that intensity tended to stay put, etching the earth with sharp-edged artistry.

Wink’s Mill was the nearest untouched town, so she stayed there in a battered old brick hotel with a sagging wooden front porch painted battleship gray. Cell phone service was vagrant, but most nights she spoke to George who said nothing about what he had in mind. “Letti,” he did say one night (without her detecting either the surrender or anger in his request), “what’s the song today? Sing me your aria.” By this he was inviting her to tell him about the procession of dislodged supplicants who, in their destitution, always reminded her of defeated churchgoers in the cathedrals of homelessness that encircle the globe, no roofs over head, no floors under foot, no possessions or effects. She’d sit there in her office trailer feeling humbled and enriched by the way their eyes scribbled distress messages in the air. Hymns, actually, not arias. Things she’d remember at night: the red creases around a man’s eyes, the hush of children who’d be better off playing outside but wouldn’t leave their mother’s presence, the impact of telling someone it would be three weeks until any modular units could make it from Arkansas when one day was eternity and two days hell.

Letti was gifted at this, yet guilt-ridden about it. She could not say no to a FEMA call just to keep a lunch date with George, or take Mom-mom to the mall, or walk Norton. She would pack the car and drive however long it took to meet the trailer in the dangerous regions of destitute America where the poor always seemed to be the ones who were burned, poisoned, and tornadoed. This was better and worse than the Philippines or Guatemala. There, the wailing went on for days, but she was insulated by strangeness from the depths of agony. Here, she was affected so deeply by the misery of people with whom she really could communicate that she had to shut down their agony fast. She’d look a victim in the eye and say firmly, “Now talk to me. I’m sitting here to help you decide what to do, and remember this is today, not yesterday. Talk to me about today and decide what you want to do.”

Saying things like that took it out of her. She could barely make it to bed at the end of the day, so she thanked George for asking but sang him no songs. “I’ll tell you when I get back,” she promised and remained conscious for just a few seconds longer in the high-ceilinged hotel room with its tall casement windows, drafts, and moody mixed glow of street lamps and the Pizza Hut across the way where she’d eaten dinner. Fifty-seven years old, short, thin, blonde, rigid as a clothing store manikin. Out cold, until the alarm at six and another coffee-fueled day in her chilly trailer, where what she thought about her own displacement didn’t matter. It was only temporary.

*

First, she went to Dr. Sandman’s to try to retrieve Norton, but Dr. Sandman’s strip mall clinic was closed. Then she drove to Treetop Suites.

“Were you surprised?” Mom-mom asked, meaning about George having the townhouse repainted and the carpets shampooed. She was wearing her blue cardigan, the one that felt so good because of the way it warmed her arms. “He didn’t want me to tell you that’s why he was clearing us all out.”

Awash in humiliation, Letti was unable to come out with it. Definitely surprised, she answered.

“That George is always doing things,” Mom-mom said.

“That George,” Letti agreed. She finished mixing a vodka and Coke from bottles she found in the courtesy refrigerator. “But his cell phone isn’t working, and the note only said you’d be here. Where’s he staying?”

“The Hilton. Better workout room, he says.”

“With Tony?”

“Tony’s with his mama. I think they’re getting along better.”

“Whoa,” Letti moaned, easing herself onto the little sofa by the window and pulling up her legs.

Mom-mom looked at her through her almost cosmic convex lenses. She asked how the disaster had gone. Letti said it was pretty hard at first. The tank field was a chronic safety violator that neither paid its fines nor corrected its flaws. The jet fuel tank was one of the few that had been updated—the 1936 rivets were switched to welds in 2003—but that led to the structural flaw that caused its collapse.

“The day you left I saw some coverage on the news,” Mom-mom said. “Poor Letti, I thought, she has her hands full this time.”

If by force of will or experience with marital failure, Letti were able to leap out of the chasm of denial and despair into which she had plummeted, that would get her more quickly to dialogue and decision, but there was Mom-mom, eighty-eight years old, a plucked-chicken of a woman with multiple miseries who didn’t know—or did she?—that Letti had done it again.

*

Even though Letti did not believe in God and equated faith in providence with supine passivity, she had encouraged her first husband to prepare for the ministry by becoming a missionary. “This is something you could do wherever I go,” she had coaxed him, wanting so badly to make things work. The fact is she was crazy about Gerald. She loved his slow, murky, uncertain lovemaking and credulous faith in what he called “the theater of the divine.” But fifteen months turned out to be the romantic limit to Letti and Gerald’s reckless self-endangerment. The memory still broke Letti’s heart: two twenty-somethings at war with each other in a rotting house in Léopoldville, Congo, in 1968. Prayer meetings in the huge living room from which Letti would escape by playing Big Pink very loud upstairs…no food, but plenty of gin, dope, tar-thick coffee, and Mom-mom’s Famous Boiled Water…and Gerald determined to cure himself of dengue fever by reading Psalms. When he did recover, he returned to the U.S., where he sued her successfully for his share of common property, including her small inheritance from her father.  He had died at fifty-one in Lackawanna, New York, from which Letti and Mom-mom were permanent refugees. Letti called it Slagville in honor of the Bethlehem Steel plant’s horrific waste. She was haunted by childhood memories of mountains of snow growing blacker and blacker outside her bedroom window as the winter progressed. Lawns, fields, rooftops, and even woodlands were encased in metallic sheets of frozen soot. Who wouldn’t leave and never go back?

The second marriage, nine years later, was to a fellow humanitarian relief specialist, Franklin. Shouldn’t that have worked, especially since Letti’s guilt about her first marriage led her to urge Franklin to put himself first and climb the bureaucratic ladder, even if this meant that he took USAID assignments in Washington when she went overseas? Yes, Letti loved Franklin’s steadiness and practical idealism and ex-Marine physique, but she had acquired habits of personal accommodation during her nine years as a divorcee, and she clung to them during their separations. Getting wind of this, Franklin countered with accommodations his own. Divorce again. Another decade alone before the homing instinct fooled yet again into thinking if she tried one last time, she’d finally get it right. She’d do it for Mom-mom. She’d do it for her old age. She’d do it because they couldn’t spend another year in the waste regions of their wanderings, always talking about where next, always uneasy about their lives among strangers, kind or indifferent, interesting or boring.

