How do you explain to your six-year-old daughter, who stays with you two weekends a month, that you killed a dog? That while you were returning from market in the van—you driving, she sleeping—a dog ran into the road, and you hit it.
The driver has just turned thirty and thought the number would protect him from such uncertainty, from social awkwardness of all kinds, but now he squats in the gravel shoulder of a country road, holding a bleeding dog’s head.
The thud of the impact woke his daughter from her late afternoon slumber. Her mouth formed the word, “What?” as he pulled over.
“Stay in your seat,” he told her. “I’ll investigate.” He still felt thirty years old.
But now, left with the certainty that the dog’s breath is not warming his hand—the dog no longer has breath—he feels his maturity running low. Paralyzed as he is by the question, he may as well be the same age as his daughter.
At home with her mother, his daughter has three cats and a dog. When the man visits his friends, and his daughter goes along by default, she sits rapt for hours stroking their pets. He is grateful for a chance to talk to adults. Though sometimes the long days with chickens and crops for company leave his mouth empty of words and he decides to cut out early. The last time this happened, his daughter refused to leave. She forced him to stay another half hour so she could pet a Siamese who hissed every five minutes. His daughter was not deterred by the hissing, just lifted her hand until the animal resettled herself, then resumed petting. She went home without a scratch on her.
Now the man looks at the dog more closely. No collar. Nondescript breed and color. Not a dog he has seen before, though he has driven by this field of new rye before. Earlier, in summer, corn was grown and the dried husks, turned back into the soil, glow in the setting sun. The man doesn’t know the grower, but he admires his methods.
The man looks across the field for a house or clue where the dog lives, but sees nothing beyond the field of rye. Narrowing his vision back to the road, he checks the dog one last time. Nothing. Just mangled fur and blood, thanks to him, to his slow reflexes and bad brakes.
The man lifts the dog, one arm under each set of paws, and moves the cooling body to the side of the road. Maybe his people will find him there, settled amongst the green shoots of rye. The shoots stand only six inches high, but the sun is so low that they cast a long shadow, fingers of new growth reaching across the dog’s body.
The dog’s shadow looms monstrous, covering the gravel shoulder and stretches all the way back to the spot of road stained with his blood.
He glances back at the van and sees his daughter’s face pressed against her window. She has stayed in her seat, but watched every move. She knows.
He walks back to the van to write a note. He is prepared with a ream of brown wrapping paper he keeps in the cab for making impromptu signs at market. Before he can reach for the green marker he carries, his daughter says, “Dad?” She sees the blood staining his jacket and her brown eyes stretch wide, her neck freezes in a twisting posture that makes her look like a wild animal.
“What happened to the dog?”
“Be right back,” the man says. He wishes then that he is forty years old, instead of only thirty. Perhaps another decade would give him the words he needs for his daughter. He wishes too for another adult—his parents, his daughter’s mother—they would know the right thing to do. The right thing is not returning to the dog right now, he knows that much, but he needs more time.
He lets the question play and replay as he scrawls on the page.
He writes, “I’m sorry I hit your dog. He ran right into the road, and I couldn’t stop in time. He died after impact, and I moved him to the field. Beautiful rye!”
He signs his name, proceeded by the word “love.” Then he adds the name of his farm, just five miles down the road, in case anyone wants to see him about the accident. He tucks the paper around the paws that aren’t bleeding and lets the dog’s dead weight hold it.
Then he turns back to the van where his daughter sits staring, her neck still frozen in that crazy twist. He motions to her to roll down the window. She hesitates, then cranks it down.
He says her name, that beautiful name her mother picked. He remembers the night he agreed to the name, imagining a life where they would call their daughter that together. Now he stands by the side of the road and says the name alone.
“Eden?”
His daughter doesn’t move.
“Eden?” He says her name again, then the truth, the truth that was so easy to write to whomever knew and loved the dog. “I’m sorry I hit the dog.”
She won’t look at him. She’s staring into the field at the motionless animal.
“Eden?” he says, beseeches her to look at him. When she refuses to turn her head, he says, “It was an accident, and the dog died. I’m sorry.”
His daughter knows what death means. At the farm, she has seen chickens, killed by foxes at night, being torn apart and eaten by their former coopmates by day. But this is not such a violent, cannibalizing death, just an accident, just a dog who ran at the wrong time, and a man who couldn’t stop until it was too late.
“He’s at peace now,” the man says, the words coming to him from a deep, familiar place. “He’s at eternal rest.”
Yet, he looks back across the field, the sun tucking down behind the farthest hill, and knows that if the dog’s people don’t come before the turkey vultures, things will get messy and there will be dog organs and guts strewn everywhere, just like the dead chickens back at the farm.
Then he realizes too, the origin of his words. That Baptist funeral he went to the week before for his ninety-seven-year-old neighbor. Ninety-seven. That woman knew a lot. He wanted to hear about that, how she really knew how to live, but it was just some man she’d never known giving the same speech he gave every time.
He curses himself for repeating these meaningless words to his daughter. He had wanted her to grow up knowing only peace and love, milk and honey. Wasn’t it bad enough that he was driving around killing dogs? He didn’t have to infuse her with Baptist preacher-talk on top of it.
“Eden,” he whispers, and she finally moves, pulls at her long wild hair, putting in the tangles he can never comb out or explain to her mother.
He takes off his jacket so his daughter won’t have to look at the blood while he drives, then rolls it up, and places it into an empty vegetable box. He hops up into his seat and turns to see if she’ll let him hug her, but she hangs back.
Then they both look up and see the sunset shooting off across the horizon and the long trails of red look like nothing but streaks of blood.
A week later, the man is returning from market alone, the sun setting in his line of vision, when a shape bounds across the road.
A moment or two passes, and he wakes up and realizes he’s been in an accident. His foot has left the clutch, and the van is stalled. Everything has gone dark, and at first he thinks he’s blacked out so long that the sun has set, but then he sees that the hood of the van is crumpled against the windshield so that he can no longer see out. His ear is ringing from an object that’s flown off the dash and struck him. Turning, he sees empty vegetable and egg boxes tipped from his careful stacks and tumbled across the back of the van.
He checks himself for soreness, but other than the ringing ear, he feels fine. He says a prayer of thanks that he was alone, that the small body of his daughter was not strapped into the backseat.
Adrenaline takes over and he jumps down from the van, looking for the cause of collision. He remembers the shape, then sees a deer, bounding along the top of a farmer’s field. The animal darts into the distant woodlot and disappears.
The man looks closer at the field and recognizes the shoots of rye, the freshness of the green in the otherwise brown, November landscape. Yes, it is the same field, the rye an inch higher, but he is a quarter mile closer to home from where he collided the week before.
He walks around the van and surveys the damage, amazed that an animal could crumple the hood onto the windshield and still run away.
On the passenger side of the van, he sees a dirt driveway with an old-time farm collie guarding the mailbox.
“Salut,” he says, his greeting to all dogs.
The collie doesn’t move or bark, but his green eyes, catching the light of the still-setting sun, see everything.
The way he’s staring, the man knows that no matter how many years he accumulates, they will not give him the right answers for his daughter. She will always have more questions.
Louise Bierig grew-up in the Northwestern corner of Pennsylvania and now lives in the Southeastern corner. In both corners, she has enjoyed writing as well as growing native fruits and vegetables. Currently, she leads the Lansdowne Writers’ Workshop, grows a small garden, and raises her sons. She has published her work in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Soul Source newsletter, The Swarthmorean, and wrote a column for the Lansdowne Fresh Picks newsletter titled The View from Lupine Valley.
Like I usually do at the end of every day, before making the climb up my apartment building’s steps, I reach into the breast pocket of my denim jacket to find my apartment key. Sifting through loose change and tangled headphones, my hand wades through my pocket until the cool brass surface of the key meets my fingertips. I make a grab for the key only to end up grazing past a crumpled receipt beneath it. The paper crunches under the key. My legs halt their campaign up the staircase. I unconsciously slip past my keys. My hand flirts with the waxy parchment for a moment. I know what the paper is. I can picture the words printed on it. Slowly I bring the receipt out into the open and uncrumple the document until each line of text is present. Through various stains of dirt and coffee the faded ink reads,
“BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO RENTAL
Good Will Hunting
Run Time: 126 Minutes
Rental Date.: 12/05/2007
Return Date: 12/15/2007
Total: $5.35”
The key no longer matters. My apartment stairwell melts away in surrender to a dream. The memory has begun again– I can’t do anything to stop that now. Without consent the receipt has made me eleven years old again. I am home in my living room. Three sides of paisley wallpaper have appeared. Dad sits parallel to me on our olive corduroy couch, manning his usual position next to our cat, Patches. His Feet resting on the ottoman. I’m sitting on the hearth of our fireplace, my back to the flames. The Saturday night ritual begins. Tonight’s communion: Good Will Hunting. A light smoke rolls out of the fireplace and engulfs the room in the smell of burnt cherry tree. Mom materializes from the darkness of the kitchen, three cups of tea in hand. Robin Williams is on the on TV telling Matt Damon how he ditched the 1975 World Series because he met his future wife. Mom shoos Patches off the couch and sinks into the sofa under Dad’s arm. A light layer of sweat forms on my back from the heat of the fire. The wind howls outside, but tonight we are sheltered together, kept warm by the familiar comforts of our Saturday night rite. Matt Damon goes in to kiss Minnie Driver. Mom nudges a few inches closer to Dad. Elliott Smith’s “Say Yes” plays from the TV. I sip my tea from my freckled mug. I sip it again, and again, and again as I always will every time I revisit this flip book memory, or grab for loose change or reach for my headphones, or just want to experience a time when reality felt concrete. But isn’t that what we all want? To live in the past again, even if it’s only through a two way mirror.
Pressure Changes Everything by Martha Bryans
My living room slowly dissipates. The paisley wallpaper, the warmth of the hearth, my parents sitting together on the couch all vanish in the smoke. I am in front of my apartment door now. The receipt is still in my hand. My phone vibrates in my pocket, with a text from Mom.
“Do you know if you’ll be spending Easter with me or your Dad this year?” I crumple up the receipt and go inside.
George Fenton is currently a senior at Saint Joseph’s University studying English and marketing. Born originally in Zug, Switzerland, he immigrated to the United States in 1996 and spent his formative years in Bucks County. He now resides in the Overbrook neighborhood of Philadelphia. George’s work has also appeared in the literary magazine Crimson and Gray. Along with writing, George also puts most of his creative energy into his band Parius.
It’s a comfort to know someone who’s as neurotic as I am. My friend and coworker Jane gives me that particular solace. Jane, like me, tends to get too attached to inanimate objects.
I am, however, trying to change.
My husband, Walt, and I married three years ago—a first marriage late in life for both of us. I often wonder if he regrets the mess, literally, that he married into. Soon after our wedding, we moved in with my mother, who had grown frail since my dad’s death a decade earlier and could no longer easily live alone. My mom and her memories were blithely ensconced in the old family homestead, a stuffed-to-the-eaves house on the Jersey shore.
Living in my childhood home is oddly illusory. Sometimes through an open window on a summer night, I imagine I’ve caught the scent of the honeysuckle that no longer grows on the front yard fence. Sometimes when I dust the porcelain horses on the shelf above my desk, I recognize in my heart the hope I’d had, at ten, of having a real palomino. And sometimes when I glance at the pull-the-string Casper that stands on my pink-decaled dresser, I feel again the pangs of first love—for a cartoon character.
And then the present pulls my string: I’m surrounded by stuff—overrun by the many objects that had belonged not only to me, but also to my mother, my father, my sister, my brother, my grandmothers, my grandfathers, my fussy Great-Aunt Flossy, my demented Great-Aunt Batty (as we fondly called her), my pack-rat Great-Aunt Esther, and my long-suffering Uncle Bo, Esther’s second husband, who had lived with all the old great-aunts in Virginia until the last of that generation died, bequeathing the detritus by default to my parents in the north. Among the jetsam were an abundance of antique candy dishes, a profusion of Flintstones jelly jars, a Ping-Pong table, five Flexible Flyers, every issue of Consumer Reports since 1936, a 1963 Montgomery Ward Sea King boat motor, twenty-two ties on a twelve-tie tie rack, an autographed eight-by-ten glossy of Art Linkletter, an inflatable Sinclair dinosaur, a Pinocchio marionette without a nose, and a seven-foot-tall papier-mâché rabbit.
Still, Walt and I threw none of these “treasures” onto the pile of things we gathered for our small town’s annual bulk-pickup day, which took place on the second Wednesday in September. Instead, on the eve of the pickup, we gathered true junk that we could never sell or give away—treadless tires, rusty pogo sticks, bent gutter drains. And, at the end of a long evening of purging, just before I carried that last armful of junk to the street, I tossed, on impulse, one more object onto the heap: my canvas lunch tote. The design of its fabric was still appealing—tiny pink flamingos and green palm trees against a black background—but the small knapsack was falling apart.
On Wednesday morning, I felt a sense of accomplishment as I drove down the driveway and glanced at the mound of street-side rubbish, the tattered tote atop the pile. For a split second, I wondered if I should reclaim the little bag from its fate, but I was pressed for time to make my train to New York and didn’t stop.
I have a daily routine. As soon as I settle into a window seat on the train’s sunny side, I tug the hood of my jacket over my eyes and doze off. I crave that extra hour of rest after rising early enough to make the 6:42. Today, though, near Rahway, I woke with a start, remembering what my friend Sarah had said when she ran into me on the boardwalk this past summer and noticed that my flamingo tote kept flopping open because its Velcro fasteners were clogged with fuzz: “Why don’t you take it to a tailor to get it fixed?”
I retrieved my cell phone from my purse and called my husband.
“Walt, do me a favor—could you check to see if the trash guys have come to pick up our stuff? And if they haven’t—”
“Okay,” he said. “Let me look.”
I hoped that the junk hadn’t been collected yet. I wanted to save that flamingo bag.
I heard Walt lift the phone again.
“Yep!” he said. “They took everything! Isn’t that great?”
My heart sank. “Everything?”
He exhaled. “Oh, no, Natalie—you’re not having second thoughts about something you threw out, are you?”
“No,” I lied. This had happened before. Last time it had been a plastic Mr. Potato Head. Since then, I’d accepted the toss because most of its pieces were missing.
I said goodbye to my husband and began, as with Mr. Potato Head, to rationalize the little knapsack’s disposal. The bag’s foam insulation had disintegrated. To try to mend it, I had stapled the cracked plastic lining to the canvas, but it had come loose.
Maybe I could buy a new lunch bag just like the old one! I grabbed my cell phone again and began to search online for “flamingo lunch tote,” “flamingo and palm tree lunch tote,” “flamingo knapsack,” and “flamingo insulated bag.” I found only one picture of it. A red-lettered message hovered over the image: “no longer available.”
Then I remembered I had bought it seven years ago at the Happy Crab Gift Shop in South Florida, on my last trip to the Gulf with my friend Harry, for whom I’d always felt a fierce and steadfast love, and who had died several months later from a simple surgery gone wrong.
Finding a new identical flamingo bag suddenly seemed vital. When I googled the shop’s website, I was cautiously hopeful. The store opened at nine. I told myself I would call when I arrived at work. There was nothing more to be done, so I shut my eyes to try to nap.
I couldn’t nap. I called the Happy Crab Gift Shop, even though it was before nine. After the beep, I left a long and detailed voice message, describing every aspect of the flamingo tote. The woman who sat next to me in the middle of the three-seater sighed loudly. My cheeks burned red when I remembered I was in the Quiet Car.
I returned to my frantic search of the Web. In the tunnel under the Hudson, I finally wore myself out and fell asleep. Two minutes later, I woke with a start when the PA blared that we were at the last stop, Penn Station.
Exhausted, I arrived at work and said to Jane, my confidante and the managing editor of Tort Times at Scotch Legal Publishing (where, according to Jane, any day was a reason to drink), “Do you remember that nice little flamingo lunch tote of mine?”
“How could I not?” answered Jane. “It’s like Mary Poppins’s magic carpet bag, but instead of tugging hat stands out of it, you’re pulling out snack bars and bananas all day.”
“It was falling apart, so I threw it away. Now I’m regretting it.”
Jane’s eyes squinted as if she could feel my pain. “Oh, no. The old attachment-to-an-inanimate-object problem.”
I knew Jane would understand.
* * *
Two weeks earlier, Jane had spent some time overseas with a French friend in Paris. “Did you have fun in France?” I asked her when she returned from her vacation.
She answered, without a smile, “Yes, but I’m really upset about a lumbar pillow I took to Europe with me and left in the rental car at the Paris airport. I’ve had that pillow for years.”
“Well, at least it wasn’t a stuffed animal.”
“It was pretty close to being a stuffed animal,” she replied. Jane’s lovely face was contorted with misery. “It was stuffed.”
I winced at having said the wrong thing. “I’m sorry, Jane.”
“It’s somewhere out there in the world without me. I abandoned it.”
“Did you call the car-rental place?”
“Yes, as soon as the wheels touched the runway at JFK. No answer. I left a message. I called my friend in France. When she finally picked up the phone, I didn’t thank her for the wonderful time—I immediately started telling her I’d lost my lumbar pillow. She probably didn’t know what I was talking about. For one thing, I don’t think she was familiar with the word ‘lumbar.’ But I don’t think she even recognized my voice. And then I realized it was the middle of the night in France.”
“Did you call her back? During the daytime—her daytime?”
“Yes, but she didn’t pick up.”
“Maybe she was out distributing flyers about your missing lumbar pillow.”
I laughed. Jane didn’t. The person who’s obsessing usually doesn’t laugh at jokes about the object of obsession.
* * *
Now it was my turn to be obsessed. Jane had left her office and was leaning against my cubicle, letting me lament my loss. Anybody else would have told me to just get over it. Not Jane.
I asked her again if she remembered how cute it was.
“Yes, it was charming.” Jane shook her head, mirroring my sadness. “I’m so sorry, Natalie.”
“Did I tell you it was made of really nice cotton?”
“Several times. But you said it was falling apart, right?” She sounded tentative, as if I might argue with her.
“Yes, it was in terrible shape. But I probably could have asked a tailor to repair it,” I said, echoing my friend Sarah’s words.
“You know, I’m not sure if tailors fix plastic and Velcro . . .” She drummed her fingers on the Plexiglas side of my cubicle. “Where did you get the bag?”
“In Florida. On my last trip with Harry.”
Jane raised her eyebrows.
“I know. I’m sure that’s why I’m so fervent about it.” Of course, the little knapsack reminded me of Harry, but it seemed as if there were something deeper gnawing at me, something that made the pain more acute.
Jane must have felt this way two weeks before. “Did your brother give you that lumbar pillow?” I asked. Jane’s only brother had died when they were both in their twenties. She still seemed bruised from the bereavement, though whenever she spoke of him, she mostly talked about what a “wiseass” he’d been.
“No,” Jane said. She looked pensive. “But when he was three, he lost a little green crib pillow that he’d carry with him everywhere. He had a total meltdown.” She shook her head as if to shake free her thoughts. “I don’t know, Natalie. Whatever it is, you and I both seem to be suffering from the same thing.” She patted the top of my cubicle wall. “We’d better get to work. But come in if you need to talk again.” She walked into her office.
I rolled my chair toward my computer and thought back to that last trip to Florida with Harry. At the end of a long day by the Gulf, we had sat side by side on our towels, facing the ocean. Harry’s arms were linked around his knees, his skinny tanned legs crossed at his ankles. His black hair stuck out, spiky and wet from the sea. The warm air smelled of salt as it stirred around us. “I think you love the beach more than you love me,” he said. I just laughed at him, knowing it wasn’t true. We stayed quiet a long time, watching the waves break into glistening foam. A flock of flamingos landed on a strip of bright wet sand. “Look at them, Nattie.” He tilted his head. “No matter how many times I see them, they still take my breath away. Pink birds. Don’t that just beat all!”
I called the Happy Crab Gift Shop. The salesgirl told me they no longer carried lunch totes. So, once again, I began trolling the Internet for flamingo bags, hoping that somehow the larger computer screen at work would yield better results than had the smaller screen of my cell phone. The search findings were no different. As I looked down in despair, I glanced at my hand. My amethyst ring wasn’t on my finger. Where was it? I always wore it.
Distraught, I rushed to the doorway of Jane’s office. “I lost my ring!”
“Oh, no!” she cried, sympathetic for the second time that morning. “This isn’t your day, is it?”
It wasn’t Jane’s day either. She’d just spent half an hour helping me through my first crisis, and right on its heels came the next one.
“Maybe you took it off and it’s at home. Did you call Walt?” She left her desk to join me.
“I’ll try,” I said, without hope.
I called home. When Walt didn’t answer, I left a message saying I couldn’t find my amethyst ring.
Norris, one of the company IT guys, must have overheard our conversation. He walked over to Jane and me. “Is it your wedding ring?”
“No,” I replied. “It’s the ring my dad gave me when I was sixteen. I’ve been wearing it since then.”
“That’s a long time,” Jane said. “I mean, that’s a really long time.”
“Did it slip off when you were washing with soap and water?” Norris asked.
“No, she never uses soap.” Jane laughed. “Sorry.” She looked at me and sucked in her cheeks. “Not a time for laughter.”
On the other side of our shared Plexiglas wall, Keith, the marketing coordinator, pulled out his earbuds. “Did you say you lost your ring? Did you take it off to wash your hands?”
“She never washes her hands,” said Jane. “Sorry, did it again.”
“I never take it off,” I said, ignoring Jane. “I even wear it in the ocean.”
“Do you wash your hands in the ocean?” Jane asked. She shook her head. “Wow, I really do apologize. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
I knew. Two weeks earlier, I, too, had felt compelled to quip about Jane’s lost lumbar pillow. Even the most empathetic people have their limits and eventually need some comic relief.
Jane, Norris, and Keith began searching the floor. I went to my coworker Elaine’s office. I often go on and on about things to Elaine, so I had purposefully avoided her all day because I knew I’d go on and on about the flamingo knapsack. When I went to see her now, I went on and on about my amethyst ring.
When faced with a crisis, whether it’s realizing that the cross-references in an 800-page treatise must be renumbered before a five o’clock deadline or whether a friend has misplaced a beloved ring, Elaine is levelheaded and charges into action. She gathered her straight brown hair into a ponytail. “You should send an email to the office and ask if anyone has found a ring.”
“Good idea.”
“I’ll look around.” She set off.
At my desk, as Elaine suggested, I emailed my coworkers, asking them to tell me if they came across an amethyst ring. In my haste, I addressed the message to “Everyone,” so my email was sent not only to my own local New York office but also to the branches in San Diego, Berlin, and Shanghai. One of my colleagues in Germany responded, “We haven’t seen it here!” with an implied “ha, ha.”
Five minutes later, Elaine appeared behind my chair. She reported that she’d combed the ladies’ room but hadn’t encountered my ring. “I’ll ask the security guards downstairs to call us if anyone turns it in.” She strode toward the lobby.
I wondered if the ring might have fallen off my hand into the bulk-pickup pile. I called Walt again to ask him to look for it in the driveway or on the road.
Walt answered the phone this time. “Did you get my message? I found your ring—it was sitting on top of your jewelry box.”
And then I remembered. Last night I’d decided to try on a new turquoise ring that I’d recently bought as a future consolation in case I ever lost my amethyst ring. I must have forgotten to put the old ring on again. How ironic. It was as if the old ring were teaching me a lesson, as if it were saying to me, “I told you so. You like me lots better than that new ring anyway.” But, of course, that was crazy—the ring was an inanimate object.
I peered through the Plexiglas wall of my cubicle into Jane’s office, but she wasn’t at her desk. I told Norris and Keith that my husband had found my ring at home. I located Elaine (who, back from downstairs, was shining a flashlight under the copier) and told her, too.
I returned to my chair and sat down. Jane was walking toward me, carrying a cup of coffee.
“I found my ring!” I said, smiling.
“I’m so glad!” She walked to the opening of my cubicle. “Now you can start obsessing about the flamingo bag again.”
In fanning the flames of my fixation, Jane was not merely craving comic relief to abate her exasperation at having listened to me moan for hours on end. Whether it was a conscious act or not, she was doing what Harry used to call “going for the jugular.” Whenever anxiety had gripped me, Harry would keep mentioning the angst-inducing object of my obsession until he was talking about it even more than I was. “Oh, Nattie,” he’d say, “if only you had stayed three more minutes at the stage door! You would have met the whole cast of The Music Man, and it probably would have changed your life!” Or: “I can’t believe you left that empty conch shell on the beach! You’ll never see it again! I’ll bet that shell is calling for you right now—‘Nattie! Nattie! Why did you leave me?’” At first, the hyperbole would make me more perturbed, but then later I’d glimpse the ludicrousness of my preoccupation, and, finally, I would laugh. Like Jane and me, Harry was prone to “ruminating” (his euphemism). “It takes one to tease one,” he would say.
After Jane’s reminder of my monomania, I once again began trying to convince myself that I’d done the right thing to toss the tote. I swiveled my chair to face her. “The lining was really a mess,” I said, seeking reassurance.
Jane set her cup of coffee on my desk and put her hands on my shoulders. “Natalie.” She fixed her eyes on mine. “You need to let it go.”
Yes. Jane was right.
That afternoon, while formatting footnotes, I mulled over how I cling to the past until it crowds out the present. I thought about the many things that I hadn’t put in the trash collection—things like my childhood crush, Casper. Harry had sometimes called me “Casper,” a loving taunt about my paleness. Now that memory made it even more difficult to exorcise the Friendly Ghost.
At five o’clock, Jane stopped by my cubicle to say good night. “Feeling better?”
“A little.” I wasn’t.
She smiled at me. “One day you’re going to laugh about this.”
“It’s as if I keep searching for something that’s already gone. It’s just an inanimate object. Why do I care?”
“It stings less,” Jane said, as she zipped up her coat, “to mourn the loss of a bit of fluff or fabric.”
Maybe the small losses absorb us to keep the bigger losses out of mind. Maybe our obsessions distract us from the terrors of love. And maybe we dwell on something silly so we won’t be haunted by our more momentous decisions—like my choice to go to the beach the day before Harry’s surgery instead of traveling to the city and spending the day with him.
On my way home on the train, I slept. I woke to see a stretch of salt marsh outside the window, the still water reflecting the evening sky. Near a patch of tall grass, three wading egrets blazed pink in the glow of the setting sun.
I could almost hear Harry’s voice beside me. “See, Nattie? If you open your eyes to what’s in front of you, you can find flamingos anywhere”.
Flamingos everywhere, Harry. Don’t that just beat all.
Beverly Jean Harris is the author of the prize-winning story “Driving the Dodge Over Fifty,” published in Volume V of Short Story America. Another of her stories will appear in Volume VI. Beverly studied fiction writing at the University of New Hampshire and New York’s New School. Having worked every kind of job from making cotton candy to proofreading paperclip invoices, Beverly is now an editor in New York City. She believes that the stories we tell are the stuff of life, along with music, creatures, and the beach. She lives in New Jersey near the ocean.
At first, when I heard the crackly voice over the PA calling my name, I thought I might be hallucinating. Over the last thirty days, I’d flown to Boston, to Cincinnati, to New York; I’d explained to dubious airport officials that a French horn was a musical instrument and that no, my conical wooden mute was not for cheerleading. I was starting to hear my audition pieces in car alarms and the inflections of people’s voices.
The day before the ten-minute audition that would determine the rest of my life, I wanted to go straight home from school, listen to a few Beethoven symphonies, and eat a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Instead, I was called to the principal’s office.
Notes of Nostalgia- Melodic Memories by Linda Dubin Garfield
The stares and giggles of my classmates alerted me that the scratchy PA voice was real. “Iris Clark,” it repeated, “please report to the principal’s office. Iris Clark. Please report now.”
I sighed and shuffled toward the office, jealous of everyone else bolting for sunny freedom beyond the school’s doors. Even a few minutes’ delay felt like a terrible imposition after a full day of imprisonment.
Mrs. LaFolle was waiting for me. She was wearing a navy blazer and a sheer ivory blouse with a tie at the neck. Her brittle smile looked like it might crack and drop off her face.
“Hello, Iris,” she said, folding her hands primly on her desk.
“What is it?”
I dreaded what she would say. Although I’d done nothing wrong, she had hated me ever since I missed the National Honor Society induction for a Youth Philharmonic rehearsal.
“Well, Iris.” She shuffled some papers and pretended to study them. “It appears that you’ve missed nine days of school so far. Tomorrow will be your tenth absence.”
“Yeah, I’m auditioning for music schools. My mom called. Didn’t you get her message?”
Mrs. LaFolle looked at me over her glasses. “If any student has ten unexcused absences, that student automatically gets five points docked from their average in each class.”
I inched forward to the sharp edge of my chair, clenching my fists in my lap. “But this is for college. My mom called. How is that unexcused?”
“If it’s an optional activity,” Mrs. LaFolle said, “it’s not excused.”
“Auditions are not optional. Not for schools like Juilliard and Eastman.”
“It’s simply my duty to inform you of the consequences,” Mrs. LaFolle said serenely. It was clear from her tone that she didn’t know what Juilliard was, nor did she care to learn.
I felt like an empty glass that had been filled with hot lava. If I sat in that office for one more second, molten rage would come spilling out my eyeballs.
“If you dock my grades for this,” I said, standing up and heading for the door, “My parents are going to sue.”
I drove home faster than I should have, blasting the angry part of Beethoven’s Fifth as loud as my speakers would go. My car hurtled down the curves of the narrow road, past the organic dairy farm and the golf course, past the driveways and mailboxes and chemically-enhanced lawns. I hated this little town, hated it, hated it. I wanted desperately to leave. I couldn’t stand its provincial inhabitants, its five churches, its tiny library that never had the books I wanted. Its bland adults were flattened mediocrities: helicopter moms, doughy dads, teachers who’d gone to Norton High and come right back to reign over students asleep at sticky desks. I vowed never to succumb. I would never be downtrodden and pale. I would always be like Beethoven, steeped in art, shaking my fist at the thundering sky.
It was outrageous and unfair that Mrs. LaFolle should occupy any sliver of my mind. But I thought of her disdainful face as I vomited my lunch in the music building bathroom, just one hour before my audition. As I retched, I held back my own hair, trying not to splatter my audition blouse. Once my stomach was empty, I stared at the toilet in dismay. I felt sorry for the delicious lunch I’d eaten a little while ago. Mom had taken me to a cafe with blue gingham tablecloths and the menu written on chalkboard. The seared sirloin steak, mashed potatoes, and brownie should have been the perfect thing to eat before the taxing task of playing the horn. Now their service had been rendered vain.
I stood up, feeling cold. There was a damp patch on my back where I’d been sweating. My throat ached and my teeth were coated in sour residue. I felt weak and shaky. I didn’t know how I’d lift my horn in this state, especially not to perform difficult music in front of strangers.
I checked my phone. There were still thirty minutes before the audition—just enough time to wolf a granola bar and brush my teeth. It would be rushed, but that was better than playing on an empty stomach.
I exited the bathroom stall and spotted Juliet Jaeger, my ex-best friend, standing at the sink. I’d hoped to get through audition season without seeing her—a foolish hope, given that we both played horn.
Juliet’s back was to me. I darted my eyes toward the door, wondering if I could escape without confrontation. But it was too late. By the way she adjusted the mess of curls hanging down her back, with a little too much of a theatrical touch, I could tell she’d heard me.
I moved to leave, but she spun around. She was wearing tight black pants, heels, and a black long sleeve blouse with a strip of sheer fabric at the top. Her hair was messy yet alluring, and she had put on dark, smudgy makeup around her eyes. She gave me a sinister smile.
“You didn’t strike me as a purger.”
I stiffened at her insinuation. “I ate something bad.” Immediately I hated that I felt the need to explain to her.
She laughed. “Right.”
I decided not to let her affect my behavior. I marched up to the sink next to hers and washed my hands, resisting the urge to rinse my mouth. As I turned to go, my eyes snagged on her growing smirk. She was staring at my chest.
I looked down and saw that, despite my efforts, some vomit had spattered on the front of my audition blouse. Not bothering to dry my hands, I strode out of the bathroom, pretending that I still had some claim to dignity.
The horn auditions were held in a small classroom. The student desks had been pushed to one side. The blackboards had musical staves printed on their surface, ghosts of semi-erased notes floating amidst the lines. A few bookshelves held tattered theory texts and busts of famous composers.
The horn teacher sat in a chair on one side of the room, one lanky leg crossed over the other. He smiled at me as I moved toward the chair in the center of the room. It was a plastic scooped chair with a dip in the center, the kind I hated. It would be impossible to sit flat in it like I needed to.
“Hello, Iris,” the teacher said. “Play some notes, empty your slides. Get comfortable.”
I lowered myself into the chair, perching uncomfortably on the edge. I worked my valves a few times, all four of them in quick succession. Although it had never happened, I was terrified that one of my valves might stick during an audition. I lifted my horn and played a few notes. There was a slight, disconcerting echo in the room.
“Okay, why don’t you play a couple of scales?”
“Which ones?”
“Choose your favorites. Major and minor.”
I hesitated, wondering if this was a trick question. Most teachers specified the scales you should play. I could pick easy scales in a comfortable range, but that might make me seem like a slacker. On the other hand, it was probably best not to reveal my weakness by venturing into the upper register.
I chose to start with D-flat major. The two-octave range of this scale lay in the safe low to middle register, but he’d be impressed with a scale that had five flats. I also preferred this scale for reasons intuitive and mysterious. I couldn’t quite explain it, but D-flat major had always appealed to me.
I took a breath and dropped my jaw, letting a mellow D-flat emerge, round and low. I slid up and down the scale with ease.
“Great,” the teacher said. “How about minor?”
I chose to play C-sharp minor, knowing the four sharps would impress him.
He smiled at my selection. “It’s unusual to hear the parallel minor. Most people go with relative.”
I hoped that would make him remember me.
“What did you bring for your solo?”
“Haydn’s Second Concerto. First and second movements”
“Interesting. Let’s hear it.” He adjusted his chair and sat back, as though settling in at the movie theater.
I flipped to my photocopied music. The Haydn concerto was a show piece for low horn, featuring a section with fast, tricky jumps between the upper-middle and pedal registers. Keeping my horn in my lap for a few seconds, I mentally rehearsed the first few measures, planning the tempo and mood. Prepared, I lifted my horn and felt a surge of dizziness. Hunger and weakness returned in a wave, washing away the small confident foothold I’d gained with my scales. I rested my horn on my leg, looked down, and shook my head.
“Are you all right?” the teacher asked.
“Um,” I said, trying to resist the nausea rising in my throat. “I’ve been sort of sick lately.”
“Sorry to hear that.” He looked like he was trying to keep a neutral expression. I hoped he hadn’t decided that I couldn’t manage the pressure of being a performing musician.
Determined to prove that I could handle it, I launched into the Haydn. Usually I navigated the short, skipping notes with aplomb, but my nervousness made me rush. I started too fast and missed nearly half the notes. I blinked at my music, surprised that it had betrayed me so unexpectedly.
“Why don’t you try that again?” the teacher said, not unkindly. “Take your time with the tempo.”
I started over, trying to follow his direction, remembering that Suzanne said some teachers liked to test you for instructability. But I over-compensated, taking it too slow and running out of breath too soon. I had to breathe at a spot I wasn’t used to and missed several notes as a result.
“Don’t rush into playing after a breath,” he said. “You’re the soloist.”
I kept failing, and he kept stopping me. The audition extended like a horrible dream. When it finally ended, I felt a rush of vertigo as I left the room. I reached for the door frame to steady myself. I thought of Bruce, who’d call me a wuss for how easily I’d been thrown by a little physical discomfort. I thought of Kintaro, who’d find not an ounce of music in my performance. I thought of Mom, who’d paid for years of music lessons. It was $65 a week for an hour-long lesson with Suzanne. It was $2,450 for Youth Philharmonic, plus $ 1500 for camp and $3,775 for this summer’s tour to Germany. That didn’t include the $75 to apply to each music school, the travel, the hotels, the various sundry costs—tuner, metronome, mutes, mouthpieces, valve oil, slide grease, snake. She had paid all this money, driven all these miles only for me to prove my mediocrity. My throat tightened and my eyes felt hot. I cried rarely, but I recognized this as the perilous prelude to tears. I moved quickly down the hall, determined that no one should witness my humiliation.
As I exited the music building with Mom, I saw that it was snowing hard and fast. Already there was a thick white inch on the ground, with more snow whirling down like some cosmic down blanket had ripped open. When we got in the car, flakes coated the windshield so quickly the wipers could barely clear a path for Mom to see. We came to a turn and Mom edged forward cautiously, but without effect. Our car slipped toward the intersection with steady, silent intent. Mom didn’t speak, only gripped the wheel so hard her knuckle bones stood out white against her skin. Another car waited on the other side. I had time to look at the driver’s face: a man in his sixties, with dignified white hair and thick eyebrows. He watched us with a touching look of concern, and for a moment my heart felt quiet as we slid with slick grace toward his vehicle. What did it matter, really, who got into Eastman and who didn’t, when it all came down to this: ice, two cars, a deadly slip on the road? A thought whispered in the corner of my mind: maybe it was better for things to go like this, while I still had indeterminate promise. Better than to keep going and prove myself wrong. Then friction snared our tires, and we moved in the right direction once more.
Emily Eckart is the author of Pale Hearts, a story collection. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Nature, Potomac Review, and elsewhere. She studied music at Harvard University. Read more of her work at www.emilyeckart.com.
Mariel was late getting to the cafeteria after her talk with Dill. She felt his eyes on her as she stepped into the room. Which made matters worse. Not only was there no place to sit, but Dill was watching her from the doorway to see whether she had anyone to sit with. He was forming his opinion, which he would then bake into a hard thing to share with the other teachers.
She felt like a character in a book, the point-of-view character. As every fifth grader knew, the point-of-view character was the one you were supposed to like, and be like.
So then why was it Mariel was the only one with no place to sit, again?
Carissa, Melissa, Sonja, and Karlyn were at the far end of a bench of sixth graders. If she went over there and tried to squeeze between Carissa and Karlyn, she would be stuck across the table from Tierney, the sixth-grade girl who liked to grab your hand and write something embarrassing on it with sharpie markers. Mariel 🖤 Tory. The last time Tierney did that to Mariel, she’d spent twenty minutes in the bathroom trying to scrub the words off because she had a violin lesson right after school, and what would Mr. D’Alessandro say, if she had sharpie scribble all over her bow hand?
Carissa looked right at Mariel as she stood there with her lunch bag, scanning, but she didn’t wave and point to the tiny scrap of bench between herself and Karlyn. Instead, still watching Mariel, she leaned across to Melissa and said something that made Melissa scream with laughter.
The only other spot left, and time was running short with Dill still standing there in the doorway smiling at her, was at the round table with Heather and Katherine.
Heather and Katherine it would have to be. Mariel made her way to the round table past the awful boys. She put her lunch bag down firmly beside Katherine, as if it were her first choice to sit here anyway. Katherine ignored her, which was fine with Mariel. The two were deep in a discussion about cheat codes in their latest video game. Video games were not allowed at school, but that didn’t faze Katherine and Heather, who were drawing diagrams on a napkin, passing it back and forth, arguing furiously.
The other kid at the table was Donovan, who was only eight, but in sixth grade already. He had a special math tutor because he was learning high school calculus. Like Heather and Katherine, he was obsessed with video games. Unlike them, he was small and cute, and smelled like Suave Green Apple shampoo, another one of his obsessions. As he leaned across the table to correct Katherine’s diagram, Mariel got a whiff of his delicious hair above the general cafeteria odor of peanut butter and Lunchables. Heather studied what he had written through her smudgy glasses, and Katherine used the opportunity to steal one of Heather’s Del Monte Pokémon Fruit Snax. Only Heather and Katherine would eat such nasty things. Not Donovan, He ate very little, and only food that was white.
Mariel looked up and saw that Dill had finally gone off to eat his own lunch in the faculty lounge. He would now report back to the other teachers that she had successfully found a place to sit for lunch. But was he smart enough to know that she was sitting at the losers’ table? And that even the losers were ignoring her?
“How is your violin-playing these days, Mariel?” Donovan had a high voice, like a soprano robot. He had a special therapist who gave him lessons on how to interact with other kids, but Mariel sometimes wondered why the therapist didn’t teach him how kids really talk. Today, though, she was grateful for Donovan’s stiff conversation. It was nice to know what the rules were, and with Donovan you always knew.
“Fine, thank you, Donovan,” she said.
“I would like to play chamber music with you again sometime,” he said.
“That would be nice, Donovan.”
Donovan had the smallest cello Mariel had ever seen. It had an unpleasantly nasal sound, probably because of its size, but he was a competent player, as good as some of the teenage cellists in her youth orchestra. Problem was, his vibrato was too tight. His Bach suites were note-perfect but as boring as the ring tones on a cell phone, and he played everything too fast. Last fall, Mary Ellen, the school music director got the idea that Mariel, Donovan, and Eugene Huang should perform a piano trio because they were the only advanced musicians in the middle school.
The trio was a disaster, of course. They were under-rehearsed because they could only practice during Group, and half the time the piano, or Mary Ellen, or one of the trio members wasn’t free. Eugene didn’t bother to learn his music well enough—he said he had plenty already to practice for his private teacher and his real piano trio, who rehearsed on Saturdays downtown at Rittenhouse Music Prep. And Donovan was incapable of listening to or taking cues from other musicians, or even stopping to rehearse a passage in the middle. He was like a wind-up toy: once he started playing, he went straight through the movement until the bitter end. Worse, Mary Ellen did not seem to recognize that these were problems, and kept a jolly attitude about the hash they were making of the Mozart. Rehearsals, when they happened, were frustrating and exhausting for Mariel, if no one else. It was impossible to reconcile this experience with the rest of her life: the daily hours of scales and etudes prescribed by Mr. D’Alessandro; the feeling that she would never, ever be able to practice enough to catch up with her youth orchestra archrival Halerie, who was eleven like Mariel, but proudly seated in the first violin section next to a high school girl. Or with snooty Annabelle Li, who was homeschooled, and said to be a prodigy, and rumored to practice ten hours a day, and already learning Sibelius Concerto.
During the trio performance at the Thanksgiving assembly, Eugene kept hitting wrong chords and losing his place, forcing Mariel to decide which of the two of them to follow (she chose Donovan; at least he was predictable.) But the A-440 in Donovan’s head did not match the A of the piano, which was a quarter-tone flat, and Mariel had tuned her violin to the piano. She considered matching Donovan’s intonation, but as he played so softly on his tiny instrument and Eugene banged so loudly on the school’s wretched upright Yamaha, that she ended up staying in tune with the piano, more or less, and in time with the cello. It was probably the most horrible performance of the Mozart B flat Major piano trio in the history of humankind. At least they stopped after the Allegro (which, thanks to Donovan, was more of a Presto.)
The audience of parents, kids, and teachers had exploded into applause. Donovan’s mom and dad were in the front row with his sister, cheering. Mariel could see her own mother in the second row, one of the last to stand up, smiling, though not very broadly. She was next to Chi-wei Huang, who looked plainly mortified by her son’s playing. And for good reason, Mariel had thought hotly. At that moment she had never wanted to kill anyone as much as she wanted to kill Eugene Huang—who appeared to be perfectly content with how the performance had gone.
“We stank,” she whispered to him as they walked offstage for their curtain call.
“So what? They don’t know the difference,” said Eugene. “Anyway, they’re not clapping for us, dummy. They’re clapping for Donovan.”
Mariel looked at Donovan, who had followed them offstage with his strange tip-toe walk, carrying his little cello. His face, in the shadows, seemed to project its own ecstatic light. Mariel’s grip tightened on her violin. Eugene was right. She saw it now. The performance was not about the music; it was not about Mozart; it was not about playing well, or even adequately. It was about Donovan playing with other kids.
Somehow Eugene had understood all this, but she had not. She and Chi-wei Huang were the only people in the room upset that the trio had gone badly. It was one of those moments when the world seemed to drop out from under your feet. And just as well, for this was a world that Mariel was not sure she wanted to belong to. She was wretched. The botching of the Mozart disgusted her. At the same time, she was ashamed of herself for being more concerned about the music than about Donovan. This had been Donovan’s moment, so why did she feel so used? Why was she so selfish?
In any case, regardless of her feelings, the results were the same as they would have been if she taken Eugene’s careless attitude and played like a slob. Donovan was happy; his parents were happy about all the progress he was making, socially. Mary Ellen was getting congratulated on her great idea by the head of school. The faculty and parents congratulated themselves on having a school so supportive and inclusive of kids like Donovan. Eugene was happy because playing with Mariel and Donovan had been a pain, and he was glad it was over. Only Mariel was miserable.
“You make yourself miserable,” her mother had once told her, out of supreme vexation. It was during one of their fights about Mariel’s perfectionism, her inability to stop working at something until it was perfect. According to Mariel’s mother, perfectionism was okay it started to get in your own way or drive other people (specifically your mother) crazy.
Perfectionism made her late for school every morning because she could not stop practicing, and when she did, she could not leave until her violin was packed in its case just so. And when it was, she could not leave until her shoes were tied, just so. And her hair, and teeth brushed, just so. The list went on. Why couldn’t she be more like Eugene, who could turn his perfectionism on and off at will? Or like Donovan, whose standards were his own, invented by himself, and who had no one to please but himself?
Look at Katherine and Heather,. They were perfectly happy in their ugly, bad-breath world of Pokémon and Nintendo. Look at Carissa, Melissa, Sonja, and Karlyn. They spent their free time watching MTV and painting their nails. Karlyn practiced her clarinet half an hour a day, and if she squawked through Clair de Lune at her teacher’s house recital, her parents brought her flowers and took her out to dinner.
But Mariel did not really want to be like any of them. She pitied them, their sloppy, undisciplined lives. How much they were missing. What joy they were missing. It was a hard thing to realize that she had more in common with Halerie, and Annabelle Li, and Mr. D’Alessandro than she did with her friends, or even her own mother.
Katherine and Heather had finished eating but had not bothered to clean up their mess, and now were leaning across their own crumbs, still arguing about the cheat codes. Katherine had bits of crushed Frito clinging all over the front of her dark blue sweater. Shuddering, Mariel headed for the trash can. There was Melissa, heading towards her from the other direction. With her blue-beaded headband and her ballerina posture, Melissa moved like the queen of the lunchroom that she was destined to become when they got to eighth grade.
“Why didn’t you sit with us?” said Melissa.
“You didn’t ask me,” said Mariel. “There wasn’t room.”
“You don’t need an engraved invitation,” said Melissa. She dumped her trash and rubbed her hands together. As if that would make them clean. “What did Dill want to talk to you about, anyway?”
Mariel shrugged.
“You sat with the freaks instead,” accused Melissa.
“I was talking to Donovan.”
“Oh, well, he’s a cutie. Speaking of which,” Melissa bent towards Mariel and lowered her voice, “what would you say if somebody asked you if you like Zach D.?”
“Zach D.?” Mariel stared at her, mortified. Zach D. was in seventh grade. He was already growing a mustache. Every sixth-grade girl had a crush on him. Fifth-graders followed his love life closely, but none of them dared declare her affection for someone so old and popular.
Melissa’s eyes were merry with excitement.
“No way,” said Mariel. “He’s like eight feet tall.”
“Well, Tierney told me he likes you.”
Mariel began to walk towards the door, and Melissa followed. It was a trap.
“She’s just making fun of me,” said Mariel. “Everyone knows Tierney likes Zach.”
“No, no,” said Melissa urgently. “That was last month. Didn’t you hear that she and Jason are going out now?”
“No way.”
“Way. He asked her at the skating party. You weren’t there. You had a concert or something.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter. You can tell her I don’t like Zach. He’s too old for me.”
“Are you crazy?” said Melissa. “He looks exactly like Justin Bieber.” Melissa always said that. Mariel didn’t know if she were right or not, because she was unsure exactly which one of the pop stars taped up inside Melissa’s locker was Justin Bieber.
“I’ll tell them you need some time to think about it,” said Melissa wisely.
Mariel opened her mouth to protest, but then the end-of-lunch chimes started, calling them back from the cafeteria to the safety of their classrooms, to social studies and language arts. When the chimes stopped, Melissa was talking again, something about a sleepover party on Friday, renting Saw III, staying up all night. That would never happen, Mariel wanted to tell her. She needed to practice her scales. She had to practice her concerto, and her orchestra part. Music Prep began at 8:30 Saturday morning.
But Melissa was already pulling her along with the crush of kids heading for the doors. Everyone was watching her, Mariel, the point-of-view character. Something was happening that was simultaneously obvious and impossible to comprehend. Everyone wanted to be like her (inexplicably taken under Melissa’s wing!) but that didn’t mean they liked her. She caught Dill’s eye watching her on the other side of the plate glass, and when he saw her looking back at him, he gave her a thumbs-up.
“Creep,” murmured Mariel. But Melissa didn’t hear. She was shrieking with laughter and running after Tierney. Mariel hurried behind them, feeling her own self evaporate, like steam, like nothing at all, into the crowd.
Karen Rile is the author of the novel, Winter Music (Little, Brown) and numerous works of short fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, American Writing, Painted Bride Quarterly, Creative Nonfiction, and others. She teaches creative writing (fiction and nonfiction) at the University of Pennsylvania, and is the founding and chief editor of Cleaver Magazine. She has an MFA from Bennington College.
“We’ll arrive on the beach by 10 a.m., so make sure Jeffrey and Sissy are ready no later than 9:30. I’ll give you $25, then you can take Jeffrey and Sissy to Funland when it opens. Use $5 for ride tickets, which will leave you plenty for lunch and snacks. I’ll collect what’s left when you meet me under the umbrella at 6 p.m. Okay, Regina? Regina, did you hear me?”
Dancer by Rinal Parikh
Regina’s eyes had been following the tall, tan Avenue Hotel’s restaurant busboy at the next table while Mrs. Rosenthal prattled. She had been given the same directions every Tuesday night since they arrived in Rehoboth at the beginning of a hot 1973 June. “Yes, Mrs. Rosenthal. Funland. $5.”
“I’m hungry! Reggie, make them hurry up!” Jeffrey Michael, Mrs. Rosenthal’s youngest child, kicked his legs under the table next to Regina.
“It’ll be out soon.” Regina smoothed her hand through his soft brown hair.
“Paint my nails when we get back,” Jacqueline said. As the oldest child, Jacqueline had already stared to copy the authoritative tone of her parents. Bored, she stared at the pale pink polish chips left on what had been her newly-painted nails.
“We’ll do that after your bath.”
Regina sighed. Back in May, the prospect of living at the beach as Mrs. Rosenthal’s “Mother’s helper” seemed like a win-win situation. The fact that she would make $10 a week, a total sum that would cover her upcoming driving lessons, while watching kids who were not her younger siblings made the deal even better. The part she hadn’t considered, though, was what this “win-win situation” really meant: indentured servitude to the most affluent family in her neighborhood.
The waitress, hardly older than Regina, arrived with a loaded tray, placing shrimp cocktail in front of Mr. and Mrs. Rosenthal, then giving Regina and the children their burgers.
“Yuck, too much ketchup.” Jacqueline pushed the plate forward and crossed her arms. “I want a new one.”
“Sissy, we don’t have time for that,” Mr. Rosenthal said. He didn’t look up while he spoke; instead, he concentrated on dipping his shrimp into cocktail sauce.
“Do you want me to scrape some of it off?” Regina asked.
“No, I’m not eating this. I want a new one.”
“Regina, do what you need to so Sissy will eat her dinner.” Mrs. Rosenthal’s stern look told Regina to shut Jacqueline up as quickly as possible.
Regina stared at the back of the waitress who had just turned away. She was tempted to ask for another burger, but she knew Jacqueline would find another reason to refuse the second one. Must be nice to have the freedom to walk away, Regina thought as the white uniform and gold apron disappeared into the kitchen.
“How about this?” Regina asked Jacqueline. She leaned close and spoke softly, as if sharing a secret. “I’ll use my nail polish on you, just this once, if you’ll eat your dinner.”
Jacqueline didn’t answer right away, but Regina knew she hit the mark when she saw the girl suppress a smile. “Okay,” Jacqueline finally said, and pulled back the plate.
Just two more weeks. Just two more weeks. Regina’s silent incantation could get her through the rest of the summer. It had to—the Rosenthals were her ride back to New Castle County.
Fifteen minutes before Funland opened the next day, Regina found herself sitting on a white bench between Jeffrey Michael, who alternately sang and ate Gus & Gus fries, and Jacqueline, who ate only the peanuts from her bucket of Dolle’s popcorn. While other children waiting for Funland to open ran back and forth between Delaware and Brooklyn Avenues, Regina wondered if she could pocket an extra dollar out of her ticket and food allowance from Mrs. Rosenthal like she usually did. It was going to be a challenge if she made good on her promise to take Jeffrey Michael on all the rides this time.
“Ride the Surf to Grenoble, Virginia waits for you! Olive waves while you walk, Maryland has the zoo! Baltimore is close yet far, Rehoboth is what we see! Wilmington is way up north, Delaware works for me! Brooklyn’s the last stop for us, but no reason to whine! We can’t play at Funland if we see the Laurel sign!”
Jacqueline threw a handful of popcorn at Jeffrey Michael. “If you sing that song one more time, I’m putting this bucket over your head!”
Jeffrey Michael jumped down from the bench and kicked at a seagull snatching popcorn kernels. “You’re not the boss, Sissy!”
Regina turned to Jacqueline. “Let him sing. He needs to know the song in case we get separated so he can walk back and find your mom’s umbrella.”
Jacqueline rolled her eyes and searched for more peanuts in her bucket.
Just two more weeks.
“I don’t want to ride the carousel. We do that every week. I want to go on the bumper cars again!” Jacqueline put her hand on her hip. “We always do what Jeffrey wants. It’s my turn now!”
“We have to wait while you ride in the Haunted Mansion car. And the Helicopter. And the Wagon Wheel. If you don’t want to ride the carousel, wait for us by the Frog Bog.”
Regina took Jeffrey Michael’s hand and walked with him through the line. “Horse or chariot today? It’s up to you.”
Jeffrey Michael stood as tall as he could. “I want to ride the ponies!”
“Go ahead and pick one.”
Jeffrey Michael chose a black horse that was low to the ground. Regina lifted him onto its saddle and said, “You okay?”
Jeffrey Michael put on a brave face and nodded. Before he was ready, the music began and the carousel kicked into motion. He yelped and clung to the horse’s neck even though Regina stood next to him and had her hand on his back.
“Why don’t we sing a fun song?” she asked. “Riding along on a carousel, trying to catch up to you. Riding along on a carousel, will I catch up to you?”
Regina sang the verses while Jeffrey Michael sang the chorus, his favorite part of “On a Carousel.” Although the song eased his fears, he squealed each time his horse dropped and laughed each time it rose. Eventually, he let go of the horse and raised his hands, enjoying the motion of the carousel until it slowed to a stop.
In triumph and still singing, Jeffrey Michael hopped off his horse. Regina took his hand, and they walked towards the Frog Bog. Jacqueline wasn’t there. They walked outside to the rides behind the enclosed building, but no Jacqueline. They walked back inside by the Skeeball machine. No Jacqueline. Jeffrey Michael continued to sing while Regina dragged him around Funland. She went back to the Frog Bog in case Jacqueline had been in the bathroom earlier.
“Excuse me,” she said to the man holding several plastic frogs. “Have you seen a girl, a little older than this boy? Wearing a tennis dress over her bathing suit. Brown hair pulled back in a ponytail.”
“I did. Walked right by me about twenty minutes ago. Headed for the boardwalk. Haven’t seen her since.”
“Thank you.” Regina picked up Jeffrey Michael, who had finally stopped singing and realized his sister was missing. They sped towards the boardwalk.
“Sissy! Sissy! Jacqueline Marie!” Regina wasn’t worried about surviving her last two weeks anymore. Instead, she was considering what would happen if she couldn’t find Jacqueline. Mrs. Rosenthal would probably call her parents and make them drive the two hours it took to get to Rehoboth to pick her up. Regina would probably have to give them most of the money she earned this summer as punishment. May as well kiss driving lessons goodbye.
Regina turned left towards Delaware Avenue. She dodged packs of vacationers and popped her head into every store Jacqueline might have visited: Gems & Junk, Candy Kitchen, Dolle’s, Rehoboth 5 & 10, all the way to the Atlantic Sands. Then she moved her search to the beach, guessing that Mrs. Rosenthal, with her thermos of gin and tonic water, wouldn’t notice them. Regina kept glancing towards the ocean, hoping that Jacqueline hadn’t had any ideas about going swimming alone.
Regina walked the beach all the way to Brooklyn Avenue, then stopped. She heard someone playing a guitar and singing under the boardwalk: “Spent a little time on the mountain, spent a little time on the hill. Heard some say better run away, others say you better stand still.”
The song was one Regina had never heard before, not at home with her mom controlling the radio, and not at the beach where music was limited to what could be heard coming from the boardwalk shops. In fact, she doubted she’d hear such music on any radio station she knew of. The bluesy tone was a refreshing break from the pop songs she was used to hearing. Still holding Jeffrey Michael, she stepped under the boardwalk to take a closer look.
Regina stared at the man with the guitar. He wore a white t-shirt and a large straw hat even though he was shaded by the boardwalk above his head. His jeans were jagged above his brown sandals. Written in green letters on the side of a faded black guitar case were the words “Big Lar.” Coins were gathered at the wide end inside it. Half a dozen people sat in a semicircle around the singer. The person sitting closest to him was the smallest—and wearing a tennis dress.
“Sissy!” Regina hissed, not wanting to interrupt the singer.
Jacqueline pretended not to hear.
“Jacqueline Marie!”
The sound of her full name made the girl turn. She smiled and waved to Regina, then turned her head back towards the musician.
Regina fumed but didn’t want to cause a scene, so she stood just outside of the semicircle of listeners, still holding Jeffrey Michael in her arms. Unconsciously, she swayed as the man sang, taking in the lyrics now that she gave him her full attention. Soon the song ended and the singer received polite applause. Several people threw more change into the guitar case’s belly and walked out from beneath the boardwalk. Regina used that moment of transition to collect her lost lamb.
“Sissy, why did you wander off?”
“I heard the music and wanted to find it. Isn’t he great?” Jacqueline beamed at the musician.
“Thank you, little missy.” The singer smiled at Jacqueline, then looked up at Regina. “I take it she’s in your care?”
“She is.” Regina smiled at the man, then shot a look at Jacqueline who continued to ignore her. Regina turned her gaze back to the singer. “What’s your name? What were you singing?”
“Name’s Larry, but I go by Big Lar.” Larry pointed to the guitar case. “Know the Grateful Dead? One of their songs. ‘New Speedway Boogie.’ Heard it at a Dead show at Temple a few years ago and decided to learn to play it.”
“I like it. I wish I could hear more.” Regina smiled again at Larry, then spoke directly to Jacqueline who could no longer feign ignorance. “Sissy, it’s time to go.”
Jacqueline slowly got up and walked towards Regina.
“Will you be back on the beach later?” Larry asked.
Regina knew the question was for her. She felt her face burn, and not because of the heat or the sun. She hesitated before answering, “I usually go to a movie on Wednesday nights. It’s my one night off.”
“If you change your mind, I’ll still be under the boardwalk. Unless I get arrested. Like the morning sun, you come, and like the wind you go. Ain’t no time to hate, barely time to wait. Oh oh, all I want to know is where does the time go.”
Regina mulled over her choices while she sat with the children in the large house’s enclosed porch. It wouldn’t hurt her feelings to skip American Graffiti because she could watch it next week. But clearly Larry, whom she had never seen on the beach before, was much older than she was. She couldn’t imagine what had brought him and his guitar here at the end of the summer. Judging by his clothes and the money he collected, her guess was that he didn’t have a regular job or a home. But she couldn’t shake his face or his voice from her mind. He lived, in a way she had only dreamed of: freely, on his own terms.
As much as Regina wanted to drop everything she had worked for—money for driving lessons, Jeffrey Michael and Sissy, time away from her parents and siblings—and run away from her predictable life, the risk of totally abandoning it wasn’t something she was ready for. More practically, if she did meet up with Larry tonight there had to be a way for Regina to get back into the Rosenthal’s house if she was out later than normal. This was a problem she had yet to solve.
“Reggie, let’s sing the song again!” Jeffrey Michael wanted to sing “On a Carousel” for the fiftieth time since conquering the painted metal beast.
Jacqueline rolled her eyes and went back to picking off her nail polish.
Jeffrey Michael sang while Regina continued the debate in her head.
How cool would it be to run off with a random guy from the beach?
How much trouble will I be in when I come back?
Maybe I don’t care. Maybe I want to walk on the wild side for once.
But what would I do? Learn to play the guitar and sing songs for a living?
Isn’t that better than what I do now?
Regina had no response to her last question.
Regina turned right from Rolling Road and the Rosenthal house and followed her normal route towards the Beachwood Theater on Rehoboth Avenue. She quietly sang the street name song she’d made up for Jeffrey Michael: “Ride the Surf to Grenoble, Virginia waits for you! Olive waves while you walk, Maryland has the zoo…”
Once she hit the intersection where Surf Avenue meets Lake Avenue, Regina took to the sand. She stopped singing and quickened her pace to match her heartbeat. Soon Regina could hear Larry’s voice even though she was a street away from him.
Larry smiled when Regina sat in front of him. “Didn’t think you’d be back.”
“Sure you did. That’s why you’re still here.”
“Maybe I hoped you would. I take it those aren’t your kids you were carrying around, Miss…?”
“Regina. No, just watching them this summer. I take it you don’t have kids since you catch change in a guitar case for a living.”
Larry laughed. “You got me! I wander around, playing music I like, just getting by. Don’t need more than that.”
Regina listened awhile as Larry strummed his guitar. Then she asked, “How long have you been ‘wandering’?”
“I dunno, maybe three or four years. I stopped counting when I stopped caring.” Larry played a few more chords, then stopped. “The sun’s down, the wind’s cool. We should drive around a bit.”
“Sure, Larry.” Regina was thrilled at her newfound boldness, and she hoped the pause that came before her answer didn’t betray her nerves.
Larry packed his guitar in its case. He stood up, grabbed the case in one hand, took Regina’s hand in his other, and sang while they walked to his station wagon. “‘Till the morning comes, it’ll do you fine. ‘Till the morning comes, like a highway sign, showing you the way, leaving no doubt, of the way in or the way back out.”
The faded blue Dodge wagon was parked on Kent Street. Larry opened the lift gate and put the case and his hat next to his surfboard, then he opened the passenger’s side door for Regina. Once she sat down, he shut her door, jogged over to the driver’s side, and jumped in. Regina stared out the window as he started the wagon. He made a left onto 5th Street, a right onto Rehoboth Avenue, and turned onto the highway, heading south.
Larry hummed for a little while, then asked, “What do you do when you’re not babysitting?”
Regina continued to look out the window. She blurted out the first lie that came into her head. “I’m starting classes at the University of Delaware in a couple weeks.”
“Really?” Larry didn’t sound convinced.
“Yup. Excited to start!”
Larry didn’t reply. He was so quiet that Regina was afraid he’d turn around and take her back to the boardwalk.
“Is everything okay, Larry?”
“I don’t think much of college. Didn’t keep me from getting drafted. Didn’t help me when I got back. Might be fine for a girl like you, but I’ve had to make my way without it.”
Regina had nothing to say to this. The men in her family had avoided Vietnam by being either too old or too young. What she knew about the war came from reports on the news or an announcement one time in her high school about a senior who had died in combat. Not knowing what else to do, Regina took Larry’s free hand in her own.
Larry turned towards Regina and smiled, then started to sing again. “Iset out running but I take my time. A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine. If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.”
Regina would have driven around with Larry all night, but she knew she had to sneak back into the large beach house. Just before midnight, Larry let Regina hop out on Surf Avenue so she could walk to the Rosenthal residence from the direction of the movie theater.
“Regina, before you go.” Larry dug into his dashboard and pulled out a cassette tape. He leaned over the seat and handed it to her. “Something to take when you go home.”
Regina saw “Grateful Dead 5-16-70” scrawled in pen on the label. “Thank you, Larry. I’ll never forget tonight.” She smiled, closed the wagon door, and waved as he drove off.
Regina hid the tape in her crocheted shoulder bag and hurried towards Rolling Road. As she approached, she saw that the house lights were out. She crept quietly to the back door and tried the knob. It didn’t turn.
Regina held her breath. She counted three windows to the right, walked to the appropriate sill, and tapped the slightly ajar pane.
“Sissy. Sissy. Can you hear me? It’s Reggie.”
Seconds as long as hours ticked by. Then the window cracked opened wider.
“I know where you went,” Jacqueline said. “I should get Mom. Or Dad.”
“And I should tell them you wandered off when you were told to stay put.”
“You wouldn’t! You’d get in trouble, too!”
“Not as much as you would.”
It was quiet. Then Jacqueline said, “Okay, I won’t tell.”
“Just move over and I’ll squeeze through.”
Jacqueline stepped back. Regina hoisted herself up and scrambled inside.
“Thanks, Sissy.”
Regina dusted the sill’s sand and dirt off her clothes and walked in the dark towards the bedroom door. Before she reached it, Jacqueline asked, “Did he sing to you?”
“Yeah, he did.”
“Did you know any of the songs?”
“Not even one.”
“Reggie, will he be under the boardwalk again tomorrow?”
Regina paused. “I don’t think so. Go back to bed, honey.”
She waited until Jacqueline tucked herself in, then Regina walked out of the bedroom and shut the door. She tiptoed across the hall and closeted herself in her bedroom, pulling the tape out of her bag to prove that she hadn’t been dreaming.
Whether because Larry’s voice was in her head or because she imagined she could still feel the breeze that came through the wagon’s window as they drove around just south of Rehoboth, Regina was more excited than she’d been for most of the summer. She forgot all about the Rosenthals and the last two weeks she’d spend at the beach house. Instead, she focused on how she would take driving lessons and soon be free—free to go wherever she wanted. Once she got her license, she would have to read maps and memorize roads that led outside of Wilmington, perhaps outside of Delaware. She’d have to find out where the Grateful Dead would be playing, maybe drive herself to a concert on her next big adventure.
Paula Persoleo is a 2011 graduate of Stony Brook’s MFA program in Southampton, NY. She was born in Wilmington and raised in Hockessin. Currently, she is an adjunct at the University of Delaware and lives in Delaware with her husband. Her most recent work can be found in Gordon Square Review.
Carpatho Celt: Prayerful Dream by Dae Rebeck Sanchez
Abby Morales, age nine, grew up just south of Mecca, California on the northern shores of the doomed Salton Sea. The shoreline was thirty-four miles of fish hooks, broken bottles, and car parts. If you believed everything people said, you’d think it was a truck-stop toilet.
Her abuelita forbade her from going. So she snuck out, hopped on her bike, and rode past Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the orchards of Grapefruit Boulevard, until she hit the outskirts of the Salton Sea. She tossed her bike on the ground–the front wheel still spinning.
She jumped a rusty fence and walked past abandoned RVs covered in graffiti. Murals of dead cartoons splayed out their bones and guts across decaying wooden siding. Did their insides really look like that? One time, Abby found a real skull with sharp teeth. It still had fur on it so she threw it onto an ant hill. The next day it was shiny and white like porcelain.
Abby picked up a rock and went looking for a window. No one could tell you what you could or couldn’t do out here. You were free to break your arm or throw rocks at windows. Abby broke several. The sound of shattering glass was liberating. Salton Sea wasn’t as bad as everyone said it was.
It wasn’t actually a sea. In 1905, engineers diverted water from the Colorado River leading to a catastrophic accident. They called it the “Great Diversion” like they did it on purpose. It took a year and a half to stop the flooding of the salt-rich sink. They started calling it the Salton Sea. The lake was fifty percent saltier than the ocean. It wasn’t a watering hole, but that didn’t stop Pelicans and Black-necked Stilts from descending on the beach in search of fish. Then came the tourists. They flocked to the accidental sea like it was a pop-up resort until it started to stink, and the fish began to die. They left in droves as quickly as they had come.
The abandoned boomtown wasted away in the desert sun, but the saltwater rift lake had no outlet, and continued to concentrate. The water levels were sustained by six and a half centimeters of rain a year and agricultural runoff that deposited heavy minerals, which sank into the mud, but were harmless as long as they stayed there. Then the California droughts hit. Every time the shoreline moved, it exposed more seabed that dried up and turned to dust. All it took was a strong gust of wind to kick it up into the air. Every summer the lake got a little smaller. A little saltier. A little more toxic.
Abby pulled a mason jar from her book bag, kicked off her sandals, and waded out into the water. Her eyes burned red from the chemical sting of sulfur and rotten eggs. In the summers the air stunk like a mass graveyard of dead fish, and after a die-off the shore was more fish bones and scales than sand, but there was a kind of beauty in the ruins. Dead oak trees with empty bird nests lined the shore–their white trunks and branches sprawled towards the sky like bleached coral.
She submerged her arm up to the elbow in the cobalt waves, and scooped up jarfuls of saltwater until she was certain she had collected the sea monkeys that needed rescuing. She threw the jar into her book bag and hopped onto her bike. A film of brine shrimp hatchlings stuck to her legs. Their tiny bodies squirmed around until the summer sun baked them into a crust like an extra layer of dead skin.
The next day, her little sea monkeys had turned a putrid black. Abby shook the jar, but her sea monkeys did not wake up. They weren’t swimming, or eating, or doing anything. There was a white fuzzy ball of growth at the bottom of the jar that hadn’t been there before.
She asked her abuelita if her sea monkeys had gone to heaven, and her abuelita said what she always said as she poured the contents of Abby’s mason jar down the toilet. “Dios mío, would you really have me wait in line behind all the pececitas you’ve sent before your pobre abuela?” With a wrinkled finger decorated in silver rings, she scooped out the last of the dead slop stuck to the inside of the mason jar and flicked it into the toilet bowl. “For my sake, I hope they are all going to hell.” She flushed the toilet, and yelled at Abby for making one of her mason jars smell like dead fish.
Abby ran to her bike, but when she cranked the pedals her front tire dug into the ground. She fell sideways and skinned her knee. Abby clenched her teeth, but didn’t cry. The last thing she needed was more trouble from her abuelita. She limped to the garage and scavenged through metal drawers until she found a pair of pliers. After one sharp tug, the nail dislodged from her tire. The rubber sealed back up, but her tire went flabby when she put weight on it. Abby snuck into the kitchen, hoping she wouldn’t get yelled at again for getting blood everywhere, and stole a piece of ice from the freezer. With nowhere to run, or a way to get there, Abby sat barefoot on her back porch steps and felt sorry for herself. The ice numbed her throbbing knee. She winced as she picked hard grains of sand from her wound. The ice slipped out of her fingers, and she watched it melt on the hot concrete within seconds.
At that moment, Abby decided she hated California. If she could, she would get as far away from this backyard as possible, somewhere where the sun didn’t beat the life out of you, and she’d never look back.
After graduate school, she applied for a job. They gave her a supplies checklist. It said to bring long underwear. Abby crammed several pairs of polar fleece and all of her excuses into a one-by-one meter box. She boarded a C-130 Hercules, four-engine turboprop military transport, along with other scientists, medical professionals and tradesmen from all over the world. Five hours later, they landed on an airstrip built from compacted snow. McMurdo Station, located on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, was a sprawling compound. The station served as the primary logistics hub for the U.S. Antarctic program.
Her contract was originally for one year, but she kept getting lucky, and her contract kept getting renewed. So far, she’d spent four summers and three winters drilling for ice cores in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. She had traded her California desert of dead fish and animal skulls for the Dry Valleys with their million year old glaciers and mummified seal carcasses. The irony wasn’t lost on her.
It was spring in the southern hemisphere, and her most recent expedition out in the field had hit a snag. Abby kneeled in front of an eight meter tall tripod. Her face and hands were numb. She mashed the giant red button on the control box with her whole palm. The winch squealed to a stop. Suspended from the tripod, a long metal tube dangled above the ice core annulus her team had been struggling to drill for the past hour. They were racing against time. The glacier they were drilling into had been buried for eight million years. The ice was like a time capsule waiting to be cracked open, but their mission was in danger of melting away.
Abby pulled the tube toward her and inspected the head of the thermal drill. It was shot. It had to be. She took off her glove and pressed the back of her hand against the rim of the tube. It should have burned her, but it was ice cold.
She kicked herself for not bringing a mechanical drill head. Mechanical drills used metal teeth. Her team usually didn’t bring one unless temperatures were below freezing. An annulus cut with a mechanical wasn’t at risk of refreezing like one made with a thermal drill. Mechanicals had more moving parts and were less reliable. They hadn’t brought one for the past two years. They didn’t need to, especially not in December. Now, her team was stuck out here wasting time and out of options.
Abby was ready to scream, when a continuous-track Snow Dragon pulled up to her dig site. The Chinese had built another dome near the south side of the Dry Valleys. It was Abby’s dumb luck that they had been passing by. The Snow Dragon’s door cracked open, and Xian called out in English, “Trouble?”
Abby shouted, “Thermal head died!”
“Okay.” Xian jumped out and rummaged around in the trailer his Snow Dragon had in tow. He walked over to Abby carrying a one-meter hand auger. “This one. We don’t use anymore.”
It was better than nothing.
“You’re a lifesaver.” Abby said.
These moments of international cooperation in the name of science were unique to Antarctica. The environment benefited from a shared goal and a distinct absence of world politics or wars.
Xian made some small talk. It was an opportunity to practice his English. Abby told him she’d got a lot of good reading in over the winter, but conversations between research teams always devolved into the same subject. How was your funding? She teased him for being able to give away equipment. Xian surprised her when he told her that his team was hoping for three more years of funding. Abby didn’t want him to know that her contract for next year hadn’t been renewed yet.
After an awkward silence, Xian jumped back into his Snow Dragon and disappeared over the horizon.
Abby looked at the hand auger. It was going to be a long day.
Dilworth Reflection Rob Lybeck
Later that night, she lay in her tent and listened to the glacier groan like a giant whale. She thought she could even feel her cot rise up and down like it was breathing. When you weren’t standing still, it was easy to forget you were floating on a slab of ice.
The next morning, her team packed their ice cores into a crate and waited for a helicopter to pick it up. Once the crate was secured to the helo’s winch, they waved goodbye to their precious cargo. They sat in a circle with their gear and waited for their ride home to McMurdo Station.
A few hours later, Abby was looking out of the helicopter’s window at the research station that she had come to call home. Her fellow Antarctic coworkers were pouring out of every building. They were scrambling to the dining hall at a pace that was criminal. Shipments of “freshies” were rare, and fruit was considered its own form of currency. This foot traffic looked like some kind of black market run on the banks–code for strawberries.
When they landed, Abby instinctively broke into a sprint.
The galley was packed. She still remembered the smell of crab legs and duck. Basically anything decadent and braised or browned, minus anything fresh like limes or avocados. Avocados. She would kidnap and sell babies for an avocado. But not a single tray or fork had left their stations. Someone had set up a small LCD screen hooked up to a cable box in the middle of the hall. The volume was maxed, and the tiny speakers didn’t quite fill the eerie silence of the galley. Abby sidled her way to the front of the crowd, and did her best to keep up with the tail end of the New Zealand news broadcast. It was politics; something about a trade deal and some kind of cold war arms buildup. She heard the word “pipeline” mentioned several times along with the name of a company: Palmer-Bak.
The crowd groaned collectively and slowly began to disperse. A lot of people lingered as if they weren’t sure what they should do with themselves next.
Someone said, “Relax, it don’t mean nothing.”
“Bullshit,” a man replied. “They’re kicking us out.”
Abby’s stomach turned. She felt sick.
The day after the news broadcast, Abby and her Antarctic coworkers were informed that their contracts were canceled and all government funding had ceased indefinitely. They were instructed that all research was to stop immediately. And that was that. Decades of international cooperation in the pursuit of science circled down the drain. Most of the contractors were phased out over the course of the next six weeks. Not all the contractors left. Some of the tradesmen got hired on by Palmer-Bak. It made for some awkward goodbyes. Abby was there long enough to watch the Palmer-Bak snow plows and giant sections of pipe start to roll in from the port straight off of Palmer-Bak freighters. It was a warm austral summer, which gave Palmer-Bak twenty-four hours of light to work around the clock. Three weeks into December, Abby saw the foundation of the oil rig starting to go up. The ice in Antarctica had remained untouched for millions of years, but it had been melting for decades. The pipeline had been inevitable.
On Christmas Eve, Abby and her research team printed out their unfinished research on the nicest stock they could get their hands on. They made camp with a propane stove and several bottles of champagne.
She wondered if, given a few years, McMurdo Station would look like the rusted-out RV park from her childhood. Abandoned Sno-Cats, collapsed warehouses, and deserted airfields. Had the scientists flocked here like the tourists to the Salton Sea? To something that was never meant to last? She hated the thought.
Nine-year-old Abby didn’t sit on her back porch steps for very long. She snuck back into the kitchen to steal another piece of ice, but she didn’t get that far. Abby took a mason jar from the cabinet, filled it with water from the tap, and threw it into her book bag. She didn’t even remember running all the way to the shores of the Salton Sea. Out of breath, Abby twisted off the top of the mason jar and dumped the fresh water into the lake. She put her hands on her knees so she didn’t collapse and stared at her red-eyed reflection in the water.
Adult Abby was too old to do what she really wanted to do. She wanted to throw rocks at the Galley windows and spray graffiti of dead cartoon seal carcasses on the Sno-Cats. Maybe skin her knee as her coworkers tried to stop her. Instead, Abby held her research over the blue flames of the propane stove. She watched three and a half years of unfinished work crumple and burn into glowing pixies of light that flew up into the air. Bright orange ashes danced across a golden sky with a sun that would never set.
She didn’t expect what happened next. From somewhere deep down, a feeling she had forgotten came welling back up to the surface.
For a brief moment, she missed California.
Derrick Calkins enjoys writing about the sea, and is currently working on a short story collection. His debut novel will follow. Growing up, his creative writing assignments were always turned in late because he would have rather gotten docked a letter a grade than not turn in a mini-novella with a better story. This is Derrick’s first publication.
Not long before Olive called a meeting of the Insult Club for the first time on the shaded, snail-calloused back steps of PS 64, she discovered a small lump, a scaling horn-like barnacle, growing on the severe wing of her shoulder. Soon, a second crustaceous bud sprouted on her opposing limb, pushing its way through the sharpened ledge of what she quickly learned (scanning WebMD for her sudden, inexplicable symptoms) was the part of her shoulder called her “acromion.”
Some unexpected “acrimony” as her new wingman?
Sunflower by Gloria Whitney
Right on, she thought. Olive wasn’t afraid.
Since the first day of 5th grade, she’d felt oppressed by a juddery, slow-churned irritation that vibrated out from her knees and surged up her coxis, where the tremor violated out through her spine and into her back as a reckless, crippling knot. Of late, she found it awfully hard to sit still in the warped homeroom chairs listening to Miss Blatter’s lessons about gout-faced men and their centuried accomplishments. She appreciated the men’s importance: their jelly lips and snorkeled groins were once the anatomy for change in science and culture. But where were the girls, their mothers, in the stories of men? What did they do when their dads sailed off? Or wandered away into their cavernous dens?
Stories happened in spite of daughters. In spite of moms, she realized.
Spite, it seemed, was her foremost school lesson.
Suddenly, Olive’s back felt better.
She relaxed as the chips on her shoulders formed.
******
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO GIRLS
Mary Shelley:
Mary chose a poet for partner at 17 and, still a teen, wrote Frankenstein two years later. Publishers assumed her husband wrote the ground-breaking novel, because, like so many, they failed to understand girls know monsters best, especially monsters who at first don’t look like monsters at all. Frankenstein—a novel about a man out of control, and the monster who put him in his place—was finally published under her own name. 13 years later.
Claudette Colvin:
16 year old Claudette defied the nation and the state by keeping her seat on the bus, and initiating the landmark civil rights case: Browder vs Gale. Described as “emotional,” “mouthy,” and “feisty”—who wouldn’t be? she was pissed off!—she was passed over so that Rosa Parks could play her part 9 months later. But it was Claudette’s case in court that finally ended bus segregation.
Atalanta:
Abandoned by her father as a babe in the mountains because she was not a son, Atalanta was left for dead and raised by bears. Later, hunters found her, took her in, trained her. Soon, she sailed with the Argonauts and helped kill the Caledonian Boar. Girls always have to prove their mettle is twice (3 times? 4 times?) as strong as their brothers. Even our myths tell us so.
