Articles – Page 148 – Philadelphia Stories

My Charlie Manson

[img_assist|nid=833|title=Limes & Lemons by Todd Marrone © 2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=206]Our wedding was in a graveyard in November darkness. I had recently turned eighteen, old enough to make hash of my life and do it legally, and my fiancée, Kemp, was forty-two. I wore light makeup and under a raincoat, my best dress of striped wool. My hair was long and straight, and my Mary-Jane style shoes were better suited to a little girl. I felt numb and disconnected, as if I were about to sign up after stumbling into in a meeting of bomb-assembling anarchists. I was also a little disappointed. It would have been festive to show off my dress, but the night was too chilly to take the raincoat off.

A brick wall surrounded the graveyard of Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia’s Old City; it was the nearest thing we had to a park, given where Kemp and I were living in the city. I was worried that someone who belonged to the church would boot us off the property, even though Kemp said they’d told him we could do anything on the premises, as long as it was legal and took place outside the church.

The absence of light at the wedding was due to a miscalculation. We’d scheduled the ceremony for five p.m. We didn’t realize—but how could my physics-trained fiancé not have realized?—that light fails early once autumn cold begins to shrivel the sycamore leaves.

I don’t remember what Kemp wore that night, but he was a man who considered his coiffure. He bleached his dark hair brassy blond on the optimistic—but faulty—premise that if his hair were similar in color to his scalp, he could pass himself off as not-balding. The stringy combover rarely stayed put, but he had an appealing, little-boy grin and nice, agate-colored eyes. He was endlessly authoritative when relating my own passion, visual art, to his interest in science. He encouraged me even as he dictated the kind of painting I did. You’re an artist now, he said. Why wait till you’re twenty-one to call yourself one? From him I learned terms like sexual revolution and Renaissance man. Years later, I found out from a former student of Kemp’s that in the early days of our relationship, he pinned my panties to the wall of his apartment.

Nobody gave me away at the wedding. My father stayed away, but my mother showed up with an elderly friend for moral support. The aisle I walked down was the worn brick path on which Kemp and I met the Ethical Culture minister. Mr. Smith was not exactly a believer, not Episcopalian, nor Quaker, as my family was, but the price he’d quoted to do the ceremony must have been right because Kemp hired him.

[img_assist|nid=834|title=Native by Suzanne Comer © 2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=191]As I stood in the darkness beside the tilted gravestones of long-dead Episcopalians, my mother’s mute presence felt like the still point of tradition from which my adolescence had fled. Perhaps her inscrutable sense of duty drew her; perhaps she felt compelled to witness the unthinkable. Introductions were made, hands shaken. My mother didn’t kiss me, and I looked away to the brick wall, thinking I had dragged her into something cheap. At the head of our tight circle, the minister held his book at an unnatural angle to catch the sallow illumination of a street lamp. He read from Genesis about a man leaving his parents and cleaving unto his wife. But I’m the one who’s leaving, I thought.

The June before our wedding, I had graduated from Germantown Friends, a private school where Kemp had been a science teacher. I was a ‘lifer’ there: K through 12. My great-grandmother, my grandfather, my father’s first cousin, and my mother had all gone there. It was a world in which the staid traditions of Philadelphia Quakerism—Meeting membership by ‘birthright’ or family succession and the quiet tending of old wealth—set the stage for their own eclipse, at least in part, by their liberal embrace of the social revolutions of the 60s and 70s. As a teenager, I was proud to be such a revolutionary, convinced that Kemp was proof of my emancipation. As my great-grandmother had, I attended mandatory weekly meeting for worship in a plain, high-ceilinged room with rows of wooden benches, where faintly rippled, tall glass windows revealed a pensive sky.

Quaker meeting for worship is simple. People steep themselves in relaxed silence, waiting until God’s spirit moves someone to speak. The first time I encountered Kemp was when he stood up in meeting. I don’t remember much of what he said—I believe it had to do with Guernica, Picasso’s tortured painting of the Spanish Civil War—but his mouth revealed the subtle overflow of his heart. Kemp was a predator on the lookout, and I had a vulnerable and sensitive ear. A few days afterward, I described on lined notebook paper how impressed I was by his brief talk. At thirteen, I was reluctant to speak my own name out loud, and I avoided writing it except on school papers. With my face latticed behind untrimmed hair, I gave him my unsigned note at a chance encounter on the stairs of the science building. The next week, one of his students handed me his reply. All I remember is one line: i don’t even know your name. His use of the lowercase “i” impressed me; it seemed poetic and humble; like e.e. cummings. I was in eighth grade. He got fired at the end of my ninth grade year for ‘inappropriate conduct,’ but I never found out whether the school knew our relationship was indeed a sexual one. From my point of view, little changed with his firing; I simply continued seeing him on the sly.

At the end of our wedding ceremony, the minister intoned the traditional warning: “If anyone…let him speak now, or forever hold his peace.” Silence crackled like a pause in a military assault. I glanced at the blue silk scarf tucked into the neck of my mother’s coat, wondering if she would yell or perhaps grab the vows from Mr. Smith and tear them up. My eyes slipped down to her no-longer-parallel feet.

No one stirred. No words were spoken. Because nothing appreciably changed, the minister’s words felt like an incantation, the power of which would only be revealed over time: I now pronounce you husband and wife…

The night speeded up. My mother bid me goodbye, sort of, and staggered back to her respectably antiqued house on the arm of her friend. Kemp and I had arranged to meet a few friends in our city apartment. I proceeded to get drunk and fell asleep fully clothed in the bathtub. He woke me in the middle of the night. It was time to clean up.

At the time, I believed that my parents would count me as dead, but as if my heart were swathed in bandages, the conviction brought no feeling. My loyalty to my new husband could have fueled an insurgency. A few weeks after the wedding, I received a set of place mats from my parents. Other than this, we had very little contact.

I was married for years before my commitment disintegrated. Cut off from my family and my privileged life, and perhaps the only one in my graduating class not to go to college, I explored the realm of the spirit. Years of Quaker worship spent in listening silence had cultivated my instinct for the reality of the unseen. Lonely, I responded when televangelists told me that God, the spirit, was also a person whom I could know. I was used to doing outrageous things. Belief wasn’t a huge stretch. The conservative church teaching fueled my zeal to serve my husband, to smile when he cuffed me, and to organize his drawer of unmatched socks, although he claimed I’d interfered with his ‘system.’ Whatever the personal cost, my life had an aura of divine sanction. My church friends didn’t agree; they spoke of give and take, of mutual submission. If one of them criticized Kemp, I sharply defended an alcoholic man whose permission I had to seek to go out to dinner with my brother, now back in town after college. You don’t understand, I argued. You don’t know what he really is.

Consider the loyalty of the Manson Family. Or the seductive influence of those who believe it pleases God to strap a bomb to a mentally challenged man and send him into a marketplace when the whole town is shopping. When there’s enough of an emotional payoff, fanaticism can trump rational morality. The reality is that even if someone does something really, really nasty, there may be a girl who won’t stop loving him.

Kemp, in fact, had not been my first love. An English cousin of my mother’s had visited us when I was six years old. I adored Tony. With his open lap and his gentle teasing, he charmed me. He enticed. He was handsome as a wolf. Early one Saturday morning, I crept up to our third-floor guest room to surprise him; I remember the sensation of flight on the stairs. Tony was happy when I appeared in the bathroom, where he stood in his boxers and undershirt, having just shaved. He closed the door. He imprinted on my body and in my brain things that I was compelled to forget. Afterward, he said: Don’t tell anyone you came up here today. While my parents fussed over breakfast downstairs, I stood in the weird light of my bedroom. What should I do? Pray? No. God was about Now I lay me down to sleep and Be present at our table Lord…He wasn’t concerned with the fallout from events that couldn’t even be named. Tell my parents that Tony had done something bad? But they would believe him and not me. In terror I saw that my mind would snap like a china plate should they turn from me in this way, and I resolved never to think about Tony again.

Adolescence churned up more than the usual burden of confusions. In seventh grade, I considered myself preternaturally grown up, advanced beyond other girls who worried about boy crushes and parties, yet I felt envious to the point of nausea when no one passed me notes in class. Kemp was an escape from middle school drama. He also offered me a chance to revisit the moral and spiritual dilemmas instigated when Tony’s eyes changed from inviting to hard and glittering. In his mesmeric influence, Kemp was not unlike Charles Manson, minus the highly developed people skills.

