Archives

[img_assist|nid=830|title=Swirly by Nicole Kristiana FitzGibbon ©2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=306]

He doesn’t know about her tattoos until they sleep together. After they finish, his eyes adjust enough to the darkness so that he can make out the black ink on her back and stomach. There are three: small, medium, large. The level of grayness and fading indicate that the smallest one was first and the largest one was last. He can’t see that much detail. She prepares homemade mushroom ravioli for dinner. A girl who matches her shoes and her purse, she doesn’t look like the kind who would have tattoos. He tries to decipher their meanings and authors: Maimonides, Cummings, Shakespeare.

She stares at him and tries to determine his ethnicity. He is half Filipino. What are they doing? One-night stand. But what do you call it after the second night? Bistand. Third night? Polystand. She works as a tutor for undereducated kids with overpaid parents. She helps them write papers and do calculus and sometimes gets paid extra to do it for them. He knows she wrote an essay that got a lacrosse player into UPenn. He doesn’t know about her brief career as a model, the breast implants she had inserted and removed during college, or the affair with her Neuroscience professor. The affair had lasted through the final two years of her undergraduate career. It was almost passionate, almost something like love. The professor never really ended it, he just started bringing his wife to more and more campus functions. Heartbroken, she moves to the city after graduation. Rents an apartment with three other girls, near the Domino Sugar Factory. This is where their lives intersect. He works at The Brooklyn Rail. Makes Xeroxes of other people’s writing. He tells her he is a copy editor. She knows this is a lie. They meet when her boyfriend leaves her in front of The Dinner Party. The boyfriend, an actor, goes to buy cigarettes and never comes back. Camel Wide Lights, which she can then no longer stomach. He loans her subway fare, the trust-fund actor boyfriend had always paid for taxis. She makes him gazpacho in exchange. They sleep together once, then once again. It becomes a habit. After a long discussion, they decide to be less frequent with their sexual visits. This plan does not work out. For the next month, they have sex five, six, seven, eight times a week. What would they call a thing like this? There are various terms, all crude and all with somewhat negative, seedy connotations. She considers pushing for a commitment, but he is younger than her and wouldn’t understand. She bakes oatmeal cookies with butterscotch chips. He is two years her junior, on the verge of being born in a different decade. She has an eating disorder that appears to go unnoticed, though he sometimes slides his hand down her hipbones and remarks on their jaggedness. He is leading on a girl in West Hartford. She sees the emails this girl sends him. Where did he meet her? Filled with something resembling jealousy, she googles the WeHa girl. Mentions West Hartford in front of him. Hm…what? He says, looking up from his cereal with a blank face. After the Hartford girl incident has subsided in her mind, he buys her a present. A wooden bookmark, carved like a tree, bought at the Christmas market in the neighborhood. This alters the meaning of everything. Startled by this new action of gift-giving, she decides on something hastily and without too much creativity. He receives a new copy of The Tropic of Cancer and homemade raspberry brownies. She wraps the first in The New York Times Book Review. He appreciates the humor. He tells her he would like to seriously date her in a few years. He’s not ready now. Why does he say this? Perhaps he is genuine. Or maybe, more likely, he wants to pacify her. He goes to visit the girl in West Hartford. He wants to pacify her too. He likes to keep his options open, as he is acutely aware of his youth and attractiveness. In his presence, she feels old and almost sagacious. She is only 23.