But how could she talk with Mom-mom and bypass George’s reproach: I cannot take care of your mother and dog another minute? It wasn’t Mom-mom’s fault. Letti knew this; she was the one who put George through the Chinese water torture of knowing the exact temperature Mom-mom liked her coffee…of Mom-mom’s scandalized attitude toward spots on drinking glasses…of Mom-mom’s excruciating pacewhile walking: three steps, stop, look around; three steps, stop, look around. Perhaps if George had not had a teenager on his hands. She thought of Tony—he had a face like a chickadee, black hair and white cheeks—storing food in his room under the bed and in drawers and on the windowsill so he wouldn’t be exposed to conversation when making continual trips to the kitchen. And she thought of how she encouraged George to retire from the IMF, swallow the requirement that he give his first wife half his pension, and accept a new job, at sixty-one, as advisor to the Islamic Alternative Bank, guiding a mismatch of billionaire Bedouin backers and hotshot young Arab financiers as they accommodated themselves to the restrictions and prejudices they encountered trying to do business in the U.S.

“You were meant to do this: think of your Arabic. Think of all your experience in the Middle East and Washington. And I’ll be right here, no more work overseas,” she promised. “We’ll scrimp until we build up our finances. Mom-mom and I take up zero room. The townhouse will be fine for now.”

George accepted her arguments with almost fathomless desire and credulity. He wanted his son back and needed a new wife to persuade the court. So he said he was willing to put up with Mom-mom if Letti put up with Tony. Besides, he adored Letti, her spunk, her resourcefulness, her worldliness. Was this love? Letti thought it might be. Sitting with him over a glass of wine before dinner in a nice restaurant, she noticed that he no longer habitually wrung his large hands together as he talked, his big thumbs kneading his meaty palms and hairy knuckles. She also noticed that he would watch her every step of the way back from the ladies’ room. Would not start the car until she had her seatbelt fastened.

But the exciting, unpredictable, exhausting separations piled up, making perfect sense to Letti, none to George. She had long lived in a world that always collapsed; he had had the world collapse on him once—his first marriage—and didn’t want it happening again. They had spats, loathsome spats. She couldn’t bear his ornate, self-hating progression from complaining to moaning to giving up.

“We goofed,” he’d say, enjoying the way that word, “goofed,” belittled their attempt at playing house again in late middle age. “We’re each entitled to the air we breathe, but breathing the same air together is asphyxiating us. I’m thinking this can’t last, Letti. I don’t know how to be married to you. You don’t want to be married to me. Off you go all the time, saving the world. It used to be Suriname, now it’s Appalachia. God knows why. What are you running from? What is out there?”

“People in pain are out there.”

“We’re not in pain?”

“They have no homes!”

“You call this a home? You don’t want a home. Why are you dragging me through this?”

“So divorce me,” she challenged him at last. Yep, she had said it. The tremendous affection she felt for the man and fear of being cast back out on the streets of the world wasn’t enough to keep her mouth shut. And bingo, she got her wish.

*

Letti fixed another vodka and Coke, pouring the silvery Smirnoff first to make sure there was room to get it all into the plastic glass before adding the gelatinous Coca-Cola. She knew she wouldn’t be able to turn George around, unsell the townhouse, and get Tony back as easily as she would get Norton from Dr. Sandman.  She was a schemer, but not that good a schemer. And to do what? Hole up in suburban Washington and die?

Mom-mom sat there quietly with her thin, speckled hands folded in her lap. Letti wondered if you could call this,though silent, a dialogue—like a silent auction or a silent movie—about her denial and despair. She asked herself, too, if that was the essence of her place in the world, a glimmering vault in which she flew soundlessly, never finding a broken window through which to escape

“Well, dear,” Mom-mom said at last. “What are you going to do?”

“He may have been the best of the three,” Letti said.

“I don’t know. I really liked the Preacher.”

“But Gerald never had a son to fight for, and he never took on anything like that crazy Islamic bank,” Letti said. “I think George deserves a lot of credit.”

“I ought to go live in a nursing home,” Mom-mom said.

“You know I would never allow that.”

“Then I suppose you deserve some credit.”

Letti made a dismissive sound, “Pah.”

The women sat a while, ruminating. There couldn’t be an explosion because that would be too hard on Mom-mom. The sadness did leak out, though, and pool around their feet, and under the sofa, and in the corners of the room. Back to disorientation, Letti thought. Time and again she’d counseled people to let it go; it was over: get to dialogue, make a decision, move on. And now once again it was her turn, but she did not want to listen to her own advice.

Robert Earle was born in Norristown, PA and educated at The Hill School and Princeton.  His short stories have been published in dozens of literary magazines across the U.S.  His first novel, The Way Home (DayBue, 2004), is set in Raponikon, PA (a fictionalized Norristown).  He is also the author of a memoir of a year as a diplomat in Iraq, Nights in the Pink Motel (Naval Institute Press, 2008).

Rafael’s job in Philadelphia was simple: keep water glasses filled, put bread on tables, bring forks, clean messes, clear plates. [img_assist|nid=6830|title=Purple Bunny by Nicole FitzGibbon© 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=225|height=159]But his unstated job, the one that no one spoke of but everyone understood, was the most important: be invisible. He kept his mouth shut and his body moving, swift and silent in black, pedaling his bike through the narrow South Philly streets, weaving amongst the tightly packed tables at La Strada, slipping between conversations and bottles of Chianti. He was good at it now. He had been practicing from the moment he stepped through a hole in a razor-wire fence and into a hostile desert where helicopters scraped the night sky with searchlights, rifles waiting.