When we were in high school, my brother challenged my father about the relationship: “Why don’t you put a stop to it?”

“Your mother and I don’t want your sister’s name in the papers,” was his response. The damage Kemp inflicted wasn’t spectacular enough to make the newspaper.

Fortunately, Kemp’s precocious interest in sex with schoolgirls translated into beer-fueled impotence in marriage. I wasn’t really interested in Eros, anyway. I was an alchemist who poured out devotion in an attempt to transmute sleaze into gold. Kemp needed a housekeeper, nursemaid, and receptacle for his rants. In our last few years together, I learned to manage him. When he dissected my flaws with his maddeningly persuasive condemnation, instead of defending myself I developed the instincts of survival in a cage. Nodding. Yes-ing. Pretending to swallow his wisdom. After four quarts of beer, he’d fall asleep, sometimes with his eyes half-open, and I would escape for a walk in the woods. Life was simultaneously boring and chaotic. But thanks to my long-suffering and, ultimately, supportive parents, I went to Tyler School of Art and obtained a degree.

Clarity came to me, over time, bit by bit. The major revolution occurred after nine years of marriage. Kemp’s mother, a serious churchgoer, had gotten me to visit a hand-clapping fundamentalist congregation. It was God on your taste buds as against the cerebral quiet of Quaker meeting. At my progressive school, I’d envied the Black kids for the easy, familial solidarity they shared. Now I met cheerfully zealous people who might not have recognized the names of most of the poets I’d studied in my senior English seminar at Germantown Friends, but they invited me to their houses, hugged expansively, and called me “sister.” And they meant it. One summer, my mother-in-law invited me to a church conference, and Kemp urged me to attend, since he transformed himself into an authority on any topic that caught my interest. He expected me to come home chastened for my sins, and he sent me off with certain verses underlined in my Bible as preparation.

Maybe I was sick of having glasses of beer tossed into bookshelves I had recently cleaned, or maybe my heart was exhausted. I didn’t expect anything from the conference beyond company for my loneliness and the possibility of becoming a better person. But that week, I began to tie the Christian notion of God as father around the fragmented pieces of my inner self. Throughout the last night there, I sat hyper-alert in my quiet dorm room, praying and touching the parts of my body I didn’t like. I repeated over and over, in shock and delight, that God loved me—my mouth that binged on junk food, my breasts, my pallid skin. Something was re-ordering my spiritual DNA. On the long train ride home, I knew things were going to change.

Kemp’s Mansonesque diatribes began to sound bombastic, even silly. He told me that what stood between me and God’s love was the fact that I had just rolled my eyes, revealing that my nature was as stiff-necked as the Israelites wandering in the desert, I didn’t argue or pretend to agree. I started sassing back.

I moved out after he described a dream he’d had, involving me and a knife. I went home to my parents. It was a relief to say, “You were right about him.” Our kisses were unpracticed and stiff, but genuine. I lived with them for a while, waiting for my divorce to finalize and figuring out what to do with my life.

Today, those shadow years lie at the periphery of my thoughts. I am happy and productive. I am married again—this time, to a gentle and loving man. I never saw Kemp or Tony again, but a mental breakdown while pregnant with my first child catapulted me into a war. I had dismissed my past as over and done. I’d been to hell and back, but here, reflected in my husband’s admiring face, were my years of Jubilee. But as I stared at the pattern on the Persian rug in my therapist’s office session after session, my past proved to be tenacious as vermin. As a young mother, while my heart sometimes threatened to explode under the pressure of change, I never lost my gratitude at having been granted a second, ordinary life. There was a time when I believed I’d spend the rest of my life in a grubby apartment, the target of Kemp’s theories that I was the genetic inferior of people who were outgoing and successful. Scary as each hour of my new life could be, I lived it in the light of day.

Today, my children know only that I was married before. That I was young and he was old. That I made a mistake. They know that I have returned to Quakerism from a more conservative place, but they are not aware that the thick walls of fundamentalism once offered refuge for my sanity. Some day, when they’re ready, I’ll tell them this story. But am I the one who hesitates, knowing that their vision of order in the world is colored, however subtly, by their view of me? Once they know, they will think no less of me. They’ll also realize that I used to be pretty strange, the kind of kid that they would choose to avoid. My straightforward parental authority has tangled roots. For now, I’m simply Mom, who volunteers at the school store, someone who would never do anything seriously outrageous or unsafe. I wish I could remain simple forever.

I’ll introduce my story casually, as if pain were not at its heart. “It was only love,” I’ll them. “Granted, that can be complicated.”

Helen Mallon received her MFA degree in Fiction Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2005. She is completing a novel, Quaker Playboy Leaves Legacy of Confusion (working title). Her poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press is titled Bone China. Her story, “Astral Projection” is in the Best of Philadelphia Stories Anthology 2007. “Biology” won the Editor’s Choice Award in issue #5 of Relief: A Christian Journal.

Her Bear Husband

“Of course I’ve been in the woods before.”

Lucia glanced around the visitor center to reassure herself that she looked just like everyone else there, then glared back across the counter at the skeptical park ranger. Until encountering him, she’d felt impervious in her new acquisitions: stiff hiking boots with heavy Vibram soles; cargo pants of a slippery, fast-drying fabric that made soft whispering noises as she walked; a rain jacket with a thin fleece lining. In preparation for her excursion, she’d also bought a 20-ounce sleeping bag that would bob atop an unwieldy pack, itself stuffed with a tiny tent – two-and-a-half pounds – a couple of changes of socks and underwear, and foil packets of freeze-dried dinners, their desiccated contents so devoid of texture and smell as to be guaranteed not to attract bears. Alone in the house she’d sublet for her temporary teaching job at a Montana college, she spent hours researching every item, checking off each against a long list of things various guidebooks insisted were essential. Then she went looking for them. Her new town’s business district comprised a scant four blocks. An espresso shop, windows hung hopefully with cheap, root-bound houseplants. Molvar’s Ladies Fashions, chipped mannequins draped in generously cut pantsuits. A newsstand, the daily headlines indecipherable: “Biggest One-Year Drop in Board Feet in Decades.” “Heap-Leach Boom Goes Bust.” “Coyote Depredations on Rise.” The last featuring a photo of a man in a cowboy hat, gesturing angrily toward the mangled body of a sheep at his booted feet, the blood a scarlet shock in the dun-hued scene.

A couple of pawnshops, and a bar – no, two – in each block, most of them along the railroad tracks that divided the town. The Mint, The Stockman, The Gandy Dancer. Red’s. Al’s. Burr Lively’s. And, not one, but three stores offering both hunting and camping gear – heavy on the former, windows a forest of camouflage clothing, including a saucy leaf-patterned bikini dangling from the antlers of a mounted elk head. But, from looks of the little plastic kayaks leaning against the doorframe, to the tents set up along the sidewalk in front of the stores, plenty of the latter, too. She would no more have set foot inside one of those stores than she would have walked through the door of Burr Lively’s, which nightly spilled a contingent of hard-faced men into the empty lot alongside it, where some slept until morning, only to list into the coffee shop at dawn, knocking back double espressos that they dosed from flasks stowed somewhere within their voluminous camouflage jackets that probably had come from the stores just down the street.

Lucia avoided them all, ordering her backpacking gear online, gasping at the total, and endured the quizzical expression of the FedEx man who delivered the outsize boxes for several days in a row.

The park ranger looked at her the same way, eyeballing the pack’s shiny fabric, the boots’ unmarred surface. Before she could even speak, he’d put the question to her.

“First time in the backcountry?”

He was tall, his starched khaki shirt and creased green uniform pants hanging loosely on a rangy frame. His hands, long fingers tapping impatience on the countertop, looked too large for picking at a computer keyboard, and she wondered who he’d pissed off to get stuck on desk duty, dealing with the likes of her. A Smokey the Bear hat sat on his desk, and she refrained from asking him to put it on so that she could take a photo and e-mail it to her friends at home with another sardonic note about her new life. Some of those notes also went to her lover.

Whose reply was always the same: “Come home.”

Home. Her alone in her apartment, him in Westchester County with his wife.

