Articles – Page 126 – Philadelphia Stories

Second Place Winner: The Painting

The oils depict a scene from my father’s youth in Pennsylvania:
he is with his older brother in a field behind the family home
where together they scythe tall grass that’s massed to the horizon
and thickest near the fence and tire-rutted country lane.

The scythes are like freakish growths rooted on their hips,
and so with sharpened violence
the Mennonite boys are caught forever in cutting poses.

Did they make a game of it, a race against the setting sky
before they were caught like this,
wearing black hats and the strict clothing of the religious—
did they make a game as dutiful sons at their chores,
dark in their beauty and restless at their work?

When my mother painted the scene
gleaned, she said, from his idle descriptions,
her paintbrush went across the canvas in the same
motion as a scythe.
And in the secret nights
when he thought I slept and instead I spied,
here he sat in the living room and stared at this framed world
where boys conspired to go beyond
what the good light allowed.

He spent long hours staring
and I think had there been no barrier to stop him
he would have climbed through the canvas
directly back to his youth to warn himself of what was to come.

When my mother revealed the painting
he frowned and said the house
had been white, not brown.
And that the fence was pure fiction.
Nor had the horizon ever been so red.
Nor had the grass ever been so tall.
Steven Harbold is a writer and editor living in South Jersey. He is a graduate of Rowan University.

First Place Winner: Hereditary

I have a twitch sometimes. I keep my left eye open in my sleep.
That hole in the bathroom door was not me.
The scar on my forearm, an accident. Burst vessel in my eye,
the blackened palms, tire marks on I-25—not me.
The patch of scalp, doorknob through a bedroom wall,
knife wound across the cabinet’s face, the sixth time
we replaced a set of wine glasses, TV hurled like a dodge ball,
the cell phone torn in half—I am not crazy, this is just Thursday.
I live alone, pay rent and taxes. I cook and fold laundry.
There are no monsters here, I don’t see ghosts.
I did not sleep with a razor in my teeth last night.
I do not keep count of my 16-year pill collection.
Haven’t had a drink in 43 hours. I have four alarm clocks
and too many shoes. This morning, I ripped open a tin can
with my own hands, cursed a man at the bagel cart. One time,
I said, Ma, calm down, and she slapped me so hard I forgot her name.
Jeanann Verlee is a former punk rocker who wears polka dots and collects tattoos. She is author of Racing Hummingbirds which earned the Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal for poetry, and her work has appeared in a number of journals, including The New York Quarterly, Rattle, and FRiGG. She is a poetry editor for Union Station Magazine and director of Urbana Poetry Slam at Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.

Poem for Dr. Dayan Visiting Philadelphia, February 2010

I
A small planet of nothing but dust,
abandoned basketball courts—
a few hapless donkeys…
hooves hidden in the powder-clouds
of their aimlessness.

I can’t find it there either
but I think I have to keep looking
in the wrong places
especially if they don’t exist.

II
I have three winter coats.
One I don’t wear.
One for schlepping around in.
One for the Lincoln Center.

III
High over the radio countdown
of all-time favorite love songs
geese keep their V as we discuss
with ardent certainty which songs
don’t belong, are treacle
as compared to Rainy Night in Georgia
or Come Pick Me Up.

Later I’m thinking “mere sentiment” is feeling too;
I don’t want to dismiss any of it.

Sharon Black has poems published in The South Carolina Review, Cimarron Review, Slipstream, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mudfish, Rhino, Poet Lore, Painted Bride Quarterly, and many others. This is her second appearance in Philadelphia Stories. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2005 and 2007. She is the librarian at the Annenberg School for Communication and lives in Wallingford, PA.

About the Gaze

"much has been written about the toxic nature of the gaze…the
unfair advantage of being the observer" – Patricia Hampl

So Don’t stare, the mother snaps
at the child who doesn’t mean to reduce
this dwarf, that cleft face, those
conjoined twins to oddity.

Led to a field, she would seek a dozen
variations on the theme of daisy
and make a garland, would bury her nose
deep into orange bells of blooms

protruding from sinews of trumpet vine.
She would edge out the needs
of hummingbird and bee, never intending
to be greedy. Blame her not. Her fields

are city streets. She bears no sting. Don’t stare,
snaps the mother so the child stands still,
closes her eyes while against her lids wonder flutters-
imperiled, insistent, diaphanous-winged.