They go out to dinner several times a week, sometimes with his
father. She realizes that his parents think they’re dating.
His mother tries to discuss their future together. No, no, your son
has issues with commitment, that’s what she wants to say. Instead
she smiles with her mouth held tightly together and listens to parenting
tips. Goes to Dean & Deluca, prepares lobster risotto. She has
no contact with her own parents. It is a mutual understanding of
inevitable separation. Her parents divorced when she was an infant.
Father is a surgeon whom she has barely seen in twenty years. Mother
is an alcoholic Presbyterian minister who is addicted to crosswords
puzzles and venomous critiques of her daughters. These daughters
inherited their mother’s dark good looks and tendency toward
addiction. Now, in lonely winters, she withholds food as a form of
comfort. He notices this. Her abandonment issues and low self-esteem
combine to form her passionate attachment to him. Pretending to be
aloof, he secretly idolizes her. What are they doing? There is no
word for this. Lovers: implies an ending and an obstacle. Friends:
does not contain room for sexual encounters. Fuck: can’t explain
the dinners and the kissing of her inner wrist. Undefined. This conversation
they avoid. He worries about emotional investment. She is concerned
about her intense—perhaps unhealthy—attachment. A definition
is needed to establish boundaries, and when they have none, the situation
is peculiar and uncomfortably amorphous. A solid, silent, secure
understanding is found only in the liquid fusion of their bare legs
and torsos. The sex between them is: karma-phala, mitzvah, asa. She
makes breakfast. Eggs with cheese he can’t pronounce, French
toast from thick slices of challah, Kona coffee, strawberries. What
are they doing? They go to his brother’s wedding and dance—she
removes her heels and is barefoot. They have had too much champagne
and too few pigs-in-a-blanket. Back in their shared hotel room, they
fall onto the bed, still in their dress clothes. He traces the curves
of her face with his index finger, drunkenly and softly. She starts
to babble about language. It doesn’t mean anything, she says.
Labels can’t confine us and define us and it doesn’t
mean anything at all, she sings. She says that their fucking and
their dancing and their Sunday mornings don’t have to be called
anything. She says they exist outside of a definition. He looks at
her. He brushes her hair off her face. He looks at her. He looks at
her. They have sex, slow motion and wet and warm and sweet. He says,
I love you. What? She asks. How does that feel? He pretends to repeat.
Oh, good, it feels good. What does this mean? Realizing that it doesn’t
have to mean anything, they continue to have it silently mean quite
a great deal. What are they doing? There is no word for this. Back
in the city, she learns how to make Beef Wellington and crème
brûlée. He gets a job as an editorial assistant in Midtown,
earning twice what he was earning at his previous job. Gets a two-bedroom
apartment in Williamsburg. She is thrifty, to a fault, and still
lives in a cramped studio space with college friends whom she would
no longer consider friendly. He asks her to move in with him. Separate
bedrooms. Roommates. It is a faulty attempt at gaining a word for
this. Each night they have sex and then one sleepily retreats back
to his or her own bed. In the morning they share a pot of coffee
and the arts section. She notices that all their friends are getting
married. They get invitations to these weddings. Recycled paper with
organic ink, letterpress with woodcuts, one is even from Pineider in
Florence. Each invitation is addressed to both of them by name. Aching,
she has no word for this. While grocery shopping, they run into the
girl from West Hartford. Girl: blonde, stocky soccer-player figure.
They invite the girl over for dinner. She prepares salmon roulade,
arugula salad, rosemary couscous, and marzipan cookies. After the
girl leaves, she asks if they can share a bedroom. Why? He asks,
genuinely puzzled but not suspicious. She tells him one of the bedrooms
should be made into a study—they both need their space to write—and
maybe they could leave a bed for their crashing friends. He agrees
as he takes his fourth cookie. The merging of bedrooms is swift and
charming. Her female friends are ecstatic; they take it as a promising
sign. At a bar one night with old school chums, he is teased about
his enviable relationship. These statements of friendly jealousy
are met with confusion and raised eyebrows. What relationship? He
asks. His friends laugh and shake their heads. What are you doing?
They ask. That night, for the first time in their history, they fall
asleep without having sex. He pulls her head towards the nook of
his chest and shoulder, as if this act was natural and commonplace.
What is this? They both search for words. He receives a call at work.
His father has died. Heart attack. 67. Smoker. The funeral is in
Brooklyn with echoes of Manila. She learns bits and pieces of Tagalog. Natay:
death: the process of transformation from one state to another. She
likes this definition. His mother, a WASP from Pennington, New Jersey,
throws herself headlong into Filipino rituals. The mirrors and glass
surfaces in the house are covered with black fabric. Are they sitting shivah?
She wonders. He and his mother don’t take baths for a week.
The process seems oddly familiar to her—her father was raised Hasidic.
Searching through his father’s study in the Greenpoint apartment,
he finds three novels by José Rizal, a Welsh love spoon, and
a worn copy of Go Tell It on the Mountain. He takes them all,
dissonant fragments of the man who raised him. Leaving his parents’—his
mother’s—apartment, they travel home together silently. Somewhere
along Bushwick Avenue, she starts to drag him in the direction of
home. He feels heavy and sore, fingers raw in her palm. Back in their
apartment, she fixes kubeh and borekas and spitz cake. This is all
she knows to do. Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba . She
is conveniently chopping onions. Yit’barakh v’yish’tabach v’yit’pa’ar.
They eat in solid quietness. In bed that night, they lie next to
each other, unmoving, unsleeping. A hand wanders over the imaginary
boundary—there are bits of stomach flesh and salty skin slowly
mingling. The sex is silent and mutually understood. She is pink
and soft and cool to the touch, a familiar body to move with. His
eyes are wet and his hands are sweaty against her hips. Is there
an answer to all this? Could there ever be an answer to this? There
is a sybaritic sadness in death. Afterwards, she lets his head rest
on her naked chest. They fall asleep like this. Her: propped up on
pillows, clutching his head and shoulders, one thin leg exposed to
the air. Him: Curled, wrapped, pressed into her, mouth on her collarbone,
hurt and unwashed. He takes weeks to mourn, more than she thinks
is healthy. He recovers slowly—blinking, unstretched. She bakes
dark chocolate cookies and fruit tarts. What are they doing? Neither
knows a word for it. They make a ritual of evening walks in Prospect
Park . He contemplates a trip to the Philippines , visiting relatives, “discovering
his roots.” She tells him it’s a good idea. It will help
your writing, she says. She bites her lip. The end for him. Apartment:
now worn and common. Her body is a shape of divinity that fits into
his hips during nights of quiet taxi noise. The Philippines will
not help his writing, he understands this. New Year’s Day Night.
She is pregnant. Decides to tell him. Decides not to tell him. She
makes homemade mushroom ravioli. Tells him. Eyes wide, there is a
word for this.