The ranger cleared his throat, awaiting details of her “backcountry” experience. Apparently that was what it was called here. Not – she’d noted his expression at her reply – “woods.” She made a mental note. She thought of long weekends at bed-and-breakfasts in the Adirondacks, youthful summers in Connecticut, strolls through the pleasant groves of elderly oaks and maples encircling sun-dappled glades.

“It’s my first time here,” she told the ranger, intending the words to convey vast experience elsewhere.

“You’re not hiking alone,” he said, not even bothering to make it a question.

“Of course not,” she snapped. Surely, there would be others on the trail.

He took a pamphlet from the holder on the counter, spread it open before her and recited from memory. After each sentence, he glanced up and looked directly into her eyes – his were grey – as if to emphasize the point.

“This is bear country. You don’t want to surprise a bear. Make noise while you hike. Clap, bang a couple of sticks together, sing.”

“Right,” she said, and forced a laugh. “My voice is terrible.”

He waited until she apologized. He resumed:

“If you’re camping in the backcountry –” His gaze traveled to her backpack. “We have campgrounds right here, you know,” he said. He pointed through the window toward a reef of Winnebago roofs visible above low trees. She was silent.

“Hang your food at least ten feet off the ground.”

She was pretty sure that, somewhere in her pack, she had some cord. It was on the checklist. Enough to hang the pack – how high again? And, how was she supposed to get it up there in the first place? Climb a tree? She nodded, trying to look bored.

“Don’t sleep in the clothes you cook in.”

These same instructions were in her books, but she was no more enlightened now as when she’d first read them. Was she supposed to hoist her clothes up into a tree along with the pack? She pictured herself standing naked, tossing her synthetic, fast-drying turtleneck and swishing cargo pants – boots, too? – up into the branches.

She nodded again, quickly.

“Don’t,” he said, and his voice changed, “go into the backcountry if you’ve got your period. Bears…their sense of smell is so keen …”

She couldn’t meet his eyes, but could feel him looking the question at her.

“Jesus,” she muttered. “No.”

“You’ll want to register at the trailhead,” he said, speaking briskly again. “Everyone in your party” – She could look at him again, her level gaze boldly challenging the disbelief in his eyes – “and how many nights you, all of you, expect to be out. How many nights is that, by the way?”

“Three. Maybe four,” she said. She hadn’t come to Montana, she told herself, just to spend her weekends at the same sort of faculty parties that filled her time in New York. Even though they weren’t the same at all. She’d arrived at a barbecue the previous weekend with a chilled falanghina; had dressed carefully, in thin-soled mules, pale capris, and a black knitted-silk shell with a matching cardigan thrown over her shoulders, only to find herself silent and ridiculous among people in roomy cargo pants like the ones she’d since acquired, swigging beer straight from the bottles. Her narrow heels, perfectly suitable for sidewalks, dug into the lawn and she twisted an ankle. Someone steadied her, catching her elbow in a steely grip. Back home, health-club memberships were a given, but these people were lean in a way that differed from the meticulously toned forms hogging the treadmills and ellipticals at her gym. Sinewy, she thought. Muscles hardened and ropy, arms and calves nicked with small scars, tans that shamelessly bisected foreheads and arms, stopped at necklines. Lucia could only listen as they talked about rock-climbing and fly-fishing and float trips, whatever those were, shivering as the sun slipped behind the mountains, deepening the evening chill for which her flimsy sweater proved no match. She was determined to join the next such conversation. Hence, this excursion into the woods. Backcountry. Whatever.

The ranger was talking again, tracing trails on a map – “These get a lot of traffic on weekends, especially this one. You’re best off here. You can read a topo map, can’t you?”

She had such a map, its surface a spiderweb of dashed red trails superimposed atop a mass of thin black lines looping into whorls like so many fingerprints. She pointed to a trace of red somewhat apart from the rest. “What about this one?”

He shook his head.

“Too isolated,” he says. “Too high. Nobody goes up there this early in the summer. There’ll be snow. It’s for experienced hikers.” Again, his gaze swept her. She had left her hair loose that morning, and she knew the effect of the elbow-length russet waves, the luminous skin, the delicate features tiresomely described as pre-Raphaelite. She was used to men staring at her. But this man looked past that, scowling one last time at her obvious inexperience, and so she thanked him abruptly and turned her back and walked toward the door, awkward in her new boots.

He called after her.

“I’ll be heading up that way in a couple of days. Maybe I’ll check on you. What’s your name?”

She called it back over her shoulder and kept walking.

The SUV she rented for the semester had felt over-large in town, but here, when the asphalt road gave way to gravel and began to climb, she appreciated its power. She passed the trailhead he pointed out on the map and, on a whim, pulled into the crowded parking area. Just as he had told her, there was a post with a covered wooden tray containing a hikers’ log protected by a sheet of clear plastic. She added her name in large, bold letters; then, with a tight-lipped smile, that of her lover. Ex-lover, she reminded herself. She got back into the SUV, studied the map, and took a side road, amusing herself on the drive by wondering what would happen if she were to get lost. His name would be reported, too, finally linked publicly with hers. There would be newspaper stories, a brief flurry of publicity before he was revealed to be safe at home with his wife. The reverie, bitter and pleasurable as a citrus sorbet, carried her through the next thirty miles until she turned into another parking area, this one devoid of vehicles.

“Good,” she breathed. The solitude she had sought since leaving New York had eluded her as her new colleagues swarmed around her with invitations to coffee, dinner and more barbecues, trying to prevent the loneliness they insisted she must feel. “Lonely is what I need,” she wanted to say, but cringed at the Garbo-esque melodrama of the words. But it was exactly what she needed, she realized as she set off into the woods – this close to the road, did it count as backcountry? – slowly adjusting to the heavy boots, the unfamiliar weight on her back. The pines stood tall and straight, with segmented orange bark, their branches trailing skeins of dark, fringed moss. Light angled through the trees, glazing a carpet of dried needles. Slowly she found her stride, steps lengthening, arms swinging easily. She inhaled deeply, rounded a bend, and followed the trail onto a ledge that traced a granite wall. To her right, the rockface climbed up and up, nearly vertical. To her left, closer than she would have liked, the ground dropped away into a vast valley. Her gaze swept its breadth, soared to the corrugated peaks on the other side. She forced it downward with difficulty, and was rewarded with the sight of a string of lakes along the valley floor, their waters tinted jade with glacial silt. A turquoise thread of creek connected them with long, crooked stitches. When she let her breath out, she realized how long she had been holding it. She thanked someone, something. Her belief in God was provisional, but the grandeur demanded acknowledgment. Only after she traversed the ledge and followed the trail back into the trees did she realize she hadn’t thought about her lover in some time. A smile stretched her cheeks.

She camped that night by a small stream, its gurgle surprisingly loud. Her pack reposed in a fork in a tree at the far side of the clearing – not ten feet above the ground by any means, but it was the best she could do – her clothes tucked neatly inside. In the end, she had indeed stripped, foolishly looking over her shoulder as though there was anyone to see her, donning for nighttime the soft silk long-underwear pants and pullover that were among the guidebooks’ endless recommendations. It had taken her longer than she’d thought possible to set up the supposedly idiot-proof tent, to start the stove, to boil the scant cup of water necessary for her odd, freeze-dried dinner. Still, she slid into the slick sleeping bag, grateful for the lightweight pad beneath it that had seemed such an annoyance when she’d packed. Throughout the day, though, she’d marveled at the concrete-like consistency of the earth beneath her feet, and was happy for even the thin buffer offered by the pad. She lay awake for a few moments, pulling the tent flap aside to gasp at the nearness of the stars, noting the pleasant ache in her thighs and calves, smiling at her outsize sense of accomplishment for having achieved the simple tasks of the tent, the stove, the meal. She tried to slow her breathing. At home bedtime involved an elaborate ritual of a hot bath, a little cognac, earplugs, an herbal sleep mask. She rationed sleeping pills carefully, cutting them in half, and even as she wondered if she should have brought some with her into the woods, she fell asleep.

Morning brought a cottony grey light and a chill that shocked her. Her breath wreathed around her head as she dipped water from the icy creek for her breakfast. Hands stiff with cold, she repeated the previous evening’s struggles with her tiny backpacking stove, pumping its primer for what seemed like forever before the flame finally caught, too slowly warming the water for a meal that purported to be scrambled eggs, but tasted instead of colored Styrofoam. Already, she was planning for her next trip, thinking longingly how easy it would have been to pack slices of thick brown bread and packets of marmalade to squeeze upon it; maybe a frozen steak that would thaw in its baggie while she hiked, providing an evening meal with actual taste and texture. At least she had thought to bring strong coffee, and, for the evenings, little bottles of wine, and that small bit of foresight cheered her, even as the sun reappeared through the trees, burning away the fog. She felt quite pleased with herself as she fumbled with the collapsed tent and stuffed her sleeping back into its sack and set out upon the trail.

In that first hour, she rediscovered the long, easy stride of the previous day, but then the trail narrowed and began to climb, folding back on itself through a forest thick with spiky underbrush that caught repeatedly at her hair. Lucia stopped and slid the heavy pack from her shoulders, fumbling in it for a bandanna that she twisted around her hair. She tried combing through its snarls with her fingers, dislodging pine needles and bits of leaves, and finally gave up, shrugging into the pack again and stepping grimly back onto a trail quickly growing wearisome. At first, the rise was gradual, but then the switchbacks came more frequently, and Lucia’s calves and lungs competed in fiery protest. The trees grew thick overhead, blotting out the sun, a mercy, she thought, as sweat dampened her shirt. Gnats whined at her ears, fastening themselves to the corners of her eyes and mouth. She breathed noisily through her nose, suppressing the searing gasps that would only draw in the insects. Somewhere deep within the pack was the recommended repellant, but she feared that if she stopped, the bugs would set upon her even more fiercely in the time it would take to unearth it. She saw an opening in the trees and moved more quickly, shoving aside thin, supple branches. She released them too soon, and they lashed back across her face. She touched a finger to her stinging cheek, brought it away bright with a drop of blood. She smeared the back of her hand across her face, then swiped it across her eyes, damp with tears of frustration. It occurred to her that despite the ranger’s warning against hiking alone, she was glad no one was there to see her struggles, and then she barely had time to reflect upon the fact that she had not seen a single person in a day and a half when the bear ambled onto the trail in front of her and stopped.

She had stepped into a clearing, and the sun was high and strong above her. She felt it warm on her back, and a soft breeze bent the tops of the pines and dried the sweat on her shirt and she thought it was far too pretty a morning for what was about to happen. The bear didn’t move, and neither did she and so there was plenty of time for her to register the characteristics the ranger had listed for her – the dished face, the humped shoulders, the gingery fur.

“If you encounter one,” he’d said, “don’t look it in the eye. They see that as a challenge.”

But she couldn’t help it; the bear was looking directly at her, its eyes honeyed and liquid, and when it stood to peer down at her from a better vantage point, she realized it was male and that he was aroused (she would learn about the baculum only later). Oddly, the sight steadied her; she was familiar with this reaction and, unconsciously, she touched her hand to her hair, lifting it from her neck, the movement loosening the inexpertly tied bandanna so that it fell away and her hair flowed over her shoulders.

The bear made a keening noise and fell heavily back down onto his forepaws and took a step toward her. She remembered how the ranger told her to play dead, and she crouched on the ground, wrapping her arms around her head (“Protect your neck, cover those big arteries.”) the way she did in elementary school when she and her classmates bent beneath their insubstantial wooden desks against the vaporizing powers of the atomic bombs.

Through slitted eyes she saw his claws arced against the earth of the trail just inches from her nose; registered the hot breath against her face. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt his snout, cool and dry, against her elbow and she braced for the clamp of jaw, the pierce of fang, but he merely nudged her arm away from her head and put his nose to her cheek. She felt it grow moist and thought she must be crying again, but realized it was his tongue, gently cleaning her face, lapping the length of the scratch, touching carefully to the corners of her eyes and lips, flicking away an errant gnat. Then he pressed his head tightly to hers and held it there a long minute as she breathed in his musky scent, withdrawing so quietly that it was some moments before she realized he was truly gone.

She stood slowly, unfolding her limbs as though they were strange to her. The sun drenched her in warmth, but she found herself shivering, noted the chattering noise that at first she thought was a woodpecker, but turned out to be her teeth. She turned slowly, a full circle, but saw nothing. Even the wind had died, and the trees stood like sculptures against the bowl of sky. She had an impulse to wonder if she’d imagined everything, but could not yield to it; there, heading back down the trail the way she had come, were prints sunk into the crumbly earth, big as soup plates, each preceded by a row of deep holes poked by those claws. She moved her mouth experimentally, touched her tongue to a hair caught in her lips, and when she pulled it away, she found it both shorter and thicker than her own, like a strand of copper wire. So it had happened. She rolled the hair between her fingers, then shoved it deep into one of the pockets of her cargo pants. From another pocket, she withdrew her cell phone, but it told her, as it had nearly from the moment she had entered the park, that she was out of range of any signal. Her legs trembled, but when she shoved one before her, it worked, and so she shoved the other, and eventually she discovered herself walking up the trail again. It seemed insane to head more deeply into the woods, but she didn’t dare return the way she’d come for fear of seeing the bear again. The trail described a twenty-eight-mile loop and she had already hiked nearly ten of those; two more nights would bring her back to the parking area. She wondered if the bear had really gone, or if it would return to stalk her; wondered if there were more bears ahead. She walked and cried, trying to push away the regret swelling within her for choosing such a lightly traveled route. She vowed to hike farther than she had planned each day so as to spend only a single night more on the trail. The thought cheered her, and she moved more quickly, hiking on legs grown rubbery until it was nearly dark, noticing little about her surroundings.

She stopped reluctantly where a beaver dam across a creek formed a small pond and, with hands shaking anew, raised her tent in the middle of the meadow, thinking it less likely that a bear would creep out of the trees toward her. She was hungry, but feared that even the tasteless, strangely textured substances within her freeze-dried packets would prove too much of a temptation, so she crawled into her sleeping bag and listened to her stomach rumbling. Improbably, she fell asleep just as abruptly as the night before, waking to the same grey fog that heralded the previous morning.

She was ravenous, and headachey from going so long without food. She disentangled herself from the sleeping bag, and with some apprehension, unzipped the tent and tentatively put her face to the opening. The first thing she saw were the fish, three trout, water beaded upon scales whose rainbow hues still shone bright, their perfection marred only by the puncture marks of the large claws. The second thing she noticed were the footprints across the dew-glistening meadow, the outsize depressions leading into the trees. The last thing she saw was the large circle of flattened grass not eight feet away. She crawled from the tent, stood slowly, then tiptoed barefoot to its center. The grass beneath her feet was still warm. She curled her toes into it, contemplated the footprints, then turned to the trout. Her stomach lurched demandingly, and within minutes, she had inexpertly gutted them with her Swiss Army knife, scraped away their scales, and sliced them into ragged fillets. She hastily pumped the little stove into life, boiled water for coffee, then sautéed the trout fillets. It was awkward – she had neither butter nor oil and they stuck to the pan, so hot when she scraped them free that they burnt her tongue, but the flesh was moist and delicate and delicious, and she forced herself to slow down and savor it, alternating bites with gulps of coffee as the sun chased off the fog. An indignant beaver surfaced in the pond, saw her, slapped its tail against the glacier-green water and dived deep. In the trees at the edge of the clearing, a raven croaked and another flapped to join it, the pair of them clearly waiting for her scraps, and she rose and stretched and laughed aloud and told herself that she had gone crazy, truly out of her mind, if she what she imagined was happening was any kind of real at all.

Still, that night, her final one on the trail, she ostentatiously lingered overlong beside a creek, stripping off her shirt and bra and splashing icy water on her face and chest and under her arms, and she was not at all surprised to find the still-warm rabbit’s carcass beside the tent when she returned, its neck neatly broken by what appeared to be a single, decisive blow.

Skinning it took some doing, but she managed, and she simmered the pieces in some of her wine, and although she might have wished for some mushrooms, a little thyme and chervil, a quick grind of coarse pepper, and a dusting of flour just to bring the sauce together, still, it was a passable meal, better than passable, and after she ate half the rabbit, and finished most of the wine, she lay back in the grass and let the stars do their slow cartwheel overhead until she was nearly asleep. But before she crept into her tent, she took the uneaten pieces of rabbit, and put them on a rock some distance – but not a great distance – from the tent, and found a good-size stone with a hollow in it, and poured the last of the wine into the depression. Then, standing before her tent as the moon rose, she took off all of her clothes (“Don’t sleep in the clothes you cook in.”) piece by slow piece, and stood a long moment in the moonlight before dropping to her knees and easing into the tent.

