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[img_assist|nid=4309|title=Fish, Simona Mihaela Josan © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=151]There was nothing wrong with where we lived, except that the neighborhood was radioactive and the house was pitched at a sharp angle. When I was in high school and obsessed with my body, I used to lay my dumbbells on the floor, and they’d roll to the wall of their own accord. My room was small and cluttered then, and my bed was missing a leg, so I had to prop it up with a brick. My sister Margaret was a year older than me and had a job at a flower shop. She was a mistake, or an “oops” as my mom referred to Margaret’s conception in rare moments of kindness, and was born while my parents were both in college. The wedding was thrown together in under two weeks, and my parents held what passed for a legitimate reception in a dance hall called the Luau Lounge, which was famous for the massive fiberglass pineapple that teetered precariously over the front door. Then came the house and the mistaken impression that if they filled it with daughters and tasteless knickknacks, they could turn it into a home or, at the very least, distract themselves from the fact that half of it was sinking into the earth, a sign, my father would lament while Margaret was in earshot, visited upon him by God to let the world know that he had made it with the wrong girl at the wrong time.

My mom invested in commemorative dinner plates and porcelain figurines she saw advertised in the slick, shiny inserts of the Sunday paper. I wish I could say I was being facetious when I say she “invested” in these things, or that some finely tuned sense of irony had inspired her each time she shelled out four payments of $17.95 to the Dearborn Mint for an eight-inch statue of a baby in a bunny suit or a frog in a tutu or a lone wolf baying at the moon, but my mom truly believed that most, if not all, of her purchases would pay off in the end. After all, the ads always noted in block capital letters accompanied by charts and graphs, many of the mint’s limited-edition plates and figurines went on to sell at auction for upwards of ten times the original sale price. Despite their alleged worth, however, mom kept all of her collectibles out in the open—lined up on the narrow mantle over the fireplace, crowding bookshelves and windowsills, and competing for showcase positions on the dining room table or in the china cabinet.

In addition to Margaret, I had two younger sisters, Kathy and Rose, and none of us were allowed to touch any of mom’s collectibles because, in her words, they were our legacy. From dad we would inherit four guitars and a copy of what appeared to be every LP pressed in the United States between 1966 and 1987, a period he frequently referred to as the golden age of vinyl. Growing up, I assumed that everyone had armies of porcelain figurines and massive stacks of old records cluttering their homes, and I was always amazed and partially scandalized when I discovered they didn’t. It was like finding out that my friends and their families didn’t believe in God or flush the toilet or own a television. If they didn’t spend their weekends scouring flea markets and yard sales for hidden treasures, then what kinds of lives were they leading?

[img_assist|nid=4310|title=Top Spot, Alana Bograd © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=224]Another oddity about my friends was that their parents beat them far less frequently than mine beat me and my sisters. Not that they were monsters about it, exactly. I mean, they knew when to stop. The only problem was that we could never be sure of exactly what was going to set them off. Like the time dad whipped me for picking up a porcelain sailor mom had just received in the mail. Had it been mom, I would have understood—and did, in fact, understand when she let me have it for dropping the sailor as dad growled my name. Since it was dad who made the initial call, however, I couldn’t even begin to guess what I’d done wrong until he informed me (between applications of the strap) that little girls who played with sailors would inevitably grow up to be prostitutes. Though I wanted to ask him what a prostitute was, I kept my mouth shut because I knew the answer would only be more of the strap and that mom was already twisting her rings. Not only had I touched my legacy, but I’d broken it, too. The sailor had lost an arm, and there were still three payments pending on him. I was six years old at the time. Margaret was seven, Rose was four, and Kathy was still in diapers. Two nights later, curiosity got the better of me, and I asked Margaret what a prostitute was.

“The same thing as a whore,” she said.

“You mean like mom?”

It was summer, and our windows were open, so we had to whisper. Otherwise, our voices would bounce off the vinyl siding of the house next door and into our parents’ room.

“Mom’s not really a whore,” Margaret said. “Dad just says that when he’s angry.”

“So what’s a whore?” I said.

“It’s the worst thing in the world,” Margaret said.

“Like Aunt Gina?”

“No, she’s just divorced.”

“How ’bout Aunt Birdie?”

“She’s an abomination,” Margaret said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Worse than a whore, I think. It means she likes women.”

“I like women,” I said.

“Not like Aunt Birdie. She wants to marry other women. She wants to make babies with them.”

“How would that work?” I said.

“It wouldn’t,” Margaret said. “That’s why she’s an abomination.”

I already knew how babies were made, more or less, and the thought of it made me want to puke. The more dad drank, the more explicitly he discussed his failure to pull out of mom before the boys, in his words, rushed the field on the night of Margaret’s conception. Likewise, the more mom drank, the more willing she became to narrate their lovemaking using words dad grunted in her ear. Even with the windows closed, Margaret and I had to cover our ears to block out the sounds of their fucking and fighting. When they were done, there’d be snoring, and all I could do was wonder why mom let him touch her the way he did.

“Margaret?” I said, half hoping she was already asleep. “What if I wanted to marry another woman, too?”

“Mom and dad would have to kill you,” Margaret said. “And themselves.”

Lying awake, I considered my options. On one hand, I could pick up a sailor one day and let him make a prostitute out of me. On the other hand, I could marry another woman and try to make babies with her, and my parents would have to kill me. As far as I could tell, there was no middle ground, unless you counted what my mom had, but I really couldn’t see the difference between actually being a whore and only being called one, so I decided to err on the side of caution and swear off men forever. Not that it was really a decision so much as a revelation, learning the name for the thing I already knew I was. As long as Margaret kept her mouth shut about our little conversation, I figured, no one could kill me. Even if mom and dad did catch me trying to marry another woman one day, I could always plead ignorance. After all, dad had only warned me about sailors. Women were another matter altogether.

*

In the beginning, it was like having a secret identity, like being Wonder Woman or, better yet, Cat Woman. Ears perked and eyes peeled for any and all information pertaining to Aunt Birdie, I’d prowl around the kitchen, pretending to look for rubber bands, thumbtacks, tape or scissors in the junk drawers whenever mom talked on the phone on the off-chance that my fellow abomination’s name might pop up, or I’d page through old photo albums at my grandparents’ house, hoping for even the briefest glimpse of an abomination in the wild. To all appearances, Birdie looked like everyone else in her black and white universe—always a little taller than mom because she was older, always in a plaid jumper, always with her long, straight hair, fair skin and the wide, toothy smile that hid the secret longing she and I would always share: not a longing for the touch of another woman so much as a longing for the unconditional love of the people we loved unconditionally.

Birdie wasn’t my mom’s sister. They were cousins, a point mom clarified whenever she could. And her real name was Bridget. “Birdie” came about when my mom was two and couldn’t quite wrap her tongue around the right diphthong. When Birdie was in high school, she had a lot of boyfriends. Then came college, and the girls there made her go lesbo. At least that’s how mom told the story to our neighbor, Mrs. Reed, snorting derisively into the back of her fist when Aunt Birdie showed up with her “friend” Joanne to the barbecue my parents held to celebrate my first communion. Joanne wore a denim dress and a straw hat, and Birdie wore a pair of blue jeans and a white blouse embroidered with flowers. They didn’t hold hands, and they sure as hell didn’t kiss, but when their eyes met, it was like they were both in on the same joke, a special secret that, for all their half-muttered comments, sideways glances and raised eyebrows, the rest of the world would never understand.

Mom hugged Aunt Birdie and shook Joanne’s hand. Dad asked if he could fix either of them a hotdog, and Mr. Reed choked back a laugh in a paroxysm of hacking coughs he blamed on the smoke from the barbecue grill. All through the party I stole glances at Birdie and Joanne from behind my white communion veil, and all through the party I prayed to God to keep me from getting caught. If they beat me for saying hi to a sailor, there was no telling what my parents would do to warn me against going lesbo. But I couldn’t help myself. The looks that passed between Birdie and Joanne meant that I was right, that being an abomination was really something special, that one day maybe I could look at someone like that, and she’d look back at me, and we’d share the same secret Birdie and Joanne shared.

The first girl I ever wanted to marry was Katie Wilcox. She had green eyes and a gray tooth, and her mom drove a Pontiac Firebird. Our relationship hit a snag, however, when I realized that the only subjects Katie found interesting were kittens, her mom’s car and boys. That’s when I fell in love with Jennifer Schmidt, whose mother was the school nurse on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. But Jennifer liked boys, too, and so did Nicole Short, Kim Mifflin, Andrea Brady, Erin O’Connell and Elizabeth Nolan. In fact, the more time I spent in third grade, the more I realized that my life as an abomination was going to be one hell of a lonely ride if I didn’t at least pretend that I saw the boys from Menudo as likely suitors and Ricky Schroder as a potential husband. By the time I was in seventh grade, I’d gotten so good at the game that I took the strap across my newly pubescent bottom for letting a boy grope me under a cafeteria table at lunchtime. Then came high school and the beginning of my dumbbell years, an awkward period where I tried to like boys and starved myself to make them like me. I wasn’t an abomination, I told myself. I wasn’t a lesbo. In fact, I hated lesbos—hated them so much that one night I practically made my dad shit himself with laughter when Aunt Birdie called and I shouted upstairs to let my mom know that “the dyke” was on the phone. When she hung up, mom said that Joanne had been diagnosed with cancer.

Dad grunted and laid the needle on a Bruce Springsteen record, thus initiating a string of incidents that stick in my mind like a sappy montage in a made-for-cable coming of age movie: We skipped the funeral because Joanne wasn’t technically family. I started kissing boys. Birdie stopped coming to family functions. Margaret let a delivery boy make it with her in the back room of the flower shop. A girl at school showed me how to puke without putting a finger down my throat. The plumbing leaked. The kitchen ceiling caved in. Mom took in a cat. Kathy discovered needlepoint. Rose got caught smoking. One grandmother won a hundred bucks in Atlantic City. The other lost over three hundred to a bogus roofer. My grandfather stopped wearing pants. I learned how to get high using a paper bag and an aerosol spray can. Kathy gave a boy a black eye. Rose got caught drinking. Margaret was late three times in a row. Mom’s cat ran away. I turned eighteen and voted Republican. Dad bought a new guitar and wrote a song about New Jersey.

One night when I was a freshman in college, I asked Margaret what sex with boys was like, and she told me it was like sticking a balloon in yourself if the condom wasn’t ribbed. She was still working at the flower shop, but the delivery boy was long gone. There were other boys now, with pencil-thin mustaches, and men with hairy chests. Margaret rarely slept at home anymore and didn’t care when dad called her a slut. Or said she didn’t, anyway, but I knew what the emptiness insider her was like because it was my emptiness, too. The only difference was the balloon. At least she had that to fill her up from time to time. All I had was my secret identity and a straw hat I bought at a flea market.

*

I wish I could tell you I’d been confused by my sexuality and that was why I tried to starve myself through high school and slip through college stoned, but I always knew I was an abomination. Or a lesbo, to use mom’s word. Or a dyke, to use dad’s. I wasn’t gay- or bi-curious, as some women claimed to be in newspaper ads for women seeking women. This wasn’t dabbling or experimentation. It was who I was, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I’d hear dumb sorority girls speculating that every woman would have at least one lesbian experience in her lifetime, or that everyone was at least slightly homosexual, or that it was probably okay (in theory) to “dyke it out” with another girl in front of your boyfriend if that was what he wanted, or that it would be really cool to have a friend who was a hardcore lesbian as long as she wasn’t the kind who hated men and refused to shave her legs.

I rode a trolley and two buses to hear gems like these every day—in the library, in the cafeteria, in the classroom. As if being gay were a merry-go-round and you could get off whenever you wanted, or having a gay friend was like knowing a well-behaved badger or a talking moose. It wasn’t cool, I wanted to scream. It was lonely. Yes, there were plenty of “resources” on campus for those of us who wished to “embrace alternative lifestyles,” but then there was always the prospect of going back to my sinking radioactive house and trying to convince my parents that my sudden interest in rainbows and pink triangles would in no way impinge upon their collective right to continue amassing vast quantities of porcelain and vinyl. Not that I thought they’d kill me anymore. They’d just throw me out on the street with no place to go. Or, if I were really lucky, allow me to live out the rest of my days with them under a dark cloud of silence and disgust. My only real option, as far as I could tell, was to let scruffy boys continue to grope their way through my bases as I grew increasingly intimate with the mind-numbing effects of household cleaners and other chemical solvents.

By the time I was a junior in college, Margaret had left for good, and the responsibility of getting Kathy and Rose off to school each morning had fallen squarely on my shoulders. Between signing permission slips, writing absent notes and pretending to be my mother when any of their teachers called, I barely had time to dwell on the fact that if they ever learned my secret, my sisters would turn on me as viciously as I’d turned on Aunt Birdie. Rose probably knew that I was sneaking hits off the blackened pipe she left on her dresser, but she never said anything (I’d like to think) because she was concerned about my health. In her own sweet seventeen-year-old way, Rose saw pot as a healthy alternative to Carbona and never stopped to think that I might be mixing the two before heading out the door in my wide-brimmed straw hat and dark glasses to ride the trolley and two buses to an American Lit class where the professor would try to scandalize us by revealing that Herman Melville may have thrown his wife down a flight of stairs or that Emily Dickinson might have been gay. This was the first class I shared with a girl named Allison Kravitz.

Allison had red hair and an overbite and always sat near the door. When she raised her hand, other students would roll their eyes. The problem wasn’t so much that Allison was particularly disruptive or held extreme political views as much as the fact that our professor, Dr. Eck, had a habit of deflecting all questions put to him back upon the class. This strategy kept him from revealing how little he really knew about anything and had the added advantage of conditioning his students to keep their mouths shut. But Allison didn’t seem to get it. Despite the murmurs and groans of our classmates, she always demanded to know why the rumors about Melville mattered and how questions about Dickinson’s sexuality were supposed to help those of us living in the here and now. Even if Emily Dickinson really was gay, she once demanded, did that make her poems suck any less?

Okay, so she was a little disruptive. But in a good way, a way that made me feel like maybe I wasn’t alone, and I liked to think I’d be asking the same kinds of questions if my brain weren’t so fuzzy all the time and I wasn’t so scared to reveal too much about myself. I was still an abomination after all, and even if Allison’s notebooks were all decorated with the appropriate geometric figures, holding on to my secret was—for me, anyway—still a matter of life and death. Which is probably why I couldn’t stop thinking about her. When it came to her sexuality, Allison was cool. Not in the dumb it-would-be-cool-to-know-a-lesbian sense, but in the sense that she didn’t wear her orientation like a badge. In fact, I never once heard her refer to herself as a lesbian. She was just Allison, and if you couldn’t deal with it, then fuck you. Although this attitude didn’t do a whole lot to improve her social life, at least she could look people in the eye, which was a lot more than I could say for myself.

Back at home, Margaret’s name was never mentioned. Dad was trying to resurrect the singing career he’d abandoned when he found out that mom was pregnant, and no one even raised an eyebrow when he introduced the delivery boy who had taken Margaret’s virginity as the new bass player in his band. Of course, Rose was too busy scoring weed off dad’s drummer to notice much of anything, and all Kathy seemed to care about was rescuing her share of the legacy from imminent doom as dad’s friends set up their instruments and amplifiers in our living room. In the kitchen, mom was making sandwiches for the band and asking over the thump of the bass drum if I thought she had to worry about dad and groupies.

“I don’t think that’s an issue, mom.”

“You don’t think he’s sexy?”

“He’s my father.”

Mom smiled as if to say she couldn’t see my point but was willing to let it slide. Dad was going to be big, she said. Maybe not like the Beatles or Bob Dylan, but that was only because he’d taken time out to raise a family. If not for the “oops,” we’d already be millionaires.

Wondering how much luck Rose might have had with the drummer, I turned away from my mother and her sandwiches only to feel her fingernails digging into my wrist.

“You’ll take care of me, won’t you?” mom said, pulling me toward her. “When dad runs off with his groupies and the other two move out?”

“I’ll take care of you, mom.”

“Promise.”

“I promise, mom. I’ll take care of you.”

“You were always my favorite,” she said, releasing my wrist. “You were the only one I wanted.”

In my mind, I was already telling Allison about the terror in my mother’s eyes, the abject fear of heartbreak and loneliness and groupies who would never materialize. Which isn’t to say that I’d actually spoken to Allison yet. To the best of my knowledge, she didn’t know me from Adam. Even so, I’d already had about a million imaginary conversations with her and held her hand through countless imaginary walks across campus, both of us stealing glances at each other the way Aunt Birdie and Joanne once did. Fuck the world, these glances said. Fuck anyone who can’t let us be who we are or love the way we want to love.

Allison lived, or so I imagined, in a tiny apartment with a single window that overlooked a gray alley. When the rain fell, heavy drops of water would pelt the glass, and we’d hold each other against thunderclaps. I’d tell her about breaking the sailor’s arm and my Aunt Birdie’s heart, and she’d say it was okay. I was just a dumb kid, she’d tell me. Dumb and scared, like my mother and sisters and even my father the first time mom broke the news of Margaret’s imminent arrival. Then Allison would say that she loved me, and I’d say I loved her, too, and I’d promise myself I’d stop getting high.

When I wasn’t busy trying to construct an imaginary world for Allison outside of class, I was doing my best to gather data on her real life. HISTORY major, the back page of my American Lit notebook read. Germantown. Bartender? “Corporate rock sucks!” Dog=Snickers. Soft pretzel w/mustard. Snapple (raspberry). Parents okay with “it.” Toyota Corolla (tan). Lunchbox!!! Strawberry Shortcake (ironic?). Presbyterian. Dead Milkmen. “Beam me up Scotty! There’s no intelligent life down here!” The list went on and on. It was Aunt Birdie all over again, the spying and the strategizing.

The class met on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. On Mondays and Fridays, I’d sit right behind her. On Wednesdays, I’d sit to her left. The trick was to get Allison to notice me without being too obvious about it, to strike up a conversation that didn’t sound forced or desperate or just plain crazy. With boys, it had always been easy. I just had to drop a hint or two that I was willing to let them touch my breasts. Allison, on the other hand, had breasts of her own and wouldn’t be so easily swayed. Besides, I had no idea where to begin as far as letting her know I liked women was concerned. It wasn’t as if I could just walk up to her and say hey there, Allison, I’m an abomination, too! Want to go for some coffee?

Or maybe I could. I didn’t know. How to talk, how to laugh, how to be who I was. All I knew was that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life alone. The image in my head was me at fifty or sixty, still living with my parents and sneaking hits of paint thinner while mom dusted her porcelain, dad listened to his vinyl and the house sank further and further into the ground. In all honesty, I knew that Allison could never live up to my expectations. I knew that pinning all my hopes on her was completely unfair, that one day Allison and I could very well end up screaming obscenities at each other the way my parents still did, that we’d open ourselves up and make ourselves vulnerable and possibly live to regret it. But it was the kind of regret I was willing to live with, the kind of risk that could lead to something better, so I called her name one day on the way out of the classroom and said something dumb about liking her lunchbox.

Maybe we could have lunch together sometime, I said, and she said that would be fine.

Maybe today, I said, and she said yes.

We walked to the quad. We sat beneath the bell tower. We unwrapped our sandwiches.

Allison asked if I was hitting on her, and I said that I was.

I was happy and nervous and scared as hell.

To think, she could have been a sailor.Marc Schuster teaches English at Montgomery County Community College. He defended his doctoral dissertation at Temple University in May of 2005 and is a founding member of the Elliot Court Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has appeared in After Hours, Schuylkill, Redivider and Weird Tales.

You and Peggy don’t agree on many things, but the communication strategy for this whole mess might just be the worst of it. Waiting for the gray of dawn to fall into your bedroom you are having tough time with all of it. And you want to cry, cry like a baby without having to pretend everything will work out. But you cannot risk Damian hearing you. You want him to know the things he will need to know, but even you are not ready to have the discussion just yet. How does it get to this point?

Peggy drove out to State College last night to spend the weekend with her parents. Explanation of your impending separation is her sole agenda item. “With intent to divorce,” you hear Peggy’s voice project into your thoughts. Fifteen years of marriage will do that for you. Peggy told you as if it were a done deal, that this would be good practice for your weekend visits. You want to scream at the insinuation that you need to practice being a father. You have more than carried your own in that regard. You are considering a stronger stance – maybe Damian should move with you – but your lawyer is doubtful. Seems that most courts think that fathers are less capable caregivers. You know that your case could be made, but not without some serious collateral damage. Something you would like to avoid. For the kid’s sake, if nothing else.

Damian, that one focusing element in your lives, is ten, almost eleven. Good kid, too. Still very trusting and genuine, though you expect the next several months will suck all of that out of him. He has strong facial features with locks of curly black hair atop his head. He is starting to take an interest in girls, or maybe they are starting to take an interest in him. Either way he refuses to get his mop of hair cut. Never bothered you, though. You have always encouraged his individuality. Unlike Peggy, trying to homogenize him into the pages of a Pottery Barn Kids catalogue. Soon he will slink into the room sleepily and fall down next to you. He will have forgotten that Peggy will be away. Might as well get that one ready now.

 

“You know how sometimes it feels good to be with your parents?” you inquire.

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s like that even when you’re older. Mom just wants to spend some time with her mom and dad. Does that make sense?”

“Uh-huh. I miss her though.” What about me? A strained voice whispers in your ear.

“She’ll be back Sunday night. Meantime, me and you’ll have a wild boy’s weekend. Right?”

“What will we do?” he asks.

“Well, the Eagles play tomorrow. I thought we’d get a pizza delivered and watch the game together. What do you think?”

“What about today?”

“Today? I don’t know. Any thoughts?”

“Something fun.”

“Alright. Bowling?”

“Maybe.” He seems surprised somehow that you have made this suggestion. “Anything else?”

“I need to run to Home Depot. But that won’t take long. I need new hoses for the washer.”

“Why?”

“One is ready to burst. Has a big bubble in it.”
“Why?”

“Over time things get worn out. It’s a good thing Mom saw the bubble before it gave out. It could have caused a ton of damage.” These words form slowly for reasons you do not immediately fathom. Damian does not seem to notice this.

“Can I see it?”

“Hmm?”

“Can I see the hose?”

“When we go downstairs.”

“Okay.”

 

Every conversation with Damian has become like walking on eggs. He is too smart not to know something is wrong. A point that you have repeatedly reminded Peggy. He is also too innocent to know what is amiss. The plan has been mapped out. Mostly by Peggy. In February you are moving to an apartment in the city. Something reasonable and reasonably near the office. As to not spoil Damian’s Christmas, you – both of you – would not tell him until the beginning of the new year. Peggy has a therapist all picked out, despite the fact neither of you has any idea how he might respond to the news. “No matter, therapy will do him good.” She states things like this with an irrefutable certainty, another thing that irks you.

You have lingered too long in the shower. Damian has subtly let you know this by flushing the toilet in your bathroom, siphoning the cold water from your shower. Sorry I forgot, he shouts merrily as he heads down the hall. You are left exposed to the cool air as you wait for the tank to refill, returning the needed cool water so you can rinse the suds from your graying hair. (Peggy has the habit of doing her business near every morning while you are showering, flushing without regard to your plight and offering a meaningless, daily apology of her own, leaving you – literally – steaming.) You quickly finish and dress for the day ahead.

 

“Eggs?”

“Nah.”

“French toast.”

“Uh-uh.”

“A Quarter Pounder with cheese?”

“Dad!”

“What then?”

“Pop Tarts.”

“Sure.”

“And orange soda.”

“Not on my watch.” This expression, one you might have used with him a hundred times, now staggers over your lips. Again you hope he does not notice.

“Mom lets me.”

You repress the urge to shout that you are not mom. “Does she now?”

“Sure. All the time.” You admire his poker face.

“Maybe you are confusing the words ‘soda’ and ‘juice.’ Could that be it?”

He is smiling at you. “Oh yeah. Juice. Thanks, Dad.”

“Busted,” you laugh. Damian laughs with you.

Damian pretends to be bothered by the Home Depot trip. This was supposed to be a ‘wild’ boy’s weekend, he nudges. He gets impatient when you start singing along with Tom Petty on the radio. Free Fallin. You turn off the music with a sincere, though reluctant, apology. Once in the store, everything changes, however. He has decided what he would like to do with his day.

“Dad? I’ve got it!”
“What?”

“What we can do while Mom is away.”

“And that is?” you ask, but you can already guess, as his gaze is fixed on and eight-foot tall air-filled snowman.

“Let’s decorate the house for Christmas.”

“Buddy, it’s barely November.”

“Who cares? This is awesome.”

It has been a while since you’ve seen that glow in his eyes. “Yeah,” you say, “who cares?”

“Really?”

“Really! Let’s do it. And do it up right too! Best ever.” This is so wrong you almost picture Peggy stopping whatever it is she is doing at the moment, instinctively racing to the car to intervene. But, alas, she is four-and-one-half hours away; if the Nits are playing at home it’ll be five and a half – at best. Much progress could be made in that amount of time.

“Can we get the snowman?”

“And the Rudolph.”

“Really?” He does not allow for a reply, “Awesome.”

You are both laughing to the point that you are drawing the attention of near everybody in the store, even those supposedly learning how install a chair rail. You have fully loaded a cart for Damian with outdoor lights of various sizes and colors, as well as several good quality electrical cords. You push a lumber dolly loaded with lawn decorations, including two white-light reindeer with bobbing heads. You were in the checkout line when Damian realized that you had failed to get the new washer hoses. You and he are far too noisy at this discovery, but every face you see seems to enjoy the irony of it all. If only they knew. The thought makes you laugh louder still.

Peggy and you were never really much for decorating the outside of the house. The inside, thanks to her expert touch, resembled a Crate and Barrel holiday display. Your first year in the neighborhood, you made a weak effort at outlining the porch beams in colored lights. The effort paled considerably to the efforts made by those around you, to Peggy’s embarrassment. You, reasonably enough, thought that all efforts were worthy. Peggy pointing out the deficiency in the end caused you to never want to decorate again. Let her, you remember thinking. That was six years ago. Nothing more than a wreath purchased from the local Boy Scout Troop and eight faux candles outwardly announced your spirit of glad tidings. This year would change all of that.

Every time an item is scanned, Damian announces the total cost of the sale. When it finally ended – just over seven hundred and eight dollars – the clerk is singing along with your son. You slap your Visa card onto the counter, holding back a fresh run of laughter. Inflatable Rudolph – forty-five dollars; outdoor Christmas lights and hooks enough to outline your house and shutters and two young apple trees – four hundred and seventy dollars; oscillating garage door shadow display – thirty-seven dollars. Seeing the look on your soon-to-be ex-wife’s face – priceless! You want to shout this out to the store. Or at least tell Damian; he’d think the knock-off humor was funny—except for the bit about the ex-wife.

 

Damian is more focused on this task than you have ever seen him with anything. He has a linear side that you would have never assumed, having navigated the disaster that is his bedroom. He is fixated on keeping the spacing of the lights spiraling up the apple tree trunks at an exact three inches. He has taken full responsibility for the tree trunks and lower parts of the branches – one in green and one in red – as you work your white-light magic on the house. He calls you off the roof when the higher branches need wrapping, but barks orders from the ground like an Irish foreman. The two of you are shouting pleasantly back and forth in the cool afternoon breeze. You warn him too often to be careful on the ladder despite the fact that he has jumped from branches higher than the six-foot aluminum A-frame. Because he is having such a good time he does nothing more than reply, Okay. The sun is hiding behind the house when you have attached the last icicle strip to the westward eave. Before you can see to the lawn ornaments, Damian coaxes you back to Home Depot for some more red lights. It looks stupid this way. I’ve gotten all of the main branches except this one. People will laugh. You are trying not to do the same. Though the branch in question is in the back of the deepest set of the two trees and well obscured, you agree, giving an accepted hair tousle and praising the amount of hard work put into the undertaking.

Back at Home Depot, Damian finds the necessary lights as you eye a reindeer-driven sleigh complete with Santa. You tell him you think it would look perfect suspended from the low roof to the higher. Cool, he agrees. You stop at Wendy’s on the drive home and break the news – over some deep-fried chicken strips – that the balance of the decorating will have to wait until tomorrow. You can tell that the strenuous day is catching up with him; he doesn’t even fake protest. Before the Eagles game, right? After breakfast you both will be back at it you promise, although you are certain you will be sore as hell tomorrow. At home, Damian showers then falls asleep on the sofa watching a Harry Potter DVD.

“Hello.”

“It’s Peggy. I left two messages this afternoon. Just calling to check on Damian.”

“He’s asleep.”

“Already? Is he sick?”

“No. Just tired is all.”

“From what?”

“We did some work in the yard today. He’s fine.”

“Can you get him?”

“Let him sleep, Peggy. How are your parents?”

“They’re broken up. I’m afraid they don’t know what to do.” Welcome to my world, whispers the strained voice.

You say nothing.

“I guess they’ll get used to it soon enough, though. They’ll have to, really,” Peggy says.

“I guess so.”

“Are you sure he’s asleep.”

“I’m sure. Have a safe drive tomorrow.”

“Lance?”

“Yes?”

“Never mind. I can tell you later.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

 

Damian bounds into the room. He wants to finish everything now. It is seven o’clock . Give a guy a break, Dame. Cook me some breakfast or something. Of course he cannot cook. He offers to ‘make’ you some Cheerios, an offer you respectfully decline. After a quick – and flushless – shower, he agrees to a Bob Evans breakfast. The balance of the morning will be dedicated to finishing the decorations. Over breakfast you share another idea. Tonight, after dinner, the two of you move the fire bowl to the front yard and light a fire. Together you can take in your festive handiwork while waiting for Peggy to return. Damian says he cannot wait to see her face. Me either, pal. Me either. Damian wants S’mores for the fire. Excellent suggestion, Dame!

The ascending Santa proves trickier than you imagined, but eventually he and his team are heading for the upper roof. Rudolph and Frosty are anchored in the front lawn and bobbling in the wind. Damian has positioned the oscillating shadow wheel perfectly, projecting a Christmas tree, a flying sleigh with Santa silhouette, and a trumpeting herald across the garage door. Wires are secured and duct taped at the point they cross the walkway. You put your arm on his shoulder and tell him, maybe more sincerely than you have ever spoken to him, that you are proud of him. He pats your shoulder and tells you that this is the best Christmas ever. And it’s not even Thanksgiving, he adds with a laugh.

The Eagles drub the Cowboys as the two of you eat Papa John’s. You are glad finally to have some down time. You allow Damian to drink Coke as you drink Michelob. You both are laughing at anything and everything, feeling free. Damian is more concerned with the progression of the sun than the football game. Every now-and-again he peeks out the curtain to measure the impending darkness. Is it time yet? Three, four, five times. The Pats are on the late game, but he will not let you concentrate. You take a glimpse outside, rub your hands excitedly together and announce that it’s time to get a fire started. Damian grabs the S’mores ingredients and races to the door. Maybe this really is the best Christmas ever. You insist he put a jacket on. You don’t want Mom to be angry with me, do you?

You were never one much for S’mores; sweets of any sort actually. But Damian likes making them, so you eat every other one. Dan Lipzowski, he who formerly presented the neighborhood’s most ornate holiday offering, is walking his Labradoodle. He stops by your fire with a thinly veiled look of disgust. “Bit early for all this isn’t it?”

“It’s six thirty , Dan. Dark enough this time of year.”

“I mean the season.”

“My Dad and I worked all weekend. Doesn’t it look great, Mr. Lipzowski?” interrupts Damian.

The man’s face softens, you fear in pity. “Sure it does, son. Never seen one look better. Just usually not in November is all.”

“My Mom is coming home soon. She’s gonna love it I bet.”

“It’s quite the display, Damian,” he offers before heading down the road, a soft grumble in his wake.

You and Damian sit wordlessly listening to the crackle of the firewood. Could Lipzowski know? Is that why he made that face at your son? Could Peggy have told his wife? Could the entire neighborhood know? How the hell can it be acceptable that this Labradoodle-owning nobody is made aware of your impending separation-with-intention-to-divorce before your own flesh and blood? Before Damian? Damn her! And all of the pain she has inflicted on you. She can play all the games she wants. You will fight her at every turn. And to hell with the collateral damage! She may win, but you will fight. He is your son as much as he is hers.

Staring at the embers, you smile. You are just waiting for her headlights to stream down the hill. Whatever else happens this moment will be yours. She will never touch it.

 

“Dad? Dad? You okay?”

“Huh? Oh, sure. Smoke in my eyes is all.”

“You think Mom is gonna like it?”

“Would I have done it otherwise?” you ask. “She’s gonna love it.”

“Yeah. This is the best Christmas ever.”

“And it’s not even Thanksgiving,” you laugh.

 Peter Cunniffe was raised in  Delaware County and has spent most of his adult years residing in Chester County.  He is currently completing a collection of short stories related to marriage set in the Philadelphia region.

 

The Glock has one bullet in the chamber and fifteen in the magazine. Roy’s got it cocked and ready. He bets me twenty bucks he can fire all sixteen while the target’s coming at him, but that’s not all. He says: “I’ll alternate – head shot, body shot, head shot, body shot, squeeze out all sixteen, and make fourteen, before the target’s five yards out.”

“You’re an idiot,” I tell him. “You can’t shoot that fast. Nobody can shoot that fast.” I tear the cellophane wrapper off a box of .38’s.

“Fuck you, you want to bet or not?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say. I drop the wrapper into an empty ammo box and I load my .357 for when it’s my turn to shoot. “If you’re gonna be a jerkoff about it, I’ll take your money from you.”

He puts the Glock down on the tray with three of our other pistols, a couple rentals, and about a dozen boxes of ammo. He wipes his hands on the front of his gray hooded sweatshirt. He adjusts his goggles, his earplugs, and his oily old Phillies cap. Then he picks up the gun and aims at the target at the end of the range, twenty-five yards away.

The target’s a life-sized photograph of a mustached terrorist armed with an Uzi. Not that we’re allowed to shoot at moving targets, by the way, but the rangemaster is outside catching a smoke. It’s a slow day here; there are only two or three other guys shooting. And they’re like six lanes away, so we’ve pretty much got the place to ourselves. It’s Tuesday afternoon. That’s one of the decent things about working 3:30-to-midnight at the bubble gum factory: I’m home every day when Jeff and Shelley come home from school; I can stay up late, get wasted, and watch ESPN after Peggy and the kids go to bed without worrying about being late to work the next day; and I can shoot when hardly anybody else is here.

Roy says, “Let her rip.”

I press the green button. The guy with the Uzi comes whizzing at us and Roy fires away. First, he completely forgets to alternate his shots to the head and body. And that was his idea! Second, he misses so many, it’s a joke. I swear three ricochet off the ceiling. Never mind firing at a moving target which it says all over the place you’re not allowed to do. If the rangemaster had seen Roy shoot up the ceiling, we’d be totally fucked. And third, if a guy with an Uzi was coming at Roy in real life, Roy would be dead.

But that’s not why we shoot. That’s not why we come here every week. And when Roy looks at that target, he doesn’t see a terrorist anyway. The twenty bucks won’t even cover the cost of the ammo and targets. But that doesn’t matter. We come here because of something Roy said after the first time we came to this range three months ago: “That felt pretty good, man,” he said. “I guess it beats blowing that motherfucker’s brains out – or my own brains out for that matter.”

And considering what he’d been through, I took him seriously. So I was like, “We should do this again.”

And he goes, “Fuck yeah.”

We used to shoot with my dad at a range near where we grew up. But we stopped on my eighteenth birthday. That was seventeen years ago. That was the last time we shot together until we started coming here – which does not in any way excuse Roy from his shitty aim today.

“You suck,” I tell him.

“You moved it too fast,” he says. Roy fishes a twenty from his wallet.

“It’s a button, retard,” I say, taking the twenty and jamming it in my pocket. “There’s just one speed – there is no faster or slower.”

“No,” he says. “The problem is it picks up speed on its way down.”

“Nah,” I laugh, “the problem is you suck.”

The whole time Roy and I didn’t go shooting, we basically didn’t talk to each other. We didn’t go to each other’s weddings. I didn’t take Roy out and get him drunk when he got his divorce. You know, shit like that. It was crazy, because we’d been best friends since first grade and we lived three blocks from each other, in the same neighborhood where we grew up. I’d run into him at Cricket’s Hoagies or Eagle Hardware or whatever, and it was always like, “Hey, how’s it going? Alright, how’s it going? Take it easy. You too.” It was fucked up, but not saying anything would have been more fucked up. It’s not like we were strangers. You know?

We started talking again four months ago at his son’s funeral. At first I wasn’t even going to go, but Peggy said I should. She said if I didn’t I’d probably regret not going. But if I went, I probably wouldn’t regret going. She was right, as usual.

I felt so bad for Roy. I didn’t know what to say to him at the wake. When I walked in it was intense. Roy was in the kitchen opening a beer. At first we were like, “Hey, how’s it going…” But that was insane because we both knew how it was going. And it was different because it wasn’t just running into each other at Cricket’s. You know? It wasn’t the same old bullshit. “I’m really sorry,” I said. I put out my hand.

Roy grabbed me and hugged me. He started crying. “I’m sorry too, man,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” Then I was crying too. His shoulders shook. For a split second it seemed like he could have been laughing, but I knew he wasn’t. He was crying like he never cried before. Times like that, what can you say? I just held onto him for a while, and we cried together. Then, it being a wake and all, we got ripped as hell.

After that we were best friends again. Up until then I figured I might go the rest of my life without ever getting together with Roy again. The thing of it is: you never know what the fuck is going to happen; and you can take that to the bank.

* * *

On the night of my eighteenth birthday I got in a fight with my girlfriend, Denise Brady. That night my mom and dad took Denise and me out to dinner down in South Philly. So after my parents went to bed, we go down to the basement where I had my bedroom. We were watching MTV. I tried to get Denise either to smoke some weed or give me a blowjob. I don’t remember; maybe both. I was like, “Come on, it’s my birthday!”

And she said, “We have to talk about something serious.” That’s when she told me she was leaving me, going to college in some dumb-ass place in the Midwest.

I was like, “What the fuck!”

And she was like, “I told you. I’m going.”

She told me there was nothing to discuss; her mind was made up. That’s what really got me. She’d made up her mind without even telling me what she was thinking! And she wouldn’t listen to what I had to say. I snapped. I pushed her, and she pushed me back. It got worse and worse, you know? Finally, I got so pissed I hit her; I smacked her in her face.

After that, Denise bolted. She ran upstairs and out. She ran three blocks, all the way to Roy’s house – not for Roy, but for Roy’s sister Liz who was Denise’s best friend.

Roy answered the door. He took one look at Denise’s bruised face and he knew I did it. I mean, he knew Denise had been over my house, and it’s not like girls got mugged in our neighborhood. And the thing of it for Roy was his dad didn’t live with the family anymore on account of beating the crap out of Roy’s mom. That situation had gotten way out of hand before the old man finally left. Once he put Roy’s mom in the hospital. And more than once social services showed up at their house.

So that night, on my eighteenth birthday, when Roy saw Denise all banged up, it’s like Peggy says: that must have pushed his button, because he flipped the fuck out.

After I hit Denise and she ran away, I stole a bottle of vodka from my parents. I went down to the basement and drank about a quarter of it. Denise and I had been going together since tenth grade. Here it was the end of twelfth; we were supposed to go to community college together, and bam! She dumps this on me. I was supposed to take business classes at community. We were supposed to move to this place on Lake Michigan – she had family there. I was going to save up and buy a fishing boat, be a charter captain, take people out fishing for lake trout and salmon and shit. We had it planned.

I sat in bed drinking the vodka, thinking about Denise, and feeling like crap. I cried like a baby for about an hour, and I guess I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was dark. I was on my back; my forehead felt cold, like someone was holding an ice cube against it. Then my eyes adjusted and I saw somebody standing over my bed, pointing at me. Jesus fucking Christ! A gun! A burglar! No. It was Roy, holding a .38 revolver to my forehead. I tried to say something, but nothing came out. I thought I was going to throw up. I looked up at him. I moved my lips; I could hear my teeth chatter. But I was so freaked out I swear I couldn’t even talk!

Roy goes, “Close your eyes.”

I shivered.

He shouted, “Close your fucking eyes!”

I thought, this is it – Roy’s fucking crazy and this is how I am going to die. I scrunched my eyes closed. There was nothing; just dead silence.

“Please don’t kill me,” I managed to say. I couldn’t breathe.

“Three…” said Roy.

“ Roy, please, man, I don’t want to die…Please, don’t…!”

“Shut up!” he said. And then he said, “Two…” and then he said, “One…”

Then there’s nothing, except for me shivering and slobbering like an idiot. And finally, Roy goes, “If you ever lay a hand on her again, you’d better never fucking fall asleep.”

I didn’t hear him leave. But when I opened my eyes he was gone. I ran up the basement steps and opened the kitchen window in the back of the house. Roy was two houses down, almost at the end of the alley. I grabbed an empty beer bottle from the kitchen counter and threw it out the window at him. It missed him and smashed against the Fitzgerald’s garage door. “Motherfucker!” I yelled into the darkness. By then Roy was gone. I know I shouldn’t have hit Denise. After that night, I never hit anyone again – never even spanked my kids. So it’s not like some good didn’t come out of it. And like Peggy says, it wasn’t really me he was pointing his gun at. But at the time – and for a long time after – it was like, what the fuck was that about?

* * *

I never saw Denise again. Before the next Christmas break her dad died and her family moved to the Midwest, where her mom was from. Community college sucked. I dropped out after the first semester and got a job at the bubble gum factory. It’s pretty decent, good benefits and that’s where I met Peggy. She worked there summers and Christmas breaks while she got her teaching degree.

Roy and I pretty much avoided each other until I heard about his son. That poor kid got run over by some dumb-ass drunk driver out on Route 1 where he lived with his mom and her new husband. For the first couple weeks after the accident, Roy was on some heavy-duty drugs to help him keep his shit together. Even then, just about all he could talk about was killing the guy who killed his son. And when he wasn’t talking about that he’d talk about “just fucking ending everything, everything…” Roy’s mom told me her brother was going to take Roy’s guns out of the house. That definitely sounded like a good idea. I told her I’d keep an eye on Roy.

A couple weeks later, when we started talking about the old days, about the old shooting range, and Roy said he wanted to try out the new range, I figured it would be good for him to blow off some steam, you know?

* * *

I load the .357 magnum with .38 bullets, because the .357 ammo has way too much kick for a little guy like me. Hell, Roy’s already done enough damage to the ceiling of this place for one day. And besides, the rangemaster’s back in his booth, so we can’t do any more stupid shit. I tape up a new target – a standard bull’s eye – and move it out 15 yards. I raise the pistol, set my sites on the bull’s eye, take a deep breath, let it out slow, squeeze the trigger, and blast a nice big hole, right through the middle of the target.

“Good shot,” says Roy.

I answer with five more rounds – BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! – emptying the revolver.

Now the range is silent. It’s that buzz in your head after there’s noise – guns, jack hammers, packing machines or whatever. You hear it even after it stops. You feel it against your eyelids and your temples.

The guys in the other lane pack up their stuff. The rangemaster flips through the Daily News. Roy wipes his Glock with an oily rag, and I reload my .357.Louis Greenstein’s one-act plays, Smoke, Interview with a Scapegoat and The Convert, have been produced many times in the U.S. and abroad. Louis is the co-author of With Albert Einstein, a one-man show about the life of the great scientist, which has enjoyed critical and popular success at the Walnut Street Theater, Princeton University, and schools and science museums. Louis is the recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts playwriting fellowship. His fiction and haiku have appeared in Muse Apprentice Guild and Dream Forge. Currently, he is working on a new novel. Louis lives in Lower Merion with his wife Catherine and their children, Raven, Hannah, and Sam.

[img_assist|nid=4339|title=”3 Mamaie” by Simona Josan, © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=113]Evie is a good daughter in some ways. When her stepfather keels over suddenly from a heart attack, she takes off two weeks from work to fly back to Iowa. She helps her mother organize the kitchen cabinet, separating the canned goods from the pasta boxes. She lets her weep and brings her Kleenex after Kleenex. She waters the plants whose leaves are brown and curling at the ends. She wears black to the funeral service, holding her mother’s hand, listening to the priest drone on about her step-dad and what a great man he was (as well as a dedicated Shriner) and she does not burst into hysterical laughter. She bows her head and doesn’t yank her hand away even though her mother grasps it tighter and tighter as if she’ll never let go, squeezing until Evie’s fingers tingle and turn cold. She calls the realtor to put their cramped and unhappy house on the market. She helps her mother sort through his junk and doesn’t correct her long, inaccurate, sepia colored reminisces.

“Do you want to take anything with you, honey?” her mother asks, holding up his round pocket watch, his WW II lighter, his fishing tackle box.

“No, thank you,” Evie says each time in a voice like someone refusing a second serving of mashed potatoes.

She even stays to search for a place to put her mother once the house sells, but her mother, in her vague manner, finds something wrong with every potential new home.

For instance:

They cruise by Sunny Vale Retirement Village, an apartment complex made of cheery yellow brick with red shutters and flowerboxes in the windows. Reasonable rent, ceiling fans, and a weekly Yahtzee game at the clubhouse. “Oh, there is no yard!” her mother says, tapping her fingers to her lips.

“ Who cares?” Evie says. Her mother blinks at her rapidly like a baby bird. Bewilderment and hurt ripples across her face. This makes Evie want to shake her or wrap her safely in a blanket.

“Why do you need a yard? Will you be sunbathing?” Evie’s new approach requires her to use sarcasm blended with a dash of autism. She’s hoping her refusal to react will force her mother to be more practical. But this is not how their relationship usually goes and it has put her mother out of whack. She looks at Evie like she is someone else’s child, one with fangs. She shouldn’t have been so clingy when she was younger, Evie thinks, each separation from her mother resembling an Irish wake. She shouldn’t have slept with her mother’s green shirt under her pillow because she missed her so much. At twelve, she should’ve shaved her head, gotten a nose piercing, and smoked cigarettes behind the school gym. Instead, she went to the library to check out books about misunderstood horses. She should’ve been a different person entirely.

Her mother looks out the car window. “Well, I think a garden…” her voice trails off, leaving a suspended silence that drives Evie to bite off her fingernails one by one.

Finally, Evie explains she really has to get back to work. Really. She has to leave. Soon. Now, if possible. She imagines dropping her mother off at the neighbor’s door with a note pinned to her blouse, “Please take care of me” and speeding off into the night, like someone released from a prison sentence. Instead, she tells her mother that she has to be back in Chicago the very next morning. It’s imperative.

Her mother nods her head slowly, like a hearing-impaired person learning to read lips. “Oh, I understand. You have things…”

Before she leaves, she tells her mom to call her any time, as much as she wants, day or night. Giddy with the knowledge that she will soon be gone, she even goes so far as to suggest that her mother could move to Chicago for a while. As soon as the words leave her mouth, Evie freezes, suddenly picturing her mother sitting on the sofa all day while Evie works, her hands folded in her lap, waiting patiently for her daughter to return home.

Her mother shakes her head. “Oh, no. I wouldn’t think of it.”

They say good-bye in the driveway next to the oil spot left by her step dad’s [step-dad’s] old wreck of a Plymouth. Her mother hugs her hard, for too long, an interminable amount of time, until Evie pushes her away. “I have to go, Mom.”

“Okay, my darling.” she gushes wildly, sounding like a lover.

Evie jumps in the car. She puts on her seat belt. Her mother continues to stand by the window until Evie rolls it down.

“I miss him,” her mother announces.

What can she miss, Evie wonders. He was a bad husband, full of rage and given to Tennessee Williams theatrics. He liked to throw things that would shatter spectacularly. He slammed doors. When introducing Evie to others, he referred to her as “the competition.” Her mother would laugh uneasily, trying to catch Evie’s eye, as if telling her silently, But you know how much I love you, right? Now, her mother waits for Evie to say something, but Evie’s brain is an empty cave. If she opens her mouth, bats will fly out. Instead, she rolls the window back up, puts the car in reverse, and drives away.

A wonderful daughter, yes.

 

The phone calls start. Her mother has taken Evie’s words to heart and calls at least ten times a day. Evie can let the machine pick up at home, but at work, she has to answer. Sometimes, she puts her mother on hold for half an hour at a time, hoping the theme from The Nutcracker playing over and over again will drive her to hang up. No such luck.

She tries to keep the calls brisk, the conversations short, and to remind her mother how busy Evie is. Busy, busy, busy. Except in real life, Evie’s nights consist of crossword puzzles, braiding and re-braiding her hair, cat tricks, TV, and paint-by-numbers. So she creates a crazy social life and a complicated divorce case at work involving necrophilia. She invents a night class on wine tasting and two new best friends who have forced her to join the Chicago Social Club. She joins an imaginary volleyball team that practices at the Y on Wednesday nights. She constructs such a rich and rewarding life that she begins to feel jealous of the self she’s made up. When her mother exclaims about an invitation Evie has pretended to get to an art opening, Evie snaps. “Well, it won’t be that fun.”

At work one Monday morning, she suggests to her boss, Matt Becker, Esquire, that maybe it’s time to change the office phone number. Ever alert in his red suspenders, MB asks, “Is someone stalking you?”

[img_assist|nid=4340|title=”Thief of Hearts” by Aloysius, © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=306]“Yes.” Evie tells him. “My mother.”

He steeples his hands under his chin. He is sympathetic but explains that, unfortunately, the phone number must remain the same.

“Then will you pretend to almost fire me?”

MB practices divorce and bankruptcy law. He understands the intricacies of relationships and has learned when to ask questions and when to button up. He has a second wife named Emma and a first child named Dexter and he never stares at Evie’s legs when she wears short skirts. The next time Evie’s mother calls, he picks up the line, speaks to her in a low, polite, and professional voice. The calls at work don’t stop completely, but they slow down to once or twice per day.

Then finally one Saturday night, Evie has a real event to attend. She’s been invited by a friend of an acquaintance to a party called “The Parent Trap.” The idea is to dress up as a mom or a dad, either someone famous or one of your own parents. People in Chicago are very clever that way. She hears clever conversations everywhere; in Starbucks, on the El, in the bathroom at work. She tries to join in, but her attempts are always slightly off, like a person who has stumbled into a conversation too late and laughs before the punch line has been delivered.

The phone rings just as she’s about to leave for the party. She stands in the doorway, her hand on the knob. “Evie, honey? It’s me.” She pauses. “Your mom.” She can see her mother clearly, standing by the yellow phone, the circle of light from the kitchen lamp casting her face in shadows, half-packed boxes towering around her. “The realtor called today and said something.” Another pause. “I think it was important but I couldn’t find the thing to write down the phone number and so now I’m worried he’s showing the house tomorrow and I just can’t…” Evie shuts the door, locks it, and hurries away. The sound of her mother’s voice echoes in her ears all the way down the long hallway.

In the elevator, she looks at her reflection in the silvery door. Her face appears distorted, like someone underwater. She surrounds her mouth with dark, dark lipstick and is startled by the results. She is all mouth. That is fine, because tonight, she is someone else entirely; someone brave, a girl with an attitude.

The party is filled with moms and dads. There are mom’s everywhere—Drag Queen Mom, a Mom with a beehive hairdo and bright pink lipstick, Martyr Mom with a fake wooden cross strapped to her back, Whistler’s Mother, a girl dressed like a cat. The dads include Mr. Cleaver, several 1950s’ dads in corduroy jackets with patched elbows and unlit pipes, dads in football jerseys with pot bellies made out of sofa cushions, sitcom dads, and a Father Christmas. Also, a man dressed as the Virgin Mary. “Get it?” he asks everyone. “Get it?”

The moms and dads bump into Evie, who can’t escape the front room. She finds herself repeating, “Oh, sorry, sorry. Whoops! Excuse me!” until finally, she’s able to wrench free by elbowing a Joan Crawford Mom carrying a handful of wire hangers.

One woman in a blue dress with puffed sleeves trails around holding a martini glass between sharp red fingernails, her face covered in white powder. Evie asks the woman what her mom is like. The woman coughs neatly into her hand. “She’s like, dead.” Evie takes a sip of her paper cup filled with warm pulpy orange juice and Smirnov vodka. She nods, unsure of what facial expression to wear.

The hostess Mom, with a black eye and an arm in a sling, circles around offering meatloaf, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread, juice boxes, Little Debby cakes, and green beans.

For half the night, she is cornered by a frizzy-haired guy in a black turtleneck with a huge yellow construction paper question mark taped to his shirt. “I’m adopted,” he explains. He leans in until Evie can clearly see his nostril hairs. Tiny spittle projectiles fly when he talks. Evie considers rummaging through the hostess’ nearby dresser for sunglasses.

She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Something too intricate and personal to untangle over the music. She catches sight of a very cute Dad leaning against the wall near the bathroom. It seems that she and the Dad are exchanging heated eye contact, but it’s hard to tell in the dim lights.

Adopted Guy has posed a question. Evie asks him to repeat it. “I said it’s an interesting idea. Do we have to turn into our parents? You know, like no matter how hard we try and rebel and not make the same dumb mistakes, we’re sort of predestined to fuck it up the same way anyway?”

Evie doesn’t know how to answer that question. She says, “Oh, hold on. I think I have something in my eye." She weaves her way over to cute Dad, who wears a long blond wig, a tie-dyed shirt, a suede vest with a peace emblem, and billowy-legged blue jeans. A knot of loud-talking girls gather near him. Evie squeezes by close enough to allow one of her breasts to brush his arm. She feels suddenly very brave and very drunk and it’s an exhilarating feeling, as though she might cause a scene.

“Mom? Mom, is that you?” Hippie Dad says, touching her arm.

Evie stops. “Son?” They’re going to have the “theatre school” conversation where they banter like two actors auditioning for Second City. While they talk, Evie imagines their wedding, their children; the interesting story they’ll recount years later about meeting at a parent party. He’ll tell their family, “As soon as I saw her, I knew she was the right Mom for our children.”

He has straight white teeth with a slight gap in the front. He probably drinks lots of milk. She could grow to love that in him. “Please tell me you’re not an accountant in real life,” she says.

“No, I don’t even own a brief case.” It turns out he’s studying to be a geneticist at the University of Illinois. He researches the mating habits of fruit flies. It’s more interesting than one would think. Luckily, he doesn’t go into detail. He has a fat, spotted mutt named Jack whose nose is flaking off at the moment. He’s taking Jack to the vet very soon. He asks Evie if she likes drive-in movies. She says yes, of course, yes! The important thing is to keep the conversation going. He reads and reads and reads and then takes naps and reads some more. He regrets not traveling to Prague with his best friend from undergrad when he had the chance (God, his thin wrists are so fucking attractive. Her mother once told her that men with thin wrists are better kissers because they’re more evolved. It’s something she read in a book). His favorite scene from any movie ever is the last few minutes of Manhattan when the Woody Allen character lists reasons not to blow his head off: the existence of the Marx Brothers, jazz, his lover’s face. He takes a breath. “But wait, what do you do?”

Evie considers making something up. She could be a private detective or the amateur photographer hired by the private detective. She says, “I work in a law firm.” His face falls. “But I am extremely unethical.” He perks up again. She confesses to reading the divorce files at work. She has access to them, technically, yes, but only to fit them alphabetically into the file cabinet. But often now, when Mark Becker, Esquire, goes to court or to lunch or to the dry cleaner’s to pick up his suit for the next day, Evie waves goodbye, counts to twenty, and then opens the files to read the personal information of the clients, all written in MB’s neatly blocked script; all the evidence needed for the divorce proceedings.

“What kind of evidence?” Her confession has not caused him to make a face like someone biting into a mealy apple. For this, too, she might love him.

“Evidence as to why his client should get everything accumulated over the course of the relationship. Including the toothbrushes.” She describes the diary the wife kept in Vitullo vs. Vitullo. It detailed the wife’s unrequited crush on the director of their church choir, and also how her husband kept old issues of Playboy underneath the bathroom sink, magazines their 10-year-old son could have found at any time. On March 15 of last year, Mr. Vitullo called Mrs. Vitullo a son of a bitch at Denny’s in front of the Sunday brunch crowd. He played his 78 of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” so many times that the neighbors phoned the cops. The complaints went on for three more pages. Most files are like that, long laundry lists of small things. It’s not always huge catastrophes that split them apart, not torrid affairs or child abuse or alcoholism, but something else; a slow, mundane animosity that sprouts from knowing another person too intimately for too long.

The room has thinned to only a few bedraggled moms and dads milling around here and there with wigs askew and smeared lipstick. The hostess flips the lights on and off. “All parents please report home to check on the children.”

“I should go,” Evie takes a last hard sip of red wine, hoping it hasn’t turned her teeth cranberry colored. He nods.

“Just wait for me for one second,” she says and ducks into the bathroom.

Her face in the mirror is startling, too pale and there are dark purplish circles under the eyes. She doesn’t appear glamorous; she looks frightened, as if someone has just threatened to punch her. She narrows her eyes, practices a better smile, one belonging to a starlet. She rummages through the medicine cabinet and finds a pair of scissors. She pulls down a long section of hair at the front of her head and cuts it quickly. The hair springs back, short. Now she has bangs. Or a bang. She snips a section off the other side. The two sides are uneven. She tries again. Dark hair falls into the sink in question mark shapes. Someone knocks on the door. She takes a few last hacks. She hasn’t had bangs since was twelve and there’s a reason. They make her face look bare, her eyes even bigger, like a real life replica of one of those horrible children in a Walter Keane velvet painting. The person outside pounds the door. “Hurry up or you’re grounded!”

When she comes out of the bathroom, Hippie Dad has vanished into the night, lost, gone on the road with his band maybe. She knew it. She knew it. She can’t pull this off. She starts for the door and nearly bumps into him as he rounds the corner with two paper cups in his hands. “Your hair!” he exclaims, taking a step back.

“Let’s go,” she says. She walks away without glancing back, hoping, please God, that he’s following and that when she turns around, he will still be there with her. And miraculously, he is.

In the cab, Evie nods and tries to laugh at the right places as he’s telling her a story about his uncle who breeds Bichon Frise’s. She makes a hurried mental survey of the state of her apartment as she last left it. Did she pick her underwear up off the floor after her shower? Are there neon signs of weirdness in plain sight such as the paper dolls she bought on impulse last week and cut out while listening to the audio version of In Cold Blood narrated by Robert Blake?

The apartment won’t be too, too bad, because she’s taken to keeping it presentable, due to a recent Saturday late night marathon of a true-life crime series on A&E that showed colored photos of dead people’s homes. They didn’t reveal the bodies, but it was still deeply disturbing to witness the way some people lived; with garbage bags piled around or stacks of decade-old Better Homes and Gardens or pizza boxes; rooms that looked like the occupants had given up at some point and said screw it, I’ll just live with the dog shit on the floor. If Evie is found murdered in her apartment, she wants the place to at least look presentable. She imagines the detective shaking his big lovely head and saying, “What a shame that the life of such a nice, clean, well-organized girl had to come to an end such as this.” It’s a comforting way to live, picking up her underwear and socks, half-thinking about the detective and how impressed he’d be with her.

But now they are in front of her apartment. When Evie glances at the front of her building, she sees a fuzzy round figure sitting on the brick planter by the two doors. Her heart zigzags. Her mother! Her mother with her brown suitcase and sewing basket! But then the person moves and she sees it’s not her mother at all, but the old bald man from 2-C who appears periodically to smoke cigarettes and pace along the sidewalk in the dark.

Hippie Dad seems to be waiting for Evie to speak. In the dark of the cab, his face looks young and cavernous. “Isn’t that terrible?” he says.

As with Adopted Guy, Evie has lost the thread of his story. She shakes her head sympathetically. She hopes that’s the response he wants. “That is a shame.”

“I know. The entire face was just, like, gone.”

The cabbie says “I never trusted little dogs,” and Hippie Dad pays and they are on their way.

He walks up the stairs behind her. She jumps when he touches the small of her back as though to stop her if she starts to fall.

Once inside, they stand in the middle of the room, looking around her apartment together. She thought she was living wittily, being brave, starting over, no furniture to move besides a few things from college and an old brown sofa of her mom’s. Everything else has come from the Brown Elephant thrift store or been found on sidewalks, other people’s discarded furniture, including a wooden crate with “Bombay India” written in black ink on the side. She’s covered that in pictures cut from magazines; a collage of children, animals, women from the 50’s, a giant pair of lips, a cartoon man in a hat running from a speeding train. She has hung aprons up as curtains and nailed a rusty bicycle wheel rim to the wall for art. Now, she views her place for the first time as a stranger might. It doesn’t look interesting or eclectic at all. It looks sad and desperate to please, like a performing monkey in a tiny red hat.

Hippie Dad pulls off his wig. His hair is blond and curly and beautiful. He says, “I love your apartment. It’s so you.” He excuses himself to go to the bathroom.

The message light on the answering machine blinks three times in rapid succession, like a warning on a heart monitor. Evie throws a dishtowel over it and then unplugs the phone and tosses it in the oven.

She’s never had anyone stay over, with the exception of her ex-boyfriend from Iowa. That had been a disaster. The moment she saw his puffy, sweet face as he exited the airport terminal, she remembered why she couldn’t be with him–not someone so open and vulnerable, a person too much like herself or her mother to be of much help. As a couple, they could never make a decision, always deferring to the other person. Do you want to go see that movie? I don’t know. Do you? I don’t know. Do you want to just rent a movie? Only if you do. They’d stumble through life together in a series of indecisive moments that left them treading water in circles around each other until both were exhausted.

She feels very pleased with herself to have Hippie Dad in her apartment. She wants to tell her story to someone; have the person say, Do you know how dangerous that is? Did anyone see you leave with him? Did you even catch his last name? But it doesn’t feel dangerous. It feels like something she has to do.

They talk and talk and talk and Evie’s cat sits calmly on his lap. He pets the cat gently and absentmindedly. Evie tries not to interpret this motion to be a sign of what he’d be like in bed. They must tell each other everything, searching for some mystic parallels. Evie has to stop herself from crooning, Me too! every time he boldly claims that he loves something (the Ramones) or despises something (people who don’t know how to parallel park). Love the death penalty? Me too! Hate babies? Me too! She is not herself. All of her opinions have vanished in the night like so much smoke. She’s not even sure if she likes him.

It’s slipping away from them, the joking flirtation from the party. They start to cover mundane topics with the utmost seriousness. The winter hasn’t been so bad this year. No, it really hasn’t, has it?

“Wow, this is a really interesting space.” His eyes scan the room and he drums his fingers on his jeans. The more he talks, the more he slips into his dad hippie character.

She too seems to be acting more like her mother. She keeps jumping up to offer him things. Do you want chamomile tea? Are you hungry? I have cookies. Any second now, she’s going to lose herself completely and bring him a stiff drink, the newspaper, and offer to give him a foot massage.

“Would you like a glass of water?" He nods. She stands, a little wobbly in her heels, and goes into the kitchen. When she turns around, he wavers in the doorway, blocking the light from the living room. Then they’re kissing. "You’re tall," she says during a pause.

"It’s in my genetic make-up." He tugs at the collar of her dress. His mouth feels soft but not too soft, tongue wet but not too wet, and his arms around her waist urgent but not too urgent. She’s becoming distracted trying to remember which fairy tale this thought reminds her of, which in turn makes her think of the story of Hansel and Gretel and the wicked witch. And that reminds her of the oven and the phone in her own stove, a white and secret thing, waiting.

His mouth finds her ear. “So, what’s with the widow costume?” he whispers.

Evie feels her spine straighten, her fingers go cold.

When her mother called to say her stepdad had died, Evie felt a stabbing pain in the palm of her hand, where she’d always felt her sharpest grief. The pain wasn’t for him. She would miss him, probably, at some point, regret that they were never close, never said I love you or did any of the father-daughter things recommended by family therapists. Instead, when she heard that he was gone, she couldn’t stop thinking, Mom, mom, mom. She missed her so much in that moment.

She misses her still.

Evie steps out of her shoes and kicks them across the kitchen floor. She wishes there were someone to tell her what to do next. All that matters now is that he’s watching her. She’ll take him to her room. She will be someone else; someone who is not afraid of the dark or of being touched by another person. She will do whatever he wants. She will be amazing. Wonderful, even. A wonderful girl, at last. Aimee LaBrie’s short stories have been published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Minnesota Review, and Eclipse, among others. "Ducklings," which appeared in Pleiades was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

[img_assist|nid=4342|title=”Comfort Zone” by Indigene, © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=186]I confess that I broke the cactus. The poor plant had been growing well enough in its little auburn pot. I counted eleven spiny spears shooting out from the center to form a mangled circle of sorts. Somebody gave it to me. I don’t remember who. And then smack in the middle of the cactus, this morning, there was a strange brown wire. I thought, is it a twig? A thread? And without further reflection, I grabbed that funny brown thing and yanked it out. I don’t know when I realized it – as I was pulling it out, or in the instant afterwards, as it lay in my hand. I have just destroyed a cactus, I thought. This twig, or stem, or what have you, was growing in that cactus. It belonged there. This twig was not trespassing. Neither was it destined to become a spiny spear. I have just destroyed what would have been the only flower of this spiny, green cactus.

I left the cactus where it was, poor wounded thing, and went to make the waffles. I made them the old way, stirring the batter with a wire whisk and pouring it into the waffle iron. On good days, when Elroy was in the mood and I was feeling up to it, I’d go out into the backyard and pick fresh raspberries. Or fresh strawberries, depending on the season. I would stir these into the batter before cooking. There is nothing like a homemade waffle with homegrown berries.

Elroy isn’t coming home today. I feel it in my bones. Today’s the day. It’s the one. La una, as they say in Spain. Or is that one o’clock? It’s been so long. The dancing is a long way off. Sometimes when I’m trying to fall asleep and Elroy is breathing lightly next to me, his soft wheezing in my ear, short phrases come back. Detached words, the lyrics of the songs we used to dance to in Sevilla or Granada. Elroy says I’m living in the past. Stuck there. “We ought to get a microwave,” he says.

“What for?” I ask. “So we can both die of radiation?” This is a genuine concern of mine.

“I’m already dying of radiation,” he says. “Skin cancer. All those summers in Florida.”

I take a good look at his leathery skin. “You have a healthy tan, is all.”

He doesn’t answer for a moment and then he says, an impish twinkle in his eye, “Want to make a bet?”

This is beyond propriety. “Elroy, I don’t want to bet on the welfare of your skin cells. They won’t like it.” He begins to chuckle. “Don’t laugh, it’s true. These are live things. They hear what we say.”

He strokes my hand and says, “Ok then, love. We won’t bet on my skin cells. That wasn’t even what I was going to say.”

“Oh? What did you want to bet on?”

He pauses and then adopts a rather serious tone. “Let’s have a bet on which one of us is going to kick it first,” he says.

And that’s how it started. As a joke. Just like any of Elroy’s jokes. Like the time he let my brother think I was pregnant. This was nearly thirty years ago, when Elroy was sixty-two and I was fifty-four. But still. At that age? It’s absurd. It’s downright lewd. We had George going for a while. If he had a known a thing about women he would have known that I’d stopped menstruating years earlier. But George did not pay attention to such things. He never has.

George died last Christmas of lung cancer. I try to tell Elroy to keep away from cigars, but he doesn’t listen.

“They don’t cause cancer,” he tells me.

“Like hell they don’t.”

“They have nowhere near as much nicotine as cigarettes.”

I don’t know if this is true or false. “Well then, do it as a favor to me,” I ask. “I can’t stand the smell.”

“You’ve been standing it for sixty years, what’s to stop you now? Besides, you should be encouraging me. That way you might win,” he says with a wink. “I might drop first.”

I tell him that I don’t like this form of banter anymore. That I want to cut it out.

“Cut what out?” he says. “Mary Beth, if you don’t have your death to laugh at in these years, what do you have?”

He has me, I think. He has me. Unless, of course, I go first.

He’s gone out for his morning walk. That’s where he’s been while I’ve been making breakfast and killing cacti. I used to go with him. Then I broke my hip. It’s a wonder the way your body hangs back as a shadow for year after year after year. And then one day it creeps up on you – bam! Here I am, it says. Feel me. Feel me.

How different the pains of the body are. How different from its pleasures. I think of the early days, when life was new to me. I used to have the sensation of flying, of being above and beyond and outside of my body. I was a spirit. I was on air. Now the body comes to me as a casement, sealing me in, keeping me shut, tight, creaking and cramped. I can’t even go for a walk.

Today must be the day. It’s icy out. February. No berries of any kind to be plucked for waffles. Elroy has his boots on, but still. I know how slick that ice can be. I know how you can be walking steadily and carefully one second, and the next you’re sucked to the ground. I have a vision of falling. Of Elroy’s blood seeping onto the ice for some animal, or worse, a child to find.

These are the images that fill my days now. Phones ring and I think – hospital? Elroy? Was it the cigars? A stroke? Sirens roar a few blocks away and my heart leaps with a rush of adrenaline. Until I remember, he’s napping upstairs. Yet even once I know that he’s asleep or watching television or taking a bath, my heart keeps hammering on. Last night I dreamt I was at my own funeral. I was lying in a casket, wearing my wedding dress. I had gone back in time to my former bridal self, twenty-four years old and glowing. One by one, people came up to greet me. I remember a blur of faces and then Elroy. He leaned over the edge and simply said, see, I won.

I try to tell myself that it hasn’t really become a contest. That neither of us would wish death for the other. Or loneliness for ourselves. But there is this competitiveness. We both have it. It surfaces exactly the same way in casinos as in graveyard gambles.

“So did you take your vitamins?” he asks me. “Don’t forget. Especially calcium. You wouldn’t want to develop osteoporosis.”

This is a joke. I try to take it as such. Secretly, I make mental notes about his breathing: Scratchier than last night. Has developed a cough. He says it’s just a tickle, but I can tell. It’s a cough.

Elroy, I think. Please be careful. It is slippery out there and you are not as limber as you once were. Elroy. I was kidding when I said those cigars would do you in. Let us pray, dearest, that our words do not bury us alive.

I pour the batter into the iron and press it firmly shut. I listen for the sound of ice crunching or the doorknob turning. Today’s the day, I can’t help thinking. Something awful. We’ve wished it on ourselves. Something terrible. I think this a lot of late.

It’s not that we’ve actually made a wager on our respective dates of doom. We haven’t. We’ve only been kidding around about the bet ever since Elroy brought it up. But that was just the problem. He brought it up. And now it is here, lurking in the kitchen and the bedroom and all along Elroy’s walk. Which one of us will go first?

Aside from that question there are the other details. There are the non-competitive details, ones not so amusing as the thought of Elroy saying I-told-you-so at my funeral. There is, for instance, the image of lying in bed alone.

I tried it yesterday afternoon. Elroy was downstairs watching television and a sudden, ridiculous fear rose in my chest. Now, I’m no scaredy-pants. I’m not going to tell you I’m looking forward to death, but when it comes I will meet it with open eyes. What I am not ready for is a year, or two years, or even ten, living in this house alone. Without him. That’s why I got into bed yesterday. I pulled the lavender sheets back and thought, This is what it is like to have a king-size bed to yourself. It didn’t feel so odd at first. Well, of course it didn’t. I’d taken plenty of naps without Elroy by my side.

If I had only stayed there. If I had only stayed on my side of the bed, next to the alarm clock, all would have been well. But I really wanted to test it out. I thought I’d make the idea as tangible as possible. So I rolled myself into the middle of the bed. Not all the way over to Elroy’s side. But smack into the middle of the bed. I was a buoy bobbing on a sea of lavender.

And so this is the work, the daily work, of staying afloat. This is the making of waffles and the butchering of cacti. The mundane acts that make the anxiety shrink. If I knew exactly what was going to happen I could be at peace. If I knew that I was to go first, or Elroy, or that I would have to live without him for three years or six or ten, if I could only know the number I could get a grip on it. I could be at peace. It’s this not knowing that stretches out like an ocean before me, full of mystery, suspense at its worst.

I can’t tell if Elroy’s bothered by it or not. He’s always been so carefree. But they say that in every joke there’s a hint of truth. And he’s the one who made the joke. He’s the one who made it, but the unfair thing is, I’m carrying it. It’s weighing me down like a lifetime of cigars or a hearty dose of skin cancer.

The waffles are on the table. I’ve set the syrup out, and the butter. The napkins are set, two saffron napkins and two forks and two knives. Pairs. Doubles of everything. When we got married, everything came in twos. We were given two golden candlesticks, two porcelain teacups, two bathroom towel sets – did they think we couldn’t use the same towels? But we don’t. I use the mauve ones, and Elroy, the lime. We never discussed it. It just happened that way.

Is this the way it will happen? No word, no phone call, no ghastly sight on the staircase or in the den? Just this empty space, vacant time, the waffles getting cold and the coffee. And then I hear them. Footsteps. They are approaching the house. They are the sound of Elroy or a policeman or a stunned neighbor. They are going to hit the front door any second now. “Mary Beth?” he calls. It’s him.

“Elroy?”

He steps into the living room and crosses over to where I am standing.

“Yes, love?” His cheeks are flushed with cold. He isn’t wearing enough clothing. Beneath his jacket there’s just a red flannel shirt. “What is it?” he asks.

He ought to be wearing a sweater. A wool hat. He has leather gloves on, but they aren’t very thick. “You must be freezing,” I tell him. “You’ll catch your death.” And then I hear them, these awful words of mine.

“Is something wrong? Mary Beth, what’s the matter?” He lays a gentle hand on my wrist. It is papery and dry and firm.

“Breakfast was ready twenty minutes ago,” I tell him. “You’re late.” Kabeera McCorkle is a Philadelphia area writer and native. Her work has previously been published by the Danforth Review, and has been produced by Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre Company.

It was my highlight of the year, telling the class of freshman boys they all wanted to murder their dads and screw their moms. Freud’s idea—not mine. We were reading about Antigone, Oedipus’s daughter, buried alive for attempting to bury her traitor brother. I wanted them to see that her fated end resided in her family line—and that there were many such invisible connections perhaps guiding their own lives even now.

I sought out the most uncomfortable face. Tim Boggs. He first buried his face between both hands, rubbed his eyes, twisted in the chair, shook his head. Tim never met the world’s gaze, his look always askance. Here, again, someone who’d rather not see. Well, I’d see about that.

“A problem, Tim?”

“That’s a load of crap," he said. He avoided me, his classmates, choosing the black of the board. I waited and slowly, uncomfortably, he swiveled to face me.

I winked at him and said, "Yeah, Tim. Figures you’d say that. I’ve seen your mother."

Ah, the eruption of laughter, some of them even falling into the aisles. Usually the act brought a smile from even the kid in Tim’s position. But not this year. This year, he trembled, his eyes searching for something else to rest upon, back, forth, like a darting trout crossed by a shadow from above.

The thing was—I’d never seen Tim’s mother.

That next day, Robin sat at the end of the kitchen island, its green granite flecked with dark brown, hazel like her eyes. She wore her brown hair pulled back, no attempt made to hide the bones that protrude in her cheeks, shoulders. It gave her the look of someone unapproachable, someone wrapped too tight.

She took deep breaths. "Okay Nick, so the mother was what?"

"I don’t know," I told her. "Disfigured. Burns or something."

"Fuck!" She stood up, swung at the air, tried to kick the stool, missed. "And so now what will we do? Move? Who’s going to hire you here?"

I knew, but I didn’t want to say it. My mother. I’d have to return to my mother’s lodge. A linebacker, my mother. Looming. Foreboding. What was it Sylvia Plath called her father? A bag full of God. Well, my mother was a bag full of God-knows-what.

Robin leaned on the island. "Look, I’m not moving—not going to lose my job." She was the school psychologist. "So what precisely were you thinking?

"I don’t know. They laughed. That’s it."

"They’re a bunch of teenage boys. Just make farting sounds if you need a laugh."

That was the challenge in class, to catch them with these off-the-wall comments, show a willingness to go where most teachers wouldn’t.

"It was funny," I said. "You have to admit that."

She raised her hand into the air. I expected the middle finger, instead got the ring one, the ring. Oh Jeez.

"The ring," I said. A few paychecks away. "I didn’t think—"

"Nick, I used to like your recklessness, as if the things that mattered to the rest of the world had yet to make an impression upon you." She put on her coat. "But now, I don’t know, it’s not working for me anymore."

I said nothing.

"You really believe the fleeting pleasure of this laugh was worth it?" she said. "Well, was it? Was it?"

I knew not to answer. Robin was an anchor, in a good way. She kept me from drifting too far out. Was she right about all this? Why wasn’t it funny anymore? What about the world had changed?

I told her I got it, understood now. But proof, Robin said. She wanted proof.

"Like what?" I asked. "A polygraph test?"

"Figure it out. You know where to reach me. Where you used to work."

Robin lived in a world void of excuses, focused only on what was clear. Incontrovertible proof. Or she would be gone. Just like that.

* * *

Client after client, all women. Her son, aren’t you? I’m fishing with Elinor Longarden’s son. Wooha! A flyfishing guru, my mother, had her own line of products, the Longarden Triangle, her very own parachute pattern, the Fuzzy Elinor, and even her own fly floatant lotion, the Rub-A-Daub. The Yoda of Dry Flyfishing. Dry flies. Only dry.

I sat under the pavilion, watched the water. Nothing yet. How daring and mature, I thought, such a return, here, to prove to Robin how wrong she was about me. But three weeks later Robin still wouldn’t talk to me, believed this return to my mother was actually a regression. A great example of irony for the class—if I’d still had one.

I heard the footsteps of the morning’s client, turned to her, squinted, saw mostly sun.

She stopped, waited, hands on hips. "Well," she said.

I shrugged, spread my outstretched hands, a "what’s up with you?" gesture.

"You have no idea who I am."

I squinted at a tiny stick of a woman, still masked by the sunlight. Thought of a cartoon: "I hate being a stick figure; every time I rub my hands, I catch on fire."

"I’m Denise." The pause, waiting for a shock of recognition. "Boggs … Tim’s mom?"

"Oh, jeez … You’ve come to fish. Or kick my ass?"

She moved, finally, under the pavilion. Her face, around her left eye, caved in, a crater, a black patch over the eye. "You sat behind me on the school bus," she said. She plopped down across from me on the bench, cracked, ready to collapse. "Said Denise the Dog. Denise the Dog. All the way to school."

"Really? That sucks." I looked back at the water, a few bugs had begun to appear, tiny olives, here, there, not enough to bring the fish to the surface yet. More proof of my idiocy, my saying stupid things that seemed funny at the time–the consequences lingering, like the smell of trout in my clothes. But still. How I hated grudges, people who held on to things way too long. They should let go, for god’s sake! Was her face like that in school? Wouldn’t I remember such a thing?

"So … your injury," I looked up into the black patch. "That wasn’t in school, was it?"

"No, you weren’t making fun of me for this. This came later. A few years after high school."

And then I remembered. Something my mom mailed me in college. A note. Wasn’t she a classmate? A baby. A Doberman. A mom between them. Disfigurement. A bite out of her head. An eye hanging. "The dog," I said. "That was you. That dog attack."

"Yes. I saved my son only to have him told later by his English teacher that he’d never want to fuck me." She didn’t smile, looked at the water, at the sound of the splashes.

They were all wild trout, none of them over a foot, but hundreds of them like boiling popcorn–fish rising here, there, everywhere, the problem being so many flies that the trout often ignored the client’s fly, floating among the naturals; but I knew the technique to catch the wariest of these trout. Course, never told my mother. Swore the clients to a vow of silence. No one had squealed, yet.

"You’ve got quite a problem, Nick. You lost your job, and your fiancée so I’m told. Yet all you see is this hole in my face. You can’t even be mad at me, can you?"

I shrugged. "Why are you here exactly?"

"Well," she said, standing up. "I paid for a day of guided fishing. You’re going to guide me."

"Forget it, okay. I was just making a joke. I didn’t know anything about you." I stood up. Names popped into my head, taunts to whisper as if we were still in school. Then I thought of Robin. Something was horribly wrong inside me. “Just go. Please.”

"Look," she said. "I thought maybe you could show me you weren’t such an asshole. And maybe, I don’t know, I could do something about your job. My son. Well. He’s getting blamed for it all. And I guess the kids liked you."

The proof Robin needed was here. The guide tied knots, undid snags, removed miscast flies from trees, changed flies, pointed out prospective trout lies, suggested casts, netted the fish, wiped a dripping nose, if need be, if the client asked. Magic, I was, out here.

I nodded. "It’s a deal," I said.

* * *

Denise Boggs, knee-deep in this always-cold mountain stream, placed the fly wherever she wanted, her eye never leaving its drift.

"Another one, Nick. That’s what, two dozen now?" she said. She high-fived me.

We stood at the bottom of a small waterfall. The stream turned, spilled against a large rock, the straits of Gibraltar. The foam gathered in that far bend of the curve. Follow the foam and you find the food; find the food and you find the trout. With all the currents between them and the fish, the key was to cast in a way so that the line had no drag.

"Drag-free drift," I said to Denise. "Throw an S-curve cast. Shake the lines and it’ll put curves of slack in the line."

"Thank you, sir," Denise said, and then did exactly as instructed. The current took the S’s, left the fly alone, and there, in center of the bend, Denise got her rise.

Sometime in the morning, the fish stopped hitting the dry fly, and so I switched her set-up. "Really," she said. "Your mother know about this?"

"My mother," I said, purposely trying not to stutter over the ‘m’ and sound like Norman Bates. No, my mother, the guru of dry fly fishing, the writer of a billion articles on the horrors of subsurface fishing, the artlessness of it, knew nothing about the fact that I tied wet flies onto the dry fly, and that I fished under the water. "Knows, Of course, she does."

Denise looked up at all the placards on all those trees: DRY FLYFISHING ONLY.

"An exception," I said. "For her son. But that doesn’t mean we have to tell her, right? She’d rather not hear about it."

"Whatever you say, Guide." Denise held out her hand, pulled me up from my crouch. Could anyone get past the missing eye? A great test of love, such a gap. Could I? Did I have such a heart, such strength?

And so it went, the morning spent taking care of her, putting her into dozens and dozens of trout, and finally Denise winked at me. "So I guess you’ll pass. Tim will be relieved. I’ll talk to Headmaster Whitling."

She made her last cast, and up rose a trout, a beautiful brookie, shimmering green. She reeled it in, held it under its belly, let it slide back into the current.

Denise wiped her hands on her shirt. "By the by, it isn’t true. What you said."

"What I said?"

"The Freud crap. It isn’t true. That’s all." We were on the bank now, stomping the mud and water away. "No boy would want his mother. It’s unnatural."

"Well, well." Another voice. I looked to the woods. Here she came, my mother, pounding down the path like some sort of Sasquatch, her red hair ablaze, the goddess of flyfishing and insanity. Born in a crossfire hurricane, jumping jack flash. I felt the earth rumble with each step she took towards me. Denise looked up, at this form bearing down upon her, stopping only inches from her, putting her into the cool darkness of shade. An eclipse, she was.

"Saw your name on today’s ledger and I thought, why that’s the bastard who got my son fired."

"I don’t think women can be bastards, Mom."

"They can! And don’t hit me with your English teacher gobbley goop." Denise caught in the burning headlights of Elinor Longarden had yet to recover her senses. "Now, Denise. What the hell happened to you that you can’t take a harmless joke? A grown woman."

Denise looked at me. I understand, her look said. You grew up with a crazy woman.

"You did this stupendous thing–saved your son. You should be proud." And then she reached for the patch, as if to grab it and rip it off Denise’s face. Denise stepped back, held her rod out like a sword. "Come now," my mother said. "You need to let the world see what you did for your son."

I envisioned my mother finally grasping the patch and holding it in the sky, far beyond Denise’s grasp. Like a tiny dog, Denise would jump after it, the emptiness of the eye, a black hole, my mother would glare into, unafraid.

"Your badge of honor," my mother told her. "A sin, to cover it up."

Denise looked ready to run her through. She backed away, aimed the rod toward my mother’s heart, wherever that might be, even though the rod would only bend, then snap. You couldn’t kill Elinor Longarden with a fishing pole.

"She’s a hell of a fly-fishing woman," I said to my mother. "The trout didn’t have a chance."

"Doesn’t surprise me. I knew as soon as I read that article that you must be something else. But this? This school thing? Doesn’t add up."

"Oh," Denise said, putting the rod down. "What’s it matter? Your son apologized. He’ll get his job back."

"He apologized?" my mother looked to me. "You? What do you have to be sorry for? You didn’t rip out her eye, did you? Attack her son?"

"No, Mother."

She glared down at Denise as if she were going to pick her up by her collar, hold her kicking in air. "My God. How I hate what’s become of women!" She kicked at a fallen stick. "Pathetic. The whole lot of you!"

A crunch of sticks and leaves. I looked up. Robin strode down the path. What? I felt dazed. On the stream, with my intense focus on one act, one goal, the world floated away, but then when it returned … I shook my head, wiped my eyes, and Robin still appeared to me, hands on hips now and still. Had she come for me, finally? Her eyes passed me by and focused on Denise. "Mrs. Boggs. Tim told me you were here. I couldn’t imagine why." And then she looked at me. "What gives?"

"You’ve got some nerve," my mother said. "Nick would be a fool to take you back. Runs away at the first sign of trouble."

"Is that right, Nick?" Robin said, then to my mother, "Don’t you know this was the proof of his love for me, Elinor? Coming back here. Purgatory. Didn’t Nick tell you that?"

Denise raised up, face red, dirt-streaked. She held the rod straight up, as it were now a lance she rested upon. Robin turned back to Denise. "They weren’t tormenting you, were they?" Robin asked.

Denise looked at me. "No. He’s not bad. Once you get him on the stream."

"Really?" Robin asked. "I never had him on the stream. Did you?"

"Jesus, Robin," I said. "What are you thinking? She’s going to Whitling. Going to get my job back. So you should be happy, now. Right?"

Robin walked by my side. "You really are sorry about all of this? Or do you feel the way she feels?" Her head bobbed toward my mother.

"I know my Nick," my mother said. "He isn’t about to bend to your demands. He’s much bigger than that."

My mother envisioned me as something big, solid, unyielding. In Robin’s eyes, this same person verged on childish and scatterbrained.

Robin walked forward and latched onto me. And as she did, Denise watched her, and Robin’s unbitten, uncratered face. Denise shook her head. "By the way," Denise said to my mother. "Your son’s wet-fly rig is something else. Especially when the trout turn off to the dries."

My mother grabbed at her chest. "My God, Nick."

"A bit much, mother," I said. "Don’t tell me this is the ‘big one’?"

Robin reached for me, grasped my elbow. "You went against your mother? Really?"

So that was it. Robin wanted the snapping of that connection, the type of run a monster of a trout makes, so the line breaks with a crack and the angler falls backward from the force of it.

Denise smirked. Perhaps I understood it. How are you ending up with Robin, the smirk asked. What if she had a patch, a crater for an eye? What then? I see your heart, Nick, and there’s not much to it. You’ve bought into myths, and so here you are, married to your new mother.

"The sanctity of my stream, Nick," my mother said. "You, of all people—"

“Yes,” I said. “My fly’s wet.”

Robin pulled me towards her. I didn’t move with her, so she stumbled backwards, tripped on a branch lying across the path. Crack. She fell into my mother’s legs, knocking my mother over, straight down, like a bag of sand, plop, next to Robin, plop.

I ended up beside Denise. "So, we’re it." I said. "The only ones left standing."

My own foot slid along the mud on the bank, split me, and I twisted against this fall and hit the cold water on my belly and struggled against, what, surely not drowning. The stream wanted to pull me away, down, under, and I wanted it too, but it lacked such will or the power or something.

When I opened my eyes, I hoped to find myself alone, finally and utterly.

Instead, I found Denise. Her one eye scanned me, up, down, then penetrated the vest, the guide shirt. I thought—finally—of Tim, her son, a lifetime caught in that gaze, searching his heart for things it didn’t have.Randall Brown is a fiction editor with SmokeLong Quarterly, an MFA in Writing candidate at Vermont College, a recipient of a 2004 Pushcart nomination, and a three-time winner of Zoetrope Workshop’s Top Story. Three dozen or so pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of publications such as Timber Creek Review, The Iconoclast, Ink Pot, The MacGuffin, and Del Sol Review.
He’s also worked closely with Nance Van Winckel, Abby Frucht, and Terri Brown-Davidson.

[img_assist|nid=4347|title=”Tongue Tied ” by Aloysius, © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=326]Once Sara was gone, Aislinn folded the bed back into a couch and surveyed the aftermath of their impromptu romp. Sex with her semi-ex-girlfriend always left Aislinn breathless and disoriented, as though Sara had passed her a dubious pill rather than a wad of already-been-chewed Juicy Fruit on the crest of her formidable tongue.

Aislinn pulled on her T-shirt and began blowing out the candles still burning along the wide, paint-flaking windowsill. It was a sweltering summer afternoon—the third day running to hit the nineties—and still Sara had peevishly insisted on lighting candles.

“It smells like Cracker Jacks in here,” she’d said, sniffing the air suspiciously, wearing that infamous scowl of hers like a facemask. “Cracker Jacks and cat piss, with—what—a splash of Listerine.”

Sara’s sense of smell was legendary among their small circle of friends. She could correctly identify a perfume from clear across a crowded bar. Not that many of them even bothered with perfume. Often they camped it up with self-parodic fixative-sprayed wrists, a dab of linseed oil behind each ear. They were art students, after all. That was image enough.

Aislinn hadn’t really expected her unofficial roommate to appreciate or understand—or even respect—her period of self-imposed celibacy. But neither had she quite counted on Sara waging an all-out war; the woman had used every weapon in her sizeable sexual arsenal, from propagandized pillow talk to the twin atom bombs of her eyes, to recapture a small but strategic piece of land that, arguably, had never belonged to her in the first place.

She went to the freezer and reached for an Otter Pop—her favorite, Little Orange Annie. Sara had found a case of them at a bulk-rate food warehouse somewhere in South Jersey, not far from her parents’ house. When she was young, Aislinn’s summer diet seemed to consist of nothing but flavored frozen water: ink-soaked Sno Cones the texture of rock salt; art deco “rocket pops” of red, white and blue; paper tubs of Italian water ice and their makeshift wooden spoons. The cartoon clique of Otters, though, had always been her favorite; they were worthy of their own Saturday morning show.

As a kid, once Aislinn had finished sucking the last of the fruit-flavored ice from their plastic packets, she’d slip the empty tubes onto her fingers and put on a sticky puppet show for her brother, drops of iridescent juice streaming down her slender fingers, some traversing her wrists and making it as far as her elbows. She’d done the same for Sara (who tended to lick her clean). In fact, when Aislinn first told Sara that she would not, after all, be moving in with her in the fall, it was Alexander the Grape who broke the bad news. Aislinn wasn’t fond of disappointing people, even though disappointing people appeared to be her forte.

The person Aislinn managed to disappoint most often seemed to be her mother. Aislinn knew Agnes O’Connor would have something to say about her decision to leave school, for sure. And, contrary to her conveniently dismissive It’s-A-Mom-Thang-You-Wouldn’t-Understand posturing, she knew why. Her mother was adamant about her children knowing exactly what—and who—they wanted. Needless to say she knew nothing about Sara. She’d wasted her own youth on a man whose name, for all they now seemed to have in common, she could just as well have drawn from a hat. Aislinn’s parents hadn’t divorced when she was twelve, but to hear her mom tell it, they’d come “thrillingly close.” These days Agnes appeared in a mad rush to make up for lost time: often she materialized, wild-eyed and winded, with merely the upper half of her mouth smeared with some age-appropriate shade of lipstick, one lone eye dusted with shadow. It wasn’t completely unheard of for Agnes to neglect to brush her chemically enhanced thundercloud of hair.

Aislinn could deal with her mother’s self-styled aberrations of fashion. The real problem was that her mother’s recent influx of nervous energy was precipitated by her realization that she had nearly ruined her life and was now, at forty-nine, quickly running out of time to salvage it. It dictated Agnes’s behavior in all aspects, not just her dress. Aislinn knew that her mother viewed her children as genetic victims of her own indecisiveness and well-hashed life-defining mistakes.

 

Aislinn finished the Otter Pop and chucked Little Orange Annie—who no longer looked so orange—in the trash. She almost apologized.

 

Sara had come by ostensibly to retrieve Walter Ego’s Proto-Indo-European Vibe. She claimed she couldn’t paint without it. Music was essential to the creation of Sara’s art. Sara often claimed to lack imagination, but Aislinn disagreed. Still, rarely had she seen Sara work without her trusty iPod, and the benefit of a garage band shouting mantras or some self-proclaimed pixie cooing encouraging words in her ears.

But even more than music and making art, Sara thrived on sex. For Sara sex was sustenance. There was simply no other word for it. She insisted on getting off once a day, and preferably not at her own hand. It was no accident, then, that she’d shown up at Aislinn’s wearing a plain Hane’s tank top. Sara was well aware of Aislinn’s weaknesses and often made no bones about preying upon them. They both agreed that there was nothing sexier—perhaps nothing more subversive—than a woman in a “wife-beater,” especially a woman with Sara’s sinewy arms and strong, elegantly tapered back. Sara cracked her knuckles, flexing every muscle along her taut, lovely arms. They hit the futon in no time flat.

“Three weeks,” Sara said, once they were through. She consulted what Aislinn called her Batwatch, a cross between a doorknob and a dial of birth control pills. “Three weeks and, look, record time. I still got the touch.”

For all her in-yo’-face sexual prowess and kamikaze resolve, Aislinn knew that Sara’s ego was as fragile as blown glass. Sara couldn’t get it through her head that the prolonged break-up had nothing to do with waning physical attraction or sexual incompatibility. In fact it had nothing to do with Sara, as a lover, at all.

“I’m not leaving you for another girl.”

“That’s what worries me,” Sara said.

“I’m not leaving you for anyone,” scolded Aislinn. “So quit acting like I am.”

Sara sighed.

“What?” Aislinn asked.

“I hate this.”

“So do I,” Aislinn said, but it was a half lie; after all, there was a measure of comfort to be found in control.

“Then don’t do it.” She stroked Aislinn’s wealth of red hair. “Choose me,” Sara said a moment later, reaching for an enormous, ribbed bottle of water. “I’m sorry, I have to stop pressuring you.”

“You have to get that self-portrait finished, is what you have to do.” Aislinn, like her mom, was a skilled subject-changer.

“I know, I know. Exactly when is it due?”

“Uh, like, an hour ago.”

“Shit.” Sara sat up, began rooting around for her clothes. “I took this course for you, y’know. So we could be together. I’m not so gung-ho about finishing in four years. And I’ve got better things to do with my summer.”

“Better than making art?” Aislinn knew it was a rhetorical question.

“Other people’s art? Fuck yeah. Definitely.” Sara found her pack of cigarettes, lit one up. “So how’s yours coming?”

It was one of those lame, masturbatory exercises the semantics of which art teachers stayed up late tweaking: Paint yourself as others perceive you. Talk about pointless, Aislinn thought. She had no idea how others perceived her, and [delete] nor did she care. She had no intention of completing the assignment—another week and she’d be gone—but she couldn’t tell Sara that, not yet. “Fini,” she said with a flourish.

“Bitch.” Sara looked away, and then looked out the window. She took a drag, expelled a perfect stream of smoke. Sara looked like an ad for something; though it wasn’t perfume, or cigarettes, or even sex, Aislinn couldn’t put her finger on exactly what. Reluctantly she followed Sara’s gaze and saw that the sky was clouding over. It was the color of Agnes’s infamous mushroom soup.

Sara checked her watch for real.

“In a hurry?” Aislinn accused.

“No.” Then, after a beat, “Well, okay. I guess I am.” She met Aislinn’s gaze. “Look, I’ll be honest.”

“For once.”

Sara didn’t smile. “Cute. The truth is, I’ve kind of got a date.”

Aislinn tried to hide her surprise even as she felt her eyes widen, her brow furrow, her jaw slowly begin to drop. She knew she looked like a parody of her mother now, whose exaggerated features had always struck her only daughter as cartoonish, slap-dash. “Kind of?”