Liz Abrams-Morley’s collection, Necessary Turns, was published by Word Press in 2010 and won an Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Small Press Publishing. Other collections include Learning to Calculate the Half Life (Zinka Press, 2001,) and What Winter Reveals (Plan B Press, 2005). Her poems and short stories have been published in a variety of national anthologies, journals and ezines, and have been read on NPR. Co-founder of Around the Block Writing Collaborative, (www.writearoundtheblock.org) Liz is on the MFA faculty of Rosemont College and writes with children in Philadelphia,
PA area schools.

Put Asunder

On the day of your wedding, I broke into the church.
I opened the baskets of waiting doves, picked up each one,
whispered against soft wings how you had promised
yourself to me. I whispered how you had bound us
together, told me forever so many times that I believed
in it. The birds cried quietly in the nest of my hands.
My voice set timers ticking inside them, counting
down to the moment you said your vows. Turning
with your bride, in the gossamer glory of your untruth,
the baskets opened and the doves whirred out, puffed
up like toads. Tranquility turned inside out. They exploded –
little bombs of purity, of peace, Molotov cocktails
of beak and pink intestine. Flour-white feathers
spelled my name in the aisle; the pews blew over
like Tunguska trees. Two doves found me in the doorway,
landed in my outstretched hands. An olive branch
in one beak, a stick of dynamite in the other.
Jeannie Catron grew up in Maryland and now lives in Tucson, AZ. Her work has appeared in Attic.

Thank You for Mixing with my Emotional Circuitry

rollercoasters are
my favorite form of
transportation

what is bribery
in poetry going
to prove?

pluck me out
of my gown
throw me
against your song

I claim a hundred feet of
air above
my head

a murmur of sparrows
flies in flies out keeping
me nauseous with love
making use
of tiny instruments
needing their
music absorbed

HOW DARE
the mayor of
Philadelphia refuse
our collective joy of
rollercoasters
over buses

tally your
math again
I love being a
statistic involving
spun sugar on a stick
and instability

counted upwards
of a thousand
drops of saliva

we can read
ANYTHING
go out and read
the engine’s cold
throttle left over
night in one
position

love came
breathing
against me I did not
mind the captivity

elevating these
harmed avionics
of the brain
climbING the track
ROARing downhill
reborn through the S-curve

the extortion of poetry
an opera mounting
the bed sheets we
won’t stop it when
we know we must

my critical review of
your little daisy staring
staring staring staring
STARING until it grows
The son of white trash asphyxiation, CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of A BEAUTIFUL MARSUPIAL AFTERNOON: New (Soma)tics (Wave Books, 2012), The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010), Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010). He is a 2011 Pew Fellow, and a 2012 Ucross Fellow. He is the editor of the online video poetry journals JUPITER 88 and Paranormal Poetics. Visit him at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com.

SEP TEPY (The First Time)1

If we assume two things-one, that the best place to start is the beginning, and two, that the Heliopolitan Cosmogony is accurate-then we ought to start with an androgynous figure masturbating. That was how Atum created the universe, and it makes sense, after all; if one’s cosmogony relies upon a single creator deity, then what more ready way to do the job? So let’s start, then, with the mound of creation, a dark wet pile of earth emerging from the chaos waters. On top of this mound Atum has come into being and he is taking care of what he has to do.

First all the universe is contained inside one being, and then it’s splattered all over the place, like the mirror-glass mosaics of Isaiah Zagar. All over South Street, walls explode out at the sun in glittering fragments, and yet stay intact. Covered in reflections of the city and the sky as seen from every angle, the wall is revealed, after all, to contain both the city and the sky.

We’re all sitting in fractured, glittering Philadelphia smoking a hookah in Leila’s Café, and the smoke (apple mint, the tastiest of the flavors) provides a sort of glue sticking the fragments back together. How soft and curving that smoke is, like the women in the imagination of 19th-century Orientalists! But Sir Richard Burton² would truly have been unable to contain his urge to create a universe if he had heard the conversation, which focused on Gina and her fiancé’s recent decision to become polyamorous. The hookah is certainly polyamorous, anyway, penetrating everyone’s mouths with equal abandon (except for mine; I put one of those disposable tips on the nozzle; Orientalist pastimes are no more likely to protect one from colds than is Communion wine). Gina’s friend Dave has taken her hand, while her fiancé’s brother chats with me. The café owner’s daughter, who wears tight jeans and a blue headscarf and has a California accent, seems equal parts happy and dismayed.

Gina doesn’t want to change her Facebook status to "Open Relationship" because she hasn’t told her sister yet. By the time you’re thirty, your Facebook wall becomes a mosaic of friends’ babies’ faces, small round eager things that blur, at thumbnail size, into soft ash-colored blobs like smoke rings, and then dissolve away again. At a distance these walls that Zagar treated, these sun-sharp multifaceted mirrors, are revealed as the compound eyes they are. The buildings must have always had such eyes, but it was only after Zagar made them visually explicit that we could tell. At what time will these insect-eyed creatures buzz away, up into the air, into the sun from which they came? At what hour will the city fly away from us?

Broken glass both inside and outside the museum: inside, where they broke into the vitrines, and outside, where they burned the cars and beat the protestors in Tahrir Square. The Cyclops eyes of news cameras have, more or less, closed by now. The compound fly-eye of the glass still stares open on the ground, though, constantly assaulted by the substance of the sun (the Greeks thought: we see objects because they constantly emit thin films that physically hit our eyes) and throwing that white sun-stuff back again.

No one does polyamory like gods, except perhaps for Muammar Qaddafi, whose "voluptuous Ukrainian nurse" has gone back to Kiev, while Ajdabiya burns. Even Jesus has his many brides, like Sister James and Sister Anthony at St. Anne’s Preschool, who used to read the same story to us every day, about a bat trying to escape from hunters. I don’t remember why the hunters wanted the bat anyway (how much meat could be on it?) but it was a very suspenseful story and always made the hour after snack time unnecessarily stressful.

[img_assist|nid=8620|title=Under Penn by Patrick Snook © 2012|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=350|height=525]Almost Easter, now. The river bank is burning with cherry blossoms, and it’s almost time to go back to St. Paul’s to share that yearly Middle Eastern meal. In Taposiris Magna they’re looking for Cleopatra VII’s tomb, even though they won’t find it there;the ancient sources are quite clear on the location of the Ptolemies’ mortuary complex in Alexandria. "Zowie" Hawass, as my parents call him, announced with great enthusiasm the project plans, in a video in which he calls his impending revelation of Cleopatra’s burial "the greatest discovery of all time." Entombed at her side they expect to find her Ukrainian nurse, Mark Antony.

Elizabeth Taylor’s grave is in Glendale, California, and Richard Burton (the Orientalist) and Richard Burton (Mark Antony) can meet up, if they like, to share a hookah in St. Paul’s Café. If you lose your one true love, says the traditional Scottish song, you will surely find another, / Where the wild mountain thyme / grows around the blooming heather. The Egyptian gods are famous, of course, for their numerous forms. Semele asked to see the true form of god; and so she did. It was fire.

And as for Dionysus: he was born in blood, of course. Ah, well, who wasn’t? With him it was merely a bit more obvious, torn from his father’s raw thigh. I suppose we all feel somewhat out of place in all the substitute wombs we find.

Dionysus the wine god: and don’t those Sufi poets praise god constantly by invoking drunkenness? Indeed, the linkage of intoxication and religious ecstasy would appear to be cross-cultural; has there ever been a society that eschewed intoxicants? None that I’ve found yet, and I’ve been looking for a while. If it isn’t liquor, it’s tobacco, or herbal substances, or God knows what. Beloved, Beloved, you surpass all wine.

One could square the circle if Mary were to be the one to destroy the body of her son, to rip it up, the way Agave does. But she doesn’t do so-no. Wine in the cup, and that is blood; bread for flesh, like sparagmos. I never drank that wine, not even at my first communion. My mom was afraid that I would catch a cold from the other children, and after all, wasn’t she right? I could have done. The mother knew better than the priest; but, after all, that’s always true. It was true of Mary, wasn’t it? And of Agave, too.

It seems like it must be nice to be a polyamorist. But then again, it also seems rather unpleasant. As for me, my Beloved is mine, and I am my Beloved’s. Pass me more of that burning, iron-tasting wine. They say that Californian wines exceed the French; in fact, the Judgment of Paris³ decided it. Does that then make the United States equivalent to Aphrodite? I like it, I like it; everyone’s Beloved, why, the sacred whore. I like it, I like it. But all the same, it isn’t fully true.

The old country laborer, passing me in Alexandria, grinned and asked, "How much?" I gave him the finger, only afterwards realizing that the gesture might not transfer cross-culturally; perhaps he was thinking, "Only one pound? Wallahi, what a deal!" But what’s to be done? Many pretty girls in Cairo wear sparkly veils that only half-hide their hair. Most of my boyfriends prefer to wear a veil of words: each syllable glittering, like mirrored tesserae. Sometimes you see yourself in them, and sometimes you see the whole design. Sometimes you see both at once, but that’s a rarity, much to be cherished, like simultaneous orgasm.

The first question I got at my interview for the Cornell professorship was, "How does your work engage with Edward Saïd?" In Luxor I was looking for a birthday present for my dad when I came upon a stuffed goldfish, modeled after the main character in Finding Nemo, which played Arabic pop songs when you pushed its stomach. Of course I bought it; as the man at the souvenir shop said when I tried to bargain down the price, "But it’s Nemo!"

Running along the Schuylkill River’s mirrored glass in spring, you pass numerous geese with half-grown babies. In a New Kingdom love poem from Papyrus Harris 500, migratory birds appear as images of the soul. A girl goes hunting for birds down by the river, and accidentally catches her own soul. As for me, I don’t want to make them angry; when they have young they are notoriously mean. The baby souls ripple the water, swimming carefully in line. Drops of flying water, each a tiny little magnifying glass-when I was a small child I thought I was the first person who had ever noticed the magnifying effect of water drops. Glittering river, mirror water, Zagar’s walls dissolved-well, good then, keep on at it, little fuzzy souls.

¹Sep Tepy: "the first time" (Hieroglyphic Egyptian). In Egyptian religious texts, sep tepy refers particularly to the moment of the creation of the universe.
²Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890): British explorer, captain in the East India Company, and translator of various Arabic and Sanskrit texts, including the Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi.
³A wine competition held in Paris in 1976, at which Californian wines swept all categories.

Caitie Barrett is a classical archaeologist and Egyptologist. Her poems have been published in Pressed Wafer Foldems, Can We Have Our Ball Back, Palimpsest, and The Gamut; she was also a finalist in the first annual Bow and Arrow Poetry Contest. She lives in Ithaca, NY and works as an Assistant Professor of Classics at Cornell University.

Stripped, A Collection of Anonymous Flash (excerpts)

The following four flash fiction stories are excerpts from the latest title from PS Books, STRIPPED, A COLLECTION OF ANONYMOUS FLASH. This is an anthology of forty-seven pieces of short fiction whereby authors’ bylines have been removed. Readers are forced to engage without the lurking presence of "what they know of the author," which is usually, at the very least, the author’s gender as evidenced by a name. Stories might be written from a typically "female" perspective or with typical "male" sensibilites, but it might be that a male writer has inhabited his female character with such authenticity or that a female contributor has gotten inside the mind of the opposite sex so convincingly. Conversely, not every story that "seems" like a man wrote it was written by a woman or vice versa-things are mixed up, so guessing will be more of a challenge, and more fun. Enjoy.

– Nicole Monaghan, editor, STRIPPED

DOG BEACH

He sits out there in his rowboat, mouth half open, the Chicago skyline rising and falling behind him. I walk on my knees though the water. Inching closer, slipping farther out into the lake. There is garbage floating near the surface. Bubble wrap and empty plastic sleeves of crackers. I skirt around them, or try to. I want it to seem like an accident. Like I just drifted over, and then all of a sudden I am next to him and I can say oh, hey, how’s it going out here?

He is the lifeguard. Young and bored, probably Mexican, with smooth black hair and sunglasses that reflect the blue sheen of the lake. He wears a standard issue red tank top and his teeth are as white as forever. I am old. And fat, and I have the face of someone who has sustained some kind of injury, only I have not. It is just my face. My nipples are the size of coasters and I have no hair on my chest. He is very young. Possibly eighteen. That would be good, actually. But he is probably younger. I can feel the blood moving through my body when I look at him, even though the water is cold.

"Sir!" he calls out to me. I stare back at the shore and pretend not to hear, ashamed at being noticed. It is crowded here today. It seems like there are a thousand dogs on the beach, wrestling and shitting and chasing wet tennis balls.

"Sir," he says again. I can hear his oars cutting through the lake as he moves closer. "You really shouldn’t be out here if you don’t have a dog." He points to the beach next to us, the one for people. "It’s much cleaner over there." His voice is as dull as an old knife. I can tell that he hates this job, which seems strange to me. I would imagine that sitting in boat all day would be one of the most relaxing ways to make a dollar.

"I have a dog," I say. "He’s over there." I point vaguely towards the shore. "A German Shepard," I add, hoping that this will impress him. "His name is Larry."

He looks off into the distance like he is thinking about something very important. He wipes sweat off of his upper lip. I feel something crumple under my toes and pray that it is not a diaper. I do not own a German Shepard. I do not own any dog at all. I just like this beach because people are friendlier here. I can stand in the sand at the edge of the water, watching the dogs run in and out, back and forth along the shore. People talk to me like we are all in a club together, like I am part of something bigger.

"Alright," he says, starting to back paddle. His arms are skinny and brown, but they look strong, and they make me think about pretending to drown.

JERRY’S LIFE AS SUNG TO “I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW”

Children behave. "Will you relax, Deanna, so what if the kid breaks a few things?" dad would say. Mom often looked like the last Kleenex in the box and no one was going to use her and throw her away. Her favorite expression: Be on your toes. I was on my toes, I suppose. Up for school. Hardly ever "sassy" when told to take out the garbage. When she died I learned that she had been on her toes for seventy-seven years. Her feet were damn tired. I never got her a pillow.

That’s what they say when we’re together. When I met Jeff, I had already come out to my parents. Jeff hadn’t. He’d say, "They think that gay people are poison. We emit killing fumes." His family figured us out–we weren’t "buddies." His mother remains cold but sends me Christmas cards with messages like "Remember Jesus’s birthday. He remembers yours." His father thinks of me as another channel to change. I don’t think they fear poison. Is this progress?

And watch how you play. I knew I was gay young. It’s like I was a contestant on You Bet Your Life and the secret word, Gay, came down and yes, Groucho, that’s me. I’ve felt watched all my life. I met my first lover, Ben, at Polk Junior High School. We could do anything we wanted provided we said "We’re not gay. We don’t love each other. Only gay people can love each other." That freed us to do what he called "the snooky ookums." Watched. By parents. Neighbors. School. I’ve spent decades dislodging eyes from my skin. Eyes in my most private places.

They don’t understand. Ben and I were "gross, weird, sinful, and only kooks do that kind of thing."

And so we’re runnin’ just as fast as we can. I ran and ran but they kept moving the finish line. After two and a half decades I realized that the finish line was in their heads, not mine. I stopped running. Even now, so many keep running, faster, faster–how do they do it? Bare feet. Gravel.

Holdin’ on to one another’s hand. Jeff’s hand is my favorite part of his body. I don’t rank his parts, but his hand is tops. When I hold it, deep blue forget-me-nots cover the most barren ground inside me. His hand is a map of wisdom. I don’t read maps well, but I never feel lost as long as I have his hand.

Tryin’ to get away into the night. My friend Mitch tried to get away for years. Booze, drugs, a bunch of guys he slathered all over his body. He quit trying. I was a pallbearer at his funeral. How easily it could have been me in the box. Mitch wore out from the daily battering ram of hate.

And then you put your arms around me and you say I think we’re alone now. Alone is a rake standing by the garage door. It needs to be put to good use. Alone is sitting with Jeff watching My Three Sons, not saying anything, but knowing when he will laugh at Bub. Alone is being in a crowded mall and trying to start a conversation with a clerk.

Alone is finding a place to hide, you think no one will ever find you, you’re OK with that, kind of, but someone does find you. Hides with you. And emerges with you. Into light. And darkness.

When I first began tutoring Shin Chan-Hwan, I did not feel attracted to him. I found his shy sadness endearing, but his body repulsed me. He had the narrow bones and taut sinews of an unhealthy woman, and yet his face betrayed masculinity. I found this combination grotesque, perhaps because I did not yet know of my preference for it.

The Supreme Leader appointed Shin Taster of Meals because He believed nobody would feed poison to such a sympathetic figure. Shin was orphaned at ten when his mother, a prostitute, was killed by one of our Dear Leader’s bodyguards. He was raised by the Generalissimo and His staff. I volunteered out of pity to tutor him, convincing the Generalissimo that the more worldly Shin became, the better able to notice culinary oddities he would be.

While it was the boy’s mitochondrial response that mattered most to the Dear Leader, He could see the benefits of having one taster for as long as possible: familiarity with His favorite dishes, a well-practiced nose, and the social ease that comes with not having a stranger at the table.

Not long after we met, Shin introduced me to sexual passion. Although I taught him to read and to know his food, we figured out as peers how two men might lie together, and how, over time, their lust might give way to a stronger bond.

