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[img_assist|nid=4528|title=Who Do Your Think by Kristen Solecki © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=284]I went to the beach in a blindfold today, because once you asked me to. I wore the scarf you chose for me by touch: the one I wore often. The same one I told you I loved, and never mentioned the garish pattern made me cringe. Tied around my eyes, I could not see the pattern any more than you could when you chose it. It was a fitting penance.

After writing nearly forty pages this morning, I needed to go out and get some air. No one opposed me. I could not stay in the house a moment longer. The glaring hole in the line of books on the shelves marked the former resting place of your Braille poetry. The furniture was rearranged. The pages of my manuscript stretched across the floor from my desk to the living room.

Guiltily, I turned to neaten the house. But then I remembered it wasn’t necessary anymore. I was free. I was so selfishly free. No one would slip on the pages. There was no dog to wrinkle them. The stereo remote sat on the kitchen table. No one would complain. I could safely leave a dirty carving knife from dinner last night in the sink.

Every object oppressed me. Each change I have made since you left weighed on my conscience. I had tried to change; did I really try hard enough? Maybe I am selfish. Maybe I pushed too much for what I wanted.

Your last morning here, when I finished work, I should have offered to read to you. I knew you hated the dry computer voice of your electronic reader, and that you got a headache from your headphones. I needed silence to write, so you had no opportunity to use the stereo.

But I wanted sun and wind. I didn’t feel like escaping from the pages of my own book to be imprisoned in someone else’s. So I suggested the beach, wheedling and cajoling while you stood firm. I pushed too hard. You raised your voice.

“If you want to go to the beach, I certainly can’t stop you. I wish you could see how it is for me. Go to your beach once the way I do; see how much you like it then.”

And then I made my last mistake. Apollo, uneasy at our argument, barked loudly. Thoughtlessly, I crouched down and held out my hand. He walked away from you to receive the caress from me. I soothed him without thinking, sliding my tired fingers through his inky black hair.

You froze. I saw your discreetly grasping fingers register his absence. You knew what I had done. I made him my pet, depriving you of your guide. You could never forgive me that.

Some days I wish I hadn’t petted Apollo. I wonder how it would have been. Some evenings I fall asleep wishing I had conceded more, wishing that I had tried harder to change. But some mornings I wake up feeling liberated.

When I stepped outside the car, the heat baked me in a moment. Barefoot, I shuffled awkwardly to the cooler surface of the steps. The wood of the stairs crunched loudly, like when I spill sugar on the kitchen floor and am too busy to clean it up. You always told me I should be neater, and I did try. Stepping off the bottom stair was like landing on the moon: a bounce and a quiet “whooph.” But if the sand is sugar, the moon is flour. Or at least, that is what I imagine, but I do not know any astronauts to ask. The sugary powder beneath me shifted with each step, creating an unaccustomed strain from ankles to calves.

Coming around the dunes, the wind hit me like a punch, abrading my face with tiny stinging missiles. I kept walking, and after the first attacks, the wind became docile and refreshing. I heard a throaty chuckle, which became a series of staccato shrieks as the gulls swooped in. I smiled up at the hungry gathering that wheeled in the air above me. Each pass of a seagull intercepted the sunlight on my face, a shadowy caress.

Further down the beach, I caught the hiss and lap of liquid fire. The damp chill came seeping up from the sand between my toes. I flinched when I stepped into a slimy mound of seaweed. You always kept your shoes on at the beach, because you were afraid of fishing hooks and washed up syringes. Peeling it from my toes, I cast it aside like a discarded streamer, and approached the water’s edge. The sand changed to pebbles beneath my feet.

My heel was pricked by a sharp edge, but it was not the cast-off of some junkie. It was a shell. Groping in the sand, I picked up clam castanets, which I clacked together while improvising a flamenco dance. No one was there to laugh at me. The empty shells withstood the abuse for a few minutes, and then the last filaments were torn asunder. I held two halves in my hands and they stank of salt and decay.

Then, a roar! A hissing angry snake of water boiled around my legs, and numbed them instantly.  I felt it shove past me impatiently, charging up the beach, and then return to flirt with my feet, trying to lure me into the ocean. Standing there I remembered that poem you loved, which was too long. “I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. / I do not think they will sing to me.” They did not sing to me either, though I stayed all day, blind and alone.

I have a confession to make. The sunset was not the same when it was merely waning warmth on my skin, and I did not love it as I usually do. But I did not hate it either.

 

 

  Mary Kate O’Donnell is a nineteen-year-old sophomore English and biology major at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. This is her first published piece.

            He used earth words and planted gardens and liked going down south and road trips to nowhere. He had tattoos of the Devil on his forearm, and looked like God, with big gentle blue eyes, open, steady and true, able to see beyond the simple human spirit. He was a great kisser. Like me. But quiet. And deep. Not deep in a click-your-fingers-at-a-coffeehouse deep; and not the kind of temporary deep you think you see in the face of a student of philosophy. He was deep like rivers that cut through canyons as old as the brachiopod lingula and the horse shoe crab.  

            I met him when I was young. In a bookstore. Buying war novels for my father. I liked to call him Mr. Smith, but his name was Steve. His hair was long and kinky and I remember I could smell his clean, hippy, 25-year-old smell as he flushed spines in the history section.  He said: “You see, you have this calming affect on me. I actually want to struggle with you.” And I thought to myself, I want to run my fingers through the algebraic recipe that cooked up the lines of your hair. I was on fire. I perused picture books of the American desert and listened to Navajo tunes. I bought a dress covered with flowers that came down to my ankles and I wore sandals.

            He struggled with me. And then he took off. Restless. One day in May. He rode with some friends in an orange VW bus out to a reservation in New Mexico to study art and history and eat mushrooms and pledge a vow of celibacy to the Great Spirit in hopes that one day he would understand the differences between love and lust.

            I waited. But he didn’t come back. The Spring was over. The warm, tired, lovesick days of August too, and eventually the fall and then the winter.

            I fell for a waiter. I made love to a Jew who became a Rabbi. I danced meringue with Paul Garcia in a club named Brazil. I kissed Doug, Scot and Eamon and the Twelve Apostles and a Moroccan named Arie. And I gave myself to a drummer one Leap Year because I lost count on how many times he said: you are so beautiful, baby.

            I married a Spaniard who barely spoke English and barely brushed his teeth. He was tall and lanky and had a long face like El Greco and chased me around the bedroom. “Come here, wife. My sex is hard for you.” We lived in a piso on the 4^th floor of a rundown building in Vallekas, a gypsy suburb of Madrid. I made tortillas and arroz con leche and sometimes crouched on the terraza under the hot sun and watched stray cats fuck on rooftops. I cried for home. And dreamed of humidity and the green, oxygen pine trees and grass that grows with dew stuck to each blade like a rock climber descending a cliff.

            I became a woman. Desired. Pedestaled. Unwoven. Torn. Shredded. Real.

            I made two babies. Moved to Jersey. Bought a home. Divorced. Years passed. In the Spring of ’04 I spread my father’s ashes across the jetty down on Nebraska Avenue. Saying goodbye to the man who taught me how to love. Boyfriends came. Boyfriends went. Sons grew up.

            I bumped into Mr. Smith at a record store one night in February. He was buying vinyl and I was perusing the CDs. I barely recognized him without his long hair. But he still talked smooth and his tattoos were all black and green. And I thought, if I had my own tattoos they wouldn’t be the face of the devil. They’d be words. Words that save me from myself, where God, not man, is the Second Coming and the Third and Fourth. Words when strung together become the only thing in life that’s real—forming a straight line like Time to a Westerner.

            We talked about books for a while. The west.  He didn’t remember much. And so I shrugged when he asked if I wanted to go for a drink. No, I said. Maybe another time.

     

Tracy Shields graduated from Rutgers University, magna cum laude, with a degree in English Literature and Journalism. She has been Concept Editor of the Painted Bride Quarterly since 2001. She’s been published in Word Riot and is a continual contributor to six sentences. She currently works and writes from home in NJ and has two beautiful sons, Daniel and Julien. Please visit her at http://sevenperfumes.wordpress.com

 

[img_assist|nid=4529|title=Blue Mist by Lee Muslin © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=267]They woke together at a rest stop on the interstate, car windows dimmed by frozen breath and through the glass, anemic blue dawn swelling over Wyoming.

She struggled out of the sleeping bag, wrestled with the nest of blankets and pulled at the door. She poured herself out into the empty lot and shuffled a few paces from the car before she buckled over a strip of grass and vomited. It slapped the ground and steam rose from it. The man got out of the car and went to her and put his hands on her shoulders to steady her, to hold her. She heaved again, just water and foam.

"Get your hands off me."

"What can I do?"

"This isn’t your problem." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Drive. We shouldn’t have stopped."

They got back into the beaten silver Saturn and pushed the blankets to the back seat, which was piled with unpacked clothes, some still on hangars, some tangled at the floorboards.

"Jesus, Peter. Why don’t you just hate me?"

He started the car, which struggled in the cold. The engine knocked and shuddered. He drove.

*          *          *

She slapped his hand away from the radio and it stung, and when he pulled away it made him swerve over the line, into the red gravel shoulder, which probably made her hate him all the more.

"Christ. Learn how to drive."

"You hit me."

"I hit your hand."

"I was turning it off."

"I’m listening."

"There’s nothing to listen to, Annie. It’s just Jesus radio. There’s nothing there."

She folded her arms and turned to the window and was sullen for a while.

"I thought they might say something about it."

They were silent for a long time more, listening to AM static rise and fall because Peter was afraid to touch the radio and upset her again, and Annie was too proud to admit that she had been wrong and there was really nothing on the radio about this horrible thing that had happened. Just hallelujah. Just praise the Lord. 

And so it was the End of Days through the long Wyoming desert.

Eventually, when the voices faded, Annie turned off the radio and there was only wind and the hiss of the road.

"This is crazy," she said.

"Yep."

"Yep? What’s that supposed to mean?"

"I was agreeing."

"Yep. Are you a fucking cowboy?"

He didn’t answer. He shifted and drove with one hand.

She didn’t look at him. "Which part?"

"What?"

"I said this was crazy and you agreed."

"Yep."

"Which part did you agree to?"

The road was empty and wide, and so he turned and stared at her. "All of it," he said.

"Keep your eyes on the road."

He turned back.

"And that isn’t an answer. Tell me what you think is crazy."

"That there are no radio stations. That we haven’t been through a town in sixty miles. There’s a storm coming and we don’t have anywhere to stay. Everything."

"What’s everything?"

"Everything that’s happened. Every goddamned thing, Annie. You and me. New York. All of it."

She nodded. That was enough.

Then it was back to the radio.

Annie hit scan and it rolled through the entire AM band without stopping. It started again and stopped on static. She switched to FM and hit a station. Christian. Like everything.

The voice was rattled. It said, What will become of the children?

There were coughs in the pause and shuffling papers.

In the final days when God’s wrath is descended over the Earth and the horsemen have strode among us. What will become of the children?

Annie drew back her hand.

Some say that children are the innocent, but God almighty, the child will pay for the sins of their fathers and death will befall them as it did the children of Pharaoh, and locusts will consume their flesh and flies will fill their eyes.

"Jesus Christ, Annie. Turn it off."

"No."

Peter flicked his finger over the volume knob and the radio went dead. He looked at her and waited for her to scream or hit him again. But she was silent. And then tears came.

"I hate you," she said.

"That’s probably true."

"This is such shitty timing."

"The worst."

"We can’t have a baby now."

He took his hand from the wheel and shifted it toward her. He put it on her leg, covered by the bloated down coat, which he loathed, and had always loathed. She put her hand on top of his and they held each other this way while the long desolation passed outside, while miles of fences flickered by and the morning sun settled on the land like ash.

"I still love you," he said. "I don’t know if that makes any difference, but I do."

"It does." She squeezed his hand. "I don’t know why, but it does."

*          *          *

Miles piled upon miles, and the exits were useless and barren.

"No Services," he said as another sign slipped by.

"How can there be no services? How do people live here if there are no services?"

"I think they drive a long way for services."

"Stop saying services."

"Sorry."

"Fuck this place."

"We’ll find something."

"Fuck you too."

They were quiet for a while.

"I’m hungry," she said.

"Me too."

"I mean it. I’m really hungry."

"When we get to an exit, we’ll see if we can find some services."

"Go to hell." She folded her arms and leaned against the window. "Why didn’t we bring any food with us?"

"Because we were in a hurry. And yesterday I didn’t think we’d have trouble finding some."

*          *          *

They did come to an exit, which wasn’t a town, just a clutter of lots and gravel to either side of the highway, two gas stations, a junkyard, and a McDonald’s.

It was a nameless settlement that had sprouted simply because one old local road rambled out of the country and crossed the interstate.

They came off the highway and crept to the top of the ramp, slick with ice and snowblown. The car slipped and then caught the pavement again.

The station at the end of the ramp had put out orange barricades and a slab of plywood that said NO GAS. They turned left and the tires slipped as they moved onto the overpass and skidded down the other side.

At the other station, a long line of pickup trucks had stacked up at the pumps.

"There’s a McDonald’s," she said.

"You never eat that shit."

"I need to eat. I don’t care what it is."

The snow on the local road had gathered in eddies and he drove slowly over black ice where the tires had no grip. He turned into the parking lot and turned off the engine.

"I don’t want to get caught in the storm," he said. "I think we can make it to Laramie before it hits. If we hurry."

She nodded. "Yeah. Alright."

They got out and the dry wind bit them. Snow blew around their ankles and packed in dusty drifts at the edge of the lot. They shuffled for the door.

Inside, it was yesterday in America. Yesterday, when nothing had happened at all.

Annie ordered breakfast, but the kid behind the counter, an Indian with long black hair and bad skin, told her that it was too late, so she muttered under her breath and walked away. Peter ordered for her.

The kid disappeared into the back and Peter waited. The place was bright. The place was warm. It was good to be warm after the bitter winter night at the side of the road.

Annie sat in a booth against the front window, staring at her open hands. She pulled off her dowdy knit hat and frazzled hair splayed out in wild directions. When Peter had met her, she had been so prim and ordered. Her hair precise, her clothes immaculate, her body angelic.

But this had changed and she had become tangled and wrecked, as they together had wheeled wildly off the rails, and whatever they’d been once, they were no longer.

At the end, they cheated on each other ferociously, for vengeance, to push the other away, to disgust the other and bring the thorny bramble of their undone love to a permanent, fiery end.

And it had worked, and they had ended, squarely and without remorse.

Then on Monday came into their lives news of the baby.

Then on Tuesday came the end of the world.

The kid came back to the counter. "Sorry it’s taking so long. A lot of people didn’t show up today."

"It’s alright."

"We don’t even got the guy that cleans the shitter."

"Damn."

"Just didn’t come in." The kid looked around to see if he was being watched. He leaned in and almost whispered. "Hey. You heard anything?"

Peter shook his head. "No."

"They don’t let us turn on the radio or nothing. So I ain’t heard. But if you heard something–"

"I haven’t. Sorry."

"Okay. Yeah. I’ll bring it out to you in a minute."

[img_assist|nid=4536|title=Untitled by Nicole Koenitzer © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=255]Peter left the counter and walked to the table by the window. He hung over Annie for a while. She looked up at him, regarded him, exhausted and confused, the same way she had looked at her hands. Perplexed by her appendages, baffled that he was still attached to her, and she to him.

He sat across from her. "I have a plan."

She stared.

"We eat. Then we find gas. We can wait in line over there. Then if we drive all day, we can make it to Omaha. If we drive hard, we could make it to Chicago by tomorrow night. We’ll be there for Christmas. Everything will be okay when we get home."

"That isn’t a plan, Peter. That’s just what we were doing anyway."

"It makes me feel better to say it."

The kid came over with a tray of Big Macs in their greasy boxes.

"Sorry it took so long. Some of ’em might be a little fucked up because the guy who knows how to put them together on Tuesdays didn’t show up today, so I just guessed from the pictures."

"It’s okay," Annie said, which was unusually kind.

He lingered, then shuffled back to the counter.

There was honking. A lot of honking and Annie craned her neck to see over Peter’s shoulder.

"What is it?" He turned.

At the gas station, two men were scuffling. One pushed the other and a clumsy swing landed them both in a pile of snow.

From the passenger side of one of the fueling pickups, a woman dropped down, drunk and morbidly obese, shouting incoherent obscenity. While she ranted, she pulled the nozzle from the tank and dragged the hose to the opposite side of the pump island, dousing the truck that was parked there.

A couple of burley men tried to stop her, but they were driven off by a spray of gasoline to the eyes. They howled and scuttered away. She grabbed at one of her breasts. She flipped her middle finger as the gas pooled around her.

Peter switched places at the table. He sat next to Annie so he could watch.

The rest of the pickups in the line started to scatter, banging into each other, honking, jamming up against the wall of the station, against the pumps and islands, steel slapping steel and glass snapping.

The woman chased a few trucks to the extent of the hose. She turned circles and wrapped her legs in it. She fell, struggling, rolling in the gas. She untangled herself and stood and held a lighter to the grill of the truck.

One of the men in the snow, all battered now and dripping with blood, stood up and yelled. He might have been trying to reason with her. She couldn’t hear or didn’t care. She sparked the lighter and lit the pickup on fire.

The flames flashed back up her arm and burned the gas that had soaked into her sweatshirt. People ran from the tangle of trucks as fire chased out over the slicks that had gathered.

The woman screamed and ran and flailed her arm, but the fire jumped to her hair and covered her body. She set fire to the ground as she ran.

The next pickup in line caught fire. The station was a roiling black cloud, a filthy billowing torch, all alight in the snowy morning.

The bloody man tried to stop the burning woman, but she was frantic and slapped at him, and some of the flame jumped across to his coat and his hair.

He tried to get away, but walls of fire rolled up from the pools on the ground. He ran through it but was consumed and collapsed into the snowbank. The fat woman fell behind him and burned.

Annie had taken a bite of the Big Mac. She put it back in the box and pushed it away.

"Why is this happening?

"Why’s what happening?"

"You know what."

"They’re fighting over gas."

"Not that. All of it."

"The usual reasons, I guess."

Annie took the Big Mac and bit it. She stuffed her mouth with it.

Peter felt the heat of the fire on his face through the glass.

He said, "If it would have happened a month ago, would we have broken up? Do you think we would have been so terrible to each other?"

She worked pieces of food around in her cheeks as she thought. "No. No, I don’t think so."

"Why not?"

"We need different things now. Things are different."

"What things?"

"We have new priorities." She looked at him and wiped her mouth with a bunched paper napkin. "It changes everything."

The glass rattled and rumbled. A broad and sucking bulge of fire rose up over the gas station.

"So what do we do?"

"We do what we have to. We make it work."

"Wait," he said. "Wait, are we talking about the bomb or the baby?"

She shook her head. "We’re talking about us."

*          *          *

They left the place behind. The fire department never came. As they slid by the gas station, Annie pressed her hands over her eyes. The burned bodies stuck in Peter’s periphery like shadows, black and stiff against the snow which melted around them in the heat of the soaring fire.

They crept out onto the ramp and back to the interstate.

"We can make it to Laramie," he said.

"Don’t you think we should find gas?"

"Look at the gauge."

"It’s on E."

"Exactly."

"Exactly what? That means it’s empty."

"No, it means we probably have sixty miles left on this tank."

"Sixty miles? It’s on empty, you asshole."

"We’ll be fine, Annie."

*          *          *

At the side of I-80, where the car had run out of gas, Annie paced along the muddy red gravel shoulder, clutching her hands and doubling over, and cursing in a way that kept her warm with hellfire.

Peter sat in the car and waited for her rage to pass.

"You stupid fuck!" She kicked the ground and a hail of gravel hit the car. She turned and walked off.

On the crests of the rocky brown hills around them, pumpjacks nodded in slow succession, draining oil from the earth, scattered across the washes and ridges.

[img_assist|nid=4532|title=Repose by Suzanne Comer © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=257]He watched her walk away and thought, as terrible as she was, as bad as they had been to each other, she was the most important thing left in the world.

He opened the door and called after her. She stopped and turned back.

"What are we going to do, Peter? We don’t have any gas."

"We’ll wait for somebody. We’ll wait for a car."

"There are no cars. There’s a storm coming. Nobody’s driving except us."

"We’re not driving either, actually."

She bit down hard.

"It’s warmer in here," he said. "Just get in the car."

*          *          *

The storm did come, and it consumed them.

They sat together in the back seat on their clothes, bundled under sleeping bags and blankets. The car rocked and shuddered in the wind.

The last pale sun came through the deepening snow on the glass, blue and icy light.

"There’ll be a plow through soon. Or maybe highway patrol. We’ll be fine."

"It’s getting dark."

"It’s just the snow on the windows."

"No. It’s late. The sun’s going down and it’ll get colder."

"We’ll be alright. We can still make it to my mom and dad’s tomorrow night. We’ll have Christmas. It’ll be normal. Everything will be O.K. when we get home."

"It isn’t fucking normal."

"I’m glad you’ll get to meet them."

"Were you ever going to introduce me?"

"Of course."

"When? We’ve been together for eight months."

"They live fourteen hundred miles away."

"You could have figured something out."

"What about you? I’ve only met your mother once, and she lives in Vegas."

"Once is enough for anyone."

"I liked her."

"That’s because you were both drunk and disgusting."

Annie shifted and brought herself closer to him. "Do you think she’s alright? Do you think she’s safe?"

"Definitely. She’s on vacation."

"So?"

"She’s out of the country. I’m sure everything’s fine in Europe."

She put her head on his shoulder, heavy and smelling of wool and sweat. The ridiculous ball on top of her hat tickled his cheek.

"What if they don’t like me?"

"They’ll like you."

"But what if they don’t? Or what if I don’t like them?"

"Annie, everybody is going to like everybody else. Everything is going to be fine."

"But that isn’t true, is it." She slid her arm behind him and held him. "Everything isn’t going to be fine."

"Things will be different, that’s all. It might get harder for a while, but it doesn’t mean it’ll be bad. It doesn’t have to be."

"Are you talking about the bomb again?"

"No. The baby. Weren’t we talking about the baby?"

"I’m cold," she said. "Do you want to make love?"

"What?"

"Do you?"

"I didn’t know that was still an option."

"Well, it is."

"Then yes. Yes, I do."

*          *          *

They did make love, with their clothes mostly on and swaddled in blankets. The windows gathered fog, which froze and glowed in the dusk.

When they had finished, and all of the light had gone out of the sky and the snow that covered the glass had gone dark, they sat together and thought of home.

Sound came from behind them. A slow vibration in the ground became a shudder and a quake. The growl from the highway became a torrent of raging engines and rattling steel.

"Jesus, what is it?" She sat up and scratched at the ice on the rear window.

Headlights burned through the snow and filled the car. Peter wrestled with the blankets and pushed his shoulder against the door to break the seal of ice that had formed. Clumps of snow fell over his freezing hands.

Standing in the gravel with his back to the wind, he watched the tanks pass with armored trucks and Humvees heading south. The headlights on the highway snaked back along the road for miles.

Annie climbed out, still wrapped in her blanket. They watched the convoy pass, too loud to speak over the whistling and growling and screaming of machines.

Annie waved her arms. She moved closer to the road, but none of them slowed.

Eventually, when the end of the convoy came, and the road was silent, a few military semis brought up the rear. A tanker passed, and another pulled to the shoulder and stopped behind them, flooding the place where they stood with light.

[img_assist|nid=4533|title=Guggenheim by Gary Koenitzer © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=202]The engine rattled and knocked. The driver dropped down.

"Are you in need of assistance, ma’am?" The soldier jogged toward them with hands deep in his coat. "They called back and said you were trying to flag us down."

"We ran out of gas," she said. "What’s happening?"

"Gas? Not a problem." He turned and shouted into the light. "Diaz. Grab a gas can."

The passenger door opened and slammed and there was a shuffling in the gravel.

"What’s going on?" Peter said.

"Can’t say."

"Do you know anything about New York?"

"Really can’t say."

The other soldier hustled toward them lugging a brown plastic gas can. She was small and wore thick glasses.

Peter had to pry the frozen gas tank door with a key.

He twisted off the cap and the soldier started to pour.

"Where are you two headed?" she asked.

"Home," Peter said.

"Where’s home?"

"West of Chicago."

"How far west?"

"Suburbs."

She nodded. "Where you coming from?"

"Salt Lake."

"You picked a very bad time to take a very long road trip."

"We’re going to see his family for Christmas," Annie said.

"Have you spoken to them?"

"We couldn’t get through."

The soldier who had been driving scraped his boot in the dirt. "No one can," he said. "Are you married?"

"No," Peter said.

"You two should get married. Make it right in the eyes of the Lord."

Annie took Peter’s hand.

"So," he said, "you planning to take I-80 all the way?"

"Yeah," Peter said.

"Well, maybe when you get to Des Moines, you should quit the interstate."

"Why?" Annie squeezed harder.

"I think you might find the old U.S….uh, the old U.S. highways a more scenic way to travel."

"We’re kind of in a hurry."

"Then you better quit the interstate at Des Moines. You follow?" He stepped closer. "This thing ain’t over, brother. Do yourself a favor and stay off the highway."

He turned and headed back to the truck.

The other one finished with the gas can and put the cap back on the tank.

"I don’t know what kind of mileage you get, but that should get you to Cheyenne. You can find gas there."

"Why are you doing this?" Annie said.

"We’re just here to serve, ma’am."

"That isn’t true."

The soldier stood for a while, quiet and staring, the last of the snow falling between them.

"Sins," she said.

"What?"

"It was Jackson’s idea. To make up for the sins we gotta go do now."

"Diaz! Let’s roll."

"What sins?"

The soldier turned away and jogged back to the truck.

"What fucking sins?"

"Annie, shut up."

"Why?"

"I don’t know. Just shut up."

The engine growled and knocked and the truck rattled back onto the road, heading south.

They stood alone in the dark at the roadside, smelling ice and sage, silent for a while. Too long.

"Start the car," Annie said. "I’m cold."

"I love you," he said.

"I’m cold," she said. "I love you, too."

*          *          *

They sang. They were beset by the madness that comes on long ribbons of American road. They sang through the snarled and snowblown streets of Cheyenne, they sang through the last of Wyoming and six more hours into Nebraska. They told stories about their lives all the way to Omaha.

They laughed and were giddy and then fell into silence in a 24 hour Wal-Mart parking lot which bustled and hummed through the night as lines backed out of doors for generators and palettes of bottled water and Band-Aids and all of the other things that had suddenly become the stuff of life.

They slept in the white glare of mercury vapor lights and in the morning Annie was sick again before they set out at dawn.

Civilization began to coalesce along the road, exits with new frequency, populated by chain restaurants and big box stores.

The radio, which had possessed her the day before, was silent. They had decided, without saying so, that neither cared to know what new and terrible things had happened to the world in the night. All they needed to know of that came from emergency vehicles flickering past and clusters of military trucks at intervals on an otherwise vacant highway.

At the edge of Des Moines, she said, "You never asked me what I was going to do."

She fiddled with the vents and the heat controls.

"Do with what?"

"If I was going to keep it."

"I just assumed."

"How could you assume something like that?"

"I don’t know. I just did."

"You were right. I just mean that I’m curious. That’s all. Why did you think that?"

"It was the way you said it."

"How did I say it?"

"You didn’t say, I’m pregnant. You said I’m having a baby."

She shook her head. She flicked off the heat. "No, I didn’t."

"Yes you did."

"No I didn’t. I said we’re having a baby."

And that was true. She had.

*          *          *

They came to signs that warned of a roadblock. Not the usual orange construction fare, but olive and white military signs which were clearly not suggestions of caution, but statements of very serious intent.

They left the interstate, off onto the snowy, vacant surface streets of the suburbs. The soldier in Wyoming had told them to quit the interstate, and from an overpass, they saw why.

A tangle of trucks and flickering lights scattered across cordons. Semis were being searched, minivans turned inside out. An entire living room had been assembled on the side of the road from a moving truck that was being taken apart. Lamps and sofas and an oversized television in proper arrangement in the snow.

*          *          *

On old U.S. Highway 30, things were clear. The wind had kept the snow off the road, blown into drifts and culverts.

They drove all day through old America, town after tiny town forgotten when the interstate had opened and sucked away what traffic had flowed through these old veins. And surrounded by wide, white fields were main streets lined by storefronts, now vacant, and other streets that crept off to the edges, shaded by broad old oaks that covered dignified, forgotten houses.

The sun fell behind them and winter dusk came early again, and then finally they came to the Mississippi and Illinois beyond.

They stopped so that Annie could piss.

There had been no town for miles, and there wouldn’t be for miles more, and even when they found one, nothing would be open. So this place was as good as any.

She walked away from the road, crunching snow out into a field. Peter leaned against the car and looked down the road, out into the strange silver dark, which wasn’t dark at all. The light of unencumbered stars and sliver of moon on the snow which had gathered against the broken stalks of harvested corn, and in the still he heard in the air a river of traffic from the interstate, two or three miles away, a brief stretch of reprieve, unhindered by barricades after Davenport.

It was this way that he remembered home. Still and perfect in winter, the smell of snow, if there was such a thing, and the rush of traffic somewhere out in the dark.

And then a light swelled in the sky.

The sky went blue like day. Annie was forty feet away, squatting in the field in sudden noonday. She fell backward and scrambled to her knees and then the light faded. It drew back across the sky, painting stars again as it receded to the east.

He heard Annie struggle in the snow, then saw her again, jogging toward the road.

"What the fuck? Peter, what was that?"

He listened.

"Peter?"

He listened and watched the sky, but there was nothing. She moved forward and fell into him. He held her, squeezed her in his arms. She was shaking.

He had stopped counting by thousands when the sound came, a low roar a minute late, which was the end of Chicago.

*          *          *

They drove and said nothing.

They drove until the places they passed by and through became familiar to him, became places he had been before, roads he had driven once, roads he had crossed twice, and then places that he called home.

They stopped in front of his house, which was an average sort of American house in an average American suburb, part of the sprawl pressing fingers out into the fields.

The lights were still on. That was good. Strands of Christmas lights lined the eaves and angles. A tree glimmered in the window. The lights wouldn’t stay on forever, but tonight at least, they were bright, and they were home.

A woman came to the glass and cupped her hands over her eyes to see outside.

"Is that your mother?"                                                    

"Yep."

"Fucking yep. Honest to God."

"Don’t be nervous."

"I’m not nervous. I’m scared."

"Yeah. Me too."

They got out of the car and walked together toward the house. His mother disappeared and he could hear her yelling to his father somewhere inside.

To the east, the sky was burning red, and at its edges, orange light broke through strange clouds, all black and scattered out over the horizon.

A breeze had swelled toward them, but it would shift by morning. He was sure that it had to. He was sure of it.

"Everything’s okay now," he said. "We’re here."

"Yes," she said. "We’re here."

"We shouldn’t stay outside though."

"No. We shouldn’t."

"Come in."

She took his hand. She squeezed it. They walked together out of the cold and into the house.

DJ Kinney is the author of The End of Oranges, an unpublished collection of short stories which examines themes of love and calamity under difficult, often surreal circumstances. Stories from The End of Oranges have been published in Eureka Literary Magazine, Eclipse, Puckerbrush Review, Allegheny Review, Vincent Brothers Review and others. DJ lives and works in Portland, Oregon with his miniature dachshund John R. Crichton, Jr.

 

There is a homeless man living in our house.

I can’t really complain, I suppose, since we walked away from the house two months ago, and when the gavel falls at the Lancaster County Courthouse in another ten days and turns it into the property of JeffFi Mortgage, it won’t be ours anymore. But until that happens, my wife and I are still on the deed, and it’s still our house, on what was our block, where our son played in the backyard with our dog Libby and our neighbors’ kids. We used to live here, in this house, on this block, in this development across from a retention basin where frogs make froggy noises at night. Hence Jeremiah Place: our developer thought naming the development after the old Three Dog Night song was the height of cleverness.

But even though it is narrowly, technically, still our block, I’m not sure what to do about the homeless man living in our house.

That’s not entirely true. I do know what to do. I can call 911. Or I can call JeffFi, assuming I can ever get someone on the phone who isn’t from Bangalore and knows what to do when I call. Hell, I could just walk in the door. After all, I still have the key, since JeffFi was too stupid to change the lock even after I sent them two letters saying change the damn locks and winterize the damn house—it’s the middle of February, you asshats.

Just to clarify: I did not actually use the word “asshat.” It’s a word I learned from my 16-year-old son. But, given the circumstances, it seems to fit.

Eight months ago two guys in khaki colored shirts and brown pants served Gwen the foreclosure notice at 9:15 in the morning. Gwen worked for County Children and Youth, and she’d been up all night, taking an abused child into custody. She’d not quite fallen asleep, and I had told her when our financial problems first started that nobody would ever be coming to the door like this, that I’d take care of it before things reached the level of sheriffs and courthouses.

When we’d received the first notice, the one that my lawyer called an “Act 91” letter, I tried minimizing its importance. This was not easy, given the fact than an Act 91 was designed by the Pennsylvania Department of Banking to be written in a manner precisely so you will not minimize its importance. It’s meant to make you piss yourself.

But I’m good. I brushed it off. So I figured I could do it again when she came to my office.

Here’s how that conversation went:

“I almost hit a duck.”

 “Gwen?”

“A duck. I almost hit a damn duck.”

“Gwen, what’s wrong?”

“You told me this wasn’t going to happen.”

I guessed this had something to do with the mortgage even before Gwen said that, but I didn’t let her know. Denial is a gas, a vapor. It seeps into everything if you let it.

“Talk to me. What’s the matter?”

I meant the exact opposite of that. Don’t talk to me. I will only have to find some other form of emotional defense.

“We’re fucked. We’re fucked. We’re going to lose the house.”

When Gwen gets angry, she mixes crying and rage into one, mashed-up, superheated emotion. She tears up, but she doesn’t cry, exactly. No sobbing lamentations, not even understated sniffling. The cry does not move one inch beyond her tear ducts. At the same time, she shows me the serrated edge of violence. Maybe she’ll throw something. Maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll just slam shit around. Like the paper in her hand, thick with legal-sized documents folded to fit the letter-sized pleadings they were attached to, making the whole of it look thicker, plumper, and all the more intimidating—like its accusatory language couldn’t be contained on mere paper but needed to spill out and beat me up.

“We are not going to lose the house. Jesus, Gwen, I work at a bank. I know how this goes. I know how this game is played.”

Which was true. I did know how the game was played. I knew we’d lose the house.

Now that we no longer live there, there’s no reason to drive past our house except anger or revenge. It’s not near any of my life’s touchstones anymore—not where I worked, not near the house we now rent, not near Jason’s school, not especially close to anything, really. Which is why I’m surprised to see anyone living there in the first place.

I drive past, slowly but not too slowly, like a stalker whose heart isn’t quite in it. I had left the basketball stuff in the driveway, thinking that the ghosts of Jason and his friends might still want to shoot a round of H-O-R-S-E, but now the only thing there is a mid-80’s Buick. So I pull up behind it and get out of my car, but then what? What do I do? What’s the protocol? I’ve been going to work earlier and earlier so Gwen won’t have to look at me, but for Squatter Guy I have no coping mechanism.

I stand by my car for maybe 45 seconds. I fiddle with my BlackBerry, looking for some newish email to distract me. Finding none and hoping it’s not because they cut my service, I put it back in my pocket and start heading towards the door, trying to walk very softly, then realizing that it’s still my house and I’m not the trespasser here.

I don’t go to the door, though. Instead, I cut across the lawn, which is just starting to look unkempt, to the window. Squatter Guy has the blinds pulled down only half the way. I walk right up to the window. Torso up, I see a vague silhouette of a man, like the blinds are keeping him in a witness protection program. Torso down, gray sweats.

I stare at the window, waiting for him to pull the shades in either one direction or another. He doesn’t. I spend about 45 seconds like this then walk back to my car.

 

I had seen plenty of legal captions and documents before, but never one with my name on. I’d always wondered what it would be like, but now I didn’t have to. I stared at the paperwork that Gwen had thrown on my desk moments earlier, reading that caption, over and over again:

In the court of common pleas of

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Civil Action-Mortgage Foreclosure Charlotte National Bank, As Trustee of Jefferson Financial Corporation, Asset Backed Pass Through Certificates, Series 2005-r-7 Under The Pooling And Servicing Agreement Dated As Of September 1, 2005 Without Record

vs.

You, Seth Weinstein and Gwendolyn Weinstein,  Deadbeat Losers, Who Took Out Too Much Loan Than You Could Possibly Afford And You’d Have Known That  If You’d Have Not Had Your Heads Up Your Ass And Actually Looked At The Adjustable Rate Which Was Going To Go Up To 9.5% On A $388,000.00 Mortgage But You Figured You’d Be Able To Refinance It Because Housing  Prices Always Go Up And Ha, Ha, Ha You Sucker, Lost That Bet Didn’t You, But So Did We Because We Sold That Mortgage, Then Sold It Again, And Now  Jeff Fi Is In The Crapper Along With Everybody Else, So We’re Both In This Together, Aren’t We?

Husband and Wife.

  

When we moved into the house in Jeremiah Place, Jason was nine, I had just jumped from residential to commercial, and Gwen was working as a sales rep for a company that sold used construction equipment. She drove to various places in Central and Eastern Pennsylvania and Northern Maryland, often wearing her trademark hard hat with a Hello Kitty decal on the front. She made more money than me, more money than any of the men who were sales reps at her company, and, with all that, we could finally afford a really great house.

Two years later, she was back at school, finally completing her Bachelors Degree at Millersville, then driving back and forth to Temple to get her Masters, all so she could work more hours for less money—way less, gaping chasms less—doing what she really wanted to do, which was to rescue kids with cigarette burns on their genitalia in the middle of the night. 

I could have had a conversation with her back then. I could have pointed out that we’d purchased a whole lot of house. That we needed her money to afford it. That what she wanted to do didn’t make sense unless we sold the house, took the equity we had, and put a really big down payment on a smaller place. It’s what the lending officer in me would have done. Here’s the thing, though. The socially unacceptable secret. There aren’t many ways to randomly display testosterone when you’re a middle-aged loan officer with bad knees and a receding hairline. But they do exist. In my case, those ways involved home equity loans. And credit cards. And refinances. And credit cards again.  Debt was great. Debt was wonderful. Debt allowed me to be both stoic and supportive. Debt rocked. 

[img_assist|nid=4526|title=Leap by Jayne Surrena © 2009|desc=Jayne is a Philadelphia native who has been actively showing her art since she graduated from the University of the Arts in 2006 with a BFA in painting. She has recently returned to UArts to receive her masters in Art Education.|link=node|align=right|width=344|height=604]

  I leave early again. Gwen doesn’t ask why. She’s in the kitchen, pouring cranberry juice. Jason—I’m not sure where Jason is. In his room, maybe, with the boxes from the move still mostly filled with stuff.  Gwen kept telling him, half-heartedly, to unpack them before she finally gave up. Only the computer and the Game Boy have seen light. The sheriff’s sale is nine days away.

I drive from this house that I rent—a house that I will not call “our house,” or “my house,” not yet, not today, not tonight—and pull to the end of this development, which doesn’t have full-grown trees. Granted, my old development didn’t have full-grown trees, either. But here I notice and resent their shortness, their lack of maturity.  There’s lots to resent here, including the fact that I took this place so Jason would graduate next year in his same school district and on his same basketball team, and I thought I’d get some kind of credit for that.

I am about to confront a strange man in a familiar place. I pull up in the driveway. This time, if there are any ghosts still here, I imagine my tires rolling over them, cracking their incorporeal bones. I get out of the car.  I consider honking the horn, announcing my presence, but decide against it. I don’t need to announce my presence. This is still my house.

I then notice that Squatter Guy’s car is not in the driveway. Or maybe I noticed it subliminally, as I was pulling in, and the thought that nobody would be there to confront me made me fearless.  Regardless, I’m here. I pull out my key, wondering if it will work.  It doesn’t. I stand in front of my door, hovering between panic and rage.

Then I turn the doorknob without thinking. It opens.
I’m in my house. Again. Still.

There is furniture in my house. Not mine. A loveseat by the wall where my bookcase used to be—greenish, worn, kind of velvety. A thirteen-inch TV-VCR combo, early 90’s vintage from the looks of it, sitting on a wooden chair—also greenish, but with some sort of yellow in the paint mix. A coffee table, oddly placed closer to the TV than the loveseat.  Recent copies of People and Sports Illustrated, and a not-quite-recent copy of, what, The Weekly Standard? What the fuck? Do I have a neo-con squatter here?

Into the living room. A card table, two chairs, both the same as the wooden chair the TV was sitting on. More magazines. Another People, a Rolling Stone. Against a wall, two boxes, long and narrow—one lying on its side against the molding, the other vertical, its top resting where a picture of Jason hitting a three-pointer used to hang. IKEA boxes. I look inside, trying to figure out what it’s supposed to look like when it’s assembled, but I can’t tell. It’s just a bunch of birch.

I start to look into the kitchen but stop. I am close enough to see a white refrigerator, but I don’t want to look further. I’m suddenly afraid of looking at his refrigerator magnets.

I leave my house. I try to lock the door behind me, fail, then run to my car. 

   

I’m worthless at work. I want to lash out at someone, but I am not a lash-out kind of guy. I have a software financing package on my desk, and some lease syndication deals that need attention, and I really wish I were a lash-out kind of guy. It would help me, I think. I could do all sorts of rage.  People would live in fear, trying to work around me, manage me, plan things so the rages didn’t happen, but, of course, none of those coping devices would work because I’d be as unpredictable as a tornado, a tsunami, a housing-price-fueled recession.

But none of that is true, so I settle for being useless.  And if I’m going to be useless, I may as well be useless at my own house.

I get in my large, red, stupid, SUV. There is a duck—one single, loveless duck—standing in front, staring at the grille. I honk the horn. I wait for the duck to honk back. He doesn’t. He just stares. I honk again. Nothing. He is not moving.  He just stands there in the parking lot, daring me to make him move. I could back out. There is no car in the adjacent parking space.

Instead, I inch closer. I think to myself I am playing chicken with a duck. I smile at that thought. It’s the most confrontation I’ve had with any creature in months, maybe years. I kind of like it. But only for a second. Then I start to feel something truly awful. I’d like to say it’s compassion for the duck, and revulsion at the thoughts I just had towards it. I know neither of those are it. I back out through the adjacent parking space, and I head to my house.  

[img_assist|nid=4544|title=Brooklyn Bridge by Greg Lamer © 2009|desc=Greg graduated from Montclair State University. He currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri where he sells books and takes photographs of people and buildings|link=node|align=left|width=450|height=299]

Today, I have it mapped out.  I am going to confront this man. I have an outline, a plan of attack. I will grab something, something heavy and capable of causing a body to gush blood, and stick it in the back of my car. I will pull into the driveway. If Squatter Guy’s car is in that driveway, I’ll box the little fucker in. I will go inside. I will tell him he has to leave. I will not have to use the heavy object. Displaying it will be enough. That and my forceful presentation. I am a peaceful guy, but I am capable of faking menace.

He will leave. I haven’t figured out what happens after that, but he will leave.

By the way, if you’re ever thinking of getting a homeless guy out of your abandoned house by force, cars don’t have crowbars anymore. I find this out when I go to check the trunk. Nothing heavy. Nothing metallic and unforgiving.  My car knows me. It knows I have a cell phone and a Triple A card. Crowbars are only for bad movies now. I shut the trunk. I open it again, thinking I might have missed some other dense object, but no, not unless I want to throw a miniature spare tire at Squatter Guy. I shut the trunk again. If it were my old house, I’d look in the garage for something, but I don’t have a garage. I look in the back seat. There’s a clipboard. On the floor is a pen with no cap and a large paper clip. I think about fashioning them into weapons, then smile, then laugh, then abruptly stop laughing.

Just me. It will have to be just me and Squatter Guy.

  

I am here. It is 11:30 in the morning. In two hours, the county sheriff will ask if there are any bids to my house. The only one who will bid will be the bank’s attorney. A gavel will hit a wooden plate, not too firmly, not too softly, somewhere between a click and a pound, because there are 41 houses on the list today and a guy could get carpal tunnel if he kept swinging that thing too hard.

That’s okay. I don’t need two hours for this. I will be back at my office soon. This will only be a long lunch.

I pull behind the old ’80s Buick. Right behind it. Practically grinding against its bumper. I walk away from the driveway, onto the grass, which is starting to look a little ragged.

I knock on the door

I wait. Ten, fifteen, twenty seconds.

I knock again, then hit the buzzer. I’d forgotten I had a buzzer. I never had to buzz my own door, I guess.

Seven, ten, fifteen seconds. Buzzer again.

I hear muffled sounds, speaking, footfalls. The door opens. Squatter Guy is real. He is taller than me, which, admittedly, isn’t saying much. He’s younger, but not by much, either. More hair, less fat. Round-rimmed John Lennon glasses. T-shirt with the insignia of the Iowa Hawkeyes and blue gym shorts. As a Penn State grad, I have an immediate, visceral dislike of that. He doesn’t deserve to be wearing a Big 10 t-shirt.

 “This is my house,” I say, in a voice that may or may not be calm 

 “Come in,” he says, in a voice that’s definitely calm. I resent that even more than the t-shirt.

I look around. He has started putting together some of the IKEA stuff, but it’s only partially assembled. I think it’s a bookcase. Or maybe an entertainment center.

 “How long have you been here?” I ask him.

“A while, a while,” he says. I focus on the accent. Not Central Pennsylvania, not at all. A little bit Jersey, north but not too far north. He sits down on the loveseat. “Do you want a tour?” He smiles. It’s not a nasty smile at all. That unnerves me even more 

“Look, this is my house. You don’t belong here.”

 “You won’t either soon.”

I start to pull one of the empty wooden chairs towards the loveseat, but stop. Instead, I take the thirteen-inch TV off the chair it’s sitting on, put the TV on the ground, and use that chair.  “I want you to leave. Now.”

 “Aren’t you the least bit curious what the hell I’m doing here?”

“Yeah, but I’m not going to ask.”

“Why not?” He leaned back, practically being swallowed up by the loveseat in the process.

 “This is my house. For the next 90 minutes, it’s my house. I want you out of it.”

 “I’m not going. And you really can’t make me.” He has the same tone of voice I used when I was denying someone a loan. No, more than that; when I was denying a customer who was already into us, who needed more money, just a little bit more to cover expenses, a little extension on a line of credit, and I’d say no. We can’t. We just can’t. It’s not personal. Though I’d never say that last part, because I was already condescending to them just by the denial itself.

I get up and walk towards the pile of IKEA wood. I grab a plank of something light colored and smooth, and begin smacking it in my hand. “Look, you’re trespassing. I want you out of here now.”

“I’m not going until the sheriff comes and changes the locks.”

Still no anger. Still no reaction. 

God, I want to hit him first. I want to hit him with this goddamn Swedish wood. I want to crack his head open with Blaarg or Kräppi.

“I think you should leave,” he says in a voice that seems almost kind.

I swing the piece of wood, aiming for the television, but I have to aim low since I placed it on the floor. The mechanics of my attempt at destruction throw me off. I hit the side of the TV, not the tube. As my right knee buckles, I pitch forward, onto the top of the TV, into the coffee table, scattering books and magazines.

He grabs me while my head is spinning, and I’m still in a daze, not sure if he’s helping me up or throwing me out. I get my answer when he lifts me under my right arm, opens the door with his left and gently deposits me, standing, outside. I think I hear him say “I’m sorry,” but I could be wrong.

I crumple to the ground. I’m dizzy, and I notice blood coming out my nose. I stay on the ground a while, a long while. I want to throw up, but I can’t. I want to cry, but I don’t. I just pant and gasp and stay down, down so far I don’t even notice a township police cruiser pulling up in the driveway, and a cop walking up to me.

“Are you okay?” he says.

“What?”

 

[img_assist|nid=4527|title=Wayne by Corey Armpriester © 2009|desc=A native Philadelphian, Corey Armpriester grew up in a military family bringing new places, people and influences frequently into his life. At the age of fifteen, photography became his medium of expression.|link=node|align=right|width=375|height=562]

“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

I look at the kid in front of me. Can’t be more than 23, 24. Tall, about 6’3”, he’s leaning over me, trying to figure out whether I’m a victim or a perpetrator. Maybe I’m giving off the vibe of both.

“I’m alright. I just, well, tried to get into my house.”

“What do you mean?” I sense a shift in the cop’s voice. I realize I’d better pull the threads of middle class respectability together quickly. I stand up, haltingly, with some imbalance and fuzziness, but I stand.

“This is my house. I left it. I’m being foreclosed on. Today. In about 45 minutes, it won’t be my house, since it’s going to sheriff’s sale. But I just wanted to look around one last time.” I feel something in my eye. I hope it’s dirt, and not tears. I pull out my driver’s license, showing him both the old address and the little slip of paper from PennDOT showing my new address. He glances at them, hands them back to me, and stares at me.

“Is there someone in that house?”

“Why do you ask?”

“We’ve been having a problem with people moving into foreclosed houses. Bandos, they’re called. Short for abandoned.”

I didn’t realize I was part of a trend.

“Is there someone in that house?” he asks again. “Is that how you got hurt?”

I think for a moment. No, that’s not true. It’s not really thinking. It’s synapses reacting, firing madly and off-key.

“No. Nobody’s in there.”

“Then how come there’s two cars in the driveway?” 

“I don’t know. I really don’t. But there’s nobody in there.”

“Well, if you say there’s nobody in there, and it’s not going to be your house soon, I guess I’ll leave you here.” Pause. “You sure I should go?”

“You can go. I’m okay. I just—well, I just got sick, looking at my old place, and I sort of passed out. I hit my head and passed out. I’m okay, though. You can go.”

And he does.

And I stay until he leaves. Then I get in my car and drive to the courthouse.

I walk through the metal detectors, and then over to the old, ceremonial courtroom where they hold the sheriff’s sales. I’d been here before, as my bank’s rep, telling the attorney how much to bid, how high to go. Now I just take up space in the back row, all scratched and bleeding and beat up. I wait for my house to go on the block. The bank bids its costs. Nobody else says a word. The sheriff bangs the gavel.

I don’t know what comes next.

As an attorney practicing consumer bankruptcy law in Lancaster, PA, Mitchell Sommers may be one of the few people in America to benefit from the economic policies of George Bush. Mitchell received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and his law degree from Penn State Dickinson School of Law. He has had op-eds published in numerous Pennsylvania newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has had short stories published in Ellipsis and PHASE. He is currently fiction/non-fiction editor of Tatanacho, an online literary journal, and is working on a novel. He can be reached at sommersesq@aol.com.

[img_assist|nid=880|title=Love Park|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=130|height=195]On the night before I drove Daisy Diamond home, I picked up my parents at the hospital, where they'd been visiting with a parishioner whose wife was dying of cancer.  As the man walked with my parents to the curb, his glistening bald head shone.  He wore a wrinkled corduroy sport coat, despite the heat, and loosely tied sneakers that shuffled like slippers on the concrete.  He was hunched over, less from old age, it seemed, than from grief.  But when he came into the light of the streetlamp overhead, I could see that he was smiling gloriously.  The man hugged my mother and took my father's hand.  After my mother settled into the front seat of the truck and my father followed, the man held my father's hand through the open window.  He pressed his moist lips to my father's knuckles and politely wiped them dry.  "Your parents give us peace," the man said to me, "more than the doctors."  I was nodding, speechless, as the man reached for my mother's hand and brought it to his lips.  "I love your mother and father," he said.  His eyes were brimming with liquid light.  "I do too," I choked out.  The man brought my parents' hands together and stepped back from the curb.  My parents' fingers stayed intertwined in my mother's lap, even as the truck entered our driveway and came to rest under the basketball hoop. 
Years ago, on the day my father installed that hoop, Andrew dribbled a basketball and shot at the stone wall above the garage door, announcing buzzer-beaters, while I straddled the gray metal pole in the grass, raised my worshipping fists, and cheered my big brother's heroics.  The old man was bare-chested, jabbing his shovel into the stubborn earth just off the lip of the macadam, while Stavros, the always-reliable church custodian, stirred cement with a broom handle in a red, rusted wheelbarrow.  The old man's shoulders rippled when he muscled the shovel's tip into the growing hole.  That night, under the floodlight, the old man and Andrew played HORSE, while I caught their shots before they hit the ground.  The old man sank baskets from the sidewalk and back yard, calling out swish! 
Today, when I got back from Daisy Diamond's house, I wanted to chain the pole to my truck's front end and back up until I heaved it out of the ground and off the property.  I wanted to take the stuffed paper bag from under the dashboard and set fire to it in the front yard.  
I couldn't stay here-home.  At the moment, I couldn't even get out of the truck, let alone go inside the house, this great house we lived in only because my rich grandfather had left my grandmother so he could live happily ever after with a cocktail waitress in Atlantic City.  I wondered if my father, growing up, had known about his father, if he had lain awake in bed, picturing him sipping martinis and eyeing girls in fishnet stockings strutting past the blackjack table.  Even before today, I'd wondered if I was the only one in the family, including Yiayia herself, who had any proper sense of justice-not that I hoped Papou was burning in Hell for what he'd done, but you'd think the woman would take down his photographs or at least stop wearing black like some widow whose husband deserved to be mourned.  What used to drive me nuts was less that my grandparents had never bothered to get a divorce than that, for years, my yiayia pretended the old bastard had never left her for another woman-pretended he was coming back, until the day she got word he'd keeled over on a Carnival cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean.  Yiayia's most recent self-quarantining, in fact, had been triggered by my prankish removal of Papou's large black-and-white portrait outside her bedroom, the absence of which had gone unnoticed only until I got to the kitchen, where I was too far away to make out the curses coming from the third-floor landing.  
A legacy of betrayal, I thought.  At least my grandfather had had the decency to be a public louse.  At least his whole life wasn't a lie.  
My shoulders sank, and my lungs seemed to shrink, as I realized that Daisy Diamond had dumped the secret onto me, perhaps for the same reason I wanted, now, to tell Andrew, Sophia, or anyone:  to free myself from being the only one who knew. 
As I skulked toward the sliding screen door, tip-toeing in the mulch, I could hear Sophia continuing a conversation that apparently had no end.  I sidestepped Theo's untamed pink roses and leaned against the stone wall outside the kitchen. 
"It's not just some idea, Dad.  It's a real program that Veronica's totally doing, and you don't have to be a student.  I told you at Christmas, and you've known this is my plan.  I never said I'm not going to college-just not right away." 
Sophia wasn't going to college right away because she'd spent her senior year doing God knew what with her friend Veronica, instead of meeting application deadlines.  Actually, I had a good idea of what she'd been doing with Veronica, but I told myself she was going through a phase.  She just wanted what everyone else wanted, she would say.  Did they have to name it?  They'd kissed, all right?  She admitted that much to me, after swearing me to secrecy.  A crush, I'd figured, until they went to the prom together.  Meanwhile, Veronica's dysfunctional life, unlike Sophia's, hadn't foiled her academic success:  she'd already moved out to Berkeley-Sophia's dream school.  
Through the window above my head, I could hear the kitchen-sink spigot's perpetual hum, my mother making dinner or clearing up from lunch-cleaning raw chicken or rinsing sauce from plates-while reviewing in her mind Sophia's flight itinerary.  I imagined my father, standing there, perplexed, wondering when, if ever, he'd actually approved his daughter's one-way trip to California.  Over the sound of rushing water, Andrew made a joke about Sophia's need for the heaviest-duty suntan lotion-SPF forty-lest she make herself so dark that our mother, assuming Sophia might ever return home, would once and for all mistake her daughter for an Albanian or even African refugee from one of the church's missions, as if such racial blurring weren't precisely what Sophia had in mind.  Theo blurted that she was better off not going to Berkeley after all, that she should stay home and hold out for the Ivy League.  
Apparently, Sophia had rounded up everyone to hear her final complaints before her departure the next morning.  Amid all the interruptions, she was trying to explain that she just wanted to explore for a year.  
"Explore what?" my father said. 
"Life.  The world," Sophia said, as if introducing new words to her audience.  "And I really don't appreciate that you think I'm going out there just because Veronica's out there.  I'm the one who told her about Berkeley-" 
"Nothing's been decided yet," my father said.  "I don't want you flying."  
"Flying?  I have the ticket, Dad!  It's a summer program!  I'm leaving tomorrow!  Where have you been?!" 
"Mom's already got a care package assembled," Andrew added.  
At last, with a deep breath, I shoved the screen door in its dry groove and stepped into the kitchen. 
"Peter, you made it!"  Theo sat in the old-fashioned schoolhouse desk next to the basement door, his string of gray worry beads twirling perpetually at his fingers.  His blue eyes appeared magnified by the thick glasses he wore only when he didn't want to miss something.  
"How long does it take to go to the Brew Hall?" my father asked. 
"Brew Mall," Sophia corrected him. 
I froze, wanting to lash out:  You don't get to question me anymore!  My heart was pounding.  I glanced into the foyer, the sun-drenched hallway leading to the front door and beyond. 
My mother stood off to my left, frozen for the moment, looking up from a white-capped blue bottle she'd just plucked from a cabinet converted for vitamin and medicine storage.  They all seemed to be scowling at me, except Melanie, who stood by the refrigerator in an ocean-colored dress, smiling sweetly.  Sophia and my father were in opposite corners, in standoff position, each head-to-toe in black, with a touch of silver jewelry:  against the icon-littered backdrop of the kitchen wall stood my father, in black shoes, slacks, and short-sleeve shirt open to the first button, along with his silver wedding band; to my left, between my mother and me, stood my sister, in black calf-high lace-up Doc Martens, fishnet stockings, mid-thigh skirt, and tank top, along with her silver rings pierced through the brow and both ears, a virtual Slinky of bands along the forearms, and a stud through the belly button, in full view, like an evil eye aimed at the old man. 
Andrew broke the silence.  "Why don't you just take some classes?" 
I stepped around the kitchen table toward the basement door, where Theo's worry beads clicked and smacked, vanishing in his grip and reemerging, a nervous gray blur.  
"I'm not taking classes to make anybody happy.  No class can make you an artist."  Sophia glanced at me, to acknowledge the source of her wisdom, though I wanted no credit for the effect I'd had on her. 
"You see?" my father said.  "I don't believe this.  Peter put this idea into your head.  Theo-!"  The old man glared at Theo's hands.  
Theo silenced his beads, and I stopped cold. 
"Don't blame Peter, Dad!  You can't even give me credit for the stuff I do that pisses you off!"  
"Honey," my mother said.  "That word."  She handed Sophia the bottle from the cabinet.  "Put this with the other things." 
"Pisses?  Jesus, Mom, stop censoring me.  You don't need school to be a poet.  You just need to live life!"  Sophia examined the label on the bottle.  "Petroleum suppositories?" 
I wanted to call out the Truth.  Good News, Sophia!  Dad's a fraud!  We're all free!  Then I remembered Daisy Diamond's words-your father's been trapped for years-and I thought, we're all trapped.  
"You'll be eating different foods, honey," my mother said.  "You never know how the change in diet will affect your bowels." 
"Mom!"  Sophia looked, horrified, at Melanie, who pretended, mercifully, to be distracted by the church calendar pinned to the refrigerator. 
"If you're not going to college," my father said, "you can stay home until you're ready.  Even Peter went to college."  
"Look what it got him."  Andrew grinned.  "Just kidding, Doc."  
"What does Peter have to do with anything?" Sophia said.  "This is so humiliating..." 
My theory was that this kind of verbal abuse had replaced the physical abuse we'd inflicted on each other as kids-and that all of it, then and now, disguised our brotherly, and sisterly, love.  Andrew used to seal his mouth around my little nose and exhale his hot, wet breath, which poured through my nasal passage and back out my mouth.  I would laugh and spit at the same time, in horror, then lie back on the carpet.  When Sophia was old enough to endure such torture, both Andrew and I would pin her down and tickle her until her laughing turned to crying and, at least a few times, peeing-she wet her little cotton pants and ran screaming into the kitchen.  Minutes later she would return in fresh pants, tears dried up, and spread herself on the carpet like an X.  No more, Andrew would tell her, and eventually her giggling would once again turn to sobbing.  
Sophia set the blue bottle next to a white surgical mask on the kitchen table, among the vitamins and first-aid items my mother had already collected.  I recognized the red letters on the packet of iOSAT tablets-to be used only as directed by state or local public health authorities in the event of a radiation emergency.  Months ago, Andrew had brought home a bag of surgical masks, along with the iOSAT tablets, from the hospital, announcing that he'd finally managed to confiscate the highly coveted antidote for anthrax poisoning.  His teasing had been evident to everyone but my mother, who promptly arranged the packets in prominent locations throughout the house, but only after pleading with me to wear a mask at work and inquiring if the tablets might also protect against asbestos and lead poisoning, this in spite of the countless times I'd explained that I worked only with water-based paint. 
Sophia was going on:  "I want to go somewhere.  And do something interesting and good for people.  Help homeless people.  He hasn't gone anywhere or done anything for anyone!  He lives in the basement!"  
As she went on, referring to me as a third-person pronoun as if I were not standing there in the room, I thought:  we keep coming back for more abuse.  Then I realized, it isn't so bad to be invisible, and sidestepped toward the basement door. 
"Peter," Melanie said. 
I looked up, my hand on the doorknob. 
"Andrew and I still have our announcement." 
Melanie was painfully lovely, her sandy-blond hair already, in late June, streaked with gold from the summer sun.  When Andrew had first brought her home, I'd looked up from art history books and gone dumbstruck.  By the end of the night she'd made her way back into the dimly lit kitchen, sat, and paged through one of my books, asking me about Ionic versus Doric, Impressionist versus Expressionist, and why I didn't have a girlfriend. 
"Remember," Andrew said, "Melanie and I called everyone in here for a reason before Sophia hijacked everything with her little diatribe-" 
"Fuck you, Andrew." 
A dish slipped from my mother's hands, and, as she reached out to save it, another followed, each crashing on the cold tile floor.  
"Enough with the language!" my father yelled. 
"It's just a word!" Sophia hollered.  
My mother stooped, and Melanie bent down to help.  
I crouched toward the mess, but when my mother glanced up, I stepped back, curling my hair behind my ears and searching my pockets for a rubber band.  I picked up a ceramic chip near my foot and set it on the table. 
Theo tucked his worry beads delicately into his pants pocket.  
Sophia paced in short steps by the sink, her eyes wild, her stiff, infant dreadlocks tumbling and jutting like spasmodic fingers. 
Suddenly I became sad at the sight and sound of her-of this unceasing rant-and wondered if maybe she was going crazy, as she often claimed to be. 
"...You don't say anything to Andrew and he completely insults me.  That's so American, to care more about language than common human decency..." 
Maybe this is how it happened, I thought:  your brain can't keep it all together anymore; you've gotten too smart for your own good, and you snap, right here in the kitchen, eighteen years old, the people who love you witnessing the whole fitful breakdown, your brain splintering in as many directions as there are family members; or, as I imagined Theo decades ago, you're trekking through Athens in the prime of your life, knapsack filled with your next batch of books, your mind like a diamond, perfectly carved and sizzling with condensed energy, entire histories of civilizations and whole novels and epic poems you hadn't known you'd memorized firing out from your skull into your blood and muscles and nerves and into the sun-scorched world, while your sandaled feet mount the same rocks Socrates walked upon when he envisioned his fate, and you fall to your knees and scurry like a bug to a crack, crawling, in your mind, to the nearest safe place where you can rest and gather your thoughts. 
Or maybe Sophia was the only sane one in the room-perhaps along with Theo-barely keeping it together while she watched everything around her falling apart. 
"That's deep, Sophia."  Andrew clapped. 
"I hate you."  She stormed off toward the stairs. 
We all waited for the heavy footfalls above us to stop.  
"Okay, let's hear this announcement," Theo said.  
"Sophia has to be here," Melanie said. 
"No she doesn't."  Andrew sighed and stuffed his hands into his pockets.  
"Yes she does," Melanie said.  "We have to wait."  
I turned for the basement again.  
"Peter."  My mother was still holding white ceramic triangles, like pita, in each hand. 
"What took you so long?" my father said. 
"Everything's in the yard," I said, opening the basement door.    
"We've been worried about you," my mother said.  
"Everything's fine, Mom." 
"We agreed you'd wear a rubber band," my father said. 
The fucking rubber band!-as if wearing it were the last thing I could do to maintain some dignity.  I closed the basement door and took a single deliberate step toward my father.  We didn't agree to anything, I thought, gripping my hair in a fist and then letting it fall.  The shadowy grooves in the old man's forehead deepened.  Andrew crossed his arms, offering his little brother a rare moment of deferential curiosity.  I imagined destroying all they knew of family dignity, making my own announcement, loud enough so that even Sophia could hear me up in her bedroom:  Our Father...! 
"I'm twenty-six," I said instead, and I meant what being twenty-six implied:  I was on my own now.  
My mother placed the ceramic pieces on the counter and wiped her hands on her apron.  "What is it, Peter?" 
"Nothing."  
Daisy Diamond, I wanted to say.  Just her name, to see what the old man would do. 
Sophia's silhouette-mini-skirted Medusa in combat boots-suddenly appeared in the foyer, before the Plexiglas storm door.  She'd come quietly down the stairs, I realized, and now she stood staring into the front yard, perhaps envisioning her new life in California. 
"I'm not your servant," I said to my father. 
When Sophia turned around, hearing me, I signaled to her with a squint:  Everything's cool.  I'm not insane.  
Just then the old man called out, "Sophia!" but she was already making her way into the kitchen. 
"What?" she said.  
Theo clapped and rubbed his hands together.  "And now the moment we've all been waiting for!"   
My father snapped, "Theo, skaseh!"-Shut up! 
Sophia glanced at Theo, who was securing his glasses over his ears, and then she grinned at me:  We're all crazy.  
I nodded anxiously.  
Melanie said, "We wanted to tell immediate family before anyone else showed up."  
I slid my hands into my pockets.  
My mother leaned against the kitchen counter.  "I don't think I can handle any big announcements today."  
"It's okay, Mom."  Andrew smiled.  "It's good news." 
I crossed my arms.  My mother folded her hands over the apron knot at her waist. 
"Melanie and I wanted to announce this together," Andrew said.  "We haven't even told her parents yet-" 
"But we're telling them later tonight, so..."  Melanie cupped her left hand with her right-hiding the evidence, I assumed.  
My brother had finally done it... 
"Well..."  Andrew inhaled dramatically.  "Melanie decided she's willing to convert." 
Andrew had finally won her over to our side-not that there had ever been a real contest, not that he'd ever considered donning the yarmulke.  Of course, Melanie's conversion meant marriage-a detail that, at least for Andrew, went without saying, though the look on Melanie's face suggested that the announcement had stopped short, too soon before my parents were rushing in toward the soon-to-be-converted Jew. 
"Wait-" Melanie squirmed free from my mother's hug.  "Mrs. Pappas, that's just the beginning..." 
My mother stepped back.  "Oh?"  She glanced at Melanie's belly.  
"Jesus, Mom."  Andrew laughed through his teeth. 
"Olympia-" my father gasped, as if my mother had just suggested something impossible.  
"Well, I don't know," she said. 
Melanie tucked her hands into her armpits.  "Andrew, tell them." 
My mother reached out and took Melanie's wrist gently.  "Oh, Andrew," she whispered. 
The diamond flickered like a Christmas light.  
Melanie stared at Andrew, who gave a tiny shake of his head:  Not now... 
"Will the wedding be this summer?" my mother added, Melanie's hand docile in hers. 
"Ma, it's almost July," Andrew said. 
"Mrs. Pappas, there's something else," Melanie said. 
"Melanie-"  Andrew took Melanie's hand from my mother's hand.  
"Don't grab me!" Melanie snapped.  
"What's the matter, honey?" my mother said.  "This is beautiful news." 
"This is what I hate!" Sophia cried out.  "Why is this such good news to everyone?"  
Melanie's resistance to her conversion had secretly represented, for Sophia, humanity's, or at least this family's, last hope for salvation.  
"Your brother's getting married, honey." 
"Nobody's even said that!  You're just glad she's converting!"  
"No, Sophia," my mother said.  
"It's not just that, Sophia."  Melanie crossed her arms.  "But apparently Andrew's having second thoughts." 
"About what?" my mother said.  
I had no idea.  No way was she pregnant.  
"All right, look," Andrew said.  "We're engaged.  That's what the ring means.  That's it." 
"I can't believe you."  Melanie backed up toward the refrigerator.  "You are such a coward," she huffed, and turned toward the garage. 
"Let's talk about this in private," my father said.  "Why don't you take a walk, Peter." 
"Me?" 
"With your sister."  
"No!" Sophia cried out.  "This isn't what God wants!  Melanie shouldn't have to do this!  God loves everyone!" 
"Of course He does, honey," my mother said. 
"Melanie, don't do it!  Jesus was a Jew!"  Sophia marched back into the foyer and slammed the storm door behind her.  Through the Plexiglas, I could see her black boots trudging in the grass toward the driveway, her dark-brown, braceleted arms flailing.  
"Don't let her spoil this," my father said, but Melanie had already gone into the garage through the door beyond the refrigerator.  
"Honey..." my mother said. 
"Let her go."  Andrew brought his hands to his waist. 
"Go talk to her," my mother said.  "This is an emotional time."  
"Trust me," Andrew said.  "She'll be right back." 
            My father went into the dining room and stared out the bay window.  Instead of Melanie or Sophia, four colorful figures were making their way across the front lawn.  They appeared, framed in Plexiglas, as the bell rang. 
In poked the pink pocked face and grinning bald head of Uncle Mike from Havertown.  He extended a clear bottle of booze into the foyer.  "Happy Name Days, Peters and Pauls!"  
"Hey-ay!" my father boomed, entering the foyer from the dining room.  He held the door and ushered them in.  "Ela, ela!"-Come, come!  He kissed and shooed them one by one into the kitchen, where I anticipated the roar of celebration, my mother's brothers, Uncle Mike and Uncle Joe, and their wives, Aunt Bess and Aunt Flo, forming a small mob of thick-strapped sundresses, bright green and orange handbags, white leather shoes and belts.  "We've got wonderful news." 
"Oh!"  The aunts shuffled over to hug Andrew.  
I lamented the predictability of the good news around here. 
"Melanie's going to convert to Greek Orthodoxy!"  My mother glowed, though her beautiful, sandy-haired daughter-in-law-to-be, who would become the mother of her grandchildren-likely her only grandchildren, if one considered how the lives of Sophia and me were taking shape-was nowhere in sight, a detail that didn't distract anyone from celebrating.  
Uncle Mike raised his gift bottle of ouzo toward the ceiling like celebration champagne.  "Let's have a drink!  Glasses!"  Glasses hung from Aunt Bess's clenched fingers.  "Ice, Paul, ice!"  He waved everyone toward the table.  "Peter!  Take this."  
I took the bottle, wanting, suddenly, to be oblivious, drunk, along with Uncle Mike, in the colorful noise of his company. 
Uncle Mike looked around.  "Where's Sophia?  Theo!  Ela!  Get us more ice!"  
I pictured the watery plastic bags in my truck bed.  
Theo was reaching out into the air before him like a blind man, his wine-colored slippers shuffling toward the freezer.  
"Theo, put your glasses on!" the old man called out.  
            "Peter, what's the matter, honey?" Aunt Bess said.  "You're quiet.  You look pale.  Look at your hair."  She set the small glasses down on the table and took my face into her warm, damp hands.  
            "He's got beautiful hair," Aunt Flo said.  
I gripped the ouzo bottle's neck. 
"You feel hot, honey," Aunt Bess said.  "Drink something.  A little ouzo." 
She pulled the chair out, and I sat down.  
Theo set the shoebox-size ice container on the table and stooped to see his own hand plucking one cube and dropping it into a glass.  
"Ice, ice!"  Uncle Mike's thick fingers scraped the inside of the container.  He called out, "Ice, Paul!" and swiped the bottle from my hand. 
My father stared into the open freezer. 
Uncle Mike plopped a filled glass into Theo's eager hand.  "Okay, Theo, wait for the toast."  
Theo jiggled his glass near his nose, watching the ice cube bouncing and turning the clear liquid cloudy. 
My father twisted a half-empty plastic ice tray above the container.  
"Ahh, bravo."  Uncle Mike scooped a handful. 
My father displayed the empty tray to me.  
"I told you," I said.  "Everything's outside."  
"What good is it melting in the grass?"  
"It's not in the grass," I said.  
"Okay, okay," Uncle Mike said.  "We have plenty of ice.  Drink, Paul, c'mon."  
Aunt Flo poked her arm through Andrew's, rehearsing for the aisle. 
I folded my arms on the table. 
My father handed me a glass. 
"I took home one of your parishioners," I said. 
"Everybody have a drink?" Uncle Mike called out. 
"Who?" my father said. 
Glasses rose, clanging amid audible smiles-"Hey-ay!  Yiasou!"  
"That's what took me so long."  I was still sitting. 
My father waited, arm raised with the rest of them. 
"Daisy Diamond."  I watched the old man's stony face. 
"To Andrew and Melanie!" Aunt Flo called out. 
My father turned his eyes to the ceiling, where clinking glasses hovered.  They all awaited the priest's blessing. 
"Stand up, Peter," Aunt Bess said. 
For a moment I made the old man wait for his apathetic, atheist son; then I inched off my chair and reached toward the chandelier of glasses-"'Atta boy," Uncle Joe said-all our necks poised to receive the drink. 
"Hronia polah!"-Many years!-Aunt Flo cheered.  
I knew the toast, which was heard at every holiday.  They all glanced at Andrew, who smiled back gratefully.  
My father pronounced joyfully, "Keh stah thikah sou!" 
I knew this one, too:  And to yours!  As in, your engagement-my engagement.  I couldn't believe my ears-or eyes:  the old man was grinning down at me, as the roomful of Greeks relished their blood-connection to Tragedy, spotlighting the poor soul whose story was most pathetic, just as they always turned their attention to the unmarried older sisters of young mothers with newborn babies, singing, "And to yours!" reminding them of their dried-up, disappointing lives, just as they were reminding me now that I was the only one in the room still unhitched, that I still hadn't found a nice Greek girl, or any girl at all.  
They all sighed, "Ahhh," and displayed their hopeful smiles.  With a unified tip of their glasses, they all leaned back, my father never flinching, and cooled their throats with sweet liquor. 
 

Excerpt is from LOVE Park (Cable Publishing, May 2009). Jim Zervanos is the author of the novel LOVE Park. His fiction has appeared, most recently, in the Cimarron Review, Green Mountains Review, and Philly Fiction, a collection of short stories featuring Philadelphia writers. He is a graduate of Bucknell University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A teacher of English and creative writing, he lives with his wife in Philadelphia.

Brrrrrrrrupt! Brrrrrrrrupt!” A muddled fanfare penetrated Allison Reed’s sleep. She rolled over, hoping she was dreaming. She was pleasantly hot under the heaped up blankets and vaguely aware that she wanted to keep sleeping. But a few moments later the sound repeated – “Brrrrrrrrupt! Brrrrrrrrupt!” – followed by a bellowed “God bless the Mummers!” in the street below and Allison was awake and knew that it was New Year’s Day. Allison rolled onto her back and lay with her arms flat by her sides, unhappy with her mild hangover. Her head was heavy and her stomach was sour. Still, she felt a deep sense of physical satisfaction, which puzzled Allison for a moment until she remembered not only the two glasses of champagne she drank after midnight, but who she drank them with and how they laughed. She popped open her eyes to confirm what she now recalled quite clearly. She’d had sex with Jim D’Angelo and he was sleeping next to her. Allison closed her eyes and ran her hands down her body. She was naked and this made her uncomfortable. It was one thing to sleep with a man, if you could work up the necessary desire and nerve and you got to turn off the lights, and another thing, not as serious yet still intimate, to share your bed with him. But it was a different category of thing entirely to lay nude next to him all night. Naked was okay for sex, but once it was over, Allison wanted to get up, wash briefly, and dress. She expected the man to know he should do this, too, although experience had taught Allison not to take any chances. When she walked back into the bedroom wearing a nightshirt, modest yet sexy, she would announce, “I’ve brought you a fresh towel and a spare toothbrush,” in the easy tone of a thoughtful host. Only once had these been refused, back in her graduate school days when she was somehow convinced that you were missing experiences of great consequence if you weren’t rutting through a succession of over-serious, over-heated – in retrospect foolish and shallow and inept – affairs. “Nah, I’m okay,” the young academic had told her. Then Allison had cocked her head, briefly considered the enormity of her misjudgment, and invited the fellow to leave. This he did, with a look of confusion and regret that Allison accepted as an apology. She had not offered Jim D’Angelo a towel or a toothbrush, however, and Allison was reasonably certain she had not offered these because instead she had climbed on top of Jim and encouraged him to “go again” with a hip motion that made Allison wince with embarrassment. She opened her eyes again to see if Jim had caught her wincing. He was still asleep. This was the first time Allison had been with Jim D’Angelo and now he would think she was one of those women that men of his class seemed to particularly desire: accomplished in their profession, elegant in society, but all hell in bed. Once a man got dug into this opinion of a woman, Allison found, he held on to her like she was the Holy Grail – or worse, ecstatically concluded that she thought of sex the way he did, which was pretty much all the time and as the central organizing principle of life. This led to all sorts of tiresome nonsense. Sometimes it meant that the man wanted to have sex in places (the kitchen, parked cars, spare bedrooms at house parties) and in places (her body) where Allison was not interested in having it. Other times, it made him think that she was as fascinated by his penis as he was. The result of this belief was random trouser dropping and witty dingle waving, such as around corners or from opportune angles on the staircase. The first time Allison ran into this, she thought she had entangled herself with a freak. By the third or fourth iteration Allison realized that it was an endemic pathology of the human male, though this realization brought her little comfort. It did, however, provide a friend from college with the topic for her doctoral thesis. Allison sighed. What had she done? Where would it all lead? And what did she want from this man? It’s not that she regretted having Jim D’Angelo in her bed Eight months had passed since the last time Allison had slept with anyone and he’d delivered the goods quite competently. Jim D’Angelo was pleasant and successful, and Allison liked him. No one could say she’d made a mistake by having sex with him. But Allison had been in this position before, and before that too, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to be. Many of her friends had gotten married, some had started families, but Allison wasn’t afraid of falling behind them. She didn’t worry that they had taken husbands and she hadn’t. She didn’t feel a great aching hole in her life when she held their babies, although their children were lovely. What troubled Allison was the possibility that it didn’t matter. She was realistically, tolerably, intermittently happy. As happy, at least, as she thought it probable she could be, not possessing a genius for living, but not lacking a capacity for genuine enjoyment either. She had her job and her friends, a trinity house on a comfortable street, dinners and concerts and plays, three weeks in Italy one year, a month in Ireland the next, and all the privacy she desired. And she had men, more or less when she wanted them. This was a sufficient life. It satisfied her. She understood its limitations and endured its deficiencies, but she did so because she believed all lives had limitations and deficiencies. Would a husband and a family be more sufficient? Would they make her more happy? Or only as happy as she was now, just in a different way? But what about love? Allison admitted the possibility of love and did not deny its attraction, but when asked about it by her friends she always turned the question back on them. Do you love your husband? Of course, they’d answer and then Allison would ask, Why “of course” and not “yes”? A small pause. They knew Allison could be sharp, but she was rarely sharp with them. What’s the distinction? “Yes” is an affirmation, Allison would say, “of course” merely a habit. You’re playing word games with us. Perhaps I am, Allison would agree. And love can’t be all excitement forever, they’d tell her. See if excitement can survive a crying baby at 3 AM. And if it could, would you want it to? I love my husband, but I don’t want to love him like I did when I was twenty-five. That takes too much time, too much energy. I want to feel more settled. I want to grow up and move on. You had a husband once, you know, until you lost your nerve. I didn’t lose my nerve – I kept it, Allison always thought to herself when this subject was raised. Long ago, she’d learned that it was useless to argue or explain, so she didn’t try. She’d look away, let them think what they wanted about Matt, then talk about something else. Allison had loved Matt. The eight months they were together before their engagement was the happiest of Allison’s life and their engagement made Allison happy too. But sometime after they had selected the inn for the reception and agreed on the Caribbean for their honeymoon, Allison began to change her mind. At first, she didn’t understand she what was happening. She was simply puzzled by a tightness in her stomach whenever she discussed the wedding with Matt or their families. Then Allison found herself resenting Matt when he wanted to talk about how many people they should invite, how much they should spend on the food and music, or where they could find a decent minister. When the face in the mirror looked at her one morning and said, “You don’t want to marry that man,” Allison couldn’t have been more surprised than if a stranger had walked up and told her the same words. It didn’t make sense. Allison knew her feelings hadn’t changed because she tracked the strength of her attachment to Matt with an exactness she knew wasn’t healthy (I love him less today, by maybe ten percent, but I still love him. I love him much more today!) but which she persisted in all the same. So she tried to think. Allison shaded her eyes from the brightness of her love, looked at her and Matt as they were that day and found nothing, then looked toward the future. They didn’t want the same things, they didn’t like the same things. They never cared. They said it didn’t matter. They said it was a problem other people had. But at some point, Allison considered as she pushed at the knot in her stomach, their life would become about more than love. And when it did, she didn’t see how they could make that life work or how that life would make them happy. What to do? No one would blamed her if she married Matt – with qualms – and later realized it was a mistake and divorced him. She was young after all. The young were supposed to live by their hearts and not their heads. She might even get credit for believing in love against her better judgment. But that looked like cowardice to Allison. The waste of years, when she saw their marriage crumbling, depressed her. Most of all, Allison was afraid of losing her love for Matt. She might lose him – if that was the necessary outcome and unavoidable – but to lose the bright secret flame that Matt had kindled inside her, that seemed worse to Allison. She tried to avoid making the decision, of course. She hoped that a few weeks, and then a few more, would leave her feeling differently, but they didn’t, and the months before the wedding dwindled from six to four. Soon it would be too late to break the engagement with any decency. Plans would have been made, airline tickets purchased, hotel rooms reserved, new clothes bought, wedding presents ordered and sent. A decision that Matt could gloss over now with a shrug, a brave smile, and the words “she had second thoughts” to his family and friends would turn into an embarrassment and a humiliation with more delay. So Allison asked Matt to come to her apartment and she told him. At first, Matt thought it was a joke–he didn’t understand. And then he got mad. He walked out of her apartment, slamming the door, but he called early the next morning to apologize and they talked it through all again until Matt understood her. Then he asked if she was sure? Because he saw the problems Allison saw, but he was confident they would solve them. Wasn’t their love enough? Wasn’t their desire to keep loving, even when it wouldn’t be as easy as it was right now, enough? No, Allison said, shaking her head, it wasn’t. They talked like this, around and around and around, for an endless week: Matt trying to coax and convince her by turns, always optimistic, usually sympathetic, sometimes impatient while every conversation left Allison – against everything she honestly wanted – more deeply convinced of her unhappy certainty. She to make herself doubt, but she couldn’t and by the end, all the talking had thrown Allison into a state of such raw animal misery that when she begged Matt to let her go – begged mercy, begged pity – he agreed. He told their families, always used the word “we”, and insisted that their reasons were private. When Allison thanked him afterwards, he nodded once, said “okay,” and walked away. This wounded Allison, but she knew it was a wound of her own making; that the wound hurt most because in it she could feel how she had hurt Matt; and that in the final circumstance, Matt had added to his pain to ease hers. She’d asked far too much of him as it was. She couldn’t expect him to say goodbye with grace. And in truth, she was thankful he hadn’t. It helped Allison feel a little less guilty for what she had done. For several months, Allison cycled between shock and acute distress. She found the shock easier to handle because she could usually make it look like serenity to people who didn’t know her well. When the distress hit her, by contrast, Allison tended to grab her head and exclaim, “God, oh God, oh God!” regardless of where she was. This made going to work an adventure and Allison had to excuse herself from more than one meeting to seek out the reliably empty women’s room near the museum’s porcelain exhibit, lock herself in a stall, and groan through her hands for fifteen minutes. This same urge struck her on a Friday night at a restaurant where she had been taken by friends hoping to cheer her up for a few hours. Everything had been going fine. She was sitting at the bar, drinking the second cocktail they had ordered for her, and making an adequate display of emotional normality when she looked into the eyes of the bartender, exclaimed, “God, oh God, oh God!” and ran outside. After this, her friends urged her to get an anti-depressant, but Allison preferred to just stay home where she could slip into her bedroom and stick her head under her pillow until the mood passed. She did this frequently enough that the same friends, now transplanted with wine, dinner, and movies to her house, ceased to pay attention to it, particularly since she usually emerged looking refreshed. During all this time, Allison had one comfort that she kept secret. She had wanted to preserve her love for Matt, even at the cost of their marriage, and she had succeeded. Her love was still there, like a warm coal in her breast and at night, alone in her bed, she would take it out and breathe greedy and grateful life into it again. She never told anyone about this because she could guess at their expressions of horror and disbelief if she did. They would think she was selfish and thoughtless and cruel – and perhaps she was. Allison sometimes worried that she had wrecked Matt’s heart in the service of a monstrous vanity. She didn’t always recognize herself during those hours in the dark. She was strange and dangerous and she couldn’t put the name ‘Allison’ to the person she found. But there was still the fact of her pain and it was only the love that made it bearable. Neither lasted. Sometime between six and nine months after she broke up with Matt, Allison’s shock melted into equanimity and her distress lessened. The agony of what she had done could still attack her, sharp and sudden, but she was able to master her physical response to its assault enough to return to a public social life with little concern for embarrassment. But as she began to recover, the love grew cool then cold. She could remember it. She knew it had been real, but it was no longer alive. This was the last grief, and it would have been the hardest except that Allison had learned how to carry sorrow over the preceding months. She had become stronger, but also more remote and detached, and she wasn’t sure she liked the exchange. By thirteen or fourteen months, she began to date again, tentatively and infrequently, not because she wanted to begin seeing men again as much as because she wanted to avoid having conversations about why she wasn’t. And after a while, she began to enjoy herself, sometimes. She worried about what she would do if any of these relationships became serious, but that didn’t happen. Allison wasn’t sure she trusted the reason she found to explain why. Maybe it was that these men really weren’t interesting enough and funny enough and sexy enough to keep giving them her Saturday nights. That was true of some, certainly. But for others, perhaps it was her diffidence that ruined their chances. She knew it was there. She could feel it slamming down like a metal storefront grate, when a date was going well, and it puzzled her nearly as much as it puzzled the guy. “I’ve wrecked myself,” Allison would think after one of the nights that went wrong. “This is my fate.” Then she would sigh and shake her head. That was too dramatic, too absolute. She was much the same as she had always been: intelligent, self-regarding, reserved, modest, over-considerate, and intense. But Allison also knew that she didn’t want love as much as she did before she met Matt. On her worst days, Allison found herself thinking that love was a trivial luxury. “What’s the point of a new boyfriend?” she asked a close friend. “He’d be like a new pair of shoes. He might look good, and he might even feel right, but I have plenty in my closet already that I never bother to wear. And one in particular.” And yet, and yet. Here was Jim D’Angelo sleeping in her bed. So what does that mean, Allison asked herself. That I haven’t lost all hope? Or that I’ve gotten really good at kidding myself? She raised herself gently on one elbow to study Jim’s face. I’ve certainly fooled you, Allison thought. If you knew what you were getting from me, you’d probably run away. Run before I hurt you. What is it you thought you saw? Allison could have continued pushing her thoughts in this direction, but she didn’t. Instead, she gazed at Jim first with curiosity, then with an emotion that might have been affection. She had known Jim since October, and last night had been their eighth or ninth date, which was quite a lot considering all the holidays, so Allison decided she must fancy him at least. Two glasses of champagne wouldn’t have tricked her into sleeping with a man she didn’t. What was it about this one? Jim’s face was serene. He might have been sleeping in his own bed, Allison considered, for how easy he looked. On their first date, Allison had mistook Jim’s self-possession for blandness and decided she didn’t want to see him again but he’d convinced her otherwise with a steady application that was confident not assertive. It also took Allison several weeks to realize that Jim was funny. The problem was he had a dry sense of humor, and his occasional jokes were absurd interpretations and implausible inferences, which he slipped into their conversation so unobtrusively – the way a cheat might slip an ace into a deck of cards – that for a little while Allison had thought Jim suffered from an obscure mental-health disorder imperfectly controlled by medication. Jim could still fool her. Last night, he had made an observation that Allison had been at a complete loss to answer until a faint sparkle in his eyes told her there was no need. Allison laughed and Jim smiled, and she meant to nudge him with her elbow, but half-stumbled and bumped his body instead, and then her lips were pressed on his, Allison holding her glass out to one side and behind her so she wouldn’t spill it down the front of Jim’s suit, and suddenly the party couldn’t be over too soon. Allison raised her head and saw their clothes scattered on the floor. They had been in a hurry. She studied Jim’s face again. All this mysterious life whirling behind his steady expressions and dependable manners. Who was he? What did he want? He looked kind, but Allison knew how simple it would be to project the feelings she wanted onto Jim and she tried to resist the temptation. “Still, it’s not impossible,” she murmured. Except I don’t know you and you don’t know me. All at once, Allison felt how lonely she had been – for years, it seemed – and how much she didn’t want to be alone anymore. Oh god oh god, what am I doing? Did I kiss you out of despair? When I laughed, I fooled you. When you smiled back, you fooled me. We’ve double-fooled ourselves and each other. It was all an accident and a trick! I don’t want…. “I’m afraid,” Allison whispered. “I was always afraid, but I’m more afraid now.” Allison watched as Jim exhaled and his eyes blinked open. She had time to cover her breasts with the sheet, but she was caught raised on her elbow, looking down at Jim, and Allison was sure her face expressed her embarrassment. What would he say? How would he seem? Allison didn’t know what she’d do if Jim looked like he thought he had made a mistake or found some excuse to leave quickly. Her hair fell half over her face, but she didn’t have a free hand to brush it back. Jim rubbed his eyes briefly with the tips of his fingers and turned his gaze to Allison. If Jim was surprised to find her staring at him, he didn’t show it. He looked her steadily for a moment and reached up and tucked the loose hair behind her ear. Then he smiled. How Allison’s heart flew out to him! Jim’s smile was neither awkward nor overly familiar. Instead it was comfortable, reserved. She was conquered. All she had left was surrender. But Allison wouldn’t. Not today. I know love’s tricks, she thought. I know all its promises. I know how it works to fools us. I’m going to test it before I call it by name. I’m going to wait before I put our hearts at risk. She smiled at him, then she took a deep breath and said, “Hi.”

Peter McEllhenney lives with his wife and sons in the Queen Village neighborhood of Philadelphia.