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[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.

The middle of the Brooklyn Bridge is not quiet, peaceful, or romantic, but sometimes when we were there together it seemed that way. We would meet there on summer Fridays, late afternoon; he would bike in from Manhattan and I would ride in from Brooklyn. We would meet somewhere in the middle, whoever got there first parking the bike and staking our claim.

We always found each other before sunset. He brought the food. Usually bread and cheese, bottles of beer in small brown bags, maybe some flaky samosas which we’d eat dry. Always a pint of chocolate fudge brownie.

We avoided the benches, sitting up instead on the green-gray metal beams, trying to find a comfortable spot between the round bumps. We’d face the Statue of Liberty and the setting sun and feed each other, sipping our beer.

I was young enough and crazy enough to believe that anything was possible, even this relationship. Or maybe it was the hum of the city, the vibrations of millions on a Friday night, some winding down, some keying up, all aware on some level that we were in the middle of something amazing. Lights clicking on, lights turning off; we rarely saw stars. We rarely looked for them. I had seen stars all my life; it was the buildings that fascinated me.

Sometimes we met under the bridge, instead, and stared at the water. We went there once during a storm, not one of ours, and watched the rushing water rising and rising. It was romantic, sexy, terrifying.

Times on or around the bridge were peaceful; looking back it seems as if those were our only peaceful times. Afterwards, we might go back to his apartment. He lived on the second floor of his mother’s house. She had the first floor, and his brother the third. I never heard a word exchanged among the three of them, ever, though we often crossed paths.

He told me once that they hadn’t spoken since his brother’s funeral, not a single word among them, although his mother filled the glass of water she kept on a small shelf every evening. Next to the water glass was a small vase filled with plastic flowers and a candle of Chango. I watched her do it once, and she was almost reverent, as reverent as such a bitter heart could be. She didn’t see me that night, didn’t address me. Never did. I was never introduced. I wondered sometimes if she even saw me, saw her sons, saw anything beyond the glass and light of what she had lost. What would she think of me, a tiny blond from someplace she had never heard of, a white girl who spoke no Spanish at all?

Looking back I can see how foolish I was to expect love from someone so wounded, wounded in his roots even, his history, his people. Although his mother never spoke, her hum was loud, loud and furious. She was tall, big even, flat-footed, flat-nosed, with the face of an angry Taino goddess, deep lines, scary level eyes that never saw. She had a funny shuffling kind of walk, never picking her feet up from the floor, as if her soles could not bear to lose touch for even a minute with the earth, solid surface under which one son was buried somewhere.

His brother was a big man too, like him, like their mother, but was wispy, ghost-like almost, as if he was trying to disintegrate away and join his murdered twin.

“Little country girl,” he’d say, holding my hand as we walked into the house, into the quiet hallway where the shelf was. “Little country girl in the big city. People get shot. It happens.” Like he wasn’t mad, like he wasn’t hurt.

“How can people come here?” I wondered, although he hadn’t come at all, he’d been born right there in the gray dullness, the neat brick rows of Sunset Park. “How can they leave their island paradise?” I thought, picturing warm sand and cool waters, fresh sweet mangoes and plantains and spicy beans.

“It’s not like that,” he said. But it was. I knew even though I’d never been. I could hear it in his music.

He couldn’t love me because he couldn’t love, but by the time I figured that out he had become obsessed with having me. He professed his love day and night, sixty-three unwanted messages on my answering machine each evening. He followed me. He waited outside my apartment so that I learned to look for him around shadow corners and go sleep at Mayra’s house.

Mayra’s second husband was sick of me but would never say so. Mayra had stabbed her first husband “only enough so I could get away,” she said.

That’s how I knew what to do, when I went in one night and he was there, long after I thought it was over. I was letting myself be happy again, doing simple things like sleeping and eating and picking up a bouquet of tulips from the Korean store. I didn’t see him at first because he was in the kitchen, my tiny kitchen on top of the BQE. I heard him, felt his hum, smelled his scent of sweet coconut and cigarettes. I reached into the utensil drawer and grabbed the first thing I could find. “Get the fuck out of here!” I screamed, brandishing a pizza wheel. “Johnny! Johnny! Vito!” I called, knowing they weren’t home, knowing that he wouldn’t know that. “Call the fucking cops!”

He moved towards me, telling me to shut up, moving as if to put his hand over my mouth. But I held up the pizza wheel like I meant it, and I did.

Later, smoking a joint on Mayra’s roof, we laughed about it. “What kind of damage would that do?” she said. “You would have had to roll it up and down on him!” She laughed her smoky laugh, her laugh that still was because she had stabbed a man, stabbed him so he wouldn’t stab her. “He won’t be eating a slice for a while!”

“I didn’t stab him,” I say, after a while, knowing I would have, pizza wheel or no. “I didn’t have to. It was my eyes, my hum, my brujeria.” It was a psychic battle and I won. He had turned and slipped through the window, down the fire escape and over the fence onto Nelson Street.

“It’s over, now,” she said, and I nodded.

It was. Only the bridge had been ruined for me, I avoided it for months. Even now, when I go to New York, walking over the bridge in afternoon sunlight with my daughter, I look for him, tall, bronze, green and black bike shorts, maroon bike, a small brown bag with a beer bottle in it poking out of his messenger bag. “I will never see him again, I will never see him again,” I chant silently in my head. And the bridge is quiet, as quiet as it ever was when we met there. And it is peaceful, and since then there have been a thousand souls, a million maybe, that have hummed there and away again, and the bridge is quiet, and peaceful, and I am laughing on a summer afternoon. Kathleen Furin is the co-founder
and co-director of the Maternal
Wellness Center, which provides education,
psychotherapy, and advocacy for pregnant women, mothers, and families.
She holds an MSW and is a certified childbirth educator. Her work
has been published in Literary Mama, The Birthkit and the Expectant
Mother’s Guide. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and two
daughters.

As Carl Crowley eased his pickup over the rock-studded dirt road, a white dog slid from wheel-well to wheel-well, too weak to lift her head, too weak to whimper, her one good eye rubbing in the sandy, cold steel track bed. The dog was nothing more than loose bones and filth, and when Carl pulled up at the end of the road, she came to rest at the front of his track like a half-filled sack of grain.