“Let me explain—”

“What’s to explain?” Aislinn cut her off. “You’ve got a date. You come over here, fuck me knowing full well I’ve been trying like crazy not to get fucked, in every sense of the term, and then tell me you’re fucking someone else.” She shrugged. “Crystal clear.”

Sara frowned. “We are not fucking.”

“What?”

“Myself and…this other person, I mean. We haven’t slept together.”

“Yet.”

Sara guffawed. “You’re a trip, Linn. I mean really. You’ve dumped me how many times now? No one’s ever dumped me in my life! Ever. Then you say you’ll see me, but no sex. No sex. And you know how I am, you know I’ve got needs—”

“Oh, I know.”

“Well what do you expect? What is it you want from me, anyway? Do you even know?”

Good questions, all, thought Aislinn. Which meant they deserved good answers.

“Yes,” Aislinn began, getting both their hopes up. She paused, unsure of how best to proceed. “I want to know her name.”

Aislinn really didn’t want to hear Sara say the words Josie Scarpone, even though every sound in the room, from the humming fridge to the ticking clock to the rapid beating of Aislinn’s very own increasingly confused heart, seemed to count off the syllables of the woman’s name.

“It’s nobody you know. Just some girl.” Sara took Aislinn’s hand. “I’m not telling you her name.” She was downplaying the intensity of this new attraction, but Aislinn had her doubts.

Sara shrugged. “She asked me to the fireworks and I said yes.” Then she leaned in close, which usually worked on Aislinn, even when she smelled less like Channel and more like a carton of Luckies. “I said yes to her, but I wouldn’t say no to you,” she cooed.

Aislinn knew that Sara falling for another woman was the only foolproof way of ending their relationship. She tried convincing herself that it was a good thing that her semi-ex-girlfriend had a date. She knew that without the intercession of Josie Scarpone or Becca Brownstein or the Rastafarian woman who waxed the floors of Royer Hall, Sara would never take no for an answer. And, despite her insufferable flip-flopping, no was the very answer Aislinn was intent on giving her.

Still, the thought of Sara falling hard for someone else, and so soon, was unbearable; for a full year now the two of them had seemed to defy gravity.

“Well?” Sara was saying. “Can you make it?”

Aislinn glared at her, but not without love. “This sucks.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Plus you and your needs need some serious help.” Aislinn screwed up her face; she was giving in.

“No argument there.” Sara reached for the ashtray—her ashtray, a plastic mug molded in the likeness of the Nestlé Quik bunny—and toppled it in the process. “Shit. Sorry again.” She regarded Aislinn. “I do more apologizing in this apartment….”

“That’s okay. Penitence becomes you.”

Sara made a kissy face, then got up and quickly began pulling on her clothes—jeans, tank top, bad-ass motorcycle boots; she never wore shorts of any kind, though slinky dresses and leather skirts were not unheard of, reserved for those occasions when she felt the need to make a very specific kind of statement. Shielded by an oversized throw pillow, Aislinn walked her to the door.

“I’ll meet you at the Circle,” Sara said, “this side of the fountain.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

Aislinn smiled. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

For an instant Sara almost looked hurt. “I tried that, remember. It didn’t work.”

“It didn’t work for you. I would’ve done just fine, if one of us had just had the guts to end it.”

“Brava,” Sara said after a moment, slowly clapping her hands. “You almost had yourself convinced that time.”

Aislinn blushed.

“The Circle,” Sara repeated. “Get there early. It’s going to be mobbed, and I can’t sarcastically oooh and ahhh all night in unison with a relative stranger.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Aislinn quipped.

“No,” Sara agreed. “But it would be the last.”

“Oooh, now I’m scared.” Aislinn dropped the pillow and gave her soon-to-be ex-girlfriend a playful shove.

“You should be,” laughed Sara, lightly shoving her back.

Aislinn pretended to busy herself with the dried paint under her fingernails. Nakedness was not her natural habitat, but she resisted the urge to scoop up the pillow. She was playing Sara’s game now, a game in which full disclosure was a prerequisite and coyness did not apply. “Okay, I’ll be there.” She shrugged. “I don’t have anything better to do.”

Sara regarded her skeptically. “Cool,” she said finally. “Very cool.” She pulled Aislinn to her and administered the kind of kiss intended to fill the void in her absence. “Don’t be late. I’m all about the pyrotechnics.”

As if she didn’t know.

Aislinn drew the chain lock on her apartment door. Then she did something she never did after fooling around with Sara: she took a shower. She was well aware of the symbolic implications of wanting to shower after sex, but she got around it by telling herself she didn’t need to feel clean so much as refreshed. She was a painter, after all, not some overzealous English major.

It wasn’t anything Aislinn had ever expected to happen, although Sara had often factored into her reveries as the one girl at Monroe she could see getting close to, closer than she’d ever gotten to any girl. But aside from having survived a grueling Intro to Anatomy class their freshman year; [, comma, not semicolon] Aislinn hadn’t known Sara very well. That is to say, she’d known pretty much what everyone knew: Sara was involved with one of the design teachers, a rather sad-looking woman with very large breasts and an inordinate fondness for paisley. It was an open secret that they were an item, although even the administration at Monroe claimed to frown upon student-teacher sexcapades. Of course Aislinn had found Sara attractive—who didn’t? But when Sara began skulking around her studio, making small talk and bringing her various things to eat from the lunch trucks camped along the curb—soft pretzels, cellophanes Tastykakes, cubist fruit salads—Aislinn had more reasons than most to consider exactly what it was about Sara she found so appealing. Aislinn liked the way Sara’s jet-black hair, choppy on top but shaved smooth as velour in back, accentuated her strong jaw; she liked the set, slightly drawn mouth and the square-tipped “ski jump” nose; she liked the subtle way Sara’s nostrils flared when she concentrated on a painting or—as she soon learned—reached orgasm. And those eyes. Caramel brown, they were sympathetic and smoldering at the same time. The eyes of both hunter and prey.

They’d both been drinking gin, which Aislinn was unused to, and attempting, without much grace, to step dance to the closing fiddle of Sinéad’s “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” at Spring Fling. Exhausted, they fell to the floor, setting off a chain reaction of tumbling dancers. The short version is that Sara accompanied Aislinn to the bathroom and tried sticking her tongue down her new friend’s throat. At first Aislinn resisted, although what had stopped her was the sheer shock of the surprise attack, not a lack of desire. But she soon warmed to the idea of having Sara’s tongue in her mouth and, an hour later, lapping gently between her legs; back at Sara’s, powerless against the gin as well as against that hungry, hell-bent look in her eye, Aislinn was happy to let her new lover lead, if only until she was able to get a feel for the dance, to learn these few unfamiliar, though oddly ingenuous steps. In her zeal, Sara had fumbled with the straps of Aislinn’s overalls so long that finally the latter decided to pitch in and help. Wracked by the giggles, they teetered there like that—neither fully clothed nor naked enough to get much done—for what seemed like days. Eventually they collapsed onto the mattress, a laughing tangle of hair and interlocked half-clothed limbs.

 

Aislinn pulled on her jade silk robe—a lavish, pointless present from her mother that Sara said made her look like something out of Fitzgerald—and lay on the futon. She plunged her hands into the pockets and felt something crinkle. Just before she retrieved the coarse watercolor paper she recalled what it was: the latest of Sara’s many “presents,” part of a Keats poem copied ransom note-style, in squares of mismatched print, and embellished with scrawls of conté crayon. She’d given it to her three weeks before, the first time Aislinn had tried to break it off. Like most of Sara’s presents—the Otter Pops, the bumper stickers, the raving purple sunflowers—it was as much an indictment as it was homage.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

 

Aislinn didn’t think her eyes particularly wild. If anything they were too small, set too close together. But her hair did reach down to the small of her back. And she had an unintentional habit of catching people off-guard.

When she got to the stanza about the “elfin grot,” Aislinn was reminded of the storage room on the fifth floor of the studio building, where for the first few months of their courtship she and Sara had met secretly. They’d scoured the building for a private place and Aislinn knew that Sara had deemed it as a kind of sanctification of their union when finally they found one. It wasn’t that they were so different, or what they were doing so odd. Still, Aislinn wasn’t ready just yet to join the proudly swelling ranks, to tout her newfound sexuality as many in the college—students and faculty alike—seemed intent on doing. Because they both had roommates, and because the studios themselves were anything but private, she’d insisted that they find a neutral meeting place and made Sara swear, to the best of her ability, to keep what they were doing quiet.

“Well, I’ll try,” she’d said, sounding as unconvincing as she could. “But it won’t be easy. You’re pretty hot stuff.”

They were seated at Sara’s enormous worktable, which was strewn with snail-like tubes of oils and thumbnail swatches of pre-treated canvas. Aislinn stuck out her tongue. Sara lunged across the table and tried to catch it between her teeth.

“Careful,” Aislinn warned, nodding to her left. Sara’s roommate and her boyfriend were in the next room.

“Please,” Sara said a mischievous glint in her eye. “They’re too busy to care about us. Listen.”

The sound of muffled groans and a creaking box spring came from April’s bedroom.

“Nice work,” Sara said. “If you can get it.”

“You get your fair share,” Aislinn countered, a faint smile gracing her lips.

“I’m a greedy girl,” Sara coolly informed her, slowly shaking her head. Her gaze was unwavering. “I want more.”

When they first found it, the door to the grot was fastened with a plastic-coated bicycle chain, but Sara was undeterred. She knew how to pick a lock as well as how to forge a signature, hot wire a car. In fact, it was Sara’s talent for minor criminal activity that, even more than her talent for painting, had impressed Aislinn, a suburban goody two-shoes who only ever crossed at the corner.

They met often after that, three or four times a week. “Meet me at the grot,” Sara would whisper on her way out of Mr. Hellman’s required English course. There in the dark, the jaggedly stacked desks and jutting easels really had taken on the appearance of rocks; the two naked girls stretched out on a flannel army blanket that of drunken bacchanals.

From the windows of the grot they could see the streetlights lining the Ben Franklin Parkway, and above them the huge, neon emblem of the Blue Cross building like something out of the Book of Revelation burning a hole in the night. During storms, those lights were their stars that cross their moon. They fucked under its glow—and munched Smartfood, poring over Eliot’s The Waste Land—their bodies tinted, or so they imagined, with a bluish sheen. Sara always insisted she would paint Aislinn in that light. After a while, word got out. It was a small school, and Sara wasn’t the best secret-keeper on campus. But by then Aislinn no longer cared. For a long time, all she had really cared about was Sara. And caring had rendered the grot obsolete.

Against her better judgment, she finished reading the poem which was Sara all over: dark, accusatory, melodramatic. The woman in the poem relished being on the receiving end of a raw deal. In reality, though, Sara had all the power. Aislinn had never taken her girlfriend’s professions of eternal love seriously, at least not so seriously that she was blind to the way other women continually caught Sara’s eye. But having few illusions about Sara didn’t afford Aislinn any sort of magical power. It couldn’t even keep her from getting hurt. Sara liked to argue that Aislinn, as a bisexual woman—if that was even the right word—was a liability for her: “Double the temptation. Twice as many reasons to cheat.” But Aislinn wasn’t a cheater. And she certainly didn’t feel like she had the upper hand, least of all when standing next to Sara (or even lying head-to-toe in bed). If anything she felt weak. Of course that was part of the attraction, and part of what irked Aislinn so. The problem was that Sara, too, claimed to be in her lover’s thrall. There were two Lovely Ladies without Pity wreaking havoc in this relationship. The poem wasn’t big enough for them both.

Aislinn took a towel to her wealth of red hair and dressed quickly, pulling on a flimsy gesso-stained work shirt and a pair of cargo shorts. Carol would be coming in any minute and Aislinn was in no mood for chitchat. Besides, her roommate was an intuitive girl who always seemed to have one ear cocked toward other people’s problems. One look at Aislinn and she would know what was up. And not even Aislinn knew, exactly, what that was.

It’d been months since she’d been to the grot, and for the first time Aislinn felt a twinge of ignominy as she picked the lock and slipped inside. She wasn’t sure what had prompted her to come here, or what she hoped to find. She half expected to find Sara, munching on an egg salad sandwich and an order of Curly fries from the cafeteria, a smiling I-told-you-so spread across her frustratingly seductive mouth.

It was musty and surprisingly cool inside, welcome relief from the stifling, record-high heat. Everything was just as Aislinn remembered it: desks carelessly thrown together piled every which way; boxes of acrylic and tempera paint stacked to the ceiling; massive reams of newsprint tucked into a corner like some scrolled ancient text. Sated and sleep-deprived, she lay down under the open window and peered out at the gray, late afternoon sky. Typical Philly Fourth of July: it started to rain.

Aislinn leaned her damp head against the folded crook of her arm and watched the overcast sky fade to black.

In her dream, Sara was insisting that she get a tattoo, which was weird, considering she didn’t have any of her own.

“Why should I?” asked Aislinn. “You can’t make me.”

“All the Monroe girls have one,” said Sara. “Some more. Josie’s got five, one on her back, one on her arm, one on each shoulder blade, like a set of wings.” She lowered her voice. “I can’t tell you where the fifth one is.”

“You don’t,” Aislinn countered.

“Oh, don’t I?” Sara tore off her tank, revealing a silk-screened Warhol portrait of Aislinn, but Aislinn circa 1989, as a first grader, in pigtails and thick-rimmed glasses. Suddenly, broken and bare-chested, Sara seemed on the verge of madness, cryptically pleading with her girlfriend, “Tell me what the thunder said before you go, tell me what the thunder said before you go…”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Aislinn said.

“Liar!” Sara screamed. She grabbed Aislinn by her long red hair as she tried to run away. “Liar, liar, snatch on fire! Tell me what the goddamn thunder said before you go!”

But Aislinn couldn’t help her; she’d no idea what Sara was even talking about. “I always cover my ears!” she cried…

Aislinn woke to a muffled boom reverberating around the storage room. She went to the window just in time to catch a trickle of white light dart over the Art Museum and watched as it burst into a myriad of glitter-trailing spangles. These were Aislinn’s favorite; the shy, silently zigzagging fireworks that didn’t so much explode as peter out and pop. Of course Sara preferred the blockbusters.

Sara!

Rushing to get up, Aislinn tripped over her own feet and hit the floor hard. A barrage of rapid-fire showstoppers lit up the night sky with a wash of apocalyptic color. Then, just like that, the show was over, and the sky filled only with smoke.

The thought of Sara settling for a Josie Scarpone consolation prize left Aislinn feeling like a flattened tin can. She pushed the image away, preferring to picture Sara alone among the throngs of families jamming the Parkway. She envisioned Sara searching the crowd for signs of her iridescent hair, all sorts of disasters—everything from a slip in the shower to an abduction and rape—flashing through her excitable girlfriend’s mind. Aislinn saw the crowd dispersing, a circle of emptiness widening around Sara and Sara, like some spot-lit, heartbroken Irish tenor, pining for her dream girl, for that’s what Aislinn’s name meant. Sara pointed this out to her their first night together: “dream.”

“And yours?” Aislinn asked.

Sara had straightened her back and delicately cleared her throat before answering. “Princess,” she said in an affected tone.

“Wow,” Aislinn laughed, “talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Aislinn got to her feet and thumbed her nose at the makeshift moon, visible now on the other side of the smokeless sky. She stood there a moment longer than she needed to, regarding her own reflection in the inoperable, unwashed casement window. The translucent young woman who returned her gaze both was and wasn’t Aislinn O’Connor, much in the same way the corporeal girl inside the studio building both was and wasn’t Sara’s girlfriend; both was and wasn’t Agnes’s daughter; both was and wasn’t a third-year painting major at a posh urban art school. Aislinn felt simultaneously crowded and alone, like a person in a packed elevator. She didn’t know which way she was moving, or which floor was hers. She couldn’t even see the tiny lighted numbers, for all the bodies blocking her view. One thing, though, was clear: The ghost in the grimy black glass wasn’t especially impressed by what she saw.

O what can ail thee, knight at arms, alone and palely loitering?

Aislinn slipped out of the storage room without stopping to lock the door behind her. She took the stairs two at a time, feeling lighter by the moment. By the time she reached her apartment she’d be all but invisible. And when Sara called the next day, feeling guilty about her own betrayal but also somehow vindicated, Aislinn, her dream girl, would be nothing but air. Shaun Haurin was  raised in the Port Richmond section of Philadelphia. He currently teaches American and world literature at Rowan University. His work has appeared in The Baltimore Review.

 The first day on the raft I missed you. The second, I tried to accept the fact you were gone. On the third day I believed you were beside me, holding my hand, running your fingers through my hair as you fell asleep with your head against my chest. On the fourth day I spoke to you—constructed sentences of rage, passion, and apology. On the fifth day you were gone. As I slept your transparent presence slipped into the night air and went off in search of whatever it is the dead are supposed to do.

On the sixth day I tried to forget about you completely and think only of survival while my eyes attempted to focus on the unending blue horizon. But I remembered the things we said we would do if you were here. I told you once I would open a vein for you and watch in erotic delight as you placed your lips around the open wound and transferred my blood to your body. You told me you would slice off a portion of your calf for me and slip it onto my tongue.

“Like carpaccio,” you said.

But there is no carpaccio, no vein to open. There is only the Pacific, the sun, and the moon to keep me company as I wonder what life, if there is to be any at all, will be like when I get to shore.

There is a duffle bag on the raft, the one we filled together for situations such as these. In it are cans of food, solar stills, emergency flares, and other means of survival. We argued about what we should put in it. You said we should have a bible.

“You don’t believe in God,” I told you.

“If I’m stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean I’ll start,” you said.

We searched the house for a bible but came up empty. We contemplated spending the night at a cheap hotel and stealing the copy next to the bed, but you found a black bound copy of Moby Dick and put it in the bag instead.

“It looks like a bible,” you said.

Neither of us had read it before, but I’m reading it now. I consider myself Captain Ahab, you Ishmael, and the whale the thing that keeps us apart.

On the seventh day I made friends—large fish with big heads, colors of blue and silver across their brows, who seemed to gain immense pleasure from bumping their heads against the side of the raft. I watched them throughout the day trying to figure out if it was defense or affection that kept them coming back. Some of them swam off into the distance, turned around, and came towards the raft like kamikaze pilots. Others circled me slowly, occasional rubbing their large heads against the sides off the raft as if settling in next to a lover.

On the eighth day I killed one. I took the spear gun from the duffle bag, knelt with it near the edge of the raft, and waited. Several of them came towards me from a distance, striking the raft with their torpedo-shaped heads and then swimming off into the distance before my spear had a chance to even touch the water. I waited, watching the ones filled with rage and fury ram into me. And then one of the others came, innocently approached the raft, his long tail swayed back and forth without worry or urgency. He placed his head against the raft near my knees. The tail continued moving slowly, the fish pushed himself into the large mysterious creature he had discovered. He looked up with one wandering eye as I fired the spear into his belly. The water turned red, the eye fluttered and the tail that had moved so slowly began to thrash in the water in an effort to escape the metal that had violated its body. I waited, holding the string attached to the spear as he tried to escape. His friends swam away, as if they were ashamed that one of their own had been so stupid and naïve as to trust an intruder in their pure world.

When the tail ceased to move I brought him into the raft and watched his gills open and close as he lay dying on the floor of the raft. I took my knife, put it through the eye and brought the bleeding socket up to my lips. There is fresh water inside the eyes of fish. You told me that once as you watched a nature show at night. I didn’t believe you.