Tonight was busy. Thursday is the new Friday. That was what Carlo said before the shift. We’re going to be packed, so keep things rolling. It’s hot out. Make sure nobody runs out of water. And Rafael did. The woman at table fifteen was getting down to a few centimeters above her ice cubes. Rafael moved in with his pitcher. She thanked him between bites of broiled fish. In the desert there had been no ice cubes. No pitchers. No thankyous. Just the heat, that unbelievable ceiling of heat pressing them down as if to crush them into the sand and be rid of them. The crinkle of an empty water bottle, the last warm drop on his parched tongue. Table eleven had ordered. Time for bread. Rafael walked back to the kitchen, scooping the empty plates off of table eight on his way. Thank you, thank you. In the kitchen there was a clatter of stainless steel.

Ant’ny, what’s this mod on table nine?

She don’t want basil.

Yeah, I can read. But the pesto’s the focal point. Without that it’s shit. You know better!

Javier caught his eye at the bread warmer. Fourteen needs a new napkin. Rafael nodded. The water, the water. His pitcher was empty, and the lady at twelve needed water. He filled his pitcher while he waited for eleven’s bread to warm. You want more water, eh? I’ll give you water. Rafael breathed in, breathed out, opened the oven, pulled out the bread with tongs and popped it in a basket. Out on the floor voices rose, ebbed, and collided, their tones warm like the candles that glowed on the tables. Wine glasses clinked. The lady at twelve’s glass was perilously close to empty. Rafael dropped the bread at eleven and a napkin at fourteen, and just as twelve finished her last sip, he appeared by her side with the pitcher, an angel bearing water. And into this image tore the rough voice, teeth stained with tobacco, eyes red from the sand and casually vicious. I’ll give you something to drink.  Rafael flinched as he turned away from the table. Javier caught his eye. Rafael lifted the corner of his mouth up and gave a slight nod. Bien bien. Everything bien.

Last Wednesday he’d been sent home early with nothing to do. Apparently Wednesday was not the new Thursday. When he’d [img_assist|nid=6829|title=Up The Bridge by Robb McCall © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=151|height=200]stepped into the apartment he’d heard Inocencia sobbing through the bathroom door. Everything bien bien here in el Norte. He’d slipped out without a sound to the bar down the street. When he came home hours later, drunk, she pretended to be asleep and he pretended to believe her.

Seventeen had finished their appetizers. Appetizer—he had taken this word apart, and it meant something you ate to get hungry. In the Arizona desert, heat and thirst stretched hunger into a thin, secondary concern. In the dusty plaza in the Sonora border town where the bus had finally left them, the coyote had told Rafael and his friend, A few kilometers through the desert to your ride. A day or two at the most. My guys, my polleros, will take care of you. Rafael cleared the plates from seventeen and replenished their water, the ice cubes tinkling in their glasses as he poured. Thank you, Rafael had told the coyote. Thank you for your help. But really, it was thousands of dollars that did the thanking, thousands of hours in the Puebla fields, thousands of maize cobs piled in Rafael’s baskets. By the second day across the desert trails the blisters on his feet had begun to bleed. They rationed their water: no one got more than two bottles a day. It was around noon on the third day when the woman from Guadalajara asked for more.

Rafael watched Anthony describe the specials to table five. Anthony’s grandparents had come from Naples. Rafael had searched for Naples on his cousin’s computer and it looked like a nice place to live, with palm trees and beaches and plentiful pizza, and Rafael could hardly imagine that it had once been so poor that people had fled it, as Anthony told him, in the rat-infested bellies of ships that took three weeks to cross the Atlantic. Rafael imagined, sometimes, when he heard Anthony speaking his few phrases of Italian to Carlo, that his own grandchildren would grow up speaking only snatches of Spanish, forgetting Mixtec entirely, and have nothing of their homeland but a headful of stories selected by their elders and retold so many times they had crystallized into fables. They would scoff at the thought of going back to the small town of San Mateo Ozolco, would probably never even make it south of Mexico City, would know nothing of Mexico but hat dances and mariachis and tequila. No. He and Inocencia were only twenty. They had time. As soon as they had saved enough money they would return to San Mateo and build a house with a real roof and a refrigerator with food in it, there between the two volcanoes, the silent snow-covered Aztec emperor’s daughter, Iztacchihuatl, and her forever fuming lover, the warrior Popocatepetl. Everyone knew the story. The emperor had sent the lover to battle in Oaxaca to get rid of him for good. But the emperor’s daughter died of grief, and when her lover returned, he carried her out and buried her, and the gods blanketed her grave with snow.

The four people at twelve were on dessert now. They were finishing their second bottle of wine, and the joke must have been good because the woman with the curly dark hair threw her head back when she laughed. Inocencia had laughed like that. Rafael had known her family, of course, but had met her when he got work unloading the truck at her uncle’s store. Rafael was a wisecracking skateboarder, his hair spiked, always blaring punk rock CDs his cousins brought back from Mexico City on his headphones.Inocencia was a reserved sort of girl, even, her words gently witty, her face calm as she weighed tomatoes and counted bulbs of garlic. It had taken him three weeks to get her to laugh like that, three weeks of her left eyebrow raising and the corner of her lip turning up, each time making him want it more, until finally he got it, her smooth throat stretched back, and that warm strong laugh let loose for him., and he knew he wanted to hear that laugh forever. Inocencia didn’t laugh these days.