Jenna Clark Embrey, a native of Hershey, Pennsylvania, is a 2008 graduate of Dickinson College with a double major in English and Theatre. In addition to writing short stories and plays, Jenna enjoys ice skating and reciting the alphabet backwards.

[img_assist|nid=826|title=Smeared PagesWith Hope by Kristen Solecki ©2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=222]

Around the corner he come all panting and wobble-eyed with his little sticks kicking out to the sides, and he slipped because the grass was wet. One of his Velcro shoes flew off and knocked into the siding. He got himself together, picked up his shoe, and bounced inside the house. Willard. I told Angela he’s over-sugared.

The older one, Brian, come sprinting across the yard. “Will!” he’s hollering. “Will!” He dropped his old bat as he flew past me, and the screen door slapped shut, and then everything was quiet again.

 I went over to the wall and turned the water off.

I’d moved in a couple months earlier. Angela and I talked about it for a few weeks, and I wasn’t hot on it at first, but she was ready to take a chance again, she said. She said her boys could use someone, too. Okay, I said. When this rental on Blue Ferry Road come available, I packed my stuff and their stuff and moved us all out here.

I got to know the boys pretty well pretty fast. Brian’s
happy to have anybody throw a ball at him. He’s one of those
kids that, if they don’t have a catch partner, you always
see staggering around the yard, chucking balls up in the air to
themself. He’ll do pretty much what you tell him to. Will,
he’s got more of an artistic side. He’ll sit for hours
drawing bloodied-up versions of the cartoons he watches, wearing
out felt tip markers to the point he’s got to lick them to
keep them going. His tongue, it’ll be purple or green whenever
he’s explaining his stories to you. They run for pages, and
he only ever draws on one side, which is a waste, I said, but he’d
throw a fit if you made him save on paper.

I could hear thuds. The two of them were talking in their bedroom.
The light fixture in the hall was rattling.

“Y’all quit dribbling in the house!” I called. “You
heard me now, Brian!”

When I come in, Brian looked up and give me a shrug. He didn’t
have the ball, so I looked to the other side of the room, and,
what it was was, Will was standing against the wall, knocking his
old head against the sheetrock, whump, whump, whump. Brian and
I stood between their twin beds watching him go at it. “Way
too much sugar,” I said.

Brian stared. “Geeze.”

Whump.

“Quit that now,” I said. “You’re going
to get a-“

Whump.

“Melonhead.” I took his shoulder and set him back
on the bed. He was wearing the blue shirt with the old messy looking
monster on it he liked. Brian made to go. “Hang on a minute,
Tex. Stay put.”

“Why?”

“Because I said.”

“Are you still washing the truck?”

“What?”

“Are you . . .” he said, like I was an idiot, “still
washing thetruck?”

“Just stay here,” I told him.