I filleted the fish. I opened his belly over the side of the raft and watched his insides slowly sink to the bottom. Greens, blues and reds, things that once made him alive now danced uselessly down into the ocean. I cut thin strips of meat from his tail and hung them to dry in the sun. I wanted to use his bones for something so I could say I hadn’t killed him in vain, but I thought they would pierce the raft so I threw them overboard and watched them float hollow and silent out to sea.

The meat tasted like sushi we once ate together.

On the ninth day I thought of someone else. She was a woman I did not know, but had seen every day for a year. She worked in a store on Ninth Street that sold water pitchers, plates, glasses and dresses. The store was on the corner and had windows all around it. She would sit in one of the windows, amongst the plates and glasses, staring out into the world like a cat in the windowsill, its tail slowly moving back and forth, its eyes fixed upon something only it could see.

I would pass her on my way to lunch, at the same time, at the same place every day. She was older, with red hair, and a body that must have been firm at one time, but now required the assistance of tight, form-fitting clothes to keep everything adequately displayed. She wore too much make-up—bright reds on the lips, and greens over the eyes. After seeing her for three months I waved. She waved back.

Occasionally the plates, glasses and her hair would change with the seasons. I never saw anyone else in the store, and I never went in. And if the light at the corner was red, I would stare at her not knowing what else to look at. She would remain unfazed; looking at whatever it is cats in the window look at in the middle of the day.

One day I looked into the store and it was empty. Its white shelves and walls deserted, as if the unsold and unappreciated objects had got up and walked out on their own, hoping to have better luck at a different store. I never saw the woman again.

When she was gone I fantasized about her. I imagined that I had entered the store at lunch and without a word she led me to some unseen room in the back where we had forceful, anonymous sex. And when we finished she resumed her post at the window and I left, closed the door softly in an effort to preserve the silence and stillness that existed inside. The fantasy never changed, and occasionally, afterwards, I felt as if I had committed some sin against the unknown woman.

The raft slowly passed her store on Ninth Street. She waved me inside, forgave me, and we indulged in the lunchtime ritual I once imagined so well.

On the tenth day you returned and accused me of being with someone else. You sat across from me on the raft and refused to speak. I told you about the fish, how I had drank from the eye socket, and I told you that you were right—there was fresh water inside. You turned away, your face looking out into the endless ocean.

I told you about the solar stills, the ones we had bought together at the Army-Navy store. I inflated them until the words Army Surplus were visible on the sides, and let them bounce in my wake slowly transforming the unusable ocean into fresh water. On a good day, when the sun is bright and the sea is calm, I can extract almost two cups of drinkable water, which they say is more than enough to live on.

“It tastes like the inside of an old clam,” I told you.

You didn’t respond, and slowly began to disappear into the mist of salt water created by the light of the moon.

The raft is eight-feet by four feet, bright orange, with a floor that feels like a waterbed without enough water. It is shaped like a hexagon, its borders formed with large cylindrical tubes that inflated automatically as our boat went down. There is a tarp I can pull over the raft when it rains, or when the sun seems intent on infiltrating my every pore. It is like a convertible we rented once.

When we bought the raft, the sign above it said it was a raft for two. There was a picture on the box it came in with a suntanned couple sitting in the raft, with slight smiles on their faces, as if they knew they had just cheated death.

“They look like they’re on vacation,” you said.

On the eleventh day I took inventory. There was the copy of Moby Dick, the solar stills, a small journal and pencil in a plastic bag, a can-opener, a spear gun, five cans of assorted beans, pastas and soups, a flare gun with five flares, a knife, a compass, and some matches. In the bottom of the duffle bag was a tampon and I wondered when you had put it there without my noticing, and if its presence would somehow contribute to my survival.

In the journal I wrote you letters. I told you how I always hated it when you slipped into bed, in your own silent world and drifted effortlessly into sleep while I stayed up wondering what it was I had done to make you pretend that I was not there. In them I told you how good it felt when you slipped into bed and silently began the soft caresses that led to making love until you were satisfied and would then fall silently asleep in my arms, while I stayed up wondering what it was I had done to stir these moments of treasured affection.

I wrote other things in the journal too. I wrote that I had discovered when I was ten years old, that sometimes people just die. It was in my aunt’s apartment in Staten Island. My mother and I walked through the apartment as we had so many times before, but it was somehow changed. We stared at the crucifixes on the wall and statuettes of the Pope. There were pictures of my aunt as a young woman and they brought tears to my mother’s eyes.

In the car, on the way to the church, my mother told me that my aunt had spent the majority of her life alone in that apartment. She told me that no one should live alone like that and I promised her I wouldn’t.

We were the first ones in the church and the open coffin, surrounded by white flowers, lay before us. My mother straightened my tie and we walked hand in hand between the rows of chairs towards my Aunt, in a white frilly dress, her lips bright red, her face the color of the moon.

My mother and I knelt in front of the coffin and my mother whispered under her breath as her hands touched the coffin. I stared at my aunt’s closed eyes and I understood that she was dead. There was no need for my mother to explain anything. And while a certain sadness existed with in me, it was soon overshadowed by the arrival of cousins who took me outside so we could play in the parking lot.

Death, at the time, meant nothing more than putting on a tie and playing hide and seek with distant relatives.

Death is different now.

I tried explaining this to you when you came back to forgive me on the twelfth day. You sat silent on the other side of the raft, your legs pressed against your chest in an effort to escape the nighttime chill. I told you I must not have loved my aunt because when she had died I felt nothing. You asked me about the others who had died.

Not the old ones on machines in their hospital beds who left you their old golf clubs and fishing rods, who you knew would die someday, but the young ones. The ones who were taken in an instant, through gunfire, suicides, and trees along the highway. The ones who seemed invincible.

“I loved them,” I told you, and I knew it was true because when they died I sat and cried for them and when I looked at their young mutilated bodies in the casket I realized I would never see them again and that it could just as easily be my eyelids shut and my body in the cold wooden box. I cried because I realized I didn’t want to die.

“No,” you said. “You really don’t want to die.”

And then you left again.

In my mind I went to the place where I lost you—the night the boat went down. You stood at the wheel, and kept her at a steady seven knots, fifteen degrees south by southwest. I stood on the deck and looked through a sextant at the stars and tried to figure out where we were. We did not speak. We were five days out of the islands and words between us were replaced by routines of cooking, steering, and taking turns at navigation.

The sextant we used was an old one. A simple device that when used properly would tell us exactly where we were on the planet. It had a small mirror on it in which to align the North Star. The goal was to find the North Star, have it shine through a lens and reflect onto the center of your forehead. The mirror would let you know if you had succeeded. But it didn’t really matter if you succeeded or not. We had satellite navigation, radios, and other modern instruments of navigation that did not entail the aligning of stars with various body parts. According to the sextant, my forehead and my math we were somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.

I told you this and you laughed, keeping her at 15 degrees south by southwest.

Before we left land I told you of the dangers at sea. The whales, storms, currents and reefs that could sink us in an instant. You said you weren’t scared. I told you of the tales told by sailors of rouge waves reaching as high as seventy feet that came without warning from the depths of the ocean and destroyed boats like sandcastles on the beach.

“I read Robert Louis Stevenson too,” you said.

But the night the boat went down you did not doubt me. I looked away from the North Star for an instant, watching you with your hands on the wheel, your eyes looking through the world at something nobody else could see.

When I saw it I could not speak. It was every bit of seventy feet and you looked so small and helpless underneath its white fury. You looked at me for an instant, turned around to face your monster, looked back at me in despair and turned the wheel in an attempt to make the boat face its predator.

I wondered then if you had read Stevenson. He once wrote that when he was in the South Seas and a seventy-foot wave had approached him, he simply kept her steady and rode the wave like a surfboard until it returned to the depths from which it had sprung.

The wave hit us broadside, capsizing the boat. It hit you first and as I held onto the mast I lost your yellow slicker somewhere inside the white rage. The wave continued to come, like an avalanche from some unseen peak, and the boat turned increasingly into the ocean. I cut the ropes that kept the life raft and duffle bag attached to the deck. It inflated instantly and floated like a balloon above the white water. The boat was on its side filling with water and sinking.

I remembered the voice of the man who sold us the boat, mentioning things like “self righting, self bailing, and unsinkable.” Then I saw you. Your yellow slicker and body caught in the rigging now under the water. The raft, attached with a rope to the sinking boat, waited anxiously above us. I swam to you and attempted to cut the steel wires and ropes that refused to let you go.

You spoke to me then in undecipherable bubbles. I imagined your eyes dancing a frantic tango in the pitch-blackness of the water. I ran my hands against your body and felt the tightness of muscles as they flexed against the cold steel cords and taught ropes.

I pressed my body against yours—we hung suspended and weightless beneath the aftermath of the wave you believed could not exist. We began drifting down, the cabin filling with water, and the sails lifeless in the sea. You grabbed my hand as I looked to see the bright orange of the raft on the surface, the rope connecting it to the boat becoming taught. I placed my hand on the back of your neck, like I had so many times before in moments of passion, rage and affection. And then, as if by some ill-fated cue, we both let go, and I untied the rope that kept the raft to the boat. You were still, your eyes straight ahead, your hands motionless at your side, and you left me as I floated alone with the rope in my hand.

It was then my lungs and brain began to feel the lack of oxygen. My body panicked as I swam to the surface, exploded out of the water into a clear sky and took in all the air I could. At the moment I didn’t even realize you were gone. The only thing that mattered was that single breath of air. And the wave, the one that had crept up behind you and taken you away, had been replaced by a calm uncaring sea.

On the thirteenth day you came to the raft, and asked me to tell you again, the way things were going to be. I told you how there would be dolphins in our wake, and stars to guide us once the moon disappeared over the horizon. I told you how we would walk around the boat wearing nothing but hibiscus flowers in our hair. I told you of deserted beaches, eating mangos from trees and lovemaking in the sand. “It will be our Eden,” I told you.

Somewhere I lost track of the days. This morning was the same as the morning before and the morning before that. Nights never differ—it is the same constellations night after night, teasing me with their knowledge of time and place.

I drink water from the stills, kill the large headed fish when they come, and speak to you when you are here. I peel my sunburned skin off in large layers, place them delicately in the water and watch them float out to sea.

When I see planes in the distant sky I fire a flare into the air, watch it explode and float back down into the ocean. For a moment it feels like the Fourth of July. But the planes never stop. They keep their course with their invaluable cargo, taking people to places they’ve never been before.

If the planes were to see me, in my floating studio apartment, and send their helicopters down to save me I may even tell them to go away and leave me in peace.

The shore is a reality I would rather not face. If I reach land there will be questions to answer, funeral arrangements to be made, and the constant reminder of what happened at sea. But here, in the unending ocean, there is still hope. There is always the chance you will come to me from the sea or the sky.

Here there is nothing to think about except the past.

On land there will be nothing but the future.

I have started to see birds. Large albatrosses with their 10-foot wingspans and airplane sized bodies. They fly silently above me, like vultures circling a corpse. Sailors used to say that the sighting of an albatross brings luck, but it doesn’t represent luck to me. To me the sighting of an albatross means there is land nearby.

You came to me the night I spotted the first one. You flew behind him in the night, and glided your way next to me in the raft. You asked me what I was going to do when I reached land.

“Eat a steak,” I told you. “With mushrooms and a potato and a good bottle of wine.”

It suddenly occurred to me that I would have to eat alone.

I slept through the night with you beside me. In the morning you shook my leg and spoke in a language I couldn’t understand. I looked for you but you were gone, replaced by an old man with no shirt, gray hairs on his chest, and eyes as bright as the sea.

He smiled a toothless grin and motioned for someone to come see what he had found. Beside him came a woman, equally old, with her weathered breasts staring at me from beneath a white sleeveless shirt. She handed me an old plastic milk container filled with water. They helped me into their small boat, the bottom filled with brightly colored fish and nets with sea cucumbers stuck to them. They tied the life raft to the stern of the boat. The woman placed a blanket around me, gave me some bread from a bag to eat and sat me down before her so I could rest my back against her sagging knees.

There was no land in sight and the old man began to row, gently humming a song. He looked at the woman at the other end of the boat and she laughed. They did not speak to each other, but smiled and gestured with slight bends of the arm, and nods of their heads.

The old man rowed until it was night. In the distance I began to see land. You were there in the saltwater sky but you didn’t come down. You simply disappeared, and left me between the sea and land, the man and the woman; you left me in the wells between the ocean waves, drifting between love and love lost.

[img_assist|nid=4327|title=”Early Bird,” David Aronson © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=163]

I care for small animals.

Once a week, I smuggle mice out of work. I stuff my jacket pockets with three sometimes four mice and deliver them from their overpopulated cages to freedom. It is a non-profit, non-political, non-religious, even-the-smallest-animals-count campaign that I started three weeks ago. It is a fact that mice can swim up to a mile and a half before they exhaust their energy and drown. With a highly acute sense of smell, they can also find their way home from up to five miles away. At the start of my campaign, I had a minor set back, when I freed the mice too close to work and found them the next morning waiting by the door of the shop. I had to secretly return them to their cages so Dave wouldn’t figure out what I had been doing. Now I let them go in more remote parts of the city.

I am not a fast runner.

I cannot bench press or squat my own weight.

I am not a team player.

I am not on a path to enlightenment.

In Positive Thinking Equals Positive Living, they suggested making a list of unique qualities and skills that only "you" possess, characteristics that make "you" an individual. I started it but ran out of ideas so started a negative list instead. Jesse freaked, she thought I was self loathing. She said it might help my self esteem if I stuck to the original list. But since she dumped me, I’ve had a hard time coming up with anything positive.

This morning I discovered a soft spot in the linoleum floor of my kitchen pantry. I suspect there is rotten wood underneath or just a hole that opens up to the downstairs neighbor’s kitchen. My neighbors are a family who has lived in the building for fifty-five years. I have met the son and the mother but have never seen the father. They say he is very sick, bedridden. When Jesse and I had sex, we would wonder if the sick father, dying in his bed below, could hear us. We thought maybe the sounds of young people making love would heal him.

Sam my co-worker has been trying hard to cheer me up since Jesse left. He only owns two pair of pants: one blue and one tan, both corduroys. He says they talk to him when he walks.

I’m filling a sixty gallon aquarium with wood chips in preparation for the arrival of two dozen Plated Yellow Throats, the recent best selling lizard, when Sam walks up.

"Look," Sam says.

I’m afraid to look up but know if I don’t Sam will stand there for hours. Sam has small squirming tumors bulging all over the thighs of his blue corduroys, where he has probably stuffed ten gerbils. The bulges are slowly moving down his leg as he lets out a soundless laugh.

" That’s animal cruelty," I say smiling.

"Oh, it feels good," Sam says forgetting that this was supposed to be a joke.

Animal cruelty is familiar territory at Petland Discounts. If I don’t skim the gold fish tanks for a week, the amount of floating carnage looks like a small massacre. The geckos and iguanas share a cage, lying on top of one another. The parakeets are always huddled together in efforts to stay warm, and the love birds keep passing a cough between the two of them. The snakes have it the best. They are in spacious aquariums with heat lamps and live food. Even the smaller snakes like the North American garters have a clean, roomy environment. Then there are the mice all in one cage, where they breed, eat, shit, and piss on top of each other. Mice are not equipped with the instinct to take care of their overpopulation problems. Dave thinks he helps them out by feeding them to the snakes. To further my campaign and to spite Dave, I take great pleasure in feeding rats to the snakes. Jesse liked the rats. She respected their strong survival instinct. Rats naturally control their overpopulation by eating their young and their elders. I refuse to clean their cage and it’s not just because the smell of shit and piss is so overwhelming or that the small piles of bones left over from eating each other are stacked in the corners like firewood. I refuse to clean the rat cage because the last time I was taken by a sudden urge to squeeze each one of them to death. I wanted to squeeze until I felt their bones snap and their miniature bodies collapse. I wanted to feel them thrash about trying to get free.

I care for Jesse.

This was the second skill on my list. When Jesse saw this she smiled wide displaying the massive size of her teeth. The first time I saw her, I thought she looked like a horse. Not in a bad way. It was her strong jaw line, large teeth, and the sudden urge to ride her to my apartment. From my perspective of five foot three, Jesse’s six foot height was monumental. She came in with a bowl of twenty gold fish and an orange Tabby in a cage. Her first words weren’t directed at me but at Sam.

"I want to trade in my pets," she said with a straight face.

Sam just walked into the back. Dave doesn’t like him speaking to the customers. I was tangled on the inside and wanted to follow Sam. There was a two second pause as she looked down at me, wondering if I was also going to leave abruptly. I gave her two bucks for the gold fish, three of which were floaters, and told her that she could post an adoption sign for her cat. Every day after that, she came in to see if anyone had inquired about the sign. I ended up buying her cat myself and she took me out to dinner.

The other night the son of the downstairs neighbor asked where Jesse was. He said he hadn’t seen "my girl" around. He has one good tooth; the others have all rotted out. It is hard to think of him as someone’s son since he is fifty years old, grey, balding, and walks like an old man. He came out of his door as I was going upstairs. Past him I could see into their decrepit apartment. There were large holes in the ceiling plaster and the wiring and light bulbs were exposed. I told him I didn’t see Jesse much anymore like it was something out of my hands, as if she had been transferred to another city.

No true animal lover would ever shop here. Our customers are not so much animal lovers as collectors. And Dave, my boss, is not just a store owner but a buyer. Dave buys, sells, trades, barters, and occasionally steals, swindles, and abducts creatures of unusual status. Not unusual as in animals of exotic origins from far off lands but common animals afflicted with some abnormality. This chain pet store with the normal fare of small, harmless, caged animals is only a facade. Past the lizard and fish aquariums and the short haired dwarf hamsters and their squeaky exercise wheel, in the hallway with the bathroom, next to the closet with the cleaning supplies, there is a set of cages and an aquarium which are reserved for the freaks. It is separate from the other animals; away from the cute pets and their adoring customers. It is where the oversized, mutant, genetic deviants, disfigured, crippled, sick, mutilated, flukes of mother-nature, tests of science, and tragedies of the modern world are celebrated. Where the animal world has shunned and estranged, we at Petland Discounts accept with open arms. These are the animals that would have been killed by their peers for their extreme differences. There is a very lucrative market for these animals in private underground collections and museums around the world. Dave thinks we are the one place where these animals are appreciated. Dave’s moral is "No Impostors." Impostors are animals that have been altered for the sole purpose of making money off of them. It is easy to spot impostors as they usually have missing appendages or broken and reset bones so their stature and gait is awkward. We do not take these animals. It is against our policy. It is seen as unusually cruel behavior towards animals which we don’t condone. We walk the fine line like the perimeter of a drained swimming pool in winter.

I do not have a social life.

Two days after discovering the soft spot in my kitchen floor I investigated it. Out of boredom, curiosity, and a small sense of destruction, I used a knife to make a small square cut in the linoleum. Just as I had suspected, part of the floor was missing leaving a hole that looked down through to my neighbor’s kitchen. Like a child looking through a key hole, I lay on my kitchen floor and looked through it. My view was partially obscured by pipes, but I could still see most of the kitchen. There were empty plastic soda bottles and half full trash bags lining one wall. And like the small glimpse I had into their front hall, the kitchen was equally dilapidated. The linoleum of the kitchen was worn away to the wood like a well traveled path in the forest. Then the son walked into the kitchen with his mom. I watched them make dinner together and then carry it on trays to another room. The son came back in and did the dishes. The drain was clogged and tomato and meat colored water rose to the top of the sink. It seemed like he was going to let it overflow, but, at the last minute, he cleared the drain and it went down. A residue of red colored suds covered his hands and the sink.