The woman at table twenty was on her third glass of water, and she shook her head to her friend as Rafael refilled it. God, I’m just so thirsty! On the third day they had hunkered down in a dry creek bed for a bit of shade, and that was when the woman from Guadalajara asked for more water. She was in her twenties, maybe, a city girl with a missing tooth and a husband waiting in Los Angeles. She had been panting all along the trail that morning, falling behind, and the polleros were getting impatient. Rafael had lingered toward the back of the group, trying to urge her along, and was the only one who saw her slip on a rock as they climbed a hill. He gave her a hand up. Está bien? She nodded, bien, and Rafael saw blood on the knees of her jeans and fear in her eyes. And now she had finished one of her two bottles for the day already and was begging for more. You want something to drink, eh? Ha ha! She shook her head, but they took her behind the mesquite trees, and Rafael watched the last drop of water roll around in the bottom of his plastic bottle. In the kitchen water flowed into his pitcher, cold, clear. Everything clear. When he had told Inocencia on the phone that he didn’t want her to come across, there was just silence for a few seconds on the line, the quiet volcano. She said that she was coming. That they would be together. And he knew there was nothing he could say to stop her. Or maybe there was, but he’d wanted that raised eyebrow, that laugh, the strong smooth bones of her hands wrapped around the back of his neck as she kissed him, so bad that he could imagine it was only birds shrieking behind the mesquite trees. That the woman from Guadalajara had wandered off and found work on a ranch somewhere out there. Anthony gestured to him. The bar needed ice. Rafael started to fill a bucket, the scoop grating against the ice. The ice was in his stomach now, the way it was when he’d come home to hear sobbing on the other side of the bathroom door. That sobbing was a new sound, in the same voice as the laugh, his laugh. But this terrifying sobbing was not his, and never could be. And as Rafael remembered how he’d crept away from the door, out of the apartment without a sound, invisible, his face burned with shame and he threw his shoulder into the scoop, grinding it into the ice harder, louder. He felt the power in his shoulders, bigger now from the weeks of pressing the dumbbell he kept at the foot of their bed. Every Monday he added more weight. Javier appeared by the ice machine, his face concerned. Qué haces, wey? Tables thirteen and eighteen needed water. Fifteen and sixteen needed to be cleared. The bar didn’t need that much ice. Rafael hauled the bucket to the bar and poured it into the bin, the sound like stones clattering down a mountain. In the late afternoon of the third day on the upside of a slope, the woman from Guadalajara vomited and collapsed to the ground, her eyes rolling up like white balls on a pool table, her breath quick and ragged. When Rafael and another migrant tried to pull her to her feet, she just moaned. Rafael wanted to try to carry her, but the pollero would have none of it. Get up, he said, or we leave you here.

Leave me alone, then, you bastard, she said. Déjame en paz. In peace. And so they did. Don’t worry, La Migra will find her, the pollero said as they scrambled on over the mountain. And so they did. They found her two months later. Rafael had checked the Phoenix Spanish-language news websites every few days, that chill clawing in his stomach, until one day, there it was. Badly decomposed, wearing a blue t-shirt, missing one tooth. In peace.

And that was what Inocencia said, in the first week after she’d arrived in Philadelphia, her face closed and her eyes somewhere[img_assist|nid=6831|title=Self Portrait, Chemo by Janice Hayes-Cha © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=259] else, in the desert maybe, searching for water in the scorching sand. Or maybe it was that he’d gotten so good at being invisible. He’d tried to kiss her for the third night in a row, slipped his hand around her waist under her nightshirt, trying to reach to wherever she was, and she sucked breath in fast through her nose and looked at him and asked him to please, Rafael, for now, just déjame en paz. In peace. Rafael imagined that if peace was anywhere, it was at the top of Iztaccihuatl, sleeping forever under her blanket of snow. But not here. Table fourteen needed more water, and Rafael poured the glasses nearly to the brim. The graceful middle-aged couple dressed mostly in black thanked him. They were going to the theater, had to be out by eight-thirty, Anthony said. By the time Rafael got home it would be past midnight, and Inocencia would be home from her job at the taquería, sleeping, or not sleeping, her hair spread on the pillow like black silk in the light from the bathroom, her long lashes resting in the dark hollows under her eyes, and instead of asking her the question he could not shape into words, Rafael would grab the case from where he’d stashed it in the back of the hall closet, sling it over his back, and walk a few blocks to an alley where he would enter a dank basement littered with electronic equipment and empty beer bottles and take out the used Stratocaster inside, holding its cool smooth body in his hands. You know how to play this thing? the guitar’s original owner, a guy everybody called Joey Z, had asked. Rafael shrugged. I played an acoustic back in Mexico. But I can’t make noise in our place. Joey Z laughed. Don’t worry, I’ve got a soundproofed basement. We usually finish up band practice around midnight. Come by tomorrow after work and I’ll show you how to use the amp. Rafael did come by, and he came by the next day too, and hit the riffs he knew again and again and again, and although it might not have been good, it was loud, just for an hour it was louder than the screeching behind the mesquite trees, louder than sobbing, louder than the echoes of that full-throated laughter, louder than anything he’d heard this side of peace.

Marleen Hustead is a 2008 graduate of Rosemont College’s MFA program. She teaches English at Philadelphia University and Temple University. She lives
in Philadelphia with her Chihuahua, Pepita, and is hard at work on a novel. (Marleen, not Pepita, that is.)

I am the first child my mother never wanted. [img_assist|nid=6459|title=Warm Autumn Sun by Madeleine Kelly © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=250|height=251]

That I have two brothers and a sister is a testament to her docility, not her change of heart. My earliest memory is of her perfume, an exotic, spicy scent, and of her dark hair swinging down around her pale and pretty face when she rescued the hem of her dress from my grasp. I was always reaching out for her. This is not selective memory. In photos she is ever lovely, and I am ever longing—one chubby arm outstretched—to touch her. One day (I must have been five or six years old and whining for her attention) she told me, “I’m not your mother.” And, for a moment, I believed her. It’s when I noticed for the first time my mother’s dreamy blindness and deafness, inhabiting what world I didn’t know. All I knew was that she was unhappy when summoned back to mine.

For all his faults, my father was the one who took care of us when we were sick, staying with us until we fell asleep. “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques. Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?” he’d chant over and over, but I’d resist, waiting once more for the “Sonnez les matines. Sonnez les matines,” loving the sweet cadence of his voice, his hand on my forehead.

Since he walked out on her, it falls to me to be my mother’s caretaker, not that she needs one yet. But if it comes down to that, it will be me. My brothers live on the east coast and my sister Sharon, who lives in Vancouver—Washington, not Canada—and close enough to drive down in a few hours, hasn’t spoken to our mother in years. “You’re a sap, Suzanne,” she tells me. “You can’t change the past.”