Shin became a national mascot, a symbol of the invincibility of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. If some callous usurper should manage to poison Shin and the Supreme Leader, the People would never stand for Shin’s sacrifice and would revolt immediately.

The General had always believed in a top-down sentimentality, but many of us in the Cabinet knew better. We knew how tenuous was His hold over the Premiers, let alone over the writhing passions of the People. We heard tales of our cousins’ cousins in China growing wealthy as we begged for moderate villas in the hills outside Pyongyang. Most worrisome, we watched as the Generalissimo grew both weary and furious-a dangerous combination-over constant criticism from other nations.

Soon, a few of us decided that no consequence of an assassination could be worse for Korea than the inevitable consequences of no assassination.

Because I had tutored Shin for so long, it fell on me to approach him. I insisted we give him the chance to be a knowing martyr, one whom the People would praise long after his demise. Perhaps I felt he deserved the chance to look in my eyes as I condemned him.

"Shin Chan-Hwan," I said as we began a lesson on European mushrooms, "I suspect you have waited for this day." I showed him the vial of thallium, a poison slow enough to wait for the Leader to eat before killing Him and His taster.

I held my gloved fingers to Shin’s mouth, to express the risk of discussing the matter further, to indicate the means by which the poison was to be administered, and, finally, to touch his lips before they parted one last time for our Korea.

When I removed my hand, Shin said "Yes, I have waited." His resolve brought tears to my eyes.

I could not watch as Shin tasted the tainted insam-ju. I do not know if he omitted his customary sniff of the gingery liquor, or if he took a larger sip than usual to steel himself against the effects the poison would later have. I must believe, though, that as the liquor passed over his lips, he thought not only of his loathing for his keeper, and not only of his country, but also of me.

AFTERGLOW

Crystal and her moon-faced children live upstairs. I live downstairs, alone. We both waitress at The Outback, and I take business classes at community college. Crystal doesn’t see a need for it. I tell Crystal that pretty soon, I’m going to own the damn place while she’ll still be washing the bloomin’ onion smell out of her hair each night. We’ll see, is all she says while she laughs and blows smoke. She tells me she’s not holding her breath. We used to fall for the same guys. I’m a lot younger than Crystal but she’s better looking.

Crystal, despite her baggage at home, made herself available to every guy who bought her a drink. To each his own. She said she’s settling down now, playing for keeps. Her kids, a boy and a girl scare me. I’ve never been good around kids. I just don’t know what to say to them.

I can smell their cigarette smoke from the back of the house, where they like to torture the large, one-eyed rabbit they named Pistachio. I’ve told Crystal it is a goddamn shame what they are doing to a living breathing thing. She always says, "Wait until you have your own, then we’ll see." But she never sees things the way they really are.

It’s hot out and I am feeling the cumulative effect of so many things. I take three aspirins with a glass of cold beer. I feel sick from the sounds of the rabbit squeals. Crystal and her boyfriend, a man my mother would have called "rogue," are thumping around in the bed, calling God down from his heaven.

Her son, throws rocks at the bedroom window that faces out into the back yard. I open my window. I yell "STOP!" They laugh hysterically. The rabbit is motionless, his only eye, blood red, frozen in fear.. I think of calling the police. I turn on the big fan in the house to block out the noise, and though my skin is moist, though I am shaking with cold.

The rhythmic thumping has stopped. I hear the murmur of their voices in the sweet afterglow before reality sets in. I want to go and rescue that rabbit, but fear grabs me by the throat. I tell myself I don’t know what to expect. But my heart knows. I stand at the door. I wrap my arms around my waist. Squeeze myself hard and think it might not be a bad thing to have a man of my own.

Basket Case

I pretty much knew the neighborhood kids, but I hadn’t seen this one before. Still living at home in the early 80’s, while attending a local college, I was in my parents’ backyard, looking through the open mesh of the cyclone fence surrounding the churchyard next to our neat brick Philadelphia row house. At first I thought he was just kicking a ball around, alone in the clean swept street, as if he was mad about something, until I heard that cracking sound. Dry matted black hair, unbarbered and uncombed, in a green and dingy white striped T-shirt so oversized it hid his arms, long khaki green baggy shorts that nearly swallowed the pencil-slim brown legs, dirty unlaced high-top sneakers, tongues wagging with each step, grimy shoestrings dragging the ground, he had the look of children who, when they don’t show up at home at dinner time, aren’t missed.