[img_assist|nid=827|title=Storm by Kathleen Montrey ©2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=176|height=69]“Let me go wash my hands first.”

We looked at them. They were pretty sticky.

“What the hell you been doing? Hurry up.”

Will had pulled his knees up to his chin and was rocking back
and forth on his bedspread. He hooked his thumbs into the neck
of his shirt and wiped at his nose so he looked like a bandit.

“You’re an odd one, Mr. Will,” I said.

Brian come back in, drying his hands on his basketball shorts.
They’d been up to something.

“Alright . . .” I sat down on the bed. I had to ask.

*

A rusty barbed wire fence run through the woods behind the house.
It had been there a long time, and the trees had grown around the
wire in places. Parts of it were all swallowed up in bark. We picked
our way over logs and through the trees, until Brian said, “Here!” and
he ducked under the fence and began to pass through. Will lollygagged
behind us. He swerved through the leaves like his compass was loose,
and when I called his name, he bumped off a tree, made some googly
sound effect, then fell down flat, spazzing with his arms out.

“Ow, mother!” Brian pulled his jersey off a barb.
He took a step back on the other side. “Come on,” he
said. “It’s up the hill!”

“Let’s go, Willard.” I raised the middle wire. “Get
through here now.”

He didn’t want to, but I waited, and so he pushed himself
up and slipped under. The two of them run up the cowpath into the
clearing, and for a second I thought about the way all kids run.
As I come out of the trees, it was like being in the country. Where
Angela’s and I were living was kind of the outer belt of
suburbs, and a lot of folks who lived here drove across the river
and into the city for work. There were gas pumps not more than
three hundred yards away, but you couldn’t see them. You
couldn’t see any manmade stuff at all here. All you could
see was the fence running around the field, and then the hills,
and the grass, and the trees, and that’s it. No wires in
the sky. It was August, a couple weeks before school.

They run through the shadow of a cloud, and I followed them up
the empty hill. They’d told me they’d found something
dead.

*

[img_assist|nid=828|title=Main Street in Manayunk by Pauline Braun ©2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=149|height=94]
Nights, Angela would go to bed before me so she’d be asleep by when I got there, which, I was learning, was how she preferred it. For a long while, I worked only second shifts with the ovens—we’re the largest processor of canned pet food in the region—and a few of us would always go out after, and I’d be home around one or so. But then they moved me to doing a lot of thirds, emptying tankers of liquid horse meat. I’d have a drink in the kitchen before bed, and when I lay beside her, I tried to sleep, though I’d usually be too wound up with things I wanted to ask her, like where she was all day when she said she only had meetings in the morning. Traffic was always bad, she said. The sun would come up, and we’d go through it all over, and as I lay there, I knew the field mice that chewed holes in my clothes were creeping around, under the boxspring—maybe even in it—or climbing through her shoes in the closet. The traffic racing on the highway was sometimes enough to keep me from thinking too much on them. People use that road to skip the stoplights out of town. They travel too fast on it, and along the shoulder you’ll find possum and deer that didn’t get out of the way. Angela worried the kids would play too close to the ditch or skateboard too far down the asphalt drive. She told me over and over it wasn’t a good home for kids. She didn’t like it out here. She wanted to find, eventually, a better place to live, even if it would be a little smaller, like their apartment before.

The exterminator told us to get a cat, so we did, but it was
a prowler, and one night come home with a gash in its chest. Even
in the house, it took two days to catch it and take it to the vet.
I had to put the medicine on because Angela wouldn’t, it
gave her the willies. Finally one night I come in, it hopped off
the counter and out the screendoor and we never saw it again. It
bothered Will the most. He used to put paper helmets on the thing.
Hero. Hero never caught one mouse I knew of.

The headlights would set the window’s shadow crawling across
the ceiling, and I remember thinking what might have put the hole
in that cat’s chest like that? A claw, maybe. Or teeth. I
pressed my fingers on the tattoo behind her shoulder and felt her
lungs fill. I rubbed the rose like I rubbed the salve on the stitches.
Maybe a barbed wire fence had done it, or some old boy’s
rake.

*

[img_assist|nid=829|title=Avalon Porch by Kathleen Montrey ©2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=206]

 It was a young red Hereford , and it was lying on its side in the grass. The boys were standing over it. The smell of animal was strong in the heat, and I slowed as I got nearer, and then my stomach just dropped to my hipbones. I felt dizzy. Sticks were poking out of the little cow’s nostrils and mouth—a whole mess of them. Its white face was all stuffed up with them and made it look like some old broom. I hadn’t ever seen anything dead that way before.