I do not have washboard abs.

Sack of oats is how Jesse referred to my stomach. It is pale and sagging and has a strange pock marked surface that reminds me more of oatmeal than dry oats. The first night that we arrived at her parents’ summer house for the weekend, she declared her love for my ugly stomach. We had been going out for four months and decided to get out of the city for the weekend.

My ex-girlfriend’s dad hates me.

This negative statement although not relevant anymore is true no matter what Jesse says. When we got to the house that first night, we had a great time. But then her parents arrived the next morning, and they argued with Jesse the whole time. It started that first morning while I was still in bed. After greeting each other and saying how good it was to see her, Mr. Morgan asked about a sweater and shirt on the chair by the television.

"Could you please clean up after yourself," Mr. Morgan said. "We’ve been over this before. This house is not a closet."

"Lower your voice," Jesse said. "Bill is still sleeping. And it’s his sweater."

"Great, he thinks he owns the place," Mr. Morgan said.

"Please, Peter, don’t start now," Mrs. Morgan said.

"Who sleeps this late anyway," Mr. Morgan said.

And then I heard the door slam as Jesse went out onto the porch.

"Nice way to start the weekend," Mrs. Morgan said to her husband.

It was silent, and I stayed in bed afraid to come out of the guest room. When I did come out, everyone was reading. Jesse obviously got her size from her father, who has hands like baseball gloves. As we shook, he seemed taken aback by my short stature. He looked at me as if my height was something perverted next to his towering daughter. We had lunch on the back porch, and another argument broke out. After helping with the dishes, I thought Jesse and I could go to town and get away.

"I need some time alone," she said. "We’ll do something in a little bit."

So I went for a walk in the woods behind the house. It wasn’t so much woods as low shrubs, pricker bushes, and burrs. I came upon a soft patch of earth. The soil was dark and moist as if it might be someone’s compost pile. With a stick, I made a hole and gathering just below the soil were dozens of slimy worms. I hit what looked like a root at first but was actually an enormous worm the size of a snake. It was big enough that I had to grab it with my whole hand and not just my fingers. It was not only extraordinarily thick but the length was three times that of any normally large earth worm. I wanted to rush it back to Petland Discounts and show everyone. I also didn’t want Jesse’s parents to see me with it but couldn’t stand to let it go. Cupping both of my hands around, I tried to conceal it as I walked back through the woods to the Morgan’s. When I got back to their house, I put it on the floor of the outdoor shower, where it was damp and mossy. I grabbed a large drinking glass from the kitchen and filled it with soil from Mrs. Morgan’s garden. The worm had made its way to the other side of the shower when I picked it up and put it in the soil filled glass. I used tinfoil with poked air holes to seal the glass. Like a banished heretic, I hid the worm in its new home, in the back of the guest bedroom closet, next to the spare blankets and pillows. Jesse and her parents argued the rest of the weekend. Their disagreements erupted from the smallest things: a remote control, misplaced milk, unfolded towels. Every time there was an outbreak, I would slowly make my way to the guest bedroom and check on my worm.

Dave has a couple of sources for animal anomalies besides trading and buying from other collectors, and the occasional stray brought in by kids playing in the swamps, at the edge of the city. His big money making sources are a couple of medical laboratories that give him their used experiments. There is also a guy who lives in the country who supplies us with wholesome freaks, farm animal types such as a chicken with long wiry fur like bristles instead of feathers. He also gave us a hairless rabbit with one ear and fully advanced cataracts that made its eyes look like smoke blown into water. The laboratory animals are sick in comparison. They stagger around the cage with hair loss from radiation or mutated from gene splicing. They are always mice, rats, hamsters, guinea pigs, cats, and some pigs. Dave has passed up numerous chimpanzees with much regret. He says the store is too small; it would attract too much attention to our Museum, as Dave calls it.

Dave also encourages us, his employees, to catch and hunt any freakish animals we can get our hands on. We get forty percent commission on any sale of the animals we catch. Sam spends a lot of his time trying to catch animals over the weekend without much success. He comes up short of any kind of oddity and catches the usual city pests: mice, rats, and pigeons. My worm was the first and only contribution that I ever made, and it was just slightly better than anything Sam has brought in.

On our way back from Jesse’s parents’ house, I carefully packed my worm on top of my duffel bag and secured it in the back seat of the car. The first twenty minutes of the car ride was silent until Jesse turned the radio down.

"Did you catch an insect or a worm of some sort?"

"Yeah, did you see me pack it?"

"Jesus Christ, Bill," she said, yelling at me. "What’s the matter with you? Can’t you be normal just for one weekend? Just leave the fucking animals alone."

"I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone saw it."

"My Dad saw it. He found it in the closet when he went to get an extra blanket. He had a fit."

"I’m sorry. I was just going to…" I didn’t know what to say.

"It’s okay. It’s not your fault. It’s just my dad is so uptight it stresses me out. We don’t get along well, if that’s not obvious enough."

"Your Dad hates me. Doesn’t he?"

"No, he doesn’t hate you. He’s disappointed with me and won’t give you a chance."

She rested her hand on my stomach as we made our way back on the highway. At the time I thought it was a sign of love and understanding. It was really a goodbye, a gesture of consolation for the break up to come.

That Monday I brought my worm into work and no one was very impressed. Dave let me put it in the back with the rest of the oddities only because he approved of my effort. I put him in a soil filled aquarium lined with contact paper decorated with green leaves and ferns. It took a little research to figure out what worms eat but I have it down to a science now. I feed the soil with nutrients that in turn the worm extracts and feeds on himself. The worm still hasn’t sold. Dave is thinking about putting it up front and selling it as a rare African snake. The heat lamps would kill it in a day.

Later that same Monday Sam came in, wearing his tan corduroys, carrying a black garbage bag over his shoulder. I remembered, he had told me he was going fishing in the river that weekend. He was hoping to find some sort of three eyed fish.

"This is the only thing I caught that I thought we could sell," Sam said. "I hooked an old tire and a bag full of trash. That was before I found this beaut."

He untied the bag releasing an overpowering odor. Dave gave me a look of fear. Sam’s hand disappeared into the bag and then came out holding high in the air some sort of dead furry animal. The smell was unbearable, and Dave and I stepped back several feet with our hands over our nose and mouth. "It’s a gigantic squirrel," Sam said.

It was a dead bloated squirrel with a mangled ratty tail and missing patches of fur exposing raw white skin and the stench of rotting flesh,

"Get it out immediately," Dave said pointing at the door.

Sam looked hurt as he walked out carrying the squirrel by his side like a stuffed animal.

This week I made another hole in the floor in the far corner of my living room. I was tired of watching the mother and son make dinner. I wanted more. I wanted to see the sick father. I approximated where I thought he might be. With a hammer and a small crow bar, I took out a couple planks of my hard wood floor. This hole is smaller than the one in the kitchen but I am able to see better because there are no pipes obstructing my view. There he was, the father, withered and shrunken with long, grey hair, sleeping in a bed with layers of blankets. To the side of him was a small nightstand with a light, a clock, and bottles upon bottles of pills. There was an empty chair to the side of the bed and also a chair folded up against the wall. I put the pieces of wood back in their place so there wasn’t a gaping hole in my living room and concealed it with a small rug.

I am not happy.

This is on the top of my negative list. Two weeks after the weekend with her parents, Jesse broke up with me, right outside the shop on a Tuesday night. She told me she wanted to be single. She needed time alone. She said she loved me but wasn’t ready for me. She said she would miss my sack of oats and to take care of her cat. Then she disappeared. That was three weeks ago. Today, while releasing some mice in a small park, in a remote area of the city, I saw her on the other side of the street. She was with a tall guy with long dark hair and a trench coat. He looked like a superhero in disguise. From where I was standing, it looked like they were holding hands.

I am a small man with a big heart.

I am lonely and do not have anyone.

Tonight, as I closed the store, I decided to expand my mouse freedom campaign to include all creatures big and small. In celebration of my new campaign, I fit seven mice into my pockets, and in two separate cages, I brought home five parakeets, three finches, two canaries, three gerbils, six small iguanas, an assortment of geckos, chameleons, and the worm I found that weekend with Jesse. I ate my dinner in the living room and watched through the hole in the floor. The mother and son ate their dinners on trays next to the father’s bed. The father drank juice and ate vegetables. I watched for hours as they ate and watched television. The mother and son finally left the room, saying good night as they went to their own beds. I waited another fifteen minutes until my eyes adjusted to the dark and the father was asleep. Then I got the animals out and ready. Starting with the mice and gerbils, I dropped them into the room with a small lob so they landed softly at the end of the father’s bed. Before I let each one go, I quietly said a positive phrase as if I were assigning it to each animal. You are a good person. You are not a coward. You can get through this. You are strong. You are a willful and powerful individual. And most importantly, you are not alone; we are here to help. The mice and gerbils slowly moved from the soft landing pad and worked their way up the bed moving cautiously over the hilly landscape made by the old sleeping man. Some of them climbed down the blankets onto the floor where they found left over crumbs from dinner. Then I let the birds loose with the same motion but they never touched the bed. Instead they flew and found perches on window sills, door frames, and lamp shades. The lizards followed the same flight pattern as the rodents, but, when they landed on the bed, they moved very slowly, hesitant to explore. Then finally I dropped the worm. When it landed on the bed the dark dirt that was on it came off onto the light colored blanket. When it landed, it squirmed violently back and forth like a dying fish. Slowly extending and contracting it slithered off the blanket, the rough wool fibers clung to its fragile, damp skin. I watched as the animals moved around the room in the dark, exploring different corners, mapping out their new home. It was a new habitat, something to which they would all be able to adapt. The old man woke up at one point and heard the small noises of animals moving around.

"Who’s there? Hello? Karry? Charlie?" he said confused. Then he fell back asleep.

I fell asleep next to the hole but woke the next morning as the sun was rising. I looked down into the room and saw the old man still asleep. All the animals had found hiding places and new homes. It seemed as if they belonged as much as anything else in the room. The old man opened his eyes suddenly and sat up. One of the birds flew across the room to find a new perch and his eyes followed the bird to the far corner of the room, the same corner I was looking down from. His confused gaze stopped on the bird. Then he saw my face looking through his ceiling, staring at him. I was afraid that if I moved too quickly he might get scared. And, without warning, he smiled at me and raised his hand in a friendly wave.

Serge Shea is a writer and photographer who grew up in and is based out of Philadelphia. A graduate of the NYU creative writing program, he is currently finishing a collection of short stories.

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Your uncle Paulie told you never carry a knife unless you know how to use it, right? That advice kept you alive for years. Even if it didn’t stop that kid from shooting you tonight, goddamnit. You’re flat on your back trying to hold your own blood in with your bare hands, wondering why it doesn’t hurt like hell.

You don’t even know this block. You’re staring over at this run-down blue house with the steps missing and wishing it was someplace you knew so you could bang on the door.

You took Paulie’s advice about carrying a blade as soon as you heard it because of your uncle Cox. Cox got himself killed carrying a blade around in your neighborhood, like if there was some kind of trouble, he was gonna cut a man. It didn’t go the way he expected, though, because it wasn’t like in a movie. There he was lying dead on Walnut Street, with his wife waiting at home, like your wife’s waiting at home, while you’re here about to die too. You took Paulie’s advice because Paulie acted like he was gonna live forever.

Paulie’s got ten years on you and you’re not too young yourself anymore. A lot of his rules sound like bullshit to you now. Like something that couldn’t keep you alive in the suburbs. Though the suburbs, they got their own problems, don’t they, every fucking Trevor and Ashley packing a Nine – and that’s what they call it, too. Too much Hip-Hop and all that. But you learned Paulie’s rules because you had to learn something to get you home every night. It wasn’t gonna be K through 12 that was gonna do it. Man, that knife rule shit sounds archaic now, doesn’t it, with everybody firing bullets. So even if you are the best knife fighter, it doesn’t do you any good, because right now you’re trying to get home to that wife and your kid, but instead you’re bleeding to death on the sidewalk. That’s what happens, and that’s what’s happened to you.

Once he found out what you were up to, Paulie took over. He taught you in the basement of his place—that he bought with his own money. People came in wanting to know how many years he had left, and they found out by testing him—all the time. He taught you all the things you didn’t know about already. I mean, you figured out how to hide a knife in the sleeve of your jacket. You figured out how to hit to get the guts out. You figured out that it’s not about intimidation—it’s about cutting fast and then cutting again. There’s no time for that intimidation shit.

It’s not like the fucking movies, man, he said, and you don’t carry around six or seven knives and you don’t worry about you got a butterfly knife and a bowie and a switch and a shiv. You’re not no goddamn knife enthusiast, okay, you’re just a guy carrying a big knife and a little knife—that’s all you need.

He taught you to think about the person’s arms, how if they’re carrying something, that’s where it’ll be. If you give that last push on a backhanded slash, you can get tendons or enough muscle that you’ve got one guy who won’t be cutting you back. That’s a rule, too – you lose if they cut you back. Stay away from that. You lost tonight, because that bullet cut right through you and you never even got in one slash. You don’t even know where you are right now.

You were so serious about learning, too. Clear-headed even—you jumped right off weed and gave up coke because Paulie said that you always want to be sure—sure, dammit, that the other guy’s more fucked up than you. If you’re sure about that, you’ve got a lot.

You believed him. A man like this knows what he’s talking about. He has a house with a den on the second floor where another bedroom used to be, three television sets, that’s nothing now, but back then it was a lot. And he owns something, dammit, a whole thing. You never saw anybody own anything, except the way your mom owned your sister, the same way she would own a dog, maybe. Or like your father owned two damn pairs of shoes. But Paulie, he has that whole bar and people love that damn place and even the cops leave it alone, no matter when he stops serving, or what under-age kid stumbles out of that place drunk after having maybe scored something at a table in the back. Your uncle Paulie is blind in both eyes if that’s what it takes, and you’re going to question him? No fucking way.

You had to practice on your own, mostly, but first there were a couple fights. Some things you just couldn’t help. Like when there were four kids and you’re not even fourteen and it’s so late that everybody needs something to happen. Punks, you say looking back, but at the time you knew they meant business—four kids walk out of some all-night sub shop smelling like onions and take your back to the wall. You don’t flash anything, try to scare anybody—though now you think maybe that would have worked on these punk kids. You just take that one kid in the gut and pull your knife across hara-kiri like—a ritual homicide. Kids scattered like superballs.

That’s how you ended up practicing alone. A few episodes like that and people know who you are, even if you’re not fourteen yet. You’re fast, and if you corner yourself right no more than two guys can get an angle on you at once and you can handle any two guys at once, easy. And now that people avoid you, now that even your parents and the local cops know who you are, you just hang in your basement shadowboxing with steel in your fist. You’re so fucking serious about yourself that once out on the street you cut your own goddamn face, deep across the cheek—did you feel teeth when you did that?—so that the scar would tell everyone you’re serious. You’re saying, couldn’t nobody get this close to me, but me.

How fast did you get used to watching your own back? Your parents just dropped you. They’ve got your sister and she’s gonna be taking care of those motherfuckers for like the rest of her life, and she’s starting to pale out from not seeing the sun. Does she even have a window in her room? Did they even name her so she could some way get into the world? Maybe you don’t even have a name anymore.

You wish you had some of those drugs you gave up now, don’t you? Bleeding like everything in you got blown loose. And maybe it even feels like drugs, like the blood that’s leaving you is the stuff from your head. Head first, right? That sounds funny to you? You’re a long way from home and getting dizzier every second. This is no time to be finding shit amusing.

Aren’t you supposed to be respectable, now? You look down and what do you see next to that spreading red? You see buttons on your shirt. You’re grown. It’s like you look down at that bullet hole—is it really that fucking bad?—and you see time passing out of you. You see fourteen through twenty go, you see yourself become a legend, even though maybe that was never really how it was. People avoid people on the street for a lot of reasons, not always because they are dangerous. There was a crazy man with a stump wrist and a wool hat, on 67th Street. Were people afraid of him, or was he bad luck? Maybe that was why people avoided you too, because you had some kind of bad luck around you.

How long has it even been since you’ve seen your parents? You lived with that uncle the whole time, didn’t you? This is no time to lie to yourself. You just made up things about your parents, your sister, because you barely remember them. Is that it? Or maybe it even seems like Paulie was made up, too—or why didn’t he have any advice when you left tonight? No words at all.

Respectable or not, tending bar or not, it seems that you’re passing out on the street, unless you’re just overreacting. But it’s not like you never seen blood before. You have, you have. It’s coming crazy, now—the street sign doesn’t read just one name out when you look at it. It looked like Cedar but it’s blurring. Now it’s Race or Chestnut—you can’t tell. You haven’t moved except to stand up. But is it the streets that are changing because you’re making progress, getting somewhere, or are the street signs changing names just to fuck with you. They’ve got to stay still, because then you’ll know if you’re almost home. Your kid’s just born but your wife will know something about what to do. Right now those street signs are spinning like they’re fucking slot machines. Maybe they’ll come up with the name of your block or maybe they’ll come up all lemons next time. You can’t stand to watch.

You’re about to lose your grip and die.

That young punk who looked like he stepped right out of your own history, shot you for not having any money. Of course, you did have money, didn’t you? You still have it in your goddamn pocket. But you said you didn’t, and under the streetlamps out in the open he didn’t flash anything, he just shot you. Kids are unbelievable now. They will kill you so fast even they don’t know what happened.

You’ve got to get home. The street sign looks like yours. Your wife—you even sure you’ve got a wife?—will know what to do. You saw those, what, nature specials about snakes and where the man has to suck the poison out of the bite. That’s what you need. You need her to suck the poison out of you before it gets all the way in from out. You’ve got to get to your wife. If you have one. There’s no time to turn back.

This old house with the missing steps is your house now. You’re pounding on the door like you never seen a doorbell in your life. It’s all just leaching out of you. You can feel yourself pouring out onto the porch. Onto the wood, onto the doormat—you are everywhere at once. It’s starting to seem like the last place you are is in that body you’re staring out of. There’s no time. But you’re pounding on the door until all the lights come on and the screaming starts. If you had a wife, she wouldn’t sound like that. How could you marry a woman who would sound like that? It isn’t her. You can’t see a damn thing even with all the lights. But you can hear it. Even before you drop that body that hardly holds you anymore, you take one last shot and push towards her. Maybe if you show her this scar on your face, she can make time out of no time. Maybe she can be your wife and take that poison out of you. Maybe she will even know you.A Philadelphia native, David Harris
Ebenbach was once featured as the "Philadelphia Poetry Provider" on
the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer and on the WB-17 evening
news, after he’d been caught scattering poems across the city for
unsuspecting locals to find. Ebenbach’s first collection of stories,
Between Camelots, winner of the 2005 Drue Heinz Literature Prize,
will be published in November 2005 (University of Pittsburgh Press).
He also wrote the chapter, “Plot: A Question of Focus,” for
Gotham Writers Workshops’ book Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury,
USA, 2003). Ebenbach has a PhD in Psychology from the University
of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College.
Find out more at www.davidebenbach.com.