Yet again, she slept deeply, but not so soundly that she was unaware of the warmth just on the other side of the tent wall, so close that she knew if she were to put her hand to the flimsy nylon shell and push just the slightest bit, she would feel a mound of muscle and the regular rise and fall of deep, yearning breaths.

In the morning, there was no trace of the wine and rabbit, but there were more trout, beside a heap of purple-black huckleberries. She ate them one by one, bursting them against her palate with her tongue, closing her eyes against the intensity of the flavor. When she opened them, he stood before her, fixing her with the same golden gaze. He waited patiently while she gathered her things, then walked beside her down the trail. At some point, she reached out and rested her hand upon his shoulder, absorbing the heat of the sun-warmed fur, pressing her fingers against him so as to sense the blood coursing just beneath the skin.

He hesitated when they approach the trailhead. But they had already come too far to turn back, and she looked at him and nodded, and so of course he came home with her, and that is how he became her bear husband.

Gwen Florio first worked in the West during the 1990s as a Denver-based national correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer. During her time at the Inquirer, she was also a member of Philadelphia?s Rittenhouse Writers Group. She has received two prose grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a residency from the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. Florio now lives in Missoula, MO, where she is city editor for the Missoulian newspaper. She is afraid of bears.

Local Author Profile: Adam Rex

Adam Rex understands children. As both a writer and illustrator of children’s books, his work captures the imaginative world children love to inhabit. His characters are heroic kids in cowboy boots who face the world fearlessly, taking on aliens and rambunctious zoo animals. His characters also include a lumbering, strangely human Frankenstein and assorted other monsters who somehow don’t seem so scary in the pages of his books.

Kirkus heartily praises one of his books, saying, “As if more proof were needed that Adam Rex has a strange and goofy mind, here’s a visit to a meta-fictional zoo with some uncommonly crafty residents…Rex gives the whole episode a surreal, expect-anything feel…[A] gleefully postmodern romp” and Publisher’s Weekly classifies his illustrations as “oil paintings [that] hearken to 19 th Century Barnum ads—or 1960’s counterculture poster art—in Rex’s offbeat tale.” Most recently, his novel, The True Meaning of Smekday was nominated alongside Harry Potter for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Despite his success in the highly competitive market of children’s book, Rex’s feet remain firmly planted on planet Earth.

Are you more invested in writing or drawing?
They’re both just different aspects of storytelling to me, so they’re somewhat intertwined. Of course, I illustrate books that I haven’t written from time to time, and I like the idea of writing something that I don’t go on to illustrate.

How did you get connected with Cricket Magazine, Spider Magazine, and Amazing Stories?
I really just did illustration work for these magazines. I never submitted any writing to them, apart from one poem that was published in Cricket. That was the first of a number of monster poems I’ve written, and I didn’t submit any more after deciding that I was more interested in seeing them collected in a book. That book became Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich.

What were your favorite books as a kid and did they influence your approach to writing and illustrating?
One of my favorites was certainly The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and I think its influence is pretty obvious in my own The True Meaning of Smekday. I’m beginning to think one of the greatest influences on the illustration work I do now is actually Chuck Jones. When I began to concentrate more on humorous illustration, I found that, in my mind, humor and illustration intersected squarely in the center of animated shorts like The Rabbit of Seville and What’s Opera, Doc?

What advice do you have in terms of the creative process for those of us struggling to get something on the page or canvas?
I think I’m always trying to trick myself into thinking I’ve started already, so that I feel more comfortable making marks. In both illustrating and writing, that seems to be a matter of making a lot of careless messes at first, and giving myself permission to do badly, or to create something that may never develop or see the light of day.

Do you draw and paint on a regular basis or just when you’re inspired (or have a deadline?
I suppose I only draw and paint when I’m inspired or have a deadline, but that covers pretty much every hour of every day. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have a serious deadline. I do miss drawing and painting for the sheer pleasure of it–just sitting in cafes, sketching people, exploring ideas–I haven’t been able to do that in years.

What are the differences between children’s illustration and fantasy art?
I’m tempted to say there aren’t any, though I’m not sure anybody would believe me. Mostly it’s just a matter of content–most fantasy art is aimed at an early teen to adult audience. Fantasy lends itself to complex compositions, while art for younger audiences tends to work better when the images are a little more straightforward. Fantasy art also tends toward hyper-detailed minutiae and, ironically, fairly traditional realism–anything to help sell the authenticity of the imagined world. It’s the difference between an anatomically plausible dragon designed from the study of bats and snakes and lizards with hundreds of finely rendered, battle-scarred scales on the one side, and, on the other, Puff the Magic Dragon.

What are you reading right now?
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer and an issue of McSweeney’s.

How is it that you are able to relate to kids so well?
I don’t think it’s too difficult to relate to kids. I just try to be honest and open, and actually talk TO them. Not at them, not to their parents through them. I see a lot of people talk to kids in a way that shows that they’re really talking to the kids’ parents–they’re not actually interested in the kid as a person, they’re more interested in sending some message to the world about what a kid-friendly, young-at-heart sort of person they are. Most kids can tell the difference.

Where do you come up with your story ideas?
I never know how to answer this question, because I don’t think I’ve ever gotten ideas in the same way twice, and after the fact I often forget what my thought processes were in the first place. I couldn’t tell you how I came to think of whatever I was thinking of, but now, hey, this idea is living in my head. It’s almost similar to the way dreams fade on you–I can no longer relate all the details of what or how I was thinking right before waking this morning, but, regardless, I’m going to be thinking about losing my teeth for the rest of the day.

What are you currently working on?
I’m finishing the illustrations for a book in which a boy is given a pet blue whale as a punishment. I didn’t write that one, so I can honestly say it’s hilarious. And I’m supposedly writing my second novel.

You mention on your website that you have two huge, gigantic cats. What are their names and occupations?
The youngest is Dr. Simon Dicker. He’s not a medical doctor, obviously–he’s an astrophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania . Little Nemo is our oldest. She’s a stay-at-home-cat.

To view Rex’s work, visit adamrex.com

Aimee LaBrie’s stories have been published in many literary journals. She recently received the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, which will publish her short story collection in December. Aimee serves on the Philadelphia Stories Planning & Development Board.

Breaking News

Cop held in killing of mute with rake
How was I to know the suspect could not hear me
shout, “Drop your weapon to the ground!”
as he continued to muster the dead leaves
which had accumulated since August?
How was I to know the perp wasn’t loaded,
that he was stone sober, going about his work?
How was I to know my language failed me,
that my dumb words ricocheted away from the man
who jerked his yard tool, startled when I stood
behind him, pointing my nervous automatic at his chest?

Only minor injuries reported to a small child
Besides, there’s plenty of time for him to grow
used to the bad news of fractures and contusions.
No need to worry him now how the world can poke
out his eyes and sever his spine, leaving him a stranger
to his extremities. When he is no longer a minor,
when he becomes a major, then we can tell him
the details of the whole story, how the happy ending
is when the victim dies, finally free of the pain
that has grown inside him waiting to be born.

Philadelphia wipes out crime on paper
And not a moment too soon,
the mayor complained
to the police chief. The trees
are a powerful block whose votes
I must have for re-election.
They weren’t happy working
overtime to replenish the reams
vandalized by careless copiers
and shredders that cut away
the best rings of their lives.
Now that the trees are muted,
I want you to hit the bricks
and clean up the mess
of the leaves and arrest
the men who do not listen,
who continue to scratch
their rakes against
the fine skin of the lawns.
Peter E. Murphy is the author of Stubborn Child (2005), a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize, and a chapbook, Thorough & Efficient (2008) both from Jane Street Press. Retired from teaching English and creative writing at Atlantic City High School, he now teaches poetry writing at Richard Stockton College and is the founder/director of the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway held annually in Cape May.

Sunflowers

Vincent understood them: the way they yield
their darkling faces
to the sun,
aflame for its arcing shimmer dance
across the day’s mysterious
expanse,
how big they are, how weighty, over grown,
the way they lean together
in the fields,
conspiring to hold each other up, creak and groan
as their heads
reach critical mass, aswarm with too much seed.

He gathered them in vases, painted their petaled fall from grace,
bunched
together, shy, askew and awkward, out of place,
caught their surprise
at being indoors, the droop and shrug of leaves,
the way they suddenly
dropped, losing all of their color.
Too painful to paint them riotous
at the roadside in full bloom:
signs of what we were before the
crows moved in to feed.

Eileen Moeller has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. Her poems have appeared in literary journals including Feminist Studies, Paterson Literary Review, Caprice, Blue Fifth Review, and Philadelphia Stories, and in anthologies, e.g. Paterson: A Poet?s City, Writing Women, Cries of the Spirit : A Celebration of Women?s Spirituality, Claiming the Spirit Within : A Sourcebook of Women?s Poetry ( Beacon Press) and The Nerve: Writing Women of 1998 (Virago). A website manuscript:
Body in Transit, appears at skinnycatdesign.co.uk/eileen/

Physics

Every day I carry my arms and legs
in a sling suspended from my teeth.
There’s a physicist who sits in
a corner of the bar I frequent, and
brags of how he’s working on
a mathematical formula that will connect
everything in the universe. “I certainly
hope that there’s something you can do
for me,” I mutter out the side
of my mouth so as not to drop my
dangling appendages. He smiles and nods
and looks dreamily out the window at the stars,
perhaps for inspiration from the divine.
Then, seeing none forthcoming, he turns
his gaze back to the bartender and
exclaims, “ANY DAY NOW!” as his smile
disappears and his blue-eyed optimistic
gaze is fixed to the bottom of an
empty glass.

Jason Jones is a graduate of Temple University. He lives in Philadelphia and works as an Editor for Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Tug-of-War

[img_assist|nid=825|title=F is For Fox by Kristen Solecki ©2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=198]After he hit our last halfie onto the roof of Perlstein’s Glass, Frankie Wnek stepped over the broomstick we used for a bat and shimmied up a drainpipe to get it. Frankie was my age, fourteen. Since I was pitching and gave up the home run, I was supposed to go, but when he said don’t worry about it, I wasn’t going to argue. Who knew when that pipe was going to snap away from the wall? Who knew that two older kids named Chickenhead and Toot were already up there, just for the hell of it, waiting to take turns punching whoever came up, then grab his ankles and swing him back and forth over the ledge?

Perlstein’s was a four-story building, so I had to look straight up to see what was going on, and I had to squint hard against the sun, which was just then breaking through a stretch of gray clouds. Frankie was screaming, of course, that goes without saying, and he kept trying to bend himself toward the roof like he was doing crunches, like I would have done, if I’d been the one up there. He could only get so far, though, before he dropped again and writhed like a snake, or like Houdini in those old black-and-white movies, hands clenched behind his knees. Frankie had long, straight black hair that hung a good foot below his head and his cheeks were watermelon red and puffy. Chickenhead and Toot laughed with their mouths wide open, looking at each other, then down at Frankie, then at the gathering crowd. They laughed even harder when Frankie pissed himself and the piss ran down his bare chest to his face.

“Oh my God!” I could hear one of them yell. “Holy
fucking shit!” Frankie turned his head to one side and shouted
for someone to get his mom, who was a bartender at Felix’s,
and after he did, about eight people took off to go get her. When
something like that happens, you do the first thing that makes
sense or you just stand there and do nothing. It’s one way
or the other––I learned that a long time
ago––and you don’t know until you’re in
the middle of something like that which way you’ll go. You
might yell for Chickenhead and Toot to pull Frankie up or run to
get Frankie’s mom or go home and call the cops or just stand
there watching the moment unfold like it’s on TV, like I
did.

One thing you don’t do is look away. That’s against
human nature. You can try to turn from the stuff you don’t
want to see, but your mind will force you to look again, the same
way you’d have to turn and face the train you knew was about
to run you down. It’s not that I didn’t want to do
something. I did. Frankie was my friend since fifth grade and we
hung out together just about every day. It’s just that I
was more scared watching Frankie hang there than any time my father
went to town on my mother, which is saying a lot. I was afraid
the guys swinging Frankie would swing me next. Put yourself in
my shoes. You’re fourteen and don’t know what you’d
do even if you could do something. Maybe you talk to someone beside
you. Maybe you don’t or can’t. Maybe you look around
for your mother, even though she won’t be home for hours
yet, and your father, who you just know is going to show up soon
enough to put his two cents in. No matter what, you end up doing
something with your hands. You clasp your fingers together behind
your neck or across your forehead, or you squeeze them into fists
and bury them into your crossed arms, which is what I did. Even
that late in the year, I had a T-shirt on, and after we stopped
playing I got cold.

I watched from our sidewalk across the street, leaning without
thinking about it into the front fender of old man Dangler’s
shiny blue Charger. It all happened so fast––two minutes,
maybe three––but even now it’s still happening.
Frankie is hanging there four years before he enlists in the Army,
launches rockets in Kuwait , then comes home with headaches that
won’t let up and crisped bodies in his dreams that want nothing
to do with war. Chickenhead and Toot are laughing together two
years before they disappear separately, Chickenhead from a baseball
bat outside the Aramingo Diner, Toot from a heroin overdose in
the back bedroom of his sister’s house. Frankie’s mom
is limping up Jasper Street before she moved away without telling
anyone, her voice a shrill string of exclamations, hands over her
head as if she could pluck Frankie like a stray balloon. Then there
was my father, who had followed her out of the bar, quiet as he
always was, running a black pocket comb through his greasy blond
hair as he walked. A month later, already thinning from the cancer
that would kill him before spring, he’d call me from my room
one night to sit with him at the glass dinner table. He’d
have his tall can of Schaefer’s and tiny drinking glass,
and he’d ask me through a Pall Mall haze if I hated him.

It was the day of Halloween, and Perlstein’s Glass was
at the intersection of Huntington and Jasper Streets in Kensington,
a nothing neighborhood in North Philly once alive with mill work
and railroad traffic, but now stifled by El track shadows and the
hulking skeletons of burned-out factory buildings. The leaves on
the few trees were gone for the year with all of the birds except
for the pigeons that walked the roof’s ledge on either side
of Frankie, whose mom, despite her bad foot, got to the corner
fast.

“Frankie!” she yelled. “What the hell are you
two doing? Pull him up. Frankie!”

“Relax,” Chickenhead hollered down. Bob Harv gave
Chickenhead his nickname because of his skinny neck and early baldness. “We’re
just messing around. Right, Frankie?”

But Frankie didn’t say anything. He was crying hard and
trying to keep his head even with the horizon. His head must have
throbbing.

“Pull him up now or so help me God, I’ll kill you
both,” Frankie’s mom said.

Then my dad chimed in. “Let’s go, assholes. Move
it. Then get down here so I can beat some sense into you sons of
bitches.” He looked over his shoulder after he spoke and
saw me standing across the street.

“Hey, Davey,” he shouted. “Get over here.” He
kept staring at me until I started around the car toward him. I
didn’t like where all of this was headed, I’ll tell
you that. Even before I reached my dad, I could smell the stale
Schaefer’s on his breath and the Pall Mall smoke that stunk
up his clothes. I could see him already, wringing his fists in
Perlstein’s back alley, ready to be a tough guy like it’s
Friday night outside Felix’s and he just called someone into
the street because he didn’t like their look or their tone.
I could picture the ring of neighbors, some cheering, some with
crossed arms, in a side lot few cops came through. And I could
see what I guess he couldn’t: there were two of them, and
they would either gang up against him or run right past, laughing
at how drunk and slow and stupid he was. He was going to get killed
some day, my mother always told him.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” said Toot, who got his nickname
from blowing trumpet sounds into his thumb while getting stoned
with Mikey K., Vic Turner, and those guys outside Griffin’s
Deli. “Fucking cry baby.”

With that, Toot started to pull Frankie up without telling Chickenhead,
holding Frankie’s ankle with one hand while grabbing first
the back of Frankie’s knee, then his wrist, with the other.
Frankie’s weight shifted fast, and his ankle slipped so easily
from Chickenhead’s hands it’s amazing he hadn’t
already fallen. Frankie swung like a pendulum into the wall, face
first, and now Toot had Frankie all by himself. Toot had him pinned
against the building, underneath the stone ledge. You could see
he wouldn’t have him for long, though, and you could hear
it, too. Underneath Frankie screaming was Toot straining and grunting.

“Fuck,” Toot pushed out every few breaths. “Fuck,
stay still, man.”

Some people on the street started rushing back toward the sidewalk.
Many were crying, and with any quick move one way or the other,
you could hear the whole crowd suck in a breath. Now Toot was a
big dude––strong as hell, about 6’2” and
250 pounds––so Frankie’s lucky Toot had him and
not Chickenhead, who was about as scrawny as Old Lady Lewis, who
held her Yorkie against her shoulder as she looked up from her
spot next to three other women her age, which would have been around
my grandparents’ age if any of them had lived that long.
They all wore white Skippy tennis sneakers and shirts with pictures
of their dogs.

“Where the fuck are the cops?” someone asked, which
is what we were all wondering. And I was thinking about the bucket
truck they’d need to get Frankie down, along with Chickenhead
and Toot, and about the ambulance you could already imagine on
the sidewalk, with some EMT giving Frankie the once-over inside
the small van awash in yellow light. Someone said something about
getting mattresses, and then people were rushing again, including
my father this time.

“Come on, Davey,” he said, pushing me toward the
house. It was like I’d been stung by something, though. My
legs wouldn’t move. They had no strength in them, no feeling
whatsoever. I remember looking up at my father and saying “I
can’t” before he ran into our house without me.

“Hang on, baby,” Frankie’s mother called up. “Help’s
coming.” She was holding her hands up near her mouth and
squeezing the fingers of her right hand inside the fist of the
left.

Chickenhead reached across Toot to grab Frankie’s other
arm and foot, but they hung too far down the wall, so he grabbed
the arm that Toot already had and pulled. I don’t know how
Frankie’s arm didn’t snap off or come out of its socket,
but Chickenhead and Toot were able to lift that arm enough to make
the other arm swing around, and when it did, on the third or fourth
try, Frankie grabbed onto the ledge and propped his legs stiff
against the wall. The three of them were working together now,
with Frankie’s feet flush against the bricks like he was
about to run up it and Toot tilted back at a forty-five degree
angle, like he was anchoring a tug-of-war, until Chickenhead pulled
so hard he almost threw himself past Frankie and off the roof.
He lurched forward far enough for me to see his whole top hanging
over the edge before something rocked him just as hard backward,
and when it did, Frankie’s feet found enough traction to
let him scale the few feet to the roof’s stone lip, when
he slid his knee over and Chickenhead and Toot pulled him up.

It was like the Phillies won the Series or something, let me
tell you. Everyone clapping and jumping up and down. Frankie’s
mom hugging everybody and saying, “Thank you, Jesus” to
the sky, as if God had been the one to pull Frankie up. Right or
wrong, that’s the version that spread around the neighborhood.
Father Flatley said so at Mass the next Sunday and, for the next
few months, people greeted Frankie on the street as Chosen One or,
more often, Jesus. People who didn’t like Frankie
from before cut him some slack, even if they teased him while they
did it. “Stay off those roofs, Jesus,” Chickie Pell,
who ran Griffin ’s, said one afternoon. “You ain’t
a bouncing ball.” My dad missed the whole thing fighting
with a mattress in our doorway. He didn’t see Frankie go
up, didn’t see all three of them sitting up there so close
they could have been friends. He brought the mattress out anyway,
just in case, and hollered up a few times for Chickenhead and Toot
to jump before some dads tried to calm him down, holding their
hands up to their shoulders, palms out, almost begging him, which
he liked, I think, more than Frankie being safe.

By the time the cops came, Chickenhead and Toot were gone. Frankie
yelled long after the fact that they had run to the back of the
roof, but he didn’t turn to look, which means they either
shot down that drainpipe pretty damn fast or they jumped across
the five-foot alley to a line of row houses and disappeared inside
an abandoned one. It took half an hour for a fire truck with a
bucket to show and get Frankie back to the street. It took the
rest of that week and into the next one for my father to stop talking
about what he would have done to Chickenhead and Toot, those
bastards, if he had gotten his hands on them. Anything could
have set him off, so my mother and I watched what we said and how
we looked at him more than usual. We made sure the front door was
unlocked when he came home from work and that there was a cold
can of Schaefer’s just opened on the table. And in my room
I rehearsed into my mirror what I’d do the next time his
voice boomed at my mother. I bent into the football crouch he taught
me and practiced throwing my shoulder like a punch. I pictured
his hands sliding from my mother’s face or neck to try in
vain to grab me as I charged. Every time I went over it in my head,
my mother got away clean, my shoulder drove through, not into,
him, just like he’d taught me, and took his sorry ass to
the ground.

Daniel Donaghy’s next collection of poems, Start with the Trouble, will be published by the University of Arkansas Press in fall 2009. His first collection, Streetfighting, was published by BkMk Press in 2005 and named a Finalist for the 2006 Paterson Prize. His poems and stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Letters, Image, and many other journals and have been featured on Poetry Daily and on the Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. He grew up in the Kensington section of Philadelphia and attended the High School for Engineering and Science before earning degrees from Kutztown University, Cornell University, and the University of Rochester. He now lives in Connecticut.

Highlights

Of all the indiscreet behaviors
that colored my college years,
my deep drags of yellow highlighter
those zebra stripes I painted across textbook pages
may be my most peculiar disgrace.

How hard it was to draw the line
when drawing those lines.
Once I had stretched that cautionary color
like crime scene tape across chapters,
inches led easily to yards
until half of a story, most of an epic
lay glistening from my indiscriminate, squeaky touch.

Professors derided aimless effort and preached diligence while,
headphones on,
I rode my own neon yellow Zamboni machine,
painting long bands of importance in their sacred texts.
Those books, still on my shelves, have one lesson left to teach:
sharpen my daily search for the heart of what matters.

And so I will cap the marker of expedience
and read my days deeply:
I will notice that dot of yellow
in the corner of my daughter’s eye
when I’ve spoken too harshly,
the beautiful yellow parentheses
framing my wife’s mouth
when she says something funny,
and the furrow in my young son’s brow,
its yellow crevice telling me
that this word he cannot pronounce yet
is, in his opinion, important.
Bill Connolly is an administrator in the Woodstown-Pilesgrove Regional School District in Woodstown, NJ.

Father’s Gluepot

Sticky heat clouds the windows.

He carries the kettle-boiled water,
a rag round his knuckles
to swallow steam.

He fills the outer pot:
the glue bubbles.

I cross my hands
beneath my bottom
while he mixes the foggy muck.

I’ll
use this on your running mouth.

Nick Ripatrazone?s work has been anthologized in The Long Meanwhile: Stories of Arrival and Departure (Hourglass Books, 2007), and has also appeared in Hobart, Yale Anglers? Journal, Eclectica, Blood Orange Review, National Catholic Reporter, Southern Gothic, and elsewhere. He is pursuing an MFA from the University of Texas, El Paso.

The Forum

On the screen, a pair of giant breasts rubbed against another pair of giant breasts, each the size of a patio table if you walked right up to them. And a person could have walked right up to them, too, without bothering practically anyone, since only one seat was filled down below. Frank watched the scene from the projection booth: the four breasts mixing it up together, and the man down in the seat, angling for just the right time to jerk off and leave. There, Frank said to himself, is a traditionalist. The man had left home and come all the way here for the show.

In the booth, Frank raised a bottle of beer to toast the back of his lone customer’s head. He’d picked this movie for the theater’s last night because it was a traditionalist kind of movie, too – no amateurs like on the internet, but no big-name, unbelievable surgery people, either. Just a pair of powdered-up women stopping at all the stations of the sex act.

Frank leaned his chin, unshaven, on his hand and watched, the warmth of the projector on his cheek, the noise of it loud in his ear. He had to admit he was pretty sad, knowing this was the last show.

Something clicked for the man down in the seat, and he made his almost-hidden movements. After a half a minute or less, he was done, and he left quickly, head down. But Frank kept the movie going. After all, a lot of people came in the middle, or at least they did when they used to come. Besides, Frank wanted to watch the whole thing. There was something about flesh made so big – less of a thing without the community of men in the seats down there, but still something.

An hour later, he locked the place up, bringing the metal shutter down with a huge crash and feeling the finality of it. The trucks would be by tomorrow to haul away everything he had managed to sell, and the wrecking crews would start in soon after that. Frank fingered the night’s little bit of cash in his pocket, turned to look down the sidewalk toward the river, and saw the edge of 30 th Street Station off in the distance. It was three in the morning, and everything was closed down just about everywhere. The block was cold and yellow with thin streetlight. I should have gotten out a long time ago, Frank thought. He turned back to the theater, the graffiti on the shutter. Fla-Z, it said in two places, big and black spray-painted letters, and off to one side, the word TITTIES in silver marker.

There was one bar you could go to after legal closing time – a place that was supposed to be called Mike’s but was called ike’s because the first letter of the neon sign hadn’t worked in so long. The cops left the place alone, and Frank usually ended his worknights here.

“Hey, Ant’ny,” he said when he went in, waving at the bartender. There were a couple other guys in there, too – Eddie and some other unknown guy drinking individually. The place was small and dark, but with only a few people in it, it seemed bigger.

“Set you up?” Ant’ny said. He was wearing a Flyers jersey, even though the season was over already.

“Set me up,” Frank said, and he took a stool and waited for his beer. This was a good way to reflect after working a night, and an empty apartment wasn’t anything to rush home for.

“How you doing?” Eddie asked from down the bar. He sounded about the regular amount of drunk, and his gray hair was sticking up, like he’d been smashing it that way with his hand.

Frank shrugged. “Tonight was the night,” he said.

Ant’ny put a bottle down in front of him. “Tonight?” he said.

Frank nodded.

“Really? No idea,” Eddie said. He pushed on his hair with his hand.

Frank nodded again. He picked his bottle up and held it near his lips, not really looking at anything in particular.

“How was it?” Eddie said.

The man from down the bar jumped in then, leaning forward to become visible in the conversation. He wore an undershirt and an old sportscoat. “What was tonight?”

“Besides Ash Wednesday?” Frank said with a sort-of chuckle. “Well, I closed my place down for the last time.” He drank a little bit of beer.

“What place?”

“The Forum,” Frank said, pointing his thumb in the general direction of the theater.

The man at the end of the bar let his mouth open up. “The Forum? That old place? Are you kidding me? Why’d you shut down?”

“Th’internet,” Eddie said. He made a jerking-off motion with his hand. “Everybody can do it at home with nobody watching.”

Frank knew that was true. People were chicken about their desires, basically.

Ant’ny, who was following along quietly, wiping out a glass, said, “My brother’s kid’s always on their computer. That thing’s probably sticky from top to bottom.”

Everybody laughed. Frank drank a little more beer. The way he took the sip was like the way you would kiss a woman after you had sex with her, at least in theory.

“You know what that is?” said the man down the bar, his face pink even in the darkness of the room. “That’s a goddamn shame. I would of gone in there one last time if I had known it was going to be one last time. What were you showing tonight?”

Frank smiled. “You know. One of those classic kind of things in a hospital. Nurses.”

They all said “Yeah” or “Mm,” at the same time.

“I sure would of gone in there if I’d of known about it,” the man said, and everybody nodded. Then: “You know what we oughtta do?” he said. “You oughtta open that up one more time for us right tonight, and we can all pay you for one more show, and we can bring over a couple bottles or whatnot and have one last nice time.”

“That’s an idea,” Frank said, dully, not really thinking about it.

“I’m serious,” he said, and he moved over one stool to slap Eddie on the arm. “Don’t you think so? It’s like a celebration.”

Frank looked down at his drink and up at Ant’ny, who shrugged and said, “I ain’t going anywhere.”

“Still,” Eddie said.

The streets were even quieter, like you could hear for blocks, like the sound of a single car could have been coming from a mile off. Philly could get so quiet in the dead hours of night, and the noise of the shutter opening seemed loud enough to break buildings apart. Frank thought about that and thought about the wrecking crews that would be coming. A long time ago this had been a regular movie theater – not a fancy one, but nice enough. And the theater was still nice enough, even if it wasn’t quite regular anymore. It was a shame to tear it down.

“Funny how you never sell popcorn in a place like this,” said the guy from down the bar, whose name turned out to be Larry. It was him and Frank and Eddie there in the lobby. The carpet had been maroon at one time, but it was a lot darker now, like the ceiling was a lot darker, too. Frank put his hands in his pockets and looked around. This was an unexpected extra visit to his place. A bonus.

He set the movie up and then came down to join the other two guys as it rumbled onto the screen. He was supposed to stay up there to make sure the projector didn’t overheat, but if everything burned down it wouldn’t be the end of the world at this point. The guys were drinking from bottles of beer Ant’ny had sold them on their way out the door, a seat separating each of them. As the screen lit up, they clinked bottles.

After the opening credits, there was an interior shot of a room that was supposed to be a hospital room but was really just four white walls and a white-sheeted bed. Two nurses were talking, their shirts half-unbuttoned, their lipstick shiny.

“Here we go,” Larry said.

In another minute, the women were making out and getting naked.

Frank watched just about every show from the projection room, but it was a different thing being down here in the community of men. This was the one place where straight men could sit together and be with sex in the same place. And of course it was ending. Frank felt his mouth twist in a sour way, and he filled it up with some beer to remind him not to hurry into the grief of tomorrow.

“That is beauty-ful,” Larry said.

The blonde woman was going down on the redhead, the wah-wah music going over the speakers.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, not really listening.

“You get ’er, tiger,” Larry said to the movie. And then nobody said anything for a while. Frank was watching the actresses and thinking about who they were and what it meant for them that a place like his was closing. Probably they had something else going. People said there was more money in porn than ever before. He was too old for any of that, though.

When a doctor came in and the two women got on their knees, Frank noticed out of the corner of his eye that Larry was jerking off under the coat on his lap. He would have noticed it even if they were sitting a lot further apart; that was what he was used to seeing in here. Then Eddie started up, both of them trying a little bit to keep it hidden.

Frank had not had sex or touched himself or even had a wet dream in a long time, but he reached into his pants anyway, just to feel human or maybe to be a part of something. Soon, he was jerking off, too – limp at first, for sure, but out in the open, not trying to hide it under a coat or anything. This wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. This was three traditionalists together on the last night of a place. They all came when they came, and nobody said anything about it, but Frank felt good and smiled, briefly, before he got the normal afterward feeling of everything being over.

After, they stood out on the sidewalk, and Frank pulled the shutter down with another huge crash. The funny thing was that nobody was awkward or nervous about anything. Pretty soon it would be morning.

“Anybody going back to ike’s?” Larry said.

Eddie shrugged, his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched up, hair straight in the air. “I bet Ant’ny’s shut it down by now.” He was still about the regular amount of drunk.

“I think I’ll walk by there and see, anyways. What about you?” he said, looking at Frank.

Frank shook his head. “Nah. I’ve got to get home sometime.”

Larry smiled. “Little woman waiting?”

“Nah. Just me and my shadow.”

Larry clapped him on the back. “Well, for a long time you done this city good with this place. I always said it was a pretty clean place. And you done us good tonight, too.”

Eddie smiled, took a fist out of his pocket, smashed his hair back, and they all stood quietly for a minute. Then they said goodbye, and Larry and Eddie walked back toward the bar, and Frank went looking for his car. Still nobody was around. Pretty soon, there would be garbage trucks rumbling around the city, their brakes screaming, and some early morning commuters. But this neighborhood would wake up last, old and beat-up and needing the rest. Probably in a few years it would all be loft apartments or Asian fusion restaurants or something. For now, though, it would sleep in. Frank, too. As he walked along, Frank could feel in his bones that when he finally got into bed, he’d be out for a long time, like a dead man, without a dream in his head.

David Harris Ebenbach’s first book of short stories, Between Camelots ( University of Pittsburgh Press ), won the 2005 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the 2006 GLCA New Writer’s Award. His short fiction has been published in, among other places, the Connecticut Review, the Greensboro Review, and Philadelphia Stories, his poetry has appeared in, among other places, Phoebe, Mudfish, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, and he wrote the chapter, "Plot: A Question of Focus," for Gotham Writers Workshops’ book Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury, USA). A Philadelphia native, he has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College, and teaches Creative Writing at Earlham College. Find out more at davidebenbach.com.