I’ve taken today off from my job at the Puget Sound Views to drive my mother to a cardiologist in Seattle for a consult about a condition that causes her heart to slow and lurch disconcertingly. She and I live on opposite sides of the Narrows Bridge; I’m in Tacoma and she’s in Gig Harbor. I leave early enough to first drive down to Point Defiance Park to walk the waterfront, a salve for the resentment I will inevitably feel when she fails to evidence any interest in those parts of my world that do not intersect with hers.

A mile long crescent of walkway snakes from the parking lot at the boat launch to the beach along Commencement Bay in the penumbra of the Cascades. Mount Rainier wears a corona of clouds, so I can’t see its distinctive ram’s head shape, even though the weather is unusually fine for December. That’s where I planned to be today for my ritual respite after the jumpy rush of making another deadline—up in Mount Rainier National Park on a small island in the middle of the Ohanapecosh River, at the Grove of the Patriarchs, filling my lungs with oxygen from the ancient trees. That stand of Douglas fir, western hemlock, and red cedar has been growing undisturbed for nearly 1,000 years, the river protecting the Grove from fire, the gods protecting it from all else. I am fascinated by the elegant symbiosis of the nurse logs, which perpetuate that lush forest. The fallen trees decay by degrees into a carpet of mosses. Then lichens, mushrooms and fern transform them into nurseries for cedar and conifer seedlings. There are nurse logs here at Point Defiance as well, along Five Mile Drive, but I’ve run out of morning.

There’s no bridge traffic at this hour so I can easily hazard glimpses down at the choppy swells and the blue-gray ropes of rip tides in the Narrows. On the other side of the bridge, I take the second exit and drive around the harbor where the marinas are filled with masts soldiering in the breeze, before looping onto the access road to my mother’s house. I turn left at the crooked Madrona tree, drive down the unpaved lane and park on the gravel. Her house, rented since my parents’ divorce three years ago, is shoebox plain with dated appliances and drab carpeting but situated on a sandy spit of beachfront amid grander homes. Inside it smells pleasantly of bracken from the stones and shells and driftwood she has placed on every windowsill, in every shallow bowl, her only contribution to this furnished house. Her decorative stamp is outdoors, in the whimsical sculptures, the tiles embedded in the pathways, a hot tub enclosed by a filmy forest of pampas grass.

My mother beams her hello from the open doorway. Nothing personal, it’s the same smile she offers everyone. She used to be beautiful, with a hint of animal wildness peeking out in the otherwise buttoned-up old photos, her belt tied askew at her cinched waist, a bit of tooth bared between the dark lips, her hip cocked and knees aslant, as provocative as she dared, it seemed to me.

Even now at nearly seventy, she is prettier than I, with her thick hair—streaked and cropped spiky-short—and espresso eyes. She wears an ivory silk blouse with a narrow black skirt and a light wool jacket the color of plums. Two-inch heels and tinted stockings show off her elegant ankles and calves. I am raggedy with lack of sleep and rumpled for lack of clean laundry.

Both my daughters were home over Thanksgiving break—Elise from Boston, where she lives with her father during the school year, and Kit from Ann Arbor, where she lives with her lover, also named Kit, also a woman. When the girls are home, except for work, I put the rest of my life on hold. Not out of obligation or sacrifice but because I enjoy their company; Elise’s mordant wit and discerning intellect; Kit’s dead-on mimicry, her hilarious political rants. I’d like them even if they weren’t my daughters.

We cook together and scout thrift stores, ride the ferries and walk the waterfront. Sail in good weather. They catch up with their friends and each other when they’re home. But they’ve stopped visiting their grandparents. My father berates my former husband to Elise, who adores him, and crudely mocks Kit’s relationship. “You just haven’t met the right guy, honey,” he told her.  “Believe me, he’d change your tune.”

My mother, on the other hand, pretends that neither the girls’ father nor Kit’s lover exist.

“I had a bad night,” my mother tells me, offering her cheek to be kissed.

“You look wonderful.” I say this as if it were an accusation.

“Oh, well . . .” she waves her hand, dismissive. “I felt it though.” She rests her fingertips in a cage over her heart.

“What? What did you feel?” I always have to shape her language to understand her. She’s maddeningly vague.

“My heart,” she says.

“Felt it what, Mom? Stop? Slow? Hesitate?”

“Just different, you know. Like it’s been.”

My mother has unwittingly chosen my profession. I untangle syntax, un-mix metaphors, interrogate reporters until I know the story as well as they, so their articles will read with clarity and grace. I sigh. It doesn’t matter what she says, anyway. We will have empirical evidence soon. The exam, EKG, the labs.

My mother waits until I pull onto I-5 and am dodging traffic before she tells me she has been seeing my father. The way she says it, I know it isn’t for coffee.

“He’s married,” I say, although that’s not what worries me.

“Maybe it’s better this way.”

“Why? So he can beat her up and date you?”

“Don’t be melodramatic, Suzanne.” Her tone is mild. “Your father never struck me.”

When I feel compassionate, I remind myself that she was constricted in every possible way: by poverty and gender, education and class. What she had in abundance was imagination. It was how, I understood later, she could pretend my father was exhausted or worried when he was overbearing or cruel. How she could reframe his badgering as concern, his insults as instructive. The dreamy quality that kept her at a remove from me, from us, was how she survived. The pity was she couldn’t imagine herself free.

 

The cardiologist is bald except for a low-lying fringe of wooly grey hair, and is extremely tall. Tall, and good-looking in a coarse, sensual way. His fingers are thick, his mouth wide. He swivels in his chair and rests one ankle on the opposite knee, his thigh a long and solid plank, his shoe like a small boat.

“I haven’t seen you before, Mrs. . . .” he glances down at her chart, “ . . . Garner, have I?”

“It’s Ms.,” my mother says. “And yes, I had a consult in August.”

He puts down the chart and studies her. “I think I would have remembered you.”  He manages to make this sound provocative.

He stands and extends his hand, “Come, let me listen before we do the EKG.”

He helps her onto the examination table, tells her to unbutton her blouse. She is, I see, wearing a lacy camisole. He slips the stethoscope under its frothy trim. Her breast disappears under his cupped hand.

“Fifty beats per minute,” the doctor says. “Any dizziness? Nausea?”

“Sometimes.”

“Which?” he asks her. “How often?”

Good luck, I think, trying to understand my mother.

He takes her hand and tries again. “How about now? Do you feel lightheaded now?”

It infuriates me that this man is flirting with my mother—and not in a patronizing way. Some remnant of her glory days clings to her, some superannuated estrogen patch or pheromone. My boyfriends, my husband, all of them were taken with her. I don’t know how my father stood it.

No, that’s a lie.

My father is the sort of man who likes his women beautiful. Beautiful and frail. He does, of course, resent them for it later.

“Christ, Adele, must I do every little goddamned thing for you?” he would say after my mother handed him a light bulb or a recalcitrant pickle jar.

“Of course you must, Mitchell,” she’d say, and laugh as she rubbed up against him, the sensuous gesture revolting to my teenage self. Was it that or the way in which my father was captivated?

He always got the best parts of her. And when my father was away, at work or on a business trip, it was as though she went away as well. From the time I was twelve, I became the woman of the house in his absence, signing permission slips, helping with homework, defrosting the ground beef for dinner. My mother wore aprons fussily, like a wardrobe in a play. Pots got burned and dinners ruined amid chapters of a book.

I am fulminating about all this when my mother blinks three times then slumps to the floor.

The doctor kneels beside her, bends his ear to her mouth. When he places his hands between her breasts, it takes me a second to realize it’s CPR. 

“Get my nurse,” he tells me. “Now. Move!” 

I intercept the nurse in the hallway. “My mother collapsed . . . he wants you . . . ”

The placid-faced Filipina races past me into a room, then pops right back out, like in a cartoon, dragging a red metal cart behind her. She summons another nurse who rushes into the same room and wheels out a gurney.

It’s only minutes before the doctor is running alongside the gurney, two nurses in attendance, the Filipina straddled across my mother’s chest, her hands like pistons revving up my mother’s heart. I run behind until they disappear into the service elevator at the end of the corridor. I’m punching the elevator buttons when the receptionist tells me they’ve taken my mother to the Cardiac Care Unit.

“Fifth floor,” she tells me. “Bear right.”

           

I call Sharon from the family waiting room. “I’ll come down,” she says.

I know she means for me, not our mother. The kindness undoes me. “Okay,” I manage through the knot in my throat. “Good,” I whisper.

“Suze?” 

I can’t speak.

“Suzanne. You’ve done your best.”

“Her, too,” I say, and hang up before Sharon can tell me that’s bullshit.

While I wait, I close my eyes and conjure the hushed embrace of the Grove of the Patriarchs, immerse myself in its green glory until I am as tranquil and still as the trees themselves, and so I can’t believe it when the handsome doctor comes out with that look on his face, the one that says everything isn’t okay and never will be again.

           

The room has a ghoulish green glow, all fluorescence and scrubs and easily washed plastic chairs. Everything else is white, the crib-like hospital beds, the linens, the bathroom fixtures exposed to passers-by.

I edge past the patient in the bed closest to the door, my heart knocking in my chest, to look for her but the second bed is empty. I double-check the slip of paper in my hand. Room 3605-A. The first bed. I spin around. I didn’t recognize her because this time she has gone so far away that she’s never coming back.

I know this even before the doctor arrives and tells me it wasn’t her heart, after all, but a burst aneurism that caused the stroke, which has spared her heart but ravaged her brain.

My breaths seem to enter my chest through a long narrow tube, one cold milliliter at a time. I back out of the room grateful for the obligation I have to call the others. I call my brothers first. They take it in stride. To them our mother has been as impartial and reliable as a nurse log, giving off nutrients but little else once they took off on their own.

“I’m sorry, Suze,” they tell me, acknowledging that the loss is mine alone.

I call Sharon but she’s not home so I don’t leave a message. I call my father last, reluctant to subject my mother to either his scrutiny or his lack of regard. Until I can make contact with Sharon, I walk the streets, wandering over to Pioneer Square, then into the lobby of the Alexis Hotel where I buy a pack of cigarettes in the gift shop. It’s been a decade since I’ve smoked but I decide I’ve been prudent for too long, that I should have been bolder and said my piece when I still had the chance. Three cigarettes later, I throw away the pack and dial Sharon again.

She cries when I tell her. Great gulping sobs, which astonish me. I’d expected her to comfort me, but it’s the other way around. When I hang up, I realize that she must have harbored the same secret hope all the years she’d been ridiculing mine.

 

The hospital room is dark now, except for the frenetic flickering of the TV. The remote is pinned to the sheet near my mother’s head, the stagy voices and static-y soundtrack leaking onto her pillow. I can’t tell if she’s listening but she’s not watching the screen, her eyes are closed. Wait. If she turned on the TV, then perhaps she’s trying to work her way back to speech, back to comprehension.

The nurse’s voice startles me.

“We turn it on for them. Sometimes it helps,” he says as he fastens the blood pressure cuff onto my mother’s arm.

“Is it helping now?” I ask, a tendril of hope taking root in my chest.

He shrugs. “Hard to tell.”

As soon as he leaves, I stand close to the bed.

“Mom,” I say. “Mom. It’s me.”

She looks up at the sound of my voice. Her gaze slides down my face to my hand, which she seizes in a fierce grip.

“Mom,” I try again, and this time she doesn’t even look up but just tightens her hold on me until my hand aches and her nails inscribe their hieroglyphics in my flesh.  One by one, I pry her fingers loose and cradle them between my palms until they slacken.           

“It’s okay, Mom, I’m right here.” I tuck her in and brush the damp hair away from her still lovely face.

I station the green plastic chair where she can see me and settle into its cool, unyielding embrace, prepared to stay until she falls asleep. She reaches for me through the bedrails. I take her hand and begin, “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques.  Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?”