What he was kicking, with a ferocity more like assault than play, was a small peach basket. He stomped it savagely, until its cylindrical symmetry shredded to an inchoate scattering. Then he attacked the shards as though each splint of wood were an enemy deserving of his singular attention.

I bet he’s a mean one.

Lucky for him that Pop was still at work. Anyway, I was sure I could handle this.

"Just what do you think you’re doing, young man?" I shouted as I started up the alley toward the street, my pace quickened with righteous indignation. "Look at that mess you’re making in front of somebody else’s house! Who’s supposed to clean this up? Now you pick up your trash!"

He froze for a second as if struck, or waiting to be. He lowered his small head and stooped in what seemed to be meek compliance. Then he began to collect the splintered pieces of wood. But he kept dropping them back to the ground, as if in silent defiance.

Oh, so we have a smart ass.

I brought an empty trash can from the side of the house and approached the offender, resolved to personally supervise the cleanup. Pop was the traditional Atlantic Street enforcer, the bane of unruly children, alley weeds, and milk crate basketball hoops nailed to telephone poles in his domain, and I was my father’s daughter.

But once I reached him with the trash can, I saw his hands, such as they were. Worse, he had no arms to speak of, only misshapen stubs that sprouted from his shoulders like eyes on a potato. Attached to the end of each was a claw-like appendage, book-ended with two knobs that, according to the standard genetic codebook, should have lengthened into dextrous gripping fingers. One of humankind’s most distinctive characteristics is the opposable thumb, but he had none. I nearly dropped the can I was carrying. I had read about the thalidomide babies of twenty-some years before: His arms looked like those afflicted children – a "seal boy."

A thousand questions flooded my mind. How did he eat? Brush his teeth, comb his hair, blow his nose? Hold a pencil to write his schoolwork? Join his hands in prayer… did he pray? What would this child have to say to God? Who was I to deny him his anger?

"What-what’s your name?"

"Eddie," a soft voice mumbled.

"Well, Eddie, let’s you and me clean up this mess, OK?"

I helped him gather the fragile fragments, thin and delicate and formless as himself, and we deposited them gently into the container.

"Now let’s see about those sneakers."

I kneeled before him, folded the tongues smoothly back into the shoe tops, threaded the laces into a neat criss-cross, and shaped him a firm, tight bow. I spun him around slowly, full circle, brushing the dust from his clothes, and laid my hands upon his damp slight shoulders. As he turned again and at last shyly faced me, I finally caught his large deep brown eyes and held them.

"My name is Miss Hall, Eddie. Thank you so much for your help. You’re a good worker! I hope I’ll see you again, sweetheart." He nodded, returned my warm smile with a bright one of his own, and skipped back down the street, a bounce of affirmation. I was sure that I would.

A month or two passed before I saw Eddie again, in the Shop N Bag two blocks away. Standing at the head of the aisle next to my check-out line, he seemed to be waiting to bag groceries for customers, as other neighborhood boys frequently did to earn the odd quarter. While he wasn’t actually packing any bags, his face shone with the hopefulness of someone who’d bought a lottery ticket and awaited the outcome of the draw. I called to him by name and waved him over. He remembered me, and accepted with a big smile the quarter I gave him, his pincers gently probing my open hand. After several painstaking attempts, he grasped the coin and deposited it into his side pants pocket.

After that, I often watched for Eddie on Atlantic Street and in the neighborhood. He must have moved away, for I never saw him again, though his memory stays close to me even now. I had so wanted to be a friend to him, and I continue to wish for him better luck than the hands chance first dealt him.

Vernita Hall is a lifelong Philadelphia resident, a LaSalle College (now University) graduate, and an M.F.A. candidate at Rosemont College.

Two Wheels

Music from my iPod blares through a single, small speaker, almost drowning out the white noise of the always-on fan and my muttered swearing. My fingers are filthy, almost black, like those of a child who’s been playing in the dirt, like I’m young enough not to care again. The air in the shop smells like oil, industrial orange hand soap, and rust. I’m bent over a bike, wielding a pair of fifteen-millimeter wrenches, wrestling with a pair of nuts that have rusted onto an axle, waiting for oil to creep into the threads, wondering just how I got there.