Carl dropped the tailgate and slowly pulled the dog toward him by her legs until she lay in front of him, her white-gray tongue spilling from her mouth and turned under her lower jaw. She huffed short, slow pants that seemed as though they might stop at any moment, forcing out breath that had the stench of vermin dead a month. Carl cupped a hand under her head, lifted it ever so slightly, and gently brushed gnats from her sightless eye. He turned back a mottled gray and white ear and wiped a tar-like grease from it, rubbing his hand clean on the thigh of his coveralls. He started to inspect the dark collar of blood-matted fur and the raw, chain-link marks embedded in the dog’s flesh, but thought better of it and stared at the motionless animal and wondered how long she had been chained to the fence before the men had found her. Carl guessed a week, maybe more. He ran the palm of his hand lightly over the dog’s muddy white rib cage and said quietly, "It’s all right, dog. Everything’s going to be just fine." He lifted her almost hairless, pale pink tail with the same caution he’d use picking up a snake, and asked in a low voice if the dog was part possum.

When they’d found the dog in a remote corner of a potato field not far from the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, the other farm hands had sensed that Carl didn’t have the stomach to do what needed to be done, and told him they’d shoot her if he couldn’t, for she was certain to die, and what’s more, she was the ugliest damn dog any of them had ever seen. But throughout his fifty-two years Carl hadn’t been too good at listening to what other folks had to say and asked the men to slow down a minute. "Something tells me she’s worth saving," he had said. Now he wondered if he shouldn’t have let the men put the dog out of her misery. The same old question, he thought. He slid his big hands and forearms beneath the dog, cradling her sharp breastbone and pointed haunches in his elbows. As he lifted her, he felt a familiar frailness, a familiar helplessness.

Carl’s clapboard shack sat far enough back in the shade of the oaks that in the summer it was well hidden from the road, but now, in the leafless days of February, it was easy to find, its tin roof, ridged like the ugly dog’s rib cage, glowing a warm gray in the late afternoon sun. He carried the dog up on the porch, nudged the door open with a booted foot and looked for a place to set her down. He gently laid her on the sofa, her opaque, milky eye pointing toward the ceiling. The vacantness of the eye made Carl shudder, and he lifted the dog and turned her over so her sighted eye was not buried. It, too, was lusterless and registered nothing—no fear, no contempt, no hope.

He looked down at the dog and thought death was around him again. He thought how his Katie had held on for so long, held on until the fever and the pain had made her crazy, until the cancer had finally taken her, but not before she had asked him to help her die, had held his hands with a strength that had surprised him, and pleaded with him, telling him it would be so much better for her, for him. He had thought how to do it, kissed her tear-filled eyes and dry mouth, told her how much he loved her, worshipped her, how much he would miss her, that he wanted to go with her. She said that she would be waiting for him and he placed the pillow gently over her face, held it there a moment, then pulled it back and lay beside her, his chest heaving against her frail body. "I’m not the man to do the Lord’s work," he had said.

Now, Carl wondered, what do you feed a dying dog?

He added water to a can of beef broth, threw in a handful of sugar and warmed the liquid on the stove. He took the pan and a brown-stained baster, sat on the sofa and lifted the dog’s head to his lap. Gently, he slid the baster’s tip into her mouth and squeezed the red rubber bulb until he felt a warm wetness on his crotch as the broth ran from the underside of her jaw. He pushed the tip farther and squeezed the bulb again. He thought he saw a slight movement in the dog’s throat and continued to pump the liquid until he felt the wet once more.

Carl fed the dog at eight o’clock and again at ten. In his bedroom, he set the alarm for midnight and undressed to his under-shorts and T-shirt. He lifted the picture of his wife and held the plain pine frame in his large hands, rubbing one of them over the glass across her smiling face. He knelt and set the picture on the bed in front of him and said his prayers aloud, as he had every night since she had died: "Dear God, please look after my Katie, and let her know I wish we were together. Well, thank you. Amen." Carl set Katie’s picture on the table, took his heart pill and a long drink from his water glass and turned out the light. He lay down and closed his eyes hard, forcing the tears to crawl out the edges. It had been almost a year since Katie had died, shortly before she turned forty-seven. Carl still didn’t understand why she’d been taken from him when she was so young. "She was so beautiful," he said into the darkness.

Carl fed the dog every two hours, every day. While he worked at the farm, harvesting the winter wheat and tilling the fields for potatoes and soybeans, the dog lay on a dirty blanket in the back of his pickup. When he was at home, she lay on the floor. The most she ever moved was to raise her head.

One evening on arriving home, the dog tried to stand in the back of Carl’s truck. He lifted her and set her on the ground and steadied her, his meaty, freckled hands on her bony white shoulders and hips. The dog wavered on uncertain legs and followed him to his shack. Twice she toppled and twice Carl helped her to her feet, finally carrying her up the porch steps.

That night while Carl fixed his supper, he put a small bowl of oatmeal by the dog’s head. Slowly she stood and licked the bowl clean, then lay down, her sighted eye looking up at Carl with a curious look. He collected the bowl and stroked the crown of her head. For the first time since she had been his dog she thumped her sparsely haired tail on the floor. "Well, I’ll be damned," he said.

At bedtime Carl added thanks in his prayers for his dog. "I plan to call her Possum," he said. He turned out the light, called good night to the dog and went to sleep.

*

In the spring, when the Canadian geese began flying north in long, loose V’s from the Chesapeake Bay, Possum followed Carl everywhere. She jumped in and out of his truck as he came and went from the farm. Her white coat was full and rippled like tall grass in the wind when she ran; her tail now covered with feathered hair, constantly winding in a small circle. Carl thought she was beautiful, even though the other farm hands still laughed and called her the ugly dog.

Behind Carl’s shack, a short walk through a stand of pin oaks and loblolly pines was a small pond where Carl spent summer evenings fishing for bass. His first evening fishing with Possum he sat against a small willow, stroking her neck, delicately searching for the chain’s scarring with his fingers, and talked to her about fishing. The dog pressed her sightless side hard against him, her sighted eye blinking lazily, her tail brushing back and forth over the ground.

Carl stood and cast a plastic worm beneath the branches of a willow that bowed almost to the water’s surface. He whispered, "Now, watch, Possum," and jerked the grape-colored worm across the water—stopping, jerking, stopping—until a bass a foot long took the lure and shot out of the water, splashing back hard on the surface. Carl fought the fish for a few moments, then led it toward a small aluminum-framed net he held in his left hand. Possum crept to the water’s edge and swung her tail slowly in a circle. When Carl had played the bass into the shallows of the pond, the dog waded into the water and jabbed her head beneath it, flattening her thick white coat along her neck and shoulders.

"What you doing, Possum?" Carl asked. The dog lifted her head from the water, the bass held firmly in her mouth, walked toward Carl, and stood, waiting for him to take the fish.