Grace Marcus has been published in The Bucks County Writer Magazine, TheWritersEye, and Women on Writing. Her novel, Visible Signs, was a semi-finalist in the 2007 William Faulkner Writing Competition. She lives in Bucks County, where she is working on a second novel and a collection of short stories.

I’d moved to Atlantic City to take care of my father. My sister Daphne had called from Tampa Bay to say that his number was up.  [img_assist|nid=6458|title=Rittenhouse Square by Nancy Barch © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=250|height=183]

“What are we going to do?” she asked me, like we talked all the time, like we was a thing.

“How bad?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Jillian had left me. I was living in a basement apartment in Bensonhurst whose only window looked out to a dry cleaner’s vent. She’d run off with the guy, Nick, who’d fix our car; they sparred together at the zendo. Jillian was a brown belt. She’d go to the zendo morning and night, and suddenly our car was never in better shape. I was most likely gambling, as I gambled every day. I always had a bet on. That was my fix, my way of getting through this life that is supposed to bring happiness before the inevitable fold.

I’d been in Gamblers Anonymous for six months before my sister’s phone call. We didn’t talk much, which is to say we didn’t talk at all. Daphne had run off when she was just seventeen with an Iranian guy who sold jewelry. The guy, Danny—Danny! I remember my father saying, What kind of a name for an Arab is that? Danny?!—was more than twice her age, and he took her to Tampa Bay where they’ve been happy ever since. They go on cruises and have Danny’s mother over for dinners, and the last time I had seen Daphne—maybe four years earlier when I was in the middle of my master’s thesis on Joyce, Yeats, and Synge, and an Anaheim Raceway horse-betting binge—she had told me they were thinking of children.

I don’t know what happened with her plans. I didn’t follow up. There was my teaching assistant money from the English department going to football and basketball and the track, there was a short, six-month bout with drinking, and then Jillian’s pregnancy, our marriage, and the miscarriage. And then the move back East where we lived with Jillian’s mother—herself addicted to mah jong and juicing—and the trips to Atlantic City to visit my old man (who’d been born there of all places and who’d moved back to be near the casinos). And the jobs I could not keep—men’s suits, ice delivery, shoes—and then the final blow, where I found myself washing dishes in the back of a Brighton Beach Ukrainian discotheque. The owner’s brother had busted one of my shins and had said he’d bust the other if I didn’t make him back the money I’d borrowed to put on a sure thing.

For better, for worse, my father did not survive long after I moved in. He was taken care of by the guy, Mr. Stottlemyre, who lived across the hall. The whole building, The Sea Crest, was out of another era. No one in the building was under 70, except the blacks who, Mr. Stottlemyre said, were in there either on behalf of the state government or the Atlantic City Improvement Council.

“You can’t blame the shvartzes,” Mr. Stottlemyre said, running a mop around my father’s baseboards. “Where else are they going to go?”

Stottlemyre was 81. He’d lived in Toronto and then moved to Providence and eventually he’d ended up at the Sea Crest, floor seven, just across from my father and the room that had the lady with all the cats.

Stottlemyre was in costume jewelry. That’s how he put it, I’m in costume jewelry, such that I checked to see if he was wearing it. He told me how Providence was the costume jewelry capital of the world, and when he said it his eyes bulged wide and the veins stood out from his neck with conviction. He’d flail his arms to make a point, and then sit in a chair and say nothing. He smoked constantly, whatever he could borrow. He’d escaped the Nazis with his brother, who’d died packing fish in Toronto. And he was a member of the Atlantic City Polar Bear Club. Somehow, he’d gotten my old man to join. Every Sunday, at eight in the morning, they plunged in and swam.

My mother died when I was twelve, so my father had long been a widower. He never remarried. He worked in the train yards for the MTA, the big yard outside of Bensonhurst. I remember him always fixing things and always working. I went to St. Stephen’s in Bay Ridge and my sister to St. Mary’s, and when I’d get home she’d be out with a boyfriend and my father would be out at the yard, though I soon understood that he wasn’t working at the yard as much as drinking. Drinking killed him. He had cancer of the bladder, and because he didn’t get it looked at until too late—and he’d have to have been pissing blood for a month—the cancer got into the surrounding muscle and lymph nodes, and that was it. He carried a scrap of shrapnel in his shoulder his entire life—sometimes it would set off the metal detectors at airports when he flew to Florida to see Daphne and Danny at Christmastime—so I guess pissing blood did not seem too much of a big deal. The one time he came to see Jillian and me in Pomona he was drunk the whole trip. But we did get him into the Pacific—he always loved to swim—and he put Jillian’s niece up on his shoulders—you could see the thick scar from where the metal went in—to show her the seabirds in the sky.

He drank to the inglorious end. He’d get cheap drinks at the casinos, especially the older ones, which were being taken over, so nobody cared. If you ever want to knock off a casino, get them when they’re being sold, when the employees feel betrayed.

Stottlemyre, on the other hand, used the casinos as an upscale walking track. He got my father to come along: a small group of oldsters power-walking from one air-conditioned lobby to the next.

In the casino lounges, my father would start with beer and end with gin, and Mr. Stottlemyre would extinguish the cigars and turn off the living room lamps and pull a blanket across my father, who always had the windows opened in a building whose super used the heat sparingly.

For years after my mother died, I’d come down in the mornings for school and find my father asleep on the sofa. He slept only sporadically in the bed he’d shared with her. They were dancers; they’d met at one of those vast VFW dances, when my mother was just eighteen. She worked at Bell Atlantic until her death, and her death was a lingerer. She was in pain for nearly two years. That’s why my father didn’t call my sister until near his own end, I think. That and the drinking. He didn’t want to remember. At the end of my mother’s life, he’d go straight from the yard to the hospital, and she would have one roommate after another, in various stages of agony, and he’d sit in the visiting chair, and he’d wait for my mother to wake, running for the nurses if she wanted even the simplest thing. Thinking of it now, the panic in his body must have been crippling without a drink

Daphne and I were there when she died. She died with an intern yelling—really yelling—into her ear to see if she’d come back to life. I hid behind the silver wrap-around curtain, and my father found me and picked me up. His face was wet, and he told me I was a beautiful boy.