There are the easy answers, or the smart-ass ones, at least. Wanting to do something different for my senior year of undergrad and needing a change from my job in recycling, spent sorting term papers from the beer bottles in every miserable sort of weather you can get in the mountains of western North Carolina, I had changed over to the Community Bike Shop. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Before I could even ride bicycles, my father was showing me how to fix them. He wasn’t a professional by any means, but he was handy with a wrench, and that’s good enough as far as machines are concerned. Whenever he walked his bike home with a flat tire when I was a boy, he would call me to his side as both a student and a helper, showing me how, with a pair of screwdrivers, to pry a tire’s bead free of the rim, asking me to hand him tools as they were needed. As I grew, he showed me more: how to install new cables and brakes; which screws I should turn to calibrate a derailleur; how to disassemble and grease a hub. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll never starve through ignorance.

Fixing bikes makes me happy. Back then, I would climb the steep, creaking stairs out of our basement workshop, hands black with grease, grime, and unknown gunk, smiling. I was a neat child, afraid of getting my hands dirty, but not with bikes in our workshop, where the bare bulbs overhead reflected their light off a dozen mirrors we’d found to brighten every dim corner. Even now, that stubborn layer of filth makes me feel young, whether I’m emerging again from my childhood workshop or from the shops in the mountains of western North Carolina and the streets of Center City Philadelphia where I’ve found employment.

Before we had books in common, my father and I shared bikes. I felt proud when I could do something the way he had showed me. I hoped he would be proud, too.

No, that’s not it either.

My father was disappointed by my inability to ride a two-wheeler by the age of six. He never said so directly, but I could tell. In 1944, when he was seven, he and his parents had fled their home in Riga, Latvia, never to return. He had taken his bicycle and all that he could carry on his back. Never a driver, my father found his freedom balanced on two narrow wheels. He only wanted me to have that same freedom. I, however, was content with my training wheels, wishing only for the freedom from falling.

What I found acceptable at six, when my kindergarten classmates were, one by one, announcing they could ride a two-wheeler, became an annoyance at seven, a social hindrance by eight. Even my younger friends could ride without training wheels. How was I to advance my social standing if I couldn’t go ride bikes with my friends? And yet, fear ruled me. Even with training wheels, even before, when I rode a tricycle, I had had my share of falls, but they were nothing compared to the imagined calamity of tumbling off a two-wheeler. I could break my head open. My brains might leak out through the vents in my helmet. Worse, I could skin both of my knees.

I tried to reason with Dad, asking if I could have just one training wheel removed. Nothing worked. My new two-wheeler – cobbled together, like all of my family’s bikes, from the best parts that could be found in the trash of the Squirrel Hill and Spruce Hill neighborhoods around my house and adorned with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles logo on the frame’s top tube – taunted me whenever I visited our basement workshop. It was everything that was cool for a second-grader.

The bike was both a reward and a practical consideration. At eight, I was getting too big for my training bike, my knees brushing against the tassels that hung from the ends of the handlebars whenever I pedaled. Dad knew that, sooner or later, I’d give in, and he wasn’t going to move the training wheels to another bicycle.

I did give in. Maybe some mental oil seeped in and freed me from my fear, a fear that had oxidized, and had me frozen like a rusted nut. One morning, I woke up from a dream about flying, ready to mount up and ride. Those first tentative jaunts only took me from one end of the basement to the other, but the ease with which I rode made me wonder, even then, what had been standing in my way. In that moment, I was in love. I knew my father’s freedom then.

Back in the shop, the nuts haven’t given yet. My muscles are burning and the wrenches have left grooves in my hands. I leave the wrenches hanging from either side of the axle and turn to the peg-board above the work bench, reaching for the hickory handle of the rubber mallet. The large, black head of the mallet makes it seem almost cartoonish, the sort of tool that I should pull from nowhere, but its reality is comforting. Returning to the recalcitrant bicycle, I give one of the wrenches a solid whack, making the whole bike bounce, though it’s clamped to a heavy repair stand, and shaking the other wrench loose. Another whack as the clang of the fallen wrench dies. The nut turns a few degrees. I move to the other side, picking up the second wrench, replacing it on the nut, and discarding an imperfect metaphor with another swing of the mallet.
Hilary B. Bisenieks is a lifelong Philadelphian
known far and wide (in West Philly) as "that guy with the kilt." He
recently returned north after a four-year sojourn in the mountains of western
North Carolina, where he completed his studies of Creative Writing and English
Literature at Warren Wilson College. In his free time, Hilary builds and rides
bicycles, both silly and sensible. Hilary can be found online at www.hilarybisenieks.com.