******
When Olive was six, the racist neighbor next door tripped on the sidewalk while shouting at an earbudded teen riding by on a bike. The neighbor fell hard, hit his head on the splintering concrete and was left, long after his pooled blood dried into the broken path, with a raw scar shaped like an N over his left eyebrow. Her mother called it his “scarlet letter.” Taught her about “Hawthorne,” “racism,” and “irony” in one informative rant. Then advised Olive “to just avoid the jerkwad’s yard.”
Long before comprehension lessons at school, Olive learned that people are stupid and sometimes the world shows them how much.
Olive wasn’t afraid of the growths on her shoulders the way adults feared crepuscular skin tags or unruly moles. Still awash in the early years of post-amniotic wonder, she tended the lumps like snails in her garden, wondering how they might inflict themselves on her flora next. Would the nubs rupture or leak like a soft-boiled egg? Peel back from her secret scabrous fruit? Would they sprout, become thistle or thorned? What kind of creature was she becoming? Would she soon be taloned? Take flight?
Naturally, Olive preferred nubs on the shoulders to bumps on her chest. The school nurse, her friend Georgia’s teen sister, not to mention the terrifyingly, cheerful Girl Scout leader who called even the troop’s cookie thieves “Dears,” had presented a forest of pamphlets with aggressive Tanner Scale sketches illustrating the maturing female form—the section on “breast buds” highlighted with care—before saying with reassuring dread: Soon, you’ll be a woman. Isn’t that exciting?
At the next recess meeting on the shaded school stoop, Olive pulled her shirt to the side, showed the huddled girls the prongs on her shoulders, let them palm the scabby nubs with their humid, pre-pubescent fingers.
They were a sign, she told them. Maybe an omen.
An insignia, she thought, of leadership.
She kept the last one to herself.
“My acromions are acrimonious,” she said, whittling the sharpening point of each nub, then going on to teach her friends the names on each part of the shoulder: the rounded bursa, the humeral head, the socketed glenoid and labrum, the scapula behind, the clavicle above. The girls nodded, then rubbed each part of their own shoulders in turn, wondering, as they looked out with terror at the jungling antics on the woodchipped playground plot if they were due their own armor soon.
Olive studied the schoolyard, the raging monkey bar play.
“Jackal,” she said, frowning at a flank-steak of a boy kicking woodchips at a scrum of K-kids barnacle-stalked on a bench.
“Boars,” Molly corrected. She was looking at the teachers ignoring the brawl behind them.
“Parasites.”
Imogen growled the word, a stone skipping air, as she carved the pitted step with a stick.
Olive nodded approval. Her shoulders were on fire.
“Yes.”
From that day forward, the Insult Club sat together on the stoop at recess, a chorus of wide-eyed girls of varied backgrounds hunched on the shaded, ant-smeared steps. The snails crawled up their arms as they named what they saw. No one asked them to join the play in the sunlight.
No one noticed the girls at all.
******
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO GIRLS
Margaret Knight:
At age 12, after watching another child get impaled at a mill, Margaret designed a safer loom, which the mill owners put into use at once. She was never given credit. But she went on to design many other inventions: most notably, the flat-bottomed paper bag. You know the one. Plastic or paper? Stacks of them. Still. At your grocer.
Malala Yousafzai:
In 2012 a Pakistani teen had to remind the world that girls are worth more than your ass. She fought for the education of girls. Then she was shot in the head for her trouble. She survived. And after recovering, continued her efforts. Malala is the youngest ever Nobel Prize laureate for her courage and her ongoing advocacy for the rights of children.
Nancy Drew:
16 year old fictional sleuth who used her brains and charisma to solve local cases. Why can we believe stories about smart girls. But not real ones?
*******
Olive couldn’t recall later, during her deposition, who named the group the Insult Club. Whether the girls came up with the name themselves. Or if a passing kid carelessly lobbed the double slur their way—an insult about insulting that neither undermined nor amplified offense—that the girls adopted at once, the way pilot fish adopt a shark. They didn’t think of their work as insulting though. They’d been taught by their mothers to be “tactful.” By their fathers, to be “polite.” By their teachers to be “correct.”
They’d also been taught not to lie.
The Insult Club had only one expansive rule: Be precise. Give what you see the tag it has earned. The name he/she/it deserves.
When one of the girls hit a name on the head, Olive first awarded the winner an M&M from her pocket, then bent to twist the sweet-eater’s arm—just once, hard—giving her a quick reddening burn that heated the skin to remind them all, she said, that telling the truth was a pleasure that almost always also gives pain.
It was something her father told her, she said, before he left when she was four. She hadn’t seen him since.
“What do you call him now?” Molly asked.
Olive shrugged.
“You have to know a thing,” Olive reminded her, “before you can name it.”
*******
Favorite insults from Olive’s pocket journal (later called “Exhibit A”).
Skinflint
7th grader, Max Meyerson.
Weapon: pencil. Specialty: poking girls’ bums in the cafeteria crush.
After being poked in the hallway, Imogen slammed a locker shut on Max’s left hand. The resulting scar on M.’s index finger looked like an arrow pointing back at his own black heart.
Mashup
The playground gazebo where the 8th graders liked to sit out of sight tucking hands into pockets not their own. The Insult Club vowed never to go there. And they never did.
Cervitude:
The adult practice of claiming as true what is untrue. Then demanding others agree.
******
The Insult Club wasn’t a club in any real sense of the world. Outcasts, the girls were driven to the back step at recess, the way pebbles are pushed to the shallows by the currenting force of a stream. They were too slow, too fast, too dreamy, too generous. The Insult Club girls were simply too much, couldn’t keep their ideas in check, or keep up with the untethered come-ons and come-backs that volleyed the field. They found their way to the shade to hide or cool off. Cautious, they stayed in the shadows to survey the terrain more clearly.
When Ava found her way, sweaty and dew-eyed, to the step one afternoon, Olive placed a snail on her arm. They watched together as it started sucking its way towards her elbow.
“Did you ever tell Ree to just bug off?” she said.
Ava looked at her blankly.
“Ree won’t wear glasses—she can’t see—it’s why she stares like that. Acts mean.”
Ava wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. It was oddly soothing to watch the snail move with steady fearlessness up her arm.
Olive shrugged. “Next time she calls you fat, tell her not to worry: she’ll look great in glasses.”
“She’ll punch me.” Ava peeled back the flesh on one finger.
Imogen snorted. “That would suck. But then she’d get in trouble.”
As the girls around her began to laugh, Ava couldn’t stop herself from letting a swampy hiccup of air escape. It was fetid, held in for too long. Not quite a laugh. But close.
Olive smiled. Rubbed her tingling shoulders.
Without looking, she could feel each prong growing.
*******
Menhirs of Alentejo: New Beginnings
Naturally, Olive’s transformation didn’t take place over night. In spring, flowers often seem to bloom with sudden fierceness. But if you’re patient, look closely, the buds first burp out gently, furry pimples testing the air, before swelling resolutely until their skins peel back to reveal caped redolent mouths breathing open, exposing tongues, tonsils, suckling throats. The fiery, perfumed breath.
As Olive walked down the halls of PS 64, she could feel herself blooming. Her whole body trembled, not in fear. Or anticipation. She was electrified, the hairs on her arms standing on end. When she passed gaggles of students huddled at lockers, they’d tentatively sniff the air, the way a rabbit twitches at the smell of a fox. But Olive smelled of mulch and moss, the mild putrid scent of insects that live beneath rocks. The kids stepped back, uncertain, looking around for a wet cat, or a snake in the rafters. They ignored Olive in the camouflage of her neatly pressed cotton skirt, her pink knee socks. The delicate fingers always pushing one loose tress behind her ear.
They didn’t know that under her shirt, her skin had grown goosed and cobbled. And that under her skin, her spine was plating. Her feet were heavy, the toenails sharp. The heat radiating through her pores wasn’t a fever, but their entire world about to implode.
What set Olive off?
What sets off a flower? Was it the girls in the hall laughing into their scalloped paws? The boys who lurked, eavesdropped? The teachers who smiled in class and smoked in the break room? Her mother who loved her, but could not change the world?
It was purely coincidental that her final change came during a test, a math test she was prepared to take of course—Olive was a good student—and which, she was certain, was going well. Until the final question.
How many steps?
She paused, looked around. The other kids didn’t seem to be miffed by the question. She reread the sheet, looked for the information she must have missed. Flipped the test over. Scanned, reread, reconsidered. Nothing.
Rising, she walked quietly up to Miss Blatter at the front of the room.
“This question,” she whispered, “is impossible,” she said.
Miss Blatter smiled, patted her hand.
“You’ll figure it out,” she assured Olive. She gestured toward Olive’s desk. “Now go finish.”
Olive half-turned to go, then paused. Tried again.
“Really,” she said. “I’ve looked it over.”
This time Miss Blatter frowned. “Olive,” she said quietly. “Go sit down and finish. Everything you need is there.”
So Olive sat down and stared at the test.
How many steps?
Beyond the window, she could see the stoop where the Insult Club gathered. Five steps, she decided. Unless she counted the foot of the staircase, the floor as it were. Which made six. But what of the top step, that final plateau before you reentered the school? Was that a step? Or a launch pad? Was a step only the horizontal plank on which a foot was placed? Or was it the entire architecture of the stairway’s construction? The vertical riser that supported the tread, which in turn supported another riser and the next tread above? If one considered that all “steps” supported “each step” could a “single” step ever exist?
Olive sat back and closed her eyes. Around her, she could hear the scratching of pencils working out problems, chairs squeaking as children squirmed in place. Labored breaths. Teeth grinding lead pencils. She could hear hearts beating. Sweat rising, condensing, between every moist thigh. The coppered smelt of fear. Lactic boredom. The enzymatic satisfaction of an answer solved before the next problem’s sinews were broached.
How many steps?
How many answers?
When had she begun to (fail to) answer the question, she wondered? The evening she studied? The day she’d listened to the lesson in class? Her first day of fifth grade? Her first day—ever—of school? Were answers always historic, a runway off which, one day, a girl might take flight? Or did they arrive in the future, always after they were needed?
Olive wrote down an answer. Knowing it was wrong. Yet because wrong, right.
Her shoulders tingled.
And the world around her was fire.
******
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO GIRLS
Sybil Ludington:
At the age of 16, she rode faster and twice as far as Paul Revere to warn her neighbors that the British were coming. Did you learn about her in school?
Mo’ne Davis:
At 13, she was the first girl to pitch a shut out in Little League Baseball World Series history. Watch out: she throws like a girl.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn:
A labor leader, feminist, and activist, the “East Side Joan of Arc” gave her first speech at the age of 16 and began a career as an agitator for women’s and worker’s rights. She never stopped.
Ruby Bridges
Just 6 years old, she didn’t run, didn’t cry, when she was led through a roiling mass of bigots into William Frantz Elementary.
******
In the initial immolation, the heat of Olive’s new body radiated out and melted every test, all the desks beneath them, the linoleum tile (even the asbestos tile the new flooring concealed), the laminated artwork collaged on the walls, all the cubbies and lockers and abandoned, half-eaten snacks. Every transcript. Every log. Every rule book.
The blast was swift, yet like Olive, selective. Why wouldn’t it be? She melted plastic, metal, and cloth. But skin and bone? The children and teachers? Naked, missing some hair, they survived. Every one of them. Though, Olive wasn’t above spite: Miss Blatter and Max Meyerson turned up more charred than the rest. The teacher’s tight bun was transformed into ash. And Max Meyerson? His bum, scorched a blistering red, was suspiciously (auspiciously?) marked by arrow shaped streaks that pointed right at his own puckered ass. He couldn’t sit down for a week.
The children and teachers sprawled on the floors where they’d once been sitting, in classrooms that no longer existed. When the temperature died back, they opened their eyes, blinked at each other in the raining light, while Olive, above them, tested her new wings in the air, pulsing hot gusts with each stroke on their sooty, exposed backs.
Like every monster who realizes she’s not a monster at all, but an evolved artifact of the human condition, as Olive flew above them, she was laughing.
********
Soon, Olive saw the concrete stoop had survived and flew over to find her friends gathered and waiting for her. They no longer sat in the shade. Because the school had been razed, the sunlight bled over their shoulders, and the snails had taken refuge where the steps caved in a new protective lair.
How many steps when steps lead nowhere?
Imogen reached over and touched Olive’s shoulder where her new wing had sprouted a webbed antler surging from its pinnacle.
“Finally,” she said, feeling its warmth radiate from the wing into her hand.
Ava’s legs were crossed. One arm was wrapped over her chest, the other shielding her eyes as she gazed out at the flattened grid of the school, at the drive leading up to a sidewalk that now only framed rubble. But there was a smile hidden behind her ash-covered face.
“Now what?” she asked.
Olive shrugged.
The once subtle preteen movement was cataclysmic: her entire wingspan convulsed.
Imogen rubbed ash from her side, just under her waist. “Look,” she said.
Olive smiled and touched the nub now growing from her friend’s hip.
******
Of course the town was in uproar. “Readiness and Response Plan #1” was invoked. The School Board Crisis Management Team huddled around hastily assembled cafeteria tables watching Power Point presentations about “insurance mandates,” “city infrastructure grids,” and the influence of the “changing environment on adolescent female biology.” Distraught parents herded truculent children indoors. On the TV, the public panicked and growsed. Fundamentalists preached. Environmentalists lectured. Zoologists gave interviews. The news bloomed and germinated its rhizomatic cycle.
The situation could have been worse. But no kids, or teachers, had perished. Not even one homeroom pet. As the school’s legal team explained to the school board, the PTA, and the police, Olive couldn’t be held responsible: there was no case law, or by-laws, for girls becoming dragons. And while her role in the school’s destruction was “leading” even “coincidental,” her transformation at the end of the day, was simply circumstantial: all the security cameras and smart phones that might have proven otherwise had melted in the blast.
Fortunately, like most cities, there were too many shuttered schools on the tax roll. Soon, one was selected. A Blight Team was sent in to prepare the way and, three weeks later, the mayor was photographed cutting tape at the (Re)Opening Ceremony of PS 42 while students walked through its newly painted doors behind him. In no time at all, the public grew bored of cataloging “Olive sightings” when she flew overhead. The mayor, meanwhile, discovered that his city was lined up for what the local news called “an insurance settlement of exceptional size,” and, in result, the tax roll debt was reduced, rearranged, forgiven. Not only was the city’s credit rating expected to surge in the next quarter, the comptroller noted, but according to both local and nationals newspapers, the mayor had also handled the PS64 Blast with such “steadfast reassurance” that they’d moved onto to the next question: Would he soon run for Congress?
While Olive tested thermal gusts above, it was the question being asked below.
Olive, of course, was still in the thick of it. In the absence of video evidence, there were depositions about her anatomy, her state of mind, her friends, the Insult Club in particular. Family genetics.
Lawyers were called. Biologists consulted. Documents notarized, distributed, filed. Meanwhile, a daily witnessing took place at her doorstep. Mormons baptized her in absentia. Catholics performed an exorcism from the curb. The Universalists sent an invitation to tea.
Olive took it all in stride; after all, she could fly away—above, out—whenever she wanted. She wasn’t trapped. For the first time, she was stratospheric. Free. They could all go to hell. She was already in the wind.
Sure, news outlets speculated that the city would soon be overrun with winged girls melting local Elks lodges and football fields, Weight Watchers franchises and Botox dens. Or that—singular in her transformation—Olive would sign a 7-figure book deal, and launch a life of celebrity in either New York or L.A. Had Olive been a different sort of girl, she might have considered such options. (Her mother, reading the “news,” reflected with curtained enthusiasm that the “7-figure book deal sounded nice.”)
As for Olive? It wasn’t that she lacked ambition. Or that she wasn’t generally pissed off at stupid tests, bullies, lunchbox size packets of 100-calorie foods, thongs, “lady” anything, or the term “tomboy.”
But for Olive, her wings weren’t new or different. They were just part of the girl she always knew she was. Her mother made her dinner and folded her (altered) clothes each night. There were still friends and cotton candy. And even if sleepovers were cancelled for the foreseeable future—and she now spent her time rejecting research proposals en masse—she was still a girl. Would always be.
Olive could have done anything.
But she chose to return to the halls of PS 42 with her friends for the first day of 6th grade.
PS 42 had to take her. It was a public school after all. And maybe, she admitted quietly to herself, she wanted to make them abide her presence now, much as she’d often endured theirs. It’s important to look past your own windowed reflection once in a while, and see who, beyond the glass, is staring back.
At the new school, the Insult Club continued to meet. At recess, they now sat out in the open—Olive’s new size required more space—and spreading her wings around her friends, she shielded them from the glare of the sun and the other kids’ curious eyes.
“Clankermass,” Imogen warned.
Frankie J. was sidling up to spy on them, but the rattling key chain hooked into his belt loop always gave him away.
“Skern him,” Ava whispered.
Olive turned her head and withered him with a look of exhausted distaste.
Reprimanded, he veered off at once toward the trees.
Olive smiled as the girls leaned against her.
The pilot light of her belly now kept them all warm.
******
List of Favorite Insults (continued).
Kiddens:
The Kindergartners who, in the Library or Cafeteria, accidentally glued their bums to chairs or snacked on paper and paste while their teacher’s backs were turned.
Dilettauntes:
Other kids who tried to insult the Insult Club. But sucked at it.
*****
Then, one day, unexpectedly, Olive’s dad came back.
She didn’t see him until she landed in the back yard, shaking small clouds of smog from her wings, before folding them delicately behind her. She walked to the house, lost in thought about her new perspective—how, from above, her neighborhood at first looked like an elegant puzzle, its form and content shifting from artistic abstraction, to unkempt, distraught rooftops, to (as she descended fast, testing her speed) a charismatically landscaped nostalgia when her feet took on earth again and she remembered the landlocked girl she’d once been—and there he was, rising from a chair in the shadows on the porch.
“Daddy?” she said. She’d seen his image in photographs for so long that his animated face, conflicted by time, was alarming.
In his hand, he held a cupcake. It had wilted in the heat while he waited, the once mountainous cap of icing now sliding a slow tsunami toward the edge.
“I had to see you,” he said. In his hand, he held a newspaper, a picture of Olive in flight on the front page.
In the driveway, her mother pulled up in her car and stepped out. She stood by the driver’s side door, stunned, looking at the two of them on the porch.
“You’ve gotten so big,” he said. He was sizing her up, not just her height, she realized, but her wingspan as well. She wasn’t the girl he remembered.
“How does it feel?” he said.
There were so many things he could mean.
“Your wings,” he clarified. “How do they feel?”
She looked at him looking at her body.
“May I touch them?” he asked.
She didn’t answer and he circled around, until he stood behind her. She could feel the inept heat of him, his heart rattling against its plasticized cage. She didn’t stop him from studying the sturdy webbing of skin, so much like the leather that still tipped her elbows, which had now grown between the enhanced architecture of her shoulder blades. When he reached out his hand, however, the wings shuddered involuntarily, collapsed in sudden recoil against her spine. He blinked. Stuffed the hand in his pocket.
Behind her, the gate creaked open, then shut. There was the rustle of gravel and leaves. Her mother’s feet on their clovered plot of lawn.
“Mom says I have her eyes,” Olive said as he shuffled his feet.
She rustled her wings at him. “Did I get these from you?”
He refocused on her. Took his time answering.
“In my family,” he said, “there are stories of girls who left suddenly. For no reason.” He blinked. “My grandmother would say ‘they just flew off.’ She’d say it the way you might say ‘took off.’ ‘Those girls just flew off.” His voice trailed. “I didn’t understand.”
Her mother was at her side now.
“Dad says I get my wings from him,” Olive said.
Her mother snorted. “He would.”
Olive could feel her mother folding anger like a fan inside her heart, trying to quell the fury it contained: wings of a different order just under the surface. One day, they might sprout too, Olive thought.
She hadn’t seen it until now. How much she took after her mother.
“I imagine many women in his family would like to take off,” she said.
Her mother looked at her. “Those wings are yours. You earned them.”
She stroked Olive’s shoulder.
“Remember.”
*****
The next day, PS 42’s new Development Officer invited Olive into his office on her way to recess: he’d love it, he said as she stepped through the door, if Olive would give a speech at Commencement about the significance of the school’s new logo. He stood carefully back from her, a good three steps maintained with care, as he explained he’d designed the logo himself.
“Take credit where credit is due,” he said, showing it to her. The image was of a child with wings, looking off the edge of the paper into the horizon of her burgeoning future.
Olive paused. She was supposed to be pleased, she thought. Supposed to be proud. She stepped closer to look at the sheet, noting his proportional shift away toward the wall.
It was one thing, she thought, to be baptized against her will by the Mormons camped nearby. To rebuff researchers. Even the stares of neighbors who knew her. It was another thing to be diminished. Transformed into a mascot.
There is a gesture adults forget how to synchronize in their rubbery, superseded bodies. A subtle twitch of the shoulder, a dismissive fleck and recoil from the chin up to the brow. The movement’s horizon is infinite. It asks for no response.
What the Development Officer saw was a shrug.
“You’re missing an opportunity,” he said. His voice frowned. He’d started to sweat. He smelled like a spent penny dug up from the dirt. She guessed he’d already sent the logo to the printer.
“It’s time for me to go,” she said, looking out the window at her friends waiting for her on the playground.
He turned toward the clock, the minute hand nearing the end of the period.
He thought he understood.
“I didn’t mean to keep you,” he said. Then: “We’ll talk more later.”
She smiled, and headed off down the hall. Soon, she joined her friends in the grass.
They sat quietly for some time. Like all creatures that travel in packs, the girls often simply sat together to share each other’s warmth.
Ava sighed and touched Olive’s arm.
“You’re going aren’t you?”
Nodding, Olive stroked Ava’s shoulder. Touched Imogen’s hip. And they, in turn, creviced into her body like the flowering leaves around a tender choke. Dragons are not only made of fire.
“There are others,” she assured them, stepping back. “You know it.”
Then, without fanfare, Olive flew off.
The Insult Club watched her go. For now, it was enough to know she was out there, a growing collective of girls whisking the moonlight. Beating every horizon back.
In no time at all, Olive was clear sky where a winged girl had once been, and the Insult Club turned to go inside. Frankie J. stood at the edge of the playground watching Olive launch her stratospheric flight path, his mouth slack in the soft meal of his face. If pudding could feel awe, Frankie J. was a gelled dessert held together by a set of frayed laces, his cinched nylon belt, and a cap.
Imogen walked over, touched her toes to his, let him feel the heat of her. He couldn’t stand it for long, and when he fled back to the school, he was red from the base of his collar to the backs of his ears, as much from her ovening swelter, as from the blush that had crept up the mostly unseen length of him.
Imogen knew that, sometime soon, she would consume him. She wasn’t sure precisely why. Or in what fashion. Just that she smelled a sweetness in him, like a yolk inside a translucent egg. Or the custard inside a mild, inoffensive pastry.
One day, she knew she’d eat him up.
Dragons have the gift of foresight.
All girls do.
Christina Milletti’s fiction and articles have appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as Harcourt’s Best New American Voices, The Master’s Review Anthology: Best Emerging Writers, Denver Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary, Studies in the Novel, and Fiction’s Present: Situating Narrative Innovation (among other places). Her first collection of short stories, The Religious & Other Fictions, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and she has just completed a new collection of stories, Girling Seasons, with the help of a fellowship from the UB Humanities Institute and a residency at the Marble House Project. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo where she curates the Exhibit X Fiction Series, and she is currently working on a novel about Cuba.
She kept reading about how all the paper houses had burned. But as she came down out of the clouds, she saw shiny fields, wet with a sheen of green water and the spikey hills she remembered. The villages tucked into crevices between the islands of trees and rocks and fields. There were certainly paper houses hidden along the shining river. And more were folded in the curves and lumps of the hills. Long white birds announced their presence with their silence and the squat bodies of cormorants raced down the dark rivers once she got to the city. Everything was different. The last few years replaced with concrete that somehow seemed more alive than she remembered. So the woman who told her about the fires was right. The houses had vanished. In the morning she watched as armies of pedestrians marched to work. Their faces placid with sleep. One eyebrow raised here, another foot placed there. Such precision and pizazz. Every now and then someone would break rank and get a coffee at one of the cafes, mildly folding and unfolding a paper. Picking a white cup off a table and then putting it down.
2.
She ended up on a street with noodle stalls. None of them had any faith. She knew, after all, that they had to kill Jesus for him to be a savior. Military men were at every corner. And the large blue fish in tanks displayed along the walls slept. She could see them breathing in the dusk of their containers. Men in white shirts and black pants jostled against each other, banging their brief cases on their thighs. Everything was lit with a burning core. These men had been at work forever. Toting their bags from home to trains to the office to the narrow streets where the food was displayed on plastic cards or in bowls with plastic wrap. Old women beckoned costumers in at the doors. Huge signs with beautiful letters hung from every open window. So many drunk men rubbing their bellies, dancing in knots close to each other just about to fight. No English here, one sign said. Inside the stall it was quiet. A cook cocked his head and looked away. It was cool, so cool she pulled her sweater closer. She’d left two grown boys and a husband in a country far away, governed by an idiot in a red coat. Everything was alive around her and no one was quiet.
3.
Her new boss said I’m part Cherokee and part Quebecois. I have great friends all over the world, some from my youth hanging out at Johnson Pond. I have many more friends than you do and have held important positions. I’m a denizen of this place, a wow guy, why do you think I got this job? Look at my desk, my legions of pictures of families close to me, for sure I’m close to my brother and sister, too. We get together every year in Maine. I’ve lived most of my life away, but you know Maine is certainly what I call home. An old house on the green, the view of the ocean from the porch, the sound of gulls in the morning, the children skating on the pond in winter, the smell of woodsmoke. My history goes like this: I, like you, have moved from institution to institution always here, mostly here, but bigwig positions, nothing less. Have you had a stroke, he asked, I know I may have seen that in your documents. Are you sure you haven’t had a stroke? She adjusted her smile and said, it was a mild one, a mild one. I have no visible residue. But she knew residue was not the right word. Visible signposts, perhaps, a certain look, the way her family inserted one word or two when they had a chance, the way her little dog looked at her with distrust. It all got to be too much. That country so far away, their loving hands guiding her down stairs, past beggars in the street and gangs of motorcycle thugs prowling the boulevards where they lived. They went to a place in the north one winter soon after her stroke and stayed in an inn where the sheets were very white and they left chocolate on your bed at night. So sweet. They ate in the dining room and she brought her little white dog with her. The dog slept under the table and she could see other holidaymakers snatching looks at her from their beautifully set tables. There were people singing in another room and lights twinkling in the trees outside. Her husband and sons were happy, skiing during the day, and she could sit on the little porch in the sun with her white dog and think about nothing, nothing at all. There was no struggle to find any words. She was in the first months of her therapy and it was difficult to say anything. She could hardly smile. Don’t worry darling, her husband said, we’ll get you back to normal in no time and she would shake her head. She knew there was no normal around the corner. Her therapist had her draw a clock and she knew from her face, even if she said that’s great Gigi, that’s great, that she had somehow gotten it wrong, terribly wrong. She studied flashcards and did homework for what felt like hours. She was instructed to substitute one word for another, but she’d never been much of a poet and isn’t that what they did? She used to love to tell stories and she could see the painful look on her younger son’s face when they were all silent at the dinner table, her boys back from one college or another. One job or another and it was her husband, who used to be the quiet one, who carried the conversation like a suitcase.
Menhirs of Alentejo: Standing Tall by Karen Love Cooler
4.
She had days before the program started so she went to a garden. She had admired this garden in books for years. When she was in this country years ago she was more interested in the mechanics of love than gardens. A brief affair, a few weeks of doing nothing but fucking on the floor in a narrow apartment where everything was miniature. It took her weeks to realize she wasn’t in love at all, just enamored of the idea. It was so far away, so far away from the kind of life she normally lived. And she loved the burning bite of sake and how it made her feel. How loved he made her feel, split off from the self she thought she knew, even if she didn’t know what she was capable of doing. She didn’t know that later when she had her stroke, years later, she wouldn’t know who she was at all and the sorting chambers of her brain would disintegrate so she couldn’t even talk to her little dog. Her little dog who she sometimes thought she loved above all else, her little dog with the pure white paws.
It was a garden of Waka poetry. The paths circled the pond in the middle of the garden like a magic incantation. Each viewing spot was a bell. A way to inspire memory. A key to the locked room where the words lived. Precious Seaweed Shore. Her days at the Cape with her mother and father and her brothers and sisters. The days burning to a crisp on the sand, cold as hell in the water. Those hours playing in the brook that went down to the sea, the horseshoe crabs moving so slowly along the bottom, waving their blunt spears back and forth. Her brothers stoning the rabbit to death one day when they went to visit cousins two towns away.
Ebb Tide Harbor, her life now.
It took her months before she could draw the clock on the blank piece of paper correctly. Now she watched a man measure bamboo stakes precisely and then saw them off and then hammer them with a wooden mallet into the ground along the edge of the mossy verge of the lake. He measured three times and then cut. She watched him happily. She was definitely happy, sitting on the wooden bench in the old garden. Very old, she knew, early 1700s. Two of the ponds were gone now, but the impression of the water on the surface of the earth remained.
5.
She wanted a resurrection. She knew that was blasphemous to want to so much. She wanted to be struck new with life. Instead God sent her lightening in her brain. And even if the doctors kept saying she’d be fine, she didn’t think this state was fine. She was such a talker. She could talk the ear off anyone, couldn’t she? Her sons knew that. And as she traveled more and more with her husband and they could do anything they wanted, she had so many stories to tell.
When her mother got sick it was up to them to take care of her, first in her older boy’s room and then in the facility down the road. It was a place with trees around it. The only place in miles with a grove of trees. Her mother didn’t care at that point that the two rooms looked out at trees, but she did.
It just seemed too much some times. The world was crumbling at the edges. A tyrant had taken over the country and the government was in shambles and then her mother started to say less and less. A kind of imitation of Gigi’s stroke, but much worse. She wouldn’t come back from this descent into silence.
She brought her meat sauce in a silver thermos. Morsels of chicken in foil. Beautiful sweet ripe clementines. Armfuls of farmer’s market flowers. Her mother stopped eating, her mother stopped moving, her mother stopped doing anything at all. And what was there to do? Her mother didn’t remember the soap operas she’d spent her life watching or the news at 6:30 or anything really. She was afraid she would forget who her daughter was. But she didn’t. Her sister came and stayed with her those last months. Her mother took forever to die. She’s just doing it on her own time, the kind nurse with the polished copper skin and tiny eyes told her. The books can only tell you the average time. The average time was two weeks, her mother wanted ten months and she took it.
6.
She’d had a bitter fight with him before she left. Her husband said, “I sacrificed all my waking hours to your rehabilitation and this is what you want to do now that I’ve got you back?”
“I was still myself, when you thought I wasn’t here,” she said. “I was still myself all those hours when you were away. I was with the boys in my heart, wasn’t I? I fought hard to get back to what you thought you wanted me to be.”
But it was all so dramatic, she thought. The simple thing was there were two of her now. The woman he’d loved for so many years and the one who went away. Went away in her head, all the words mismatched, unavailable for the moment. Not useful.
“You’re not the same,” he said, “not the same at all if you keep this cockamamie idea in your head and leave us again.”
“I can’t believe you said cockamamie,” she said and then they started to laugh. Everything was so ridiculous after all. There was the tyrant as president, the marches in the street, people with different kinds of hats parading in every town, marching and chanting. Flags waving on every corner. The terrifying blasts in even places you’d think would be safe. Knife attacks on subways. It was a relief to be somewhere like where she was then. Military men, and sometimes women, stationed at subways and street corners and outside of train stations to guide your way. The soft patter of rain, now that the monsoon season was warming up. She was not in the same world, but it didn’t matter. No one knew who she was before and she’d gotten the job on her own without the help of her husband or sons or even her little white dog, who she missed terribly.
She’d taken the train to a part of the city with twenty temples. Arched wooden temples with deities who might be sympathetic to her. It was kind of Zen to walk slowly around the village on her own through the vast cemeteries and narrow streets that were spared war and fire and bombing. The hydrangea were in bloom. Delicate lace bright blue like the sky. She met a girl with an owl. A pet owl, three months old. A baby, the girl told her. For a few yen, she could pet it. But it was enough to look at the owl as the bird swiveled her head back and forth. The soft whirl of spotted caramel feathers around her face. The owl’s deep black eyes shining as she looked into them and the owl didn’t flinch. The bird was perfectly calm. There was a world there that was very different from the one she’d fled. Serene, astonishing, filled with peace.
7.
She talked to a man at the faculty meeting who told her she should get a car, borrow someone’s to go to the big international store at the edge of the city. She could get chairs there, you could get anything really. It was stupid to take a train or a bus there, it didn’t make sense. After all what were cars for, if not to transport people to places where they could buy things, he laughed. He was thin and wore a white tunic. He had beads around his neck and his hair was as white as his clothes. Everything about him was impermanent, a little foggy. She could hardly hear him when he spoke. I used to teach physics, but now I teach music and yoga. Like the music of the spheres, she said, so that makes sense. He leaned in close to her, yes. The room was filled with men. There were hardly any women. She followed a man with an umbrella out of the building to an annex across the narrow street up the elevator. Are you one of the faculty she asked, or a parent and he said quickly, I’m the CFO. You’re a bigwig, then, she said. When the door opened he vanished down a corridor and shut the door.
A woman in the business office opened a brown packet filled with the first edition of her pay and fanned the money out on the desk in front of her. The solemn faces of someone famous in this country glared at her from the surface of the gray desk. There were so many shades of gray in the city.
She was making a garden on her balcony. It was just big enough for several small pots and it looked out at the canals. Someone had planted a spring garden along the paved walkway that ran along the bank. She was on an island of concrete in the concrete city. One man at the meeting told her during the last earthquake everything swayed and then was still. He likes to wear women’s clothes, another man told her.
8.
At one of the temples she visited she put coins at the foot of several minor gods who wore pink caps. They were standing guard along the fence to the temple near their leader, a much larger statue with a pink apron around his neck. There were crows the size of eagles carrying pieces of toast and little birds who flew through the towering trees faster than she could imagine. She missed her husband. He would have laughed at the pink hats. He was pretty irreverent about everything. A woman was pushing a cart filled with willow brooms and wooden buckets marked with black calligraphy. For holy water, she thought. Bouquets of fading flowers defaced the graves. Why didn’t someone take them away once they started dying? Bundles of wires crisscrossed the sky above her head as she walked into a tiny alley where they were selling juice and puffy buns with cream. She hadn’t been hungry in such a long time, but the buns were soft and warm in her mouth. It was a relief to be alone. She didn’t have to search for the words she wanted, she could let whatever came to the surface be what she wanted to say. Penguin. Pigeon. Parrot.
9.
Men with white gloves drove the cabs in the city. The seats covered with white lace. The white ghosts followed her when she went to the 100 yen store where the checkout person, a lively woman, told her there were so many foreigners in the neighborhood, or took the little bus to the hills north of where she was living. When she was watching her mother die all those months, her little white dog came with her. She waited for morsels of food her mother dropped on the rug or the crumbs from the tiny pieces of bread her mother ate. One day her dog noticed something on the ceiling. Her son thought it was angels. The angels come to lead her mother to heaven. She laughed, “Really” she said. “I didn’t think you believed in any of that stuff.”
“Really mom,” he said, laughing, “look at the way Tinker’s acting.”
She was acting strange circling her mother’s hospital bed, sniffing under the covers, whining at the ceiling. It was comforting in a way that angels were there to help her mother, when no one had been around when Gigi’d had her stroke. She was making lunch, something heated up in a pan. A strange thing to do, but there it was. Lunch was in her hand, she was walking across the kitchen, her beautiful white kitchen with jars arranged on the shelves, and the shining silver refrigerator, and then she fell. Lightning and then nothing. When she could see again she dragged herself across the kitchen floor to the hallway and then to the living room. Her phone was on a table in the immaculate room. It took her hours to reach her phone and when she got through to her husband all she could do was make a noise, a simple noise that she thought sounded like help me, but her husband said much later, months later, was more like a croak.
10.
It was hard to go a day even so far away from where most of her life had been without her mother appearing in some way before her eyes. She’d been persistently haunting her for her whole life. A woman who wanted perfection in everyone but herself. Gigi took the little bus to hills north of where her apartment was in the largest city in the world. The librarian at the university had told her about a museum with a small, perfect garden. She walked aimlessly in the direction of where she thought the museum was past women with their perfect faces, their gloved hands clutching bags from expensive stores. Each one accompanied by her mother. A woman who was an older version of themselves, but just as perfectly dressed in shades of cream, or gray or delicate floral.
On the bus, she’d met a woman who told her how to get to the museum. I’m going that way, I’ll show you, she said. Her English was impeccable. They walked quickly along the wide boulevard. “And you live in the dormitory of the university?” the woman asked.
“No,” Gigi laughed. “I live near the bay, in an apartment.”
“How nice,” she said. “But you’re very brave to spend the summer in Tokyo.”
“The heat?”
“Yes,” she said. “The heat, the humidity. It’s really quite terrible.”
“What do you do?” She asked the woman, who was wearing navy. Her short stylish hair framing her face.
“I’m a guide,” she said. And she laughed. “I’ll leave you here, I’m going to the market. Have a wonderful summer. You should really stop at the market after the museum. It’s my favorite museum.”
She wondered if everything in her life was an echo of her mother and if, since her mother’s death, everything was a shadow of that same echo. In the museum she spent an hour studying many hanging paper scrolls with squares of poetry framed by paper, adorned with gold flecks. Saturated with the color of the sky or the moon or the sun. In another room there were tea bowls with names, famous tea bowls celebrated for their misshapen beauty.
There was a Buddha in the garden sitting quietly when everyone else was circling the garden, taking pictures. The Buddha sat on the edge of the flowing stream, before it cascaded to the pond where two turtles overlapped on a rock. Stretching their green streaked necks out, sunning. It was much cooler in the garden, she wished she’d worn a sweater.
11.
She met her new boss again in the street when she was looking for lunch. He was pushing a bike. A young woman, very beautiful, was trailing behind.
“How are you?” She asked.
“Great. I’m going to work out and she’s going home. You know they’re here to review me. I thought I’d look for a putter. When those meetings are taking place on Friday, I’ll be playing golf with Fred Olson. But I need a golden putter. When I played with Tony Mashimito he had the putter to end all putters and he beat me like that. He gave a ton of money to the school. I want to be ready this time. I’ve got to step up my game.”
There were children all around them as the young woman smiled shyly. She was dressed in a silky flowered frock. He was in a polo shirt and shorts. His bike was black. His teeth seemed to be broken, or cut off at the ends. Such an unfortunate mouth. She couldn’t imagine him kissing the young woman who walked behind as he pushed the bike. But you never knew about these things.
12.
She knew her mother’s body too well after those months taking care of her. She would guide her into the shower, turn the water on and then hose her off with the handheld shower. Her mother’s skin was still firm. The pounds she’d accumulated over all those years of life gleaming on her bones. After those months in the facility when she refused to eat, things changed.
She wakes to bright light, almost burning white here, very early in the morning. At the Cape when she was young, not so young, just after she graduated from college, the first time she had a hard time calling up words, she would visit her aunt and uncle and stay in a bedroom in the basement. Right on a marsh. It was the light then that called her to the ocean. A brilliant burning on the waves, the salt spray on her tongue in the morning. A kind of crystalline definition of the birth of the day.
The city presses down around her after her days in the foreign country. The ambulances politely calling out to pedestrians to please move away from the vehicle, the women in the department store showing her all the attributes of the pillow she wants to buy anyway. They instruct her to try it out, her head on a piece of gauze covering the pillow, her feet placed on a sheet of plastic at the foot of the bed. When the transaction is finished the two women dressed smartly in tailored clothes, like a uniform, bow and thank her over and over again.
It’s the time of the year when trains are delayed in the city. The electric screens in the subway announce passenger injury several times a day. Or antelope on the tracks. Gigi thinks it’s a problem with translation. Could there really be antelope in this country? The term passenger injury means someone has jumped. It’s just a euphemism for death, several people at the faculty meeting told her. It’s a bad time of year for that. The raining season coming up, the brutality of the spring. Everything blossoming. New life. She’d read in the news that pigeons had been arrested for carrying little backpacks with pills sewn into the fabric. The backpacks were miniature and fashioned to look like their feathers. The pigeons didn’t know they were drug mules. They just loved to fly.
13.