"Well, I’ll be damned," he said as he slid the wriggling bass from the dog’s mouth, "I’ve never seen the likes of this." But Carl did see the likes of it on the next bass he hooked, and on the one after that and all that were to follow.

That night when Carl knelt to say his prayers, he spent a little longer than usual. "Dear God, please look after Katie and let her know I wish we were together. And please tell her about this dog you sent me that retrieves fish. Coming from you, she might believe it. Amen."

As he lay in the dark, Possum jumped on the bed, spun in a circle and lay down next to him. "No you don’t," Carl said. "Off the bed. "The dog craned her neck forward and licked him on the face. "Your breath smells like fish," he said, smiled, and went to sleep.

*

The first Sunday in August the temperature reached ninety-seven degrees. Everything green around Carl’s shack shied away from the sun for lack of rain. Carl sat in a rocking chair on the porch, half-asleep, listening to the Orioles-Yankees double-header while Possum slept in a hole she’d dug beneath the weathered planking. Late in the afternoon Carl heard a car door slam in the distance, then slam a second time. He could hear a man’s voice yelling but couldn’t make out what he was saying. He looked and listened, then watched dust roll above the trees as a car sped down the road. "We may have trouble, Possum," he said, and switched off the radio.

Carl waited a few moments. A young woman stepped from the trees and timidly approached his shack. She led a child, no more than three years old, by the hand, a maroon duffel in the other. Carl thought they both were very small and pale, and had the blackest hair he’d ever seen.

Possum opened her good eye and crept out from under the porch.

"That dog bite?" the woman asked.

"You’d know by now if she did," Carl said. "Where you headed?"

Possum pressed her nose into the boy’s neck. The child wrapped his arms around his mother’s leg from behind.

"I don’t know," she said, and looked down at the child. "We just got thrown out of a car."

"What made you stop here?"

"We got thrown out the other side of those trees. It’s the first place we come across."

Possum nuzzled the boy again. The child giggled and pressed his cheek against his shoulder to cover his neck. Carl stood and looked down at the woman. He thought she looked strong for someone so small. Her eyes were shiny black like her tight curls. Her lower lip was scraped a blood red and puffed on one side.

"How’d you get that bloody lip?" he asked.

She lowered her eyes and drew the toe of her right sandal in the dust. "I’ve been worse," she said.

"It needs tending to." She’s in some kind of trouble, Carl thought. "What’s your name?" he asked.

She said her name was Jean Carol; that her son’s name was John.

"Those all your belongings, Jean Carol?" he asked, pointing to the duffel.

She nodded.

Carl shook his head and smiled. "Not much to live off."

"No, sir, but it’s all we got."

Carl wondered where the woman and the boy would go. He wondered what harm it would do to take them in.

"You can stay the night, if you’d like. You and the boy can have the couch."

She shrugged her shoulders and looked at her son. He was giggling and waving a hand above Possum’s head to pat her. "That would be nice, sir," Jean Carol said. "We have no other place to go."

"If you’re going to stay, stop calling me sir," he said. "My name’s Carl Crowley. I call the dog ‘Possum.’"

The woman smiled an awkward, fat-lipped smile and lifted her son. "We won’t be any trouble."

"The sooner you put some ice on that lip, the better," Carl said.

Carl stepped out of the way as Jean Carol carried her child up the porch steps and past him. Possum followed closely, rolling her tail in slow circles. Jean Carol opened the screen door and looked in. Carl was embarrassed by what he imagined she must think. Dirty dishes in the sink. The bedspread draped over the sofa covered with muddy paw prints and white dog hairs. The few pictures on the walls uneven and the American flag above the wood stove a dusty gray.

"You’re free to go in," he said. "It’s a bit of a mess."

Jean Carol stepped inside and looked into the bedroom through the open door. Carl followed her eyes. A frayed hunting jacket hung on the doorknob and a paint-splattered pair of coveralls and an olive T-shirt were piled on the dresser. The large bed was unmade, one side dark with dirt.

He watched as Jean Carol peered into the small bathroom where the residue of shaving cream lined the chipped porcelain sink and the shower curtain hung dankly, showing large mildew spots along its bottom edge. He heard her whisper, "It’s only for a night, John."

Carl opened the refrigerator, took a handful of ice cubes and wrapped them in a dishtowel. "Here," he said, handing the damp towel to Jean Carol. "It’ll help with the swelling."

After they were through eating their supper, as Jean Carol readied the boy for bed, she said, "Your place could use some cleaning."

"It’s all right the way it is," Carl said, and whistled at Possum to follow him to the bedroom. He sat on his bed for a long while and wondered what he’d gotten himself in to. As darkness closed around his shack, he undressed, placed his wife’s picture on the bed and got to his knees. He studied the picture, Katie’s straight brown hair parted in the middle, her startled black eyes looking for something, for me, he thought, then pressed the frame against his chest. "Dear God, please look after my Katie and let her know how much I wish she was with me. I hope she wouldn’t mind me giving this woman and her boy a place to lay their heads. Amen."

Before he turned out the light, Carl opened the door a crack and said goodnight. The woman thanked him for taking her son and her in, and the shack was silent until daybreak, when Possum woke Carl to pee.

After breakfast, Carl lifted his lunch pail and a plastic jug of water, ready to go to the farm before the heat of the day began to build. A narrow pain flashed through his shoulder and down his left arm. He waited for the pain to pass, as he had many times before, and turned to Jean Carol. "Where will you and John go now?" he asked.

"Baltimore. I’ve got family there."

"You’re going to drag the boy sixty miles north on foot?" he said.

She looked at him with large, hopeful black eyes. He liked her smooth white skin, tightly curled black hair and narrow, sloping shoulders. He enjoyed it when she smiled. He didn’t think she could be any older than twenty-five. "I don’t know what else to do," she said.

Carl clucked at Possum to follow him. At the door he said, "You’ll find what you need for cleaning underneath the sink."

Carl’s shack was orderly when he returned that evening. The clothesline drooped with bedding and his clothes, all dried by the heat of the August sun. The floor was swept and the kitchen clean and uncluttered for the first time in almost a year. At first Carl liked the way his place felt when it was ordered, it made him feel like Katie was home, but soon a feeling of guilt came over him and he wondered how this stranger thought she could replace her. That night at the supper table Carl said, "I don’t know how much longer you should plan on staying. I don’t want your boyfriend poking around here."

The bright smile that Carl had begun to admire lighted Jean Carol’s face, and she said he had nothing to worry about, that all her boyfriend wanted was to be rid of John and her.

"Maybe so," Carl said. "But I think it’s time you moved on."