On the day my father headed to the big Caesar’s Palace in the sky, I was at a GA meeting. We’d got him so he could die at home, such as it was, at The Sea Crest. A male nurse came in once a day. Mr. Stottlemyre was there all the time. I wondered about Stottlemyre’s family. Stottlemyre had kids all over the place, as he put it, but in the five months I’d eventually live at the Sea Crest, I never saw them visit even once. Stottlemyre cooked and took my father’s sheets to the laundry and one time when I came home they were smoking cigars and he was covering my father’s hand with his own.

They talked about the War. My father had never talked about the War before, with me or my sister, as far as I know, and I don’t think much with my mother. I heard my father tell Mr. Stottlemyre that until he’d fought beside one, he’d never liked Jews, had heard they were stand-offish and yellow. Stottlemyre shrugged, said he’d heard all Irish were drunks. And he told me a story, one night when neither of us could sleep, when the Giants game was over and the TV reception was frazzled by a shore-line lightning storm, how in 1945, in northern Italy, with the War for all intents over, a German soldier no older than fifteen had shot at him. My father said he couldn’t believe it. He let the German kid get away, staring right into the kid’s face so the kid would know his benign intentions, and then the kid fired a second shot at my father—my father, an old man sergeant at twenty-one, who’d nearly bled to death from shrapnel in the neck, whose eardrum was punctured by mortar. The German kid leapt onto the back of a hay wagon, pointed his rifle right at my old man, and my father fired and killed him with a single shot to the head, the boy’s head bursting, he didn’t have to say it, with the lightning outside the window, with the glass untouched on his knee, all over the dry hay.

At the GA meeting, I talked a little about Jillian. About the late miscarriage, in the sixth month, how we’d feel Shea practicing kicks in the womb. Flying Monkey, Jillian would laugh. Horse Scraping the Hoof. I’d place my ear to Jillian’s belly to hear our daughter. I’d sing to Shea. Born to Run and Dirty Old Town. Jillian would read her stories. Maybe she came to know the fighting; maybe she came to know how in her name I was betting her upbringing away.

My sponsor, Bob A., a former card shark who’d had his teeth literally kicked in when he tried to hustle the larger games—we all had our little indignities—told me that Jillian hadn’t left me, but that I chose to let her go. Although I’m not the type, I nearly decked him.

When I came back from the meeting, Mr. Stottlemyre was reading a Bible and had covered my father’s whole body with a blanket. He didn’t look up when I came in. He sort of bobbed there, leaning over my father, praying, two water glasses half-full with seltzer, a cigar still smoking in the ashtray. The broken television set, the framed photograph from his wedding, the dusty sea bass mounted on the wall. I excused myself fast and headed for the bathroom.

I splashed my face with water. There were cigar ashes on the tap. My father would sit on the toilet and tap his cigar ash into the sink. I remember this as a kid, my mother complaining, It’s like living with Groucho. My father with, It’s the only place I can sit in peace!  She was a duster, she always had the feathers flying. The house could be on fire, my father would say, and you’d run back inside to straighten! Once, winking at me, she’d vacuumed his chest hair when he’d fallen asleep eating crackers on the living room sofa. He jumped so high and laughed so hard that our cat leapt out the window onto Twelfth Street.

When I looked up from the ashes on the sink, I stared into the complete whiteness that I had experienced the time I was wrapped in the hospital curtain while the intern yelled into my dead mother’s ear. Out the opened window, an ambulance sirened. And then I realized that Stottlemyre had covered the medicine cabinet mirror with a towel that my father had swiped from the Holiday Inn. In the mirror, where my face should have been, was a casino in terry cloth relief.

I turned to the window. I hoisted it higher. The cold snapped in. Past the low roofs of Pacific Avenue banks of light swirled with the storm clouds; snowflakes flashed red, green, and gold. Beyond the lights, white caps crested the ocean. I looked down to the Avenue. The rows of air conditioners, the square windows each the same, dropping toward the street, where the ambulance’s lights whirled in front of a pawn shop, Gold Bought Here.

In the living room, Mr. Stottlemyre’s eyes were shut, the Bible open in his lap, the window shade pulled tightly behind him.

“Did you call someone?” I asked.

For a moment he seemed as far away as my old man. “Call your sister,” he suddenly said, and without opening his eyes he made a karate-chopping motion with his hand.

I pulled on my coat—a heavy coat that in fact had once been my father’s—to get out of there, and I walked up Kentucky Avenue fast. I walked past St. Joe’s, where my father had been confirmed in 1937, snow falling across headstones as in every Irish novel, past Dino’s Grinders, his favorite, Real Gravy Served Here. I crossed Atlantic and Pacific and up along Baltic and cut through the shitty little park the casinos built—seagulls clustered on the waterless fountain, a homeless kid slipping a bag over his head—and out onto the frigid boardwalk, and I wish I could say that I dove straight into the dark water like one of Stottlemyre’s bold cronies.

Instead, I sat on an icy bench—all the benches in Atlantic City have their backs to the sea—and watched two bronze horses guard two minarets. A couple of dealers came out, leaned on the concrete railing at the top of the flashing escalators, the Taj Mahal bright behind them, the gold plate, the lapis-like archway, inside the clashing of chips, the whorls of slots and roulette, the clean snap of blackjack and the tumble of fresh dice.

When my father was home from the Army for a few weeks and thinking about, I imagine, what to do, he drove down to Alabama to visit a guy he’d served with. He spent the night sleeping on a roadside in South Carolina, only to be awakened before sun-up by a cop about his age, rapping on the windshield. You can’t sleep here, son. He says it was the son that did it. My father stepped out of his car and decked the cop who merely looked up, lying on the ground on his back, and let my father drive away.

One asks for mournful melodies;

Accomplished fingers begin to play.

Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,

Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

The dealers lit cigarettes. When I called Daphne, Danny answered. He was in their back garden, in Tampa, spraying their lemon trees with soap.

Jeff Bens is author of the novel Albert, Himself and many short stories.