In a prefecture north of the city there were radioactive wild boars. Thousands of animals with blunt noses and fierce eyes. Hundreds of hunters had tracked them down and killed them but not enough to clear the cities. She was curious. Her days in the sparkling city were lining up into something she couldn’t define. It was the first day of classes. Someone was pounding on the floor above her apartment, shaking the ceiling.
A friend had lost her husband once in in the aftermath of an earthquake. She was visiting a place where they were building a beautiful resort on the sea. Her two girls were with her. She and her husband had gone to take a look at the resort. The girl’s godfather was part owner. The girls were up in the hills with a friend exploring. When the tsunami hit, their parents had to run for dry land and their father spotted the skeleton of a building. He led a group of people wearing only their bathing suits to the top floor. It was too much for him and he died there, already prone to a weak heart. Her friend had to cover him with someone’s flowered wrap and leave him there while she searched for her daughters. She thought she’d lost her family to the water.
“I didn’t know if they were alive,” she told her. “Until I heard from a friend who I met days later that the girls were with another friend, safe and well in another part of the island. It changed everything for me. And then we all went back to the place where Andrew died and brought his body into town.”
14.
One of her students, a solemn boy from India, told her he almost died climbing the sacred mountain. You were supposed to be able to see it from the city, a perfectly shaped cone with snow on the top. But she’d been lost in the concrete caverns for days now and couldn’t understand how you could see the mountain from the city. It rose up, she knew, from the plains below. A stark reminder of the majesty of geography.
Her student, Goreesh, was climbing the mountain with six friends. They were ill equipped and cold by the time they got to the shoulder of the mountain. There was a hut where they paid a huge amount to sleep on hard pillows and wrapped themselves in one thin blanket. He was not feeling well. Maybe it was the altitude, he thought, and his friends wanted to give up. But he went ahead in time to see the sunrise. He was so tired, he told her, that he slipped at the edge of a ravine and was almost never heard from again. And he was so young. His mother would have been bereft and his friends very unhappy, but he caught himself and they all went on to reach the top. It took them 18 hours to climb the mountain.
She was thinking perhaps she should tell the man she’d met at the faculty meeting that she would take him up on his offer to find a car. She wanted to go somewhere, anywhere out of the city. Was there something wrong with that? She was thinking she wanted to go to the prefecture with the wild boars. There were deer there and hawks and other animals gathered in a place with lots of grain and fruit trees and tender shoots to eat. A ripening away from human habitation. She thought it would be interesting to catch a glimpse of that. The authorities were trying to convince the people who’d fled to return to the place they’d left.
Her husband had been calling her, trying to convince her to come home. “You can use your health,” he said, “as an excuse. Tell them you didn’t realize how stressful the trip would be.”
“But I’m fine,” she said. “And I don’t want to come home yet. This is important to me even if you think it’s stupid.”
“I’m not important to you?” he asked. It was his night and her morning. There was no way they could talk about this. It was yesterday there and today here. They were not even on the same globe, somehow. She heated up the water on the stove. Watered her collection of plants on the tiny balcony while it heated and looked down at the canal flowing in and out of the bay. The bay was once barricaded from foreign ships.
Her long rehabilitation had seemed like it would never end, but she was passionate about being able to talk again. And she did, but not in the way she thought she would.
15.
If there was a story to tell she couldn’t remember it some days. And what of the man with the white hair and the white stones around his throat and the white clothes. What was his story, she wondered, as she walked past the temple and then up the hill that wound pass the Friends School and the expensive looking houses and tiny gardens to the boulevard that led to her apartment. Everything was miniature in her place. The chairs, the lamps, the glasses, the forks. That’s what her mother’s life was like those last weeks, something that had spread out to several houses and states and countries and shrunk to one room. A bed, a chair, a TV she didn’t watch anymore, a sink, a toilet, a brush.
Sometimes there was music that came out of thin air. Like the words she lost all those years ago. Or was it so long ago? There were children with pink hats holding their mother’s hands as she came up to her building. A monk kneeling in the garden, touching the roses one by one. A man feeding two cats by the canal. Was everything a gesture of something else? Her mother’s hand fading in her hand as she watched. Her eyes disappearing. Everything sinking into the white sheet of the bed, until finally even her teeth seemed to have disappeared.
17.
What are you doing up? She texted back to her son.
Woke up. No reason, he texted back.
How are you?
Fine.
Just fine mom?
Great. Really great, she texted and added a heart.
Love you mom, he said, miss you.
Miss you sweetheart. Nite nite
Nite, mom.
It was her sons she thought of when she thought she was dying. She wanted to go back to the time just after the lightening. Just fall back into blackness, but the thought of her sons pulled her across the floor and into the bedroom where she’d left her phone. Just that thought. Her love for her sons. She didn’t want to leave them just yet. And though she loved her husband dearly, it wasn’t the thought of him alone that pulled her back to the living. Not that at all.
18.
He’d always wanted to go off to the wilderness. When he was in high school it was the west. He’d talked a friend into driving with him to Oregon. They took three days driving nonstop. And it was wild out there. Trees packed into the land along the ocean as thick as thieves. They camped near the beach even though it was illegal. What did they care. They’d grown up in a town not far away from a place with perpetual underground fires. The catacombs of coalmining. He studied physics because it was a language he could understand. It translated the wilderness into numbers. There was something comforting in that. Evidence that there was still mystery in the world. Why did he fall out of love with that language? He supposed the woman he met at the faculty meeting was right. It was just a continuation of his obsession with the music of the spheres that pushed him into yoga and dance. He fingered the beads around his neck. You’re just an old hippie, that bastard Bryan, had said to him yesterday. He could hear the big headed jerk telling a student even though he had a letter that said he could miss as many classes as he wanted, it wouldn’t stand up in his class. Anxiety was no excuse.
He’d been in this country now for how long, Bryan had asked him, and he still hadn’t achieved enlightenment.
It was the path that mattered, Richard thought, the path was the only reason for anything, wasn’t it? Right now he was hell bent on getting to see those radioactive boars and the wilderness grown up in the prefecture. He’d heard that Chernobyl was the same way. The animals taking over the landscape, even though the radiation was off the charts in their bodies. His tea was cool now and he placed the cup on the low table in his apartment. It was the beginning of summer. The morning light blazing at 5 on his face as he sat on the narrow balcony and looked down into the water of the canal.
Hay Shoot by William Sweeney
19.
She woke every morning with all her molecules lit. That’s what it felt like. Her body more alive than it had felt in years. The whole city was on fire. Fire bombed, fire forged from disaster at one point or another. And then shaped again with concrete. When she walked along the canal she saw men sitting on benches before they went to their offices. Their eyes closed, leaning against the back of the bench or bent forward, the slim egret and brave heron slicing past them in the air. One man bent over his dark trousers fanning his legs with a paper fan spread wide, picking lint off the dark fabric, another fed two cats crouched by the edge of a building. On her way to the university she passed a shrine. She could hear the monk beating a drum with a stick, a ringing sound that filled her with peace.
It was such a long time before she could put a sentence together after lightning struck her that time. After her stroke. Her therapist had sheet after sheet of exercises for her to do. Filling in sentences like a fourth grader. Dredging up grammar from the depths of her brain. Sometimes it felt like there was nothing there anymore. No word for key, or apple, or car. The trick was to search for nearby words that might give someone else some idea of what she wanted to say. It was a game. A trick. A way to pretend she was normal.
She stopped teaching. It was difficult enough to remember the word for son or husband, let alone plinth or column. But here she was teaching the history of art to five students from all over the place really. In the city for one reason or another.
“It’s such a short course,” she said to her husband and sons. “I’ll just be away for a couple of months.”
“That’s a joke, mom,” her older son said. “You’ll be most of the way around the world.”
“You’re so bored with us you want to get that far away?” Her husband asked and laughed. He was stirring sauce on the stove. Her older boy was setting the table. Jobs she once did without thinking.
When the occupational therapist had her make tomato sauce, she couldn’t remember how to use a spoon and picked up the smallest knife to stir the pot. This interchange of one thing for another was maybe not so bad. What did it matter anyway? In this country you used chopsticks.
20.
She passed a green phone booth almost every day. You could make a call there to someone in this country or internationally. She couldn’t remember the last time she’s seen a call box in her country. Country of ignorant men, country of tyrants and cars. Country of hate, country of bores. She wanted to make a celestial call. Every day she thought about her mother. What a strange thing to do. Her mother had been a pain in the neck, really, but still she was her mother and she missed her like she’d miss a hand or a foot or an ear. In all the stories she’d read there was a way to get what you wanted. And even if you failed, the story was the challenge. She wasn’t sure what she wanted anymore. For so long it was to talk again, to be part of the conversation.
Even if she opened the door to the phone box she wouldn’t know her mother’s number wherever she was. It was unlisted surely.
She passed a little girl with a pink hat as she walked away from the phone. She passed a man playing a song on a harmonica, something from a Broadway musical. She passed a little dog with soft pointed ears and bent to pet her. She’s six, her owner said. She was the first person Gigi had encountered on her walks who spoke English. She’s so cute.
She could feel the dog’s bones through her shining fur.
She passed a woman with orange shoes walking two dogs on two leashes who had bright orange booties. She passed the gray birds quarrelling in the trees along the canal and a woman picking berries from a bush.
If she picked up the phone and heard her mother’s voice what would she say? There were so many things to tally up as mistakes or losses. But here she was in a country that had lost so much. Whole cities obliterated, wiped clean in the war.
21.
“I just like reading,” her student said. “I don’t watch TV. I’ll be reading and the tea will boil or the dog will want to go out and I just can’t put the book down. The phone will ring, I still have a landline, or the doorbell will chime and I just can’t put the book down. The house will shake, or I’ll have to go to the bathroom, and I just won’t put the book down. Even when my father died, I couldn’t put the book I was reading down. It was about a princess. She’d fled to the mountains with her brave samurai general and a loyal handmaid. Her father had raised her like a boy instead of a girl. She was real swashbuckler. Prancing around in the mountains, her gold hidden, her dynasty in ruins. The samurai had offered up his sister, disguised as the princess on a platter, to save the royal line. The revolutionaries thought they had killed the princess and let down their guard. This was in oh, I think, about 1600, so it was cold in the mountains and the princess was hidden in a cave. She wasn’t content to stay there, though, and spent much of her time thwarting her own attackers, two peasants who had stumbled on two bars of gold in a stream. It all ended happily. That’s what I’m most worried about. Will everyone make it alive out of the story and get back into their lives.”
The student was from somewhere in England, somewhere in the north, Gigi thought. She was round like a ball and her head stood on top of her shoulders framed by blond hair. One of the other students, a boy, was her friend. He had tattoos down both of his arms, an insignia like an anchor on his neck. They needed the course to fulfill their art requirement, but they weren’t really interested in the subject. Gigi tried to make it interesting by showing movies and slides in elaborately constructed powerpoints. Her husband had helped her put things together before she left. Just follow the word on the powerpoint and you’ll be fine, he said. They don’t know the difference between a portico and a plinth, so it won’t matter if you mess up now and then.
She knew she didn’t tell her husband enough how much she loved him. That was the problem, wasn’t it? She was afraid he’d wake up some morning and realize he had poured so much wine into her chalice and all she did was drink and drink and never distribute the goods to the congregation. She didn’t say thank you enough for the hours he spent drilling her on vocabulary or the walks up and down the corridor of the rehab place until she could walk straight and not list to the side. Until she could get up off the floor on her own and the director said she was certainly ready to home.
Her student pulled a flowered kerchief out of her bag and wiped her face. Her friend laughed. Just like the woman on the train, he said. Not quite, she said, and tucked the piece of cloth back into her cotton tote.
Gigi had watched a mother and daughter share a handkerchief on the train, too. It was something people seemed to do in this country. The had shared hand lotion and then used the cloth to wipe the excess off of their hands. It was such an intimate thing to do. She had never had that kind of relationship with her mother. Her mother was always the princess. Her sister the handmaiden. The night before she’d dreamed of her mother, young and beautiful on the arm of her father. They were going to a party. She smelled of the spicy perfume her mother always wore. Her lips were painted bright red. She wore slim shoes. Her father smelled of aftershave. They were all glitter. Her brother had a tantrum after they left, and she told the babysitter to just ignore him. He’d turn blue and then settle down. He wouldn’t choke to death.
22.
She found, by chance, a small shrine tucked into the corner of a lane. It was a surprise that there were still these crooked lanes in a city that was so big you could drive for hours and still not escape it. She’d had a conversation about escape with Richard, her colleague who taught the music of the spheres. He really looked angelic, she thought. Spare, white, robed in the lightest of clothes. A kind of Zen impression of a catholic angel. He was one of the few people who seemed at all interested in her. Which was just as well. When she was anxious it was harder to call up the words she wanted. Her students were an incurious bunch of kids, so she hardly ever had to answer questions. She just walked herself through the information on the slides and pointed out the important details of whatever piece of art she was talking about and everything went smoothly.
The shrine was reinforced with concrete, covered with wood. Incense was burning. It was in the cool corner of a shady place. She’d read that the deities with the pink caps and pink bibs were in memory of lost children. This deity had a stained bib, the same kind she used on her two boys when they were babies. There were fresh flowers and sticks of incense in a little box. She slipped a coin into the slatted box at the foot of the shrine and picked up the slender stick of incense. She had lost a baby before her two boys were born, one and then the other not long after the first. It was a surprise to get pregnant so easily when she was not that young and then it was a loss so great she thought she wouldn’t recover for an instant when she sat with her husband in the waiting room and the doctor told them that the baby was gone, the slip of child just disappeared on the ultrasound.
Richard had told her he wanted to drive north to see the wild boars in the prefecture that had the earthquake and tsunami a few years ago. It was sort of a wacky thing to want to do, he told her, but then he never had much of a liking for normality. Even growing up. That’s probably why he ended up leaving the country even before things got so bad. He thought if he had stayed he would’ve ended up in jail, certainly, since that’s where most of his relatives worked. The huge buildings that took up so much space near the town where he was born.
23.
He only wanted to write about himself, her student told her, how his brain was on fire. How he couldn’t escape the thoughts in his brain, like someone hitting on the wall in his room and shaking it minute after minute. He wanted to clear out who he was and become someone else. He’d thought he would be a filmmaker, but that didn’t look like a good idea. He just didn’t get along in groups. He couldn’t talk.
“But you’re talking to me right now,” she said.
“Yes, but it’s just you and me.”
He wanted to be screenwriter, he thought, then he could work alone. She didn’t want to tell him at that point, the fluorescent bulbs in the classroom humming, shades tilted to let in the blazing light of noon, that everyone had to talk to someone unless you were a hermit and what chance was there of doing that in this place or this time?
She had gone to a poetry reading with her older son not long before she’d left the country and the poet told a story about his boyfriend who was living for a few weeks in a community of people who raised their own food, meditated on their lives, and went off into caves now and then to think. It was in the southern part of the country. A place where she was afraid once hiking in the woods and she had to avoid a man with gun who followed her for miles. Tracked her like a deer. The police called the poet, who wasn’t as famous as he would become, and told him his boyfriend had committed suicide. It wasn’t anything the poet expected his lover to do, so he called the coroner’s office and had the report sent. Suspected suicide, but several irregularities, the report said. Someone at he sheriff’s office said, No, it was definitely a suicide. The poet was even more suspicious and composed poem after poem about the tragedy. Years later filmmakers got interested in the case and read the coroner’s report and then interviewed the coroner. The poet’s boyfriend had been tied up, beaten, and then burned. It was certainly not a case of suicide.
Outside her window she could hear the blackbirds chattering on the trees below the balcony that lined the canal. They were squeaking and whistling, arguing over the berries that looked like mulberries. She had read the last empress of the country had raised silkworms and had her subjects spin silk. The empress also wrote 30,000 poems.
When she told her son, he said, “But mom, they were very small poems, weren’t they? It’s not like she was writing epics.”
Sharon White’s book Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs award in creative nonfiction. Boiling Lake, a collection of short fiction, is her most recent work. She is also the author of two collections of poetry, Eve & Her Apple and Bone House. Her memoir, Field Notes, A Geography of Mourning, received the Julia Ward Howe Prize, Honorable Mention, from the Boston Authors Club. Some of her other awards include the Neil Shepard Prize from Green Mountains Review, Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, the Leeway Foundation Award for Achievement, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She teaches writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Scratching the Surface of Friendship by Annalie Hudson
She was a fast learner, an easy learner, therefore, a joy. She could be counted on, never late, sitting front row, her hair twisted twice, pulled and bound by a ribbon. She wore cream-colored sweaters, white blouses on very warm days. She was one of those rare visions: a freshman who’d taken cues from re-runs of Gidget or The Patty Duke Show and set about fashioning the exact college experience she had planned.
When he unbuttoned his sport coat before her or rocked on the balls of his feet and surveyed the rest of the class, his eyes finding hers, he was moved. He’d known other eager students who could toss back answers as if they’d studied the whole night before to please him. These students went on to respectable programs at respectable schools. Yet watching Rose-Lynn Coyle, listening to her read the work of Dryden, Pope, and Gray, how her voice would lilt at a surprising turn of phrase and sometimes laugh, Randall felt lifted, reminded of why he was a scholar, why knowledge and pursuit of knowledge had been and still were so very important to him.
One morning he asked to speak to her after class. His voice wavered, an embarrassing quality he thought had vanished with his youth. “Marvelous insight today,” he said. “The Rape of the Lock is nearly as sad as it is funny. That’s why we read it as a mock epic.”
“I wondered if I was reading it correctly,” Rose-Lynn said.
She was very small. He’d never stood close enough to realize how small, in fact, she was. “Are you thinking of graduate school?”
“Oh, I think about a lot of things.”
“Start planning,” Randall said. “Never too soon. You have something. A fire.”
“To be honest,” said Rose-Lynn, “your class is the only class I’ve been doing well in.”
He looked at her and smiled. She was wanting to say something more, he felt it, too. He watched her search for the words.
There were times when Randall took his good position in the department for granted. He—along with Merritt, Chouinard, and Wester—was branded one of “the senior statesmen,” a term reflecting the years he’d spent with the department, a term he didn’t care for. He was fifty-two, not particularly old. He had a full head of hair. Half the men in the department, years younger, couldn’t boast that. No lung cancer to complain of, as Chouinard did, often so busy he’d forget to eat yet never too busy for a smoke. Merritt, however, ate like a horse; his clothes stretched at the seams. And Wester, the oldest of the four, slowly, year to year, was losing his mind. Students complained of his incoherent lectures.
The English department, often thought of as “liberal,” was not a place of change. While the rest of the college grasped at modernization and physical reconstruction, English Hall remained true, was filled with dust motes and smelled old, like a place of learning. Sometimes, descending the main flight of stairs, Randall’s eyes would tear, considering the knowledge dispersed among the walls. What changes that did occur within the department were small ones, visiting lecturers, a revision of the previous year’s syllabus. There was a push to move more and more to the Internet, an experiment Randall had questioned initially but was nonetheless supportive of. John Goodwin, the new Romantics expert, had argued in favor of it.
Randall wasn’t sure of his feelings for John Goodwin. Goodwin was with the department only three years, the type of fellow one liked in order to forego the guilt of disliking. For an academic, John Goodwin was striking, with his big frame and dramatic voice and the beard he kept trimmed close, his eyes that always seemed caught up in clouds. Goodwin worked out four times a week. His criticism was sound. Randall had read each of his books, trying to find some small thing not to like about John Goodwin, but as he read Goodwin’s books, Randall could hear that booming assured voice, the voice that made everyone around him feel welcomed and wanted and at ease. No one denied the rumors about John Goodwin and his relationships with select students. But these types of things weren’t uncommon. Administrators spent salaries arguing the implications of such trysts, yet no written law—in the College Code or otherwise—prohibited them once a class was over. Those involved in such things did their best to keep hush. Whatever happened within the walls of English Hall didn’t escape those old walls, and what happened beyond the walls was under no one’s jurisdiction.
A relationship with a student had never, really, crossed Randall’s mind. He was married for twenty-four years, with two successful grown children, and in the scope of his own life, he thought himself a success. Everything he wanted, he had: a five-bedroom house with a clay tennis court, one grandchild, a cocker spaniel that retrieved the stick thrown for its amusement. Randall’s job with the college was secure. One night, walking home from a snack at the town restaurant, he’d turned to his wife, taking her hand that was cold from the snow. That night, there were buckets of stars, and as he looked down Main Street, he could see the gray of the Schuylkill, the black blocks of college buildings beyond. “This is all I’ve ever wanted,” he said to Lois, and she agreed. They hurried home. He poured brandy. They sat by the fire listening to Scarlatti until a log shifted in the fireplace. In a trance, they rose together. It was time to sleep.
Rose-Lynn appeared at his office hours, tapping at his door, until he told her that 3:30 every Wednesday afternoon would be the perfect time for them to meet. He’d make no other arrangements, that slot was for her and her only. “How do you like that?” he said.
He didn’t mind looking at the essays she brought from other classes. “I’ve put my whole soul into this one,” she insisted, “but still it doesn’t seem good enough.” He tried to show her where points trailed off, where her interpretation was faulty. “Write down exactly what you just said, it’s so good,” she told him. He recommended books she might turn to, important articles only a scholar would know existed.
One Wednesday afternoon, Rose-Lynn was in a state. “Professor Malvin hates me,” Rose-Lynn said. “She absolutely hates me.”
Malvin was not Randall’s favorite person. Students called her “The Vampire” because she’d written three books on those blood-suckers, one book on blood-letting, and three others on Victorian women and rape fantasies. Malvin always wore black, and her long hair seemed a shade even darker. Some joked that she was a witch, was good friends with Anne Rice. Some said she was Anne Rice. Of all the women in the department, Dorothy Malvin was the only one Randall would call a true feminist.
“She hates me because I’m pretty,” Rose-Lynn said. Randall had heard of cases like this, cases where Malvin favored fat girls, ugly girls, lesbians. “I turned in this paper, on time and everything, and still she gave me a C-.”
“A C-? That seems very low for your work.”
“She hates me. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Let me see the paper.” Malvin had scrawled red pen everywhere, the paper a bloody mess, an effect he was sure she intended. Malvin’s comments seemed reasonable, however; the paper did lack organization, showed no central thesis.
“I can see why you think she hates you,” Randall said. “Let’s you and I hate her back. Together.”
As Rose-Lynn reached for her essay, the tip of her fingernail dragged across Randall’s bare wrist, so slowly he thought it couldn’t be accidental, that slight but deliberate weight awakening his skin.
The last week of April, Randall found an invitation to John Goodwin’s 3rd Annual Bacchanalia stuffed into his department mailbox. Since Goodwin’s first term at the college, he’d been running the event, a party for faculty and the English majors held at his own home. The night was intended to be one of literary revelry. “Come as your favorite Romantic,” the invitation said. Randall had never previously considered attending one of Goodwin’s Bacchanalias, having heard that those department members who attended always left by nine. What happened after that, Randall could only guess. After Bacchanalia weekend, students in his Monday morning class looked exhausted, as if their lives had been spent.
“I received your invitation,” Randall said, passing Goodwin in the hall.
“You’ll be coming, will you?” said Goodwin. Randall knew Rose-Lynn had been a student of Goodwin’s, his class another of her trouble classes and Goodwin another professor who had her all wrong.
“Yes, maybe yes, I’ll come this year. I’ve heard good things.”
“The wine will flow freely for those of age.”
“And what will the children drink?”
“Blood,” Goodwin laughed. “Or Arizona Iced Tea. I hear it’s a hit with the younger set.”
Goodwin tapped down the hall into the department office. Randall was laughing, he didn’t know why or how, but the sound echoed up the stairs to the marble mural of Shakespeare. Then English Hall went silent.
“Aren’t you going to shave?” Lois asked.
“No,” Randall said. “Not tonight. I thought in the morning.”
“You look like an old bear.”
“I’ll be home before you know it.”
“I don’t like it when you leave,” Lois said.
“I won’t be long.”
“Here,” Lois said, searching the dresser drawer. “Even if you hate the idea of wearing a costume, at least try color.” She’d found a pink Hermes scarf with gold paisleys and tucked it into the pocket of his gray blazer. “Perfect.”
Goodwin’s place was two towns over, back from the main road, squared off by woods and cornfields with a windmill turning against the night. The house itself was three stories, a fine old structure with a balcony and a large tractor shed that was empty of tractors. He told Randall once how he’d bargained with the farmer to get this piece of land so private, just a flicker to anyone passing by along the main road.
Low music rumbled from the house, and once inside, Randall stood for a moment by the door. No one seemed to notice him. He went into a large room adjacent to the foyer, a sitting room. Candles, thin and thick, jutted from candelabras placed in the corners of the room, on windowsills, in sconces. Chairs, none matching in style, looked arranged by a madman about the large room. Boys and girls were done up as fairies, small nylon wings pinned to their backs, their faces painted pink and yellow and putrid green. He was sure the students had A Midsummer Night’s Dream in mind and wanted to tell them they were wrong: Shakespeare was Renaissance, not Romantic. There were courtiers and wenches, damsels, rakes, their faces vigorous, blushed with life. Two boys wore togas, Aristotles or Platos perhaps, a handful of Bacchae, someone as Mark Twain. Randall felt sick, lost in time, these literary histories were so crossed.
A few colleagues had arrived: Wester and Chouinard standing by the food table, the two of them done up, looking more like pimps or old nightmares than revelers. Dorothy Malvin was stationed by a window. She looked like herself, and Randall thought he’d ask her later who she’d come as, La Belle Dame sans Merci? Pouring red wine, hearty Goodwin chatted with Wester and Chouinard. Clearly Goodwin invested in his costume; the velvet and red tunic, much like a bathrobe, looked too good on him. He wore white leggings and his shirt was open at his chest. He caught sight of Randall and waved, coming toward him with a limp and carrying two glasses of wine.
Lonaconing Windows by Eric Loken
“Professor Turner, I see you came as a businessman,” Goodwin said.
“My fancy pants are at the cleaners. What happened to your leg?”
Goodwin bowed. “George Gordon, sir. Lord Byron.” Goodwin lifted the hem of his robe and showed a grotesquerie made to look like a club-foot. “It’s a killer with the ladies.”
“I bet it is,” said Randall. He wanted to say, “And the gents, too,” seeing as Byron was more noteworthy for his bisexuality than his poetry.
“Drink this glass of wine and get yourself another.”
“I will, I will,” said Randall.
“The masses await. But we’ll talk later, once things are up and running.” Goodwin crossed the room, patting students on their backs, rustling their hair as if they were infants, his children. Randall nodded to Malvin on the other side of the room, where she feigned interest in something caught under her pinky nail.
Several of Randall’s students chimed, “Hello,” in passing, then giggled. Out of context, students transformed into creatures other than the selves he knew in class. They became chaotic and careless, infantile. He had liked every single one of his students, but he often wondered if he’d met them some other way whether or not he would have cared for many of them at all. A number of them were drinking wine. Maybe they were seniors, which was possible. Seniors would be of legal age. He looked for Wester and Chouinard, but they’d left the room. Diana Regan and Tom Voll, the two glib Americanists, lounged in chairs by the fireplace. They seemed too interested in one another. There was really nowhere else to go, so Randall sucked in his breath.
“And who have you two come as?” Randall asked.
“Percy Shelley,” Voll said.
“Mary Shelley,” said Regan.
“How nice. The Shelleys. Not going to run off together, are you?” They looked at each other, smiled. The affection the two shared for one another, despite each being otherwise married, was far from private.
“We’ll see how the evening goes,” Regan said.
“Yes, we’ll see,” said Voll. “Never can tell.”
There was a trumpet blast, a silly thing pumped through the speakers. Goodwin was standing on a stool. “I’d like to welcome everyone to the 3rd Annual Bacchanalia. Or as you few repeat performers might know it, ‘A Dip in the Drink.’ I thought we’d start our evening with some grand verse and some grand meter. Let’s hear some odes, some ottava rima, two or three bout-rimés.”
A girl in a carnation gown and dark hair raised her hand. “Okay,” Goodwin said. “We’ll begin with our Claire Clairmont.”
This Claire climbed onto the foot-stool, looking pale and ghostly. “I dreamed my life was like a leaf / half-turned, then turned in full, tossed by the Wind / the evil Wind who frets the threads of fragile life / that laughing Wind who….”
Randall had never been turned on to student poetry, by struggling poetry of any sort. The Writing Department, the small and little thought of annex below English Hall stairs, was an assault to the greats: thinking that something like writing poetry could be taught!
Yet no sign of Rose-Lynn. He poured himself more wine. Mark Twain was reading now, a kid with a high forehead, Edward something. “Great minds have fallen and no fall is greater than mine / for it was I, Adam, father of humankind….” Nothing made sense, their mixing of historical and classical allusions, not following through with metaphors. Goodwin was sure to jump up after each one, clapping, rousing everyone to a cheer, no matter how bad the poem or how silent and disinterested the crowd. As he drank more wine, Randall had the sense these Romantic attempts at poetry might become easier to stomach.
It occurred to him that he’d like to see the rest of the house, so he slipped along the wall, back to the foyer and through the rooms on the first floor. Doing all the renovation himself, Goodwin had managed. There were no smudges along the ceilings, no signs of haste. Randall padded up the stairs to the second story, past one room that was being done-over; a belt-sander, sawhorses and paintbrushes littered the floor. He passed another room yet to be touched, then he came to what must’ve been Goodwin’s bedroom, not at all what Randall had imagined. There was no Gothic bedframe with white sheets and red satin pillows, no cherry oak furniture so rich and seductively dark. Heavy drapes didn’t obscure the windows. Instead, thin white curtains were pulled to one side. The bed sheets were gray and light blue and white, a simple country motif, and the furniture that squatted about the room was rustic to be sure, certainly not horrifyingly old, nothing European or imported, only a dresser and bedside table and lumpy green chair that looked as if they’d been garnered at some Sunday swap meet.
Was this the kind of person Goodwin was in his private life, soft and quiet, someone other than his self? Randall moved about the room, touching things, picking up a small bronzed baseball, horse-head bookends, a picture of two old women in a frame. He opened the top drawer of the dresser bureau: boring white underwear, just like he had at home, rolled into balls, stuffed among socks. He felt beneath Goodwin’s clothing. Surely that was where people hid the things they feared others would find. His fingers grasped at the glossy pages of a magazine. Pornography, he thought, but was disappointed when the shiny publication was nothing more than an Alumni magazine from Yale. Randall sat down on the edge of the bed, placed his wineglass on the nightstand and began looking through its drawers: green ear-muffs, a ruler, envelopes, pencils and pens, a Bible, a book on meditation, a novelty back-scratcher. Not even so much as one prophylactic: how very boring.
Then Randall heard voices in the hall, a high-pitched giggle, followed by footsteps. He knocked over his wineglass, red wine onto the beige rug, and ducked into the bedroom closet, leaving the door open slightly with a view of the room. At first, he thought he was about to witness something important. He imagined Goodwin, sweeping away one of the girls, carrying her like property up the hall stairs and tossing her down on the tidy bed. Yet it wasn’t Goodwin, not even someone half as interesting as Goodwin, some kid with longish hair and a soul patch, dressed as Puck, half-goat, half man, with nubbins of horns stuck to his head. The girl, Randall recognized. Kimberly or Kimmy. Or was it Kimbi? Kimi? She at least looked more of the period, not some fairy creature but voluptuous and indulgent, certainly Romantic. He’d noticed her before, once at school, at the vending machine.
The silly boy lay back on the bed. Watching, Randall was certainly aroused. He could tell both were not good kissers, more motion than technique. A sliver of saliva sparkled on the girl’s lips. Then, suddenly, the two burst into laughter and stopped. The girl straightened her gold hair ornament and went flitting into the hall. “Kimberlyn,” the boy called, but she didn’t come back. “Fuck,” the boy said, getting up from the bed.
When they’d gone, Randall slipped from the closet, into the hall, pretended to be casually descending the stair, and found more red wine. Lois didn’t allow him to drink much anymore—had reason to dislike his having too much—but she wasn’t here. The readings had come to an end. Popular music played, and the fairies were dancing. Light flickered on, then off, then on. Randall thought about that girl’s mouth, that geometry of saliva descending from her lips. He could no longer remember what it felt like: kissing young lips. He’d come to love Lois and her mouth, her kiss, yet he couldn’t remember what her lips felt like when they were young. The knowledge he once ardently possessed now escaped him.
Randall’s heart leapt: Rose-Lynn! She was so carefully articulated, her hair pinned and neat, suggestively pure, not sopping with sexuality. Over the years, students like that Randall had admired for their virtues and soon forgotten. Rose-Lynn, however, was art. Forging his way through the shaky undergraduates on the dance floor, he noticed the sprig of purple nightshade Rose-Lynn had secured with a barrette and the dark eyeliner that gave her the quality of the dead. She wore ballet shoes. He noticed too, unfortunately, she was laughing and in conversation with Dorothy Malvin.
“Rose-Lynn,” Randall said. “Rose-Lynn, who . . . who have you come as?”
“Oh, Professor Turner,” she said. “I’ll let you guess.”
“You get three chances,” interjected Malvin.
“Only three?”
“Here,” Rose-Lynn said. “I’ll give you a hint.” She closed her eyes and extended her arms in front of her. “Think somnambulist.”
“Just as I thought. Coleridge’s Christabel.”
“I suggested the costume,” said Malvin.
“Who have you come as, Professor Turner?” asked Rose-Lynn.
“Oh, don’t you recognize him, Rose-Lynn? He’s come as himself.”
“What better way to appear than as one’s self,” Randall laughed. “You can insist on being nasty, Dorothy, but I’ll remind you that you haven’t procured my promotion vote yet.”
“What’s one vote?” said Malvin.
“Lovers’ quarrel?” Rose-Lynn laughed.
“No love lost,” said Malvin.
“I’m sorry, Professor Turner, Professor Malvin, excuse me.”
Randall watched Rose-Lynn go, left standing with Malvin who too was watching Rose-Lynn go, slipping through the crowd like a breeze through a dream. Malvin was silent. Randall took a gulp of red wine.
“I like you, Dottie. You know, I really do.”
“I thrive in negative space,” she declared. “Sticks and stones.”
They didn’t say anything to one another after that. He waited for her to move away from him, and when she had, as he was sure she would, without another insult or an apology, he went to look for Rose-Lynn.
He discovered Rose-Lynn between the legs of a boy Greg on Goodwin’s back porch. The boy, perched on the railing, had crossed his heels behind Rose-Lynn’s knees. Rose-Lynn stiffened, seeing Randall there, and whispered into the boy’s ear.
“Let’s go for a walk, Professor Turner,” Rose-Lynn said.
“Yes,” Randall said. “Let’s.”
The backyard was nearly the color of dark wine now, the perimeters of each shadow red-tinged. Rose-Lynn pointed toward a cluster of trees at the end of the lawn.
“That boy’s just a tadpole!” Randall said.
“I knew you’d be jealous,” said Rose-Lynn. The trees at the end of the yard were arranged in a circle, a faerie ring, and at its center Goodwin had placed a cast-iron bench. Black roses twisted around one another, serving as legs. “Where’s your wife?”
“She hates these things.”
“I imagine her thin, old and pale,” Rose-Lynn said.
“She’s not so old or so pale. How old you do you think I am?”
“Fifty,” she said. “Fifty-two?”
“I was hoping you’d say forty.”
“You asked me how old I thought you were, not how old I thought you looked.”
“Ah. You seem older tonight,” Randall said.
“I’m an old soul.”
He could detect something in her eyes, a self-immolating fire, something that both excited and disturbed him. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Rose-Lynn, silly. Who else would I be?”
“Some kind of bewitchment,” Randall said. “A snare.”
“You’re caught up in the night.”
“How can I not be?”
“Do you have any children?”
“Two: one son, one daughter,” Randall said, and then joked, “Do you?”
“No,” said Rose-Lynn. “I was pregnant once, abortion, etcetera. It wasn’t a big deal, just one of those things that gets in the way.”
“In the way of what?”
“In the way of everything. Nights make me think of children, I guess. The running around, the squeals as the sun sets. When I was little we played Haunted House outside in the yard, blankets thrown over lawn chairs. I could make the scariest faces.” Rose-Lynn screwed up her face, her eyes crossed, cheeks stretched. “I wasn’t afraid like other girls.”
“My children did the same.”
“I would’ve liked you as a child,” Rose-Lynn said.
“I would’ve liked you, too, but not in the same way as I do.”
“Let me get us another drink,” said Rose-Lynn. When she walked off, Randall worried she might not come back. He’d been left at parties by attractive women before. Sometimes he wondered if that was why he’d married Lois at such a young age when other choices might have presented themselves. Too quick to get everything right, to have everything in place.
Rose-Lynn returned with a red cup. “Here.”
“What’s this?” Randall said. “It tastes awful?”
“Cheap rum.”
“An odd after-taste.”
“Oh, that’s the roofies,” she laughed. “Drink it. I mixed it myself.”
“Really now?”
“It’s my second major.”
Randall chuckled and paused. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Who has time?”
“And Greg?”
“I love the gray of your hair, Professor Taylor. One of the few good things about getting older. Can I touch it?”
“Sure.”
She didn’t run her fingers through it as he wanted her to; instead, she stroked his head as if she were petting a cat. The motion made him feel suddenly woozy, and he found that he was willing to tell her everything: his impressions of the other students, the faculty, the college. “You’ve awakened something in me. Kindred spirits, you and I.”
“I should get to know myself then,” she said, resting her head in her hand and gazing toward the field. “What’s it like, being wise? I feel like I’ve spent my whole life being the opposite.”
“Everything will work out. It always does,” said Randall, yet as soon as he said it, he knew it couldn’t be true. Nothing worked out really, did it? The appearance of structure was a cage. Those Romantic spirits were right. The tall black stalks of the cornfield, so upright and sure of their positions, marching in rows yet journeying nowhere.
“I wish I could see further,” she said. “What lies beyond the beyond. Tell me how you think.”
“About what?” asked Randall.
“How you think when you think.”
He laughed: “Drinking will do this to us, make us philosophical.”
“Tell me.”
“For me, rooms build themselves around ideas. The planks of floors, walls hung with paintings curling in like fingers into an open palm. My thinking’s like that.”
“What am I doing there, in your rooms?”
“Meaning?”
“I’m there, aren’t I?”
She hadn’t taken her eyes from the line of cornstalks when her hand slid down the front of his pants. Randall bit his lip, then leaned to kiss her. “No,” Rose-Lynn said, her eyes still forward, peering toward some dark distance. It wasn’t at all what he wanted. It was detached, impersonal, and finished quickly, a fulfillment of two bodies inclining themselves toward one another, yet neither willing to live, to give in fully to that moment. When they did look at one another again, he to her, and her to him, it was with a sense of embarrassment of what they’d just made, a longing to return to the before.
“It’s gotten chilly, hasn’t it?” she said.
“It’s late,” Randall admitted, and Rose-Lynn smiled.
Driving, he felt at the tethered end of headlights, the illumined beams pulling him and the car homeward. The idea that’d resembled Rose-Lynn in appearance—which once might have stood gesturing by an open window or elongated on an upholstered chair in one of the rooms of his mind—had vacated, and only the dull hum of the radio found its way in now. It wasn’t a sadness that filled him, arriving home, but something else, a sloppy cousin to joy when Lois greeted him. “Some night?” she asked.
“I didn’t have much. Only a sip,” he laughed. “How was your evening? All quiet here?”
“I was reading,” she said. “Your pajamas are laid out for you.”
“I wish you’d gone with me.”
Rose-Lynn missed class on Tuesday and didn’t stop by his hours that Wednesday. When she appeared the following week, she didn’t cheerily greet him as she usually did, but she didn’t appear upset or bothered. He called on her several times during discussion, found himself complimenting her responses more than he’d compliment other students’, just to let her know that he was still there, with her, despite what’d happened between them.
“Rose-Lynn, can we talk after class?”
“I have somewhere else to be,” she said. And it was like that for those few times after, even as she sat committing words to a blue book during her final exam: she had somewhere else to be. It was John Goodwin who told him later that Rose-Lynn would be transferring to Yale in the fall.
Born in York and raised in Dover, Pennsylvania, Michael Hyde is the author of What Are You Afraid Of?, a book of stories and winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. His stories have appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories, Austin Chronicle, Bloom, Ontario Review, and Witness. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with Honors in English, where he studied with writers Diana Cavallo, Gregory Djanikian, and Romulus Linney.