"You’re certain," Jean Carol said.

He said he was certain.

Carl had finished his prayers when Jean Carol quietly opened the door to the bedroom. She stood with darkness behind her, wearing one of Carl’s large denim work shirts, buttoned only at the bottom, showing her small breasts. She smiled at Carl and clasped her hands behind her back like a schoolgirl.

"John’s asleep. Do you want me to come in?" she asked.

Carl rose up on an elbow. "Come in?"

"I thought if… well … I thought maybe you’d let us stay a little longer."

"I said it was time for you to move on," Carl said.

"But we don’t have any place to go," she said. The smile had gone from her face. She rocked from one bare foot to the other.

"Coming in here won’t change that," Carl said.

Jean Carol remained facing Carl and slowly buttoned the shirt. He looked away from her and ran his thumb over the crown of Possum’s head. He heard the door shut, and was alone with his dog.

“ I didn’t mean to insult her, but she surprised me.” He got out of bed and opened the door. "Jean Carol, I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. I’m not much good at being a widower. It’s got nothing to do with you."

" We’ll be leaving in the morning," she said.

" You and John need a place to go first. You’re welcome to stay until we’ve got it worked out."

As Carl lay down in the dark, Possum licked him on the forearm. "She’s real pretty," he whispered as he dropped his arm across the dog’s chest, and wondered how things had changed so in such a short time. He thought how much he enjoyed her smile, and admitted to himself that he liked the way his home felt with her and the boy in it. He could see her buttoning his shirt to cover herself and wanted her to stop. He knelt by his bed a second time that evening. "Dear God, I need Katie now more than ever. Please don’t let her be mad at me for what I’m feeling. Well, thank you, again. Amen."

The next evening Carl took John to the pond to catch their supper. Possum walked at the boy’s side, switching her tail. While Carl tied a lure on his line, he kept an eye on the boy, watching as he threw pebbles in the water, wandering close to the pond’s edge. "Careful, son," he said, leaning his rod against a small willow. As he spoke, he froze in pain, a pain that joined his body at his left shoulder, ran down his arm and along his jaw, and clamped his chest. He grabbed at his shirt and tried to tell the boy to run and get his mother but the words wouldn’t come out. He slumped to the base of the willow and came to rest as though he had seated himself.

John walked closer to the water, searching for pebbles to throw, giggling as he stepped in the soft black mud at the edge of the pond. For an instant his feet were sucked in place and then he lurched forward, free of the mud and in the water, struggling, then slowly sinking.

Carl called weakly for Jean Carol but his cry was lost in the thickets of oaks and pines. He dragged himself toward the pond, his hands and knees heavy in the sand, and saw the boy roll on his side under the water like a dead fish. At the water’s edge, the backs of Carl’s hands came in and out of focus as his chest grew tighter and tighter, and he fell forward, the side of his face digging a furrow in the sand.

He reached for the boy but his hands grabbed nothing but thin, black mud.

Possum’s tail circled slowly. She stepped past Carl and into the pond, jammed her head underwater and grabbed John by the back of his pants and—half-dragging him, half-carrying him—pulled him to the safety of higher ground.

The boy’s piercing cries ricocheted through the trees. All the while, Carl lay as still as the humid evening air.

In minutes, Jean Carol arrived gasping, sweat beading on her forehead and upper lip. She screamed Carl’s name as a question and then in desperation, knelt and pulled John to her and pushed his wet hair from his face. "Hush, baby, it’s going to be all right," she said, and then asked, "Carl, what’s happening? Was he drowning?"

Carl rolled to his side. His chest burned with pain. He saw Jean Carol holding the boy, the dark eyes he admired so when she smiled now wild with terror and felt her hand gently brush the sand from his cheek. He clutched at his shirt as though he was trying to tear away the breast pocket.

"Is it your heart?" she said. Then, "Oh, God no, Carl. Please hang on. Please. We need you."

Carl coughed a painful cough, and shook his head. "Just let me go, "he said, and watched Jean Carol stand, back away from him, then turn and stumble toward the shack carrying her son.

He wrapped his arms across his chest. His vision dimmed, the trees around the pond slowly becoming nothing more than a green smudge against the evening sky. Possum crept near him; her rear end cowered close to the ground, her feathered tail curled tight between her legs. She whined and pawed at Carl’s shoulder, then lay flat to the ground, stretched her head between her forepaws, and swept her tail across the sandy bank of the pond.

Carl felt heavy and very tired. Each breath he drew was short and shallow. "I’m coming, Katie," he whispered, and closed his eyes. All went silent and then he heard a woman’s voice: "Not yet, Carl." He forced his eyes open to look for Jean Carol, but she wasn’t there. Beyond the trees he could hear the wail of a siren and closed his eyes again as Possum pressed her wet, sightless side against him.Harry Groome was born in Philadelphia, graduated from Penn, and has lived here most of his sixty-seven years. In 2000, he received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Since then, his stories have won several writing awards and appeared in numerous publications including Aethlon, Aim Magazine, American Writing, Detroit and Gray’s Sporting Journal. He has just finished his first novel, Wing Walking, and is hard at work on his second.

[img_assist|nid=4328|title=”Step into the Sky,” Bill Turner © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=188]Once in a blue moon, Mark turns to Leigh and grins, revealing the coin-slot space between his even front teeth.

“Maybe I should break it off,” he tells her. Usually it’s after the last ripples have subsided, while she lies wrapped in one of his brown sheets and he’s sliding away, showing his well-muscled back as he goes for the bottle of Black Bush he keeps under the nightstand. They meet in the apartment above his restaurant, two rooms expensively furnished in hypothermic chrome.

He only started saying it because Leigh dropped the idea into his head first. She believes he challenges her as a kind of game. It springs from the same impulse that makes him friendly with men who know, ahead of time, which team will win the Super Bowl. His tone is subtly calculating. She could bet he makes internal wagers as to what her response might be. So far, her response is to keep pushing, diving for the perfect saturation of their first sexual encounters. The break-up remains stored in the back of her mind, implicit, a kind of biblical insurance. No matter how bad you’ve been, the option remains to duck and run.

Actually, the discussion with Mark was initiated by accident. Leigh’s doubts were supposed to remain private. Her deepest mind betrayed her when, recently, a bubble of doubt popped from her mouth. Mark and Leigh lay on his king-size bed, afterward, as he stroked a switch of her hair across his cheek:

“I’m married, Mark, married.”

Which was no news, of course, but they’d always left it, tacit, among things better unsaid.

Leigh thinks Mark shouldn’t press the issue. She’s the one with the spouse’s conscience. Now she feels pressure to take the moral high ground, to arms, men, damn the languor and sadness. If Mark has ever been married, he seems to have forgotten.

Mark insists that Leigh would agonize even if she didn’t have a husband and daughter. Claims she’s a closet Victorian. She’d feel guilty about sex for its own sake, crash and burn, even without Peter and Ellie.

What right does he have to say that? Leigh’s family is tangled up in a part of her where Mark has no access. It’s a separate compartment. Peter manages renovations in a large architectural office, sometimes oversees whole buildings, working beyond the point of fatigue. He gets home around one or two in the morning, then he sleeps for four hours and wakes up at seven to drop hints about a cooked breakfast. Still, Peter is good to talk to about painting and art, he is reliable in bed, and he sometimes plays poker with Ellie on weekends, racking up IOUs which they tear into pieces the size of moth wings and burn in the fireplace.

Occasionally, her husband travels to Baltimore to visit his aging, demented father, or he disappears for several days on job meetings. Once a month, Ellie, an eight-year-old with a tender and mocking mouth, visits her grandmother, Peter’s ex-stepmother, overnight in the country. In Center City, any grass you see is half-wilted by the urine of geese and dogs. In Wyomissing, Ellie rolls down hills and hangs out wash, and she comes home smelling like meadows. Until Leigh met Mark, Ellie’s visits were occasional. But then, everything had dovetailed; the little girl wanted to be with Nana more, Nana agreed to help Leigh get on with her painting. Those dawning Sundays, Mark and Leigh never went to sleep.

During ordinary days when Peter and Ellie are gone, Leigh works on her painting in their dining room, now a studio, and extrapolates the possibilities in her mind. Drunk drivers. Black ice. Engine malfunctions on a routine flight. Accidents so devastating, they will seem intentional. Loss of her daughter would be unspeakable. She never worries about Mark. Could life be easier without Peter?

When Leigh fetches Ellie, holding her, worried that the little girl already loves Peter’s ex-step-mother too much, that’s when Leigh tells herself that she must, she will break it off with Mark, it doesn’t need to continue, and Ellie wriggles away saying, “Mom, it’s not like I’ve been in Africa.”

Now it’s a rancid Sunday in March during Ellie’s spring vacation. Everybody’s away but Leigh, and Mark has been in Las Vegas. Before he called on Friday, she started wondering if she’d have the chance to break it off. What if he’s on indefinite vacation with some new woman? Leigh hopes to end it, clearly, like the stream of water from the bathtub faucet. Which part of NO didn’t you understand, baby, the N or the O? A line from Ellie.

So now they’re on again, only Mark might be up to something. Tonight they’ll meet for the first time as officially clandestine lovers inside his restaurant, Blue Aura. Normally they pass through the downstairs only in off hours to vanish into the apartment; otherwise they use his brother Len’s place. Mark wants Leigh to try the lobster ravioli. To enjoy what he does second best. Sex plus food: the combination notches things up to a new level. Next thing, they’ll be shopping for an exotic pet together. It has the weight of commitment; could Mark actually be falling in love with her?

Only that doesn’t sound like him. It’s now or never, she’s decided. If someone is going to take the moral high ground, it had better be her. Mark assured Leigh that the upstairs dining room—furnished with white sofas around the perimeter—would be all theirs. Blue Aura will be dead anyway, on a Sunday night. Guaranteed.

It might help Leigh that the place is full of Peter. The renovations were his job; his zooty blonde-and-black bar, his white dining room and open kitchen. Very courant. Very Old City. To terminate the affair in that setting seems almost ceremonial.

Last November, Leigh and Peter went to Blue Aura at Mark’s invitation. Mark insisted that Leigh snap a picture: The owner and the architect. Mark slung a glance at Leigh, quickly, handed her the camera, and she swallowed what felt like a baby’s fist. They’d had sex exactly three times.

“Everything looks great,” Leigh told Mark. Peter smiled like an uncle.

“My pleasure,” Mark purred. She has never told him that she found the food at Blue Aura overly complicated, too heavy on the ingredients.

Not long afterward, the bubble of doubt popped out, and breaking it off became a point of philosophy between Leigh and Mark.

Wrapped in a robe and trickling wet down her legs, Leigh’s staring into the closet when the phone rings.

“Yes.” she looks out the window at rooftops below. Skylights.

“I can’t meet tonight. There’s this convention.”

“ What convention?”

“ Paranormal psychologists.”

Come on. “It’s Sunday night.”

“ These people drink like fish. We’re too busy."

“You should have named the restaurant something else.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Mark. It’s been weeks. I don’t have to eat. It’ll take fifteen minutes.”

He hesitates. Leigh sometimes teases him: The connoisseur of Hit and Run. “Thirty-five or an hour. That I don’t have.”

“I can wait. Maybe the crowd will lighten up.” She’s too ready. It has to be tonight, and not over the phone.

Leigh can feel him smile. “You really want this, don’t you?”

She dries her hair in the bathroom, blowing it out straight. Hair thick as thieves, Peter used to say. It falls from the brush like glossy wheat. One of Leigh’s atmospheric paintings hangs on the wall between the sink and whirlpool bath—a female body emerging from fields of colored mist, in which float shapes hinting of lipstick tubes and stiletto heels.

Leigh has chosen a soft green silk shirt and well-cut black pants. She unbuttons the third button in her shirt, then hesitates. Buttons up again.

Lipstick and her lambskin coat and the night spread open before her. She halts for a moment, touching the marble Buddha’s head that sits on a teak sideboard by the door. Its deep cold calms her. Going down in the elevator, Leigh closes her eyes.

When she steps outside the building, it’s raining. The macadam street shines like black leather under greenish city lamps. Peter’s got the car, but she needs to walk. Under the building canopy, she paws in her bag for an umbrella.

She walks to the corner, brisk and purposeful, but then fishes out her cell phone, reaches Mark’s neuter voice mail.

“Hey. I’ll wait for you at the bar. Call when you’re ready.” Turning east, wind funnels down the street, and Leigh sways into the steel light of a street lamp. Rain like needles on her face. She fights to keep the umbrella around her head.

The two lovers met during the Blue Aura renovation. Leigh was in a group show at an Old City gallery that favored semi-abstract painting, and Mark was looking for something to carry the ambience. He chose one of hers for the main dining room; an oil in which red and blue draped figures of ambiguous sexuality stand in fog, entwined like one new creature. Romance, she called it. It was a stupid title. Leigh went to the restaurant to hang the painting. Two days later she came back, reeled in, after Mark called her. There was a problem with the lighting, he explained, and she persuaded herself to take this at face value.

Leigh was attracted to his movements. His aggressive masculinity cut the air as if it, too, were muscular. It turned out the painting looked fine, but Mark confessed that lately his head wasn’t clear. He went behind the bar for a bottle of champagne, a thank-you, a celebration, he said. And Leigh was pissed at Peter for living at the office, and Ellie was far away in Wyomissing where she’d wake the next morning to the warmth of cinnamon buns if the house didn’t burn down first. He couldn’t sleep, Mark said, for thinking of her. Leigh had never done anything more risky in her life than to smoke weed at night with a girlfriend behind a strategically parked car in the lot of her old school. She turned slowly away from Mark’s patient, luminous gaze, which grazed her face like the clear heat of candle flames. She’d wasted so much time anticipating disasters of all kinds. Here, then, was a risk she could walk away from at any point. Or could she? There was only one way to find out.

Even then, Leigh intended to set down her glass, firmly, on the bar. But she let him pour one more glass—his smiling, onyx eyes—and he filled it again, and she swallowed desire like a vapor, until she wanted to dance; but instead, with a spasm of resolve, she looked for her coat. Mark produced it, laid it gently around her shoulders. Put two fingers beneath her chin. They kissed. And he was powerful, he moved like a boxer, but touched her that first time with the tenderness of worship. Leigh felt like a shadow-figure in one of her oil paintings, something you can wipe away with a rag.

The rain is heavier now; it shatters on the pavement. Leigh’s hair is beginning to frizz. Mark, I can’t keep this up. I have my family to consider. Blah. What is it about the language of fidelity? Why can’t the voice of goodness be more saturated with color than the dreams of seduction?

A red light at Broad Street. A taxi, yellow and black, shoots puddles across the sidewalk. What emerges as the night splits open? Leigh follows a knot of people crossing the street. Rain-clotted lights and reflections make their paths shimmer and shift. An ancient woman steps in front of her, covered only by a thin coat, a triangular scarf around her head. The old lady reaches out uncertainly, as if tugging herself across the street. Leigh sidesteps her and the wrinkled face tilts up, peering, showing a fuchsia blur, a smile almost of recognition. What does she know, Leigh thinks. The lit clock on City Hall Tower leans upward into iron clouds.

By the time she reaches Blue Aura, nine blocks further down, she is chilled to the marrow. The polished aluminum door bounces Leigh’s reflection as she steps back. People flow in ahead of her; they must be the rear guard of parapsychologists. A man’s deep voice insists: The visionary IS a region of measurement. Leigh slips behind them into the bar area. Matte black padded walls, the brushed-metal cocktail tables crowded with glasses; a bullet-proof window refracts light from the street. The bar seats only six on contoured aluminum stools; behind them, people stand three and four deep.

Conversation runs like bathwater. Mark’s younger brother, Len, spins behind the bar, dressed in black, pulling drafts and shaking tumblers. He doesn’t acknowledge Leigh; he rarely does. Len is there sometimes when she and Mark pass through to go upstairs. They could fornicate on the bar and Len would merely turn his shaved head away, impassively polishing glasses.

Now Mark stands in an alcove at the desk across from the open kitchen. Leigh pushes toward him, her coat over her arm, ready for him to take it for safekeeping. He seems to have expanded with the night; everything about him looks wide, even the pen behind his ear. She could count the comb-strokes in his slicked hair. He looks up and his far-set eyes open farther, the irises black as his pupils. He has a child’s winsome lashes.

“Don’t call when I’m busy,” he says. “Got it?”

Stung, she gapes at him. He’s always taken her calls.

“We’re crowded. Excuse me.” Mark looks through her with eyebrows raised ingratiatingly as he beckons to the group behind her. Mark’s jaw muscle twitches as he strides past Leigh toward the white dining room.

She stands near the bar, her coat dragging on the floor. No one has a watchful look. Eyes flick past her, disinterested, professional. Laughter. Some of the psychic people look ostentatiously shabby, the others defensively professional. Leigh is a landscape of hills in her green silk. Behind the bar, Len is a pinball, firing drinks at the customers. He draws them in, palming their tips.

“I had an out of body experience once,” he tells two women with serious, heavy jaws. Leigh edges between them to stand at the bar. They clutch their wine glasses to their chests, retreating as from a force field. What do they see?she thinks. She slides into Len’s range, placing her foot on the aluminum railing.

Len cocks an eye. “Tonic and ectoplasm,” she says, looking around. Leigh checks her watch. Eight thirty, the place shows no signs of slowing down. The inside edge of the bar is inset with a row of votive candles. The flames tremble when Len reaches over them. Overhead, incandescent light bulbs, each wearing a pair of white wings, hang on varying lengths of wire. It’s a good place to wait. Len offers her matte-finish absolution; no questions asked. A boy in black. The bottles glitter on the wall.

Len slides a martini over the ebony bar.

“Green Chartreuse,” he says. “No ectoplasm.” His hand stays for a moment on the thin stem of the glass. She lays down fifteen. But Len is watching her. Questioning? Behind his head is a mirror. Leigh opens her mouth and no words come. She feels like a reptile, gaping at the sun. She smiles apologetically, but Len is already two customers ahead, bills in one hand, a beer glass in another. Nodding his long head, laughing, sleek.

When Leigh steps away from the bar, her cell phone rings. Leigh holds her glass with gossamer delicacy, juggling the coat, digging in her open bag.

“Mark?” She speaks without thinking.

“Mark? What the hell are you up to?” Oh Jesus Oh Mother Oh Christ. It’s Peter calling from Baltimore. His laugh is percussive and humorless. Leigh gulps down her entire drink.

“Listen,” Peter says. “Dad just had a fall in the restaurant. He’s quiet, the ambulance is coming.”

“Is he okay?”

“He was telling me before about his war experiences. Leigh,” Peter keeps his voice steady. “He doesn’t know me. He says I pushed him. Tried to rob him.”

“Oh, God.”

“I wish we could talk. I’m sorry. Can you hear me?”

Leigh looks around the crowded bar, and suddenly, all sound is amputated, snatched from the atmosphere. She hears a rushing sound in her head, the static of an empty universe. People’s faces move and no sound comes out. They tip back their heads like empty cups and laugh silently. Maybe they’re mind-reading one another. She totters on the border of good faith: Peter, Ellie, family on one side; and on the other, the lure of danger that slings toward you like a fist.

“Leigh?”

“I know he’ll remember you. Peter, I love you.”

“I can’t…” Peter’s call breaks up. But Leigh does love him. She knows it, and it hurts. Peter’s strong, slim body, his easy laugh, and now, his father is accusing him of assault and theft. She closes her eyes and her lips move again.

When Leigh looks up, the wave of voices rolls around her again, and she stares at the glittering bottles above the bar. She is hard and clear inside, and her cheeks burn. The crowd at the bar has thinned. She takes the open seat. The row of candles before her glitter as she lays her hands palm-down on the shiny wood.

Perhaps she will change her painting style. Hard-edged, she considers, iconic. She’ll do figure studies: Madonna and child in modern dress, massive, filling the picture plane. Inseparable forms, vivid with eternal presence.

“I’ll have another.” Leigh catches Len’s eye. “I like this extrasensory alcohol.”

“I read your mind.” He gives her a dark, ambiguous glance.

Leigh digs out a twenty and is about to put it down, when a hand grabs her forearm. A small-fingered hand with tidy, pink nail polish.

“It’s on me,” a girl’s falsetto voice says. Leigh turns and stares. It’s a woman. No more than five feet tall, she presses close to the bar. She has a thin Southern accent. The walrus-faced man who has been trying to catch Leigh’s eye yanks his stool away, making room. The girl offers bills like flowers, held between thumb and forefinger.

“Make that two,” she tells Len. She has blue eyes, chin-length yellow hair, and is dressed in a sort of impossible black coverall. Her eyelids are coated with pale lavender eye shadow. She looks like the girl on the Little Debbie Snack Cakes box wearing a too-large bodysuit from the Matrix.

“I’m Alison.” She looks up at Leigh, standing too close, and her mouth shapes each word separately.

Oh, God. Where’s Mark? Len sets down the green martinis, but he’s gone before Leigh can think how to ask for help.

“Cheers,” Alison says, with a concentrated frown. Leigh’s almond-stuffed olive rolls like an eyeball. Alison clinks rims, intently, as if she’s willing the drinks to burst into flame. The tiny woman sips, her eyes impassive. “I think you’ve been stood up,” she says with authority.

Leigh’s mouth drops.

“Might could you’ll need that drink.” Alison nods at the glass in Leigh’s hand.

Is Mark behind this somehow?

“I don’t bite,” Alison offers. “I’m with the conference. You know?” She indicates the crowd with her chin. “I study the astral body. I’ve been watching you.” The tight focus of her blueberry eyes makes Leigh move her stool back, reflexively; back into the warm, squishy intimacy of the walrus man’s belly. She smells mint on his breath. People have increased on every side. There’s nowhere to go, and she turns back to Alison, feigning a laugh.

“That was a hell of a pickup line,” Leigh says. She’s gained maybe three inches distance from the crazy woman. Twisting around, she looks for Mark through the crowd. Against the black padded wall of the bar, through the shift of bodies, his hand flashes out. She sits up. No. He was calling a customer. His wide shoulders move away, toward the main dining room.

“I want to ask you something,” Alison says, her voice now shy, breathy. Leigh swivels back to her. The woman has a faint vertical scar through one eyebrow. She breathes fast; Leigh can see her thin chest rise and fall. Great. She’s about to be hit on by a dyke who resembles Rainbow Brite.

“And?” Leigh grips her handbag. Is her phone set on silent? Is it possible Mark called and she missed it? Peter, maybe?

“A few minutes ago, you projected your astral body.” Alison lifts her eyes toward the exposed, black–painted ducts on the high ceiling, as if she expects angels are squatting there, their thick wings stuffed between roof struts.

“Did it bounce off the ceiling?” Leigh smirks, trawling her bag for the cell phone. No calls. Crap.

“It went beyond.” Alison is earnest, impressed. “I was afraid for you. Then you drew it back. It’s important. What were you thinking just then?”

“Just when?”

“You looked down, then you looked up. After that you sat here.” Alison nods at Leigh in her seat.

Around them, voices diminish. Leigh considers, taking fast sips of her ectoplasmic martini. It had, she realizes now, been her moment of decision. She is Mark’s meaty bone. She is his latest meal. She wanted a conflagration, devouring, hot, and magnetic. Something dangerous to yank her hand away from. Something she could control. Against that, there is uncertainty; Peter spending himself on his own mistress, architecture, and tonight, caught up with his father and grief. Tomorrow, there will be Ellie’s disparagement of the lumpy scarf Gran is teaching her to knit. Peter, who walks away from Leigh into the vaulted spaces of his mind; Ellie, who needs Leigh to push against.

Leigh needs to get home; there is work to do. For starters, figuring out what she’s going to tell Peter about her adventures with Mark.

“Why,” she asks the small woman, “do you want to know what I was thinking just then?”

Alison presses her lips together. “I have this theory,” she says in her squeaky voice, “that when someone is rejected, their connection to the astral body becomes elastic. If they pay attention to where it goes, they know what to do.”

“So mine went through the roof.” But Leigh’s smiling.

“Yeah! Like fireworks. It must be something—big.” Alison looks wistful; she’s sagged a little in her black combat suit.

“It is big.” Leigh thinks of Ellie and Peter, stacking up their poker chips. Alison’s eyes have drained of light. She might be a person, Leigh imagines, for whom big things rarely happen.

Blue Aura is quieter now, and Leigh looks around. Craning, she sees Mark leave the dining room. This time, he hones in on her, offering his coin-slot grin.

She turns back and whispers in Alison’s ear. “Are you hungry? Because I know the owner, and he promised me a free dinner. He said I should bring a friend.”

Alison sticks a finger in her martini and licks it. “Nah,” she says. “I get nervous when I eat around other people. It’s this quirk I have.” There are spots of color on her Little Debbie cheeks. She gives Leigh a wry smile.

Mark draws up beside them, formal and solid as a wall. His silk jacket is faintly iridescent. “Your table is ready,” he tells Leigh, with a barely perceptible bow.

She jumps up, facing him. “Do you believe in astral projection?”

“What?” His cool expression contracts like a fist.

“I didn’t believe in it,” Leigh rattles on. “Maybe I still don’t. But it feels like part of me has been untethered from my body. Half of me’s already gone. I’ve been evaporating under your hands.”

She grabs his shoulders. Beneath Mark’s eyes are shadowed crescents of fatigue. His cheekbones reveal tiny veins that, with time, will become the calligraphy of alcohol. Leigh gives him a shake, as if to make him understand. He pulls back, palm flying up; he will hit her. She darts away. Far enough that Mark can’t reach her without overt, public aggression. Across the bar, Len watches; he’s holding an iridescent cocktail in each hand. The walrus man, his chivalry aroused by the scene, bustles toward Leigh. Along the bar, staring faces hover on the edge of her vision.

Leigh turns on light feet, unafraid. Alison has appeared beside her somehow, though Leigh had not seen Alison move after she stood up to confront Mark. Leigh takes her little hand, and they lace fingers for a moment.

“Thank you,” Leigh whispers, and then she slips on her coat and is gone, ready to risk her family, into the night. Helen W. Mallon comes from a Philadelphia Quaker Family. Her poetry chapbook, Bone China, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems and/or essays have appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Drexel Online Journal, Mars Hill Review, Gumball Poetry, One Trick Pony and Schyulkill Valley Journal. Poems are forthcoming in Commonwealth: An Anthology of Pennsylvania Poets and Phoebe: A Feminist Journal. Barring calamity, she will graduate in June with an MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College.

 [img_assist|nid=4361|title=Hair Drawing, Simona Mihaela Josan © 2004|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=151]My mother wishes for me: I wish you’d cut your hair short. I wish you had some security. I wish you’d write about real Italians. That wish came on a rainy spring Sunday after she and my father had spent the previous evening attending the decade-old play-in-a-restaurant, "Tony and Tina’s Wedding."

"Your cousin didn’t like it either. And your father —" she batted the air, "Well, nothing bothers your father."

Not true, of course. Wool bothers my father, wool and the entire sad history of mankind and any and all humiliations to the human spirit big or small. Earlier, he’d stood in my living room contemplating the rose window in the church across the street. Then he turned toward us slowly, looking as though he’d just had a long talk with God, and announced that he wasn’t coming with us to the annual Philadelphia Flower Show.

He wanted to watch a golf tournament. We left him in the company of Tiger Woods. By then it was raining heavily. I kept my eyes on the streets, trying to avoid the pot holes, while she, waiting for my corroborating outrage, continued to describe the play.

"It’s a satire, Mom.”

"It was mean," she said. I let that one pass. Given her exasperation, it was not the time to lecture her on the properties of satire.

"When did you ever go to a wedding in our family where they served a piece of meat meatballs hard as a rock—instead of salmon or even just a nice chicken? And when was the last time you ever saw anybody dance on a table with her—all of her top was hanging out! The clothes were awful and the language. This we paid $75.00 for? No one in our family acts like that."

No one in our family acts like that. My mother had been seduced into believing that those characters were badly-behaved members of our own family. She loved being an Italian-American. Tony and Tina had embarrassed her.

"And you," she said.

"Me? What me?"

"You should do something about it."

The parking attendant was waving and flailing at me. Lot full. I backed out onto the street. "Like what?"

"Write something good."

"Aren’t I writing a novel?"

"Is it Italian?"

I had been keeping my own counsel with this third novel because there were Italian-Americans in the work. Until now, I’d never mined the depths of my Italian-American experience, mostly because I didn’t think there was one.

My mother was already convinced she was the mother in two previous novels (women to whom she bears no resemblance, both of whom I’d killed off in violent ways). How could I tell her that I planned to showcase her in the new book? So far the writing had made me sleepy with guilt. Each time I shot an arrow aimed at the bull’s eye authentic, I hit caricature.

We found a parking space two blocks away, then linked arms under a single umbrella and ran to the convention center, where we were cast into yet another ethnic wonderland: France. Amid the lush floral displays stood a mini Eiffel Tower; a Parisian cafe; a repro Tuileries. Geraniums, blistering red and swollen, spilled out of glazed pottery. There was even a reconstructed Japanese bridge against a canvas backdrop of Monet’s garden at Giverney. Years before I’d been to Giverney and had stood on the real bridge looking out over Monet’s pond.

My father was stationed in France after World War II. For decades I’ve been running with the joke that my parents named me Denise because my father—who chose the name—was secretly fascinated with a French chanteuse named Denise. I’ve invented his French experience as romantic, clothed him in fluid gabardine instead of army fatigues, added an unrequited love to his post-war France. I wanted to account for being a Denise in a family of Joes and Marys. I wanted a reason. So I made one up.

That day at the flower show I said, "It doesn’t look like this."

But my mother was thrilled, believing she was a guest at Monet’s home. Should it matter then that the play had depicted Italians as lewd, gauche, dumb? Wasn’t it all invention? This garden in a convention center? Those actors in a wedding? My mother didn’t think so.

She believed that somewhere between depictions of Italians exerting brute force, wearing bad clothes and making wise-cracks, there had to be another portrait.

As we sampled bistro food under a striped cafe awning I began to feel shame—not for what I was, but for my obsessive efforts to banish all traces of it. I hid my maiden name: Piccoli. Gess, my married name, was short, sweet. What I’d barely admitted to myself was how much I loved its Anglo-Saxoness. I was a coward. I never wanted anyone confusing me with those other Italians.

“Where are the Italian-American writers?” Gay Talese had asked in an essay for the Times. Why so mute? Well, Italians don’t grow up with books in their houses, he pointed out. There were books in my home and magazines, yet nothing that resembled a library. I wasn’t read to as a child—I was talked to. I grew up in a family where everyone thought it was their obligation to articulate their raw emotions as if they were splinters that needed to be tended to immediately. The entire range of emotion was accessible by asking, "How do you feel?"

"Sit down and I’ll tell you."

Seated around a table with relatives is how I learned story. Sometimes the stories were funny and sometimes they were somber, but my mother was right: they were not stupid, brutish, or lewd.

After we’d had our fill of croissants and espresso, we linked arms and left the convention center. The rain and wind had died out. The sky was opaque gray.

"Italians bleed together like cheap madras," I said.

"That’s true," my mother said. She shrugged. I watched the sharp planes of her face shifting. "I’m not educated like you and your brother and your sister, but I know when somebody’s making fun of me."

On the subject of my intense family ties I’ve been from A to Z and back again, as torn up as a dirt road after a drag race when I examine their blunders, their open-hearted messiness.

"Be funny," she said, "but tell a whole story."

Hadn’t she, my first reader, always offered herself up for scrutiny? That day she was asking me to give something back, something more complex than stereotypes: real Italians.

"I’ll give it a shot," I told her.Denise Gess is the author of two critically-acclaimed novels, Good Deeds (1984) and Red Whiskey Blues (1989) and the co-author of the non-fiction book Firestorm At Peshtigo: A Town, Its People and The Deadliest Fire in American History (2002). Her short fiction has appeared in the North American Review and has been anthologized in The Horizon Reader. She’s working on a collection of essays entitled Bad For Boys.