Brian studied me. He tried to laugh. “It was dead,” he said.

I pushed him over. Will fell to the ground, too, on his own, and a second later he was crying.

“What were you guys thinking? This is stupid.”

Will stopped just long enough to see how his brother would answer. When Brian didn’t, Will started crying again. He rolled in the grass.

“Do you hear me?” I said. “Knock it off, Willard. Get up.” I squatted down next to it and looked at the sticks jammed up in there. “You a part of this, too?” I asked Will. It was something else. “Both of you, get these sticks out of it, right now.” I stepped back so they could move in.

They began to pull them out of its face one at a time. They seemed
to know just how. Will, he dangled a long twig in front of his
eyes for a sec. Brian was working faster.

“Did you all think it would bite you or something? Huh?”

Will dropped the stick. “It bit Zach. On his fingers.” His
mouth hung open.

Brian glared at him vicious. He turned away.

“You mean it wasn’t dead?” I said. “Brian?”

He stayed crouched there, wiping a slimy stick in the grass.

“Was it or wasn’t it?”

“Not at first,” Will said.

*

Zach lived across the highway and around the corner from us.
I could hear the TV on, but no one come to the door, so I knocked
again, harder. “Zach!”

“PlayStation,” Brian said.

Their crummy dog started barking.

I poked my head in the door and called again, and the TV snapped
off, and so I went in after him. The dog was jumping all under
my feet. I pushed it away with my boot.

It was the first time I’d ever been in their place. Cereal
bowls on the kitchen table, a cracker box on the floor with crackers
all over. They were keeping the fridge closed with masking tape.
I caught fat Zach by the shirt as he tried to squeeze out the sliding
door, and I hauled him around, and we pulled the screen off its
track. I stepped on the damn dog again, and it yelped and went
flat then scurried across the dirty linoleum to I don’t know
where. I whirled Zach onto the taped-up couch. It let out a slow
hiss as he sank in it.

“You stretched out my shirt!” he said. The dog was
still yipping.

“Yeah, hell, and I broke the door, too. Will!” I
lifted the screen and got the wheels back in the groove. “Goddamn
it. Brian! Get in here.”

They come in slow.

Will raised a hand. “Hi, Zach.” He plopped down on
the couch, wiggled a sec, then pulled the black remote out from
under him. He held it in his hands like he’d never seen one
before.

“No. Put it down,” I told him.

“What?”

“Just put it down,” I said.

“Y’all get off my property,” Zach told us.

“You shut up a minute. Sit on the couch there, too, Brian.”

Three blind monkeys they looked like. They needed a leader, but
there wasn’t any.

“Somebody better start saying something,” I
said. “Now.”

Zach got nervous. Angela’s wouldn’t look at him. “Stupid
cow was eating my pop tart,” he said.

Will’s eyes lit up. “You were feeding it,
Zach. Remember?”

“Remember,” I said. “You better remember.”

“Not all of it! I wasn’t,” Zach said. “I wasn’t.
It just started-“

“So we had to stop it,” Brian explained.

“It wouldn’t stop eating Zach’s food,” Will
cried. He got to his feet, not even knowing he was doing it.

“Sit down. And stay sat down.”

“You seen it,” Zach said to the boys.

Brian was real calm. “That’s the way it happened,
Tim.” He’d get better at this as he got older.

I tried to imagine how they brought it down. Chasing after it.
The whole thing. “Regular heroes. Stopped a cow from eating
a pop tart. How’d you think to start putting the sticks in
it?”

They shrugged.

“Huh? You guys aren’t even supposed to be in that
pasture,” I said.

*

They tailed me like dogs to the metal shed on our lot. The backyard
was damp, and the shed was situated in its lowest spot—it
was always full of mosquitoes. I brushed a cobweb off my nose and
grabbed the old shovel.

“Ho, mother,” Brian smiled, rubbing his shoulder. “You
gonna bury it, Tim?”

I tossed the thing to him. He spun it in his hands.

“No,” I said.

I let that sink in. We went back into the woods.

*

None of them was very good. Will, he was about useless. Zach
was probably the best because he was the heaviest, but he wasn’t
into it. In little more than a half hour, they had this uneven
ditch about four feet long, three feet wide, and two feet deep.

“Shovel sucks,” Zach said.

Will showed me his palm. “I got a splinter.”

A horsefly settled just below the calf’s eye and sat there
in the sun like it was waiting for a bus. “The hole’s
not big enough yet,” I told them. “Look at it.”

Zach held his arms out to get the width of the calf, then he
tried to hold his measure as he moved his hands over the hole. “It’s
goddamn close.”

Brian snatched up the shovel. “Why we have to put it in
the ground?” he asked. “Won’t it just-“

“Because y’all killed it.” I looked around
at them. “Aren’t you even embarrassed? I’d be.
Or maybe you’d rather go over there, Brian, and tell the
farmer y’all killed his calf.”

“No.”

“Huh? And for no reason,” I added.

“It wasn’t just me.” Brian put the shovel on
his shoulder and swung for the fence.

“Get serious,” I said.

“Tim, shouldn’t we tell the farmer anyway?” Will
asked.

The barn roof showed just over the hill.

Zach wiped his nose. “Don’t forget it was eating
my food. We said the reason.”

I threw a stick at his head, but it missed.

“That’s right,” Will remembered. “It
was eating his pop tart.”

“So I heard.”

The sun was getting low. Brian was quiet. He tapped the dead
Hereford softly with the shovel.

“Dig,” I said.

“Oh mother . . .”

*

When we got back, Angela’s car was in the drive behind
my truck. “Aw, hell, your mom’s home,” I said.
It was a joke they never got.

Zach walked home punching a cloud of gnats like he was hacking
through some jungle, and the boys and I went inside.

“Where have you been?” she wanted to know. “No
note. No nothing.”

They escaped for their room.

“Where have you been?” I said. “We went out
on a hike. Wash up!” I called to them. She faced me, waiting
for something better. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll
tell you about it later.”

I squirted Lemon Joy on my hands and knocked the faucet on. I
wanted to say things.

She set two cans on the counter.

I shut the water off.

“You want green beans,” she said, “or baked
beans?”

*

I don’t know, she and I had met in this strip mall bar
I tried after work once because I was tired of the bullshit at
the regular one. It was called Sidewinders. It was next to a Chinese
take-out, and she was eating a rice thing with her cigarette going
when I come in. Rum and ginger ale. I sat down next to her, and
I asked the sleepy girl behind the counter for a Budweiser, which
took her a whole five minutes to get it, open it, and set it on
the little cardboard. The whole time I’m waiting, Angela’s
stopped eating and is just staring at the side of my face–smoking
at me–because I practically sat on her lunch when there’s
a hundred open seats in the place. That’s my style.

“I bet they call you Apeneck,” she said.

“Who does?”

“Somebody ought to.”

I bought her a drink.

Snoozin Susan brown bagged us a six, and we took it out to my
truck. We drove out to the lake, to that parking lot behind the
parking lot that had a chain up for a while, but the chain was
down and I just pulled back where the weeds grew through the gravel
and stopped beside this tall brush pile somebody cleared. The lake
glittered through the trees.

“You’re making me feel back in high school,” she
said.

“Sorry,” I said, and I cracked another can for her.
I opened the crammed glovebox to get a napkin to wrap around the
can, la-dee-dah.

“Good lord,” she said. “Half Burger King’s
stuffed in there.”

I kissed her.

“Apeneck,” she laughed, pulling at my hairs. “A-a-ape-ne-e-eck.”

I laughed, too. No one had ever called me that before.

She slid closer. “What did you do to your hands?” She
kissed them. Ducks were quacking.

“Nothing,” I said. “Some bullshit.”

*

When I come downstairs morning after the cow thing, Will was
cross-legged in front of the TV. The volume was turned low, and
he was sucking on a tube of Gogurt.

“Morning, Mr. Will. How’d you sleep?” I had
a headache. “You’re up early,” I tried again.

“Can we go to the grave?”

“The grave. No. I don’t want you guys in the pasture
at all for a while. Why would you want to go to the grave?” I
waggled my fingers at him.

“To put flowers on it.”

“I see. And where would you get flowers, Willard?”

“At Walgreen’s they have some. Fake kind.”

The nearest intersection was about a quarter mile down the highway,
and there was a new little plaza there, built for neighborhoods
creeping this way from town. So far, they had the gas station and
a drugstore and a little pizza place, where I took them once, and
a hair salon. Couple offices, maybe. One place had kung fu classes.
Others had lease signs in the windows.

“And what are you going to buy flowers with?” I asked.

“Money. Duh.”

I went into the kitchen and put the coffee on. Duh. A fresh trail
of mouse droppings run along the counter’s splashguard. During
the night, I had come down for a drink of juice and found a mouse
scrambling in the empty sink. It couldn’t get out. It reminded
me of the kids with their boards at the skate park. I stood there
half-awake, watching it scratch its way up the steel sides only
to slide back down. Then I gripped the roll of paper towels and
set to it with soft, quiet crushes. I barely slept at all.

Will sang along with a commercial for some sort of crap.

“Hey,” I called.

He come to the doorway.

“C’mere, buddy.” I took Angela’s purse
off the chair.

*

Zach’s mom called and spilled the beans. Old Zach the Sack
complained I made them dig–it give him blisters–and soon it all
come out, and, presto, the bag calls Angela.

“Why didn’t you tell me?

“Why did you bury it?

“Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

She’s a strong arguer, Angela is. She gets energy from
it, though I’m not sure about her reasoning sometimes. She’d
gone on and on and ended her favorite way with, “End of story.” She
called Information.

The farmer was a Carlson or a Carlton , and as soon as she had
the right number she called the old boy up. “I’ve got
to go to work,” she told me. “You’re going to
take care of this.”

“Okay,” I said. “I thought I’d
taken care of it yesterday.”

“I know you do. I know you do . . . Hello,” she said. “Is
this Mr. Carlson?”

His mailbox was a half mile down the road from ours, the opposite
way from the plaza, but then I had to drive my truck another quarter
mile down his old gravel lane, which went around the foot of the
pasture, and then up to his house and barn on the far slope. I
drove slow. A new Chevy sat in the dirt drive. I got out and shut
my door. The house had a cool, settled look to it, and the whole
place, even outside, smelled like a basement. It might have been
the weather. He was waiting just inside the screendoor, and he
let me into the enclosed porch and stepped aside as the door eased
shut against my back.

In an instant, a dog was sniffing my boots. This happens regular
to us who work the floor at the plant. I tried to shake it without
overdoing it, but it growled and started sniffing and licking again.
Carlson spoke to the dog then shut it in the kitchen.

The porch was concrete and covered with a big round rug, and
a pair of stuffed chairs faced each other, and a shelf of magazines
and newspapers. A chain of pop can tabs hung from an empty birdcage,
and this feather dangled at the end of that. It was dyed blue,
like the kind you might win at a carnival or get at a gift shop.

“Where you keep your bird at?” I asked.

“It died from fumes from something I had on the stove,” Carlson
said. “On accident.” He was heavy, and moved and talked
slow, but he had this calmness and confidence about him because
of it—he might have hurried on his own account, but it was
clear you weren’t going to rush him. I never got the impression
he was dumb. He smelled like he had just shaved. “You want
to have a seat here?” He raised the birdcage by its pole
and set it aside. “I was surprised to get your call, but
I was glad you did. I hadn’t realized what happened. Go on.
Sit.”

“That was Angie who called,” I told him.

“So she said.”

“Believe me, we’d love to tell you this was all an
accident.”

He sat down, too. “I know you would. I’d prefer to
believe it.”

“We can pay you for it.”

His big hands rested in his lap. He was looking at the stripe
on my boot where his dog had licked.

“I don’t know it’s the price that worries me
so much,” he said, “though it might’ve at one
time. I can see how it might be some relief to you to pay something
for it.” He smiled sadly. “Her calling, your coming
up here says a bit. I appreciate that part.” He cleared his
throat and looked hard at me. “I just went out there after
lunch. You all buried it?”

I leaned forward, nodding.

“I suppose there’s been some pretty sharp words in
the household over all this,” he said.

“Yes sir, there sure has.”

“Imagine there could be some more yet.”

I wasn’t sure if he meant there should be, or if he was
just guessing there would. I leaned back and found myself not caring
what he meant, exactly. “You bet there will,” I told
him. “What was that calf worth?” I asked. “It’s
important those boys learn the price of things.”

“It’s not just the price.”

“Still.”

A flicker of sun caught his face through the screen. “Did
you notice it was the only one out there?”

I hadn’t. I told him so.

“I haven’t kept my own cows in ten years,” he
said, as if it were something. “That one was my granddaughter’s.”

“She had her own calf?”

“Prizewinner,” he said. “She helped raise it.”

“Then we definitely want to pay her for it.”

His mouth moved slowly as he stared at me. “She’s
moved off with her mother to we don’t know where.” The
dog started barking behind the door. “They’re not really
your boys, are they?”

“No.”

“How they manage to kill it? They got a gun?”

“No,” I said. My voice raised a little. “Sticks.
Rocks. A bat, maybe.”

He studied me, but I didn’t flinch. He looked out the window
of the old porch. “How old are they?” he asked.

I told him.

*

I called in sick and went and found her in the Sidewinder. She
was sitting with some smiley guy, with her stool turned to face
him, sipping her rum and ginger ale. She saw me but didn’t
say anything as I sat down on the other side of her. Susan waited
her to say yea or nay, but Angela she just kept her back to me.
Maybe she rolled her eyes.

“I went to talk to that old Carlson,” I said.

She turned half around. There was lipstick on her straw. “You
should have,” she said.

“I’m Tim.” I stretched my hand past her. He
didn’t take it. “You all talking business?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” she said.

“Can’t you see I’m sick,” I said.

She lit a fresh one. “There’s no point in prolonging
this. How do you want to play it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just get it over with,” the man told her. He wasn’t
smiling anymore.

*

I went to my closet and threw all my clothes into my duffel bag.
I had broke my right middle finger on him when it got caught weird
in his collar. I sat going over my checkbook, one-handed, until
they come home.

They had been at their dad’s girlfriend’s place,
and Angela had picked them up, after I guess she had taken Smiley
home or to the hospital. She didn’t explain anything. I was
planning to check into a motel somewhere.

The boys were chewing candy bars and went straight past me to
the TV. Will, he was carrying a plastic package of birthday prizes.
He held it in front of my face as he went by.

“What’s those for?” I asked.

“The grave.”

“I thought you were getting flowers.”

“We didn’t like them,” Angela said. “Get
out of here. I’m serious.”

We stared across my big bag that had the outside pockets chewed
up by mice.

Will came in holding a plastic cup. “This was under the
couch,” he said.

“Well, that’s not where it belongs,” Angela
said. “Go and drop it in the dishwater. I’ll wash it
up.”

He skated to the sink in his socks, dropped it in, then went
to her, and she held him between us while she smoked. “There’s
something wrong with you,” she hissed at me. “How many
chances do you want? You’re messed up.”

“I’m messed up? You spend afternoons with Dudley
Dipshit, and I’m messed up. What, you expect me to hug him?”

“You knew it was going to happen,” she said. “You
wanted it.”

Later, I thought of more things I could have said.

*

In the pasture, Will opened the birthday prizes one by one. He
was fascinated by them, and I could see him struggling to keep
on task, as Angela put it. The boys insisted I come with them,
and Angela didn’t say no. All she said to me was, “You
don’t ride with us.” I followed them in my truck.

She was slowed down some, done with the insults and the hollering
and just waiting for me to shove off. I was ready to. The boys
could tell something was wrong with us. She talked quietly to them,
almost in a whisper, while to me she spoke a touch louder than
regular. It was as if there were two groups—she and I were
one, and she and the boys were another—and, to be a part
of them both, she had to run two different personalities.

“Aw, hurry up, Will,” Brian said.

Will whipped around. “Be quiet, Brian!” He pulled
a spider ring from his finger and added it to the circle in the
dirt.

Angela tapped Brian, and they walked down to the creek for a
spell, since it seemed Will might be a while. The creek run from
a dirty pond on the hilltop and curled its way to the bigger creek
below Carlson’s house. The banks were steep with switchbacks
where the dirt had caved away. As my eyes followed it, I saw Carlson’s
blue truck driving toward us. For a sec, I wondered what to do,
how we might go without him being the wiser. He pulled up beside
us.

Carlson looked at the little rubber and plastic things scattered
over the dirt. “What you doing, there?” he asked.

Will glanced up at him. “These things are to mark his grave,” he
said, standing up.

Carlson got out of his truck, and his dog waddled over to my
boot.

“You about finished, Will?” I said.

“No. Why’d they leave? They were supposed to stay
for the whole funeral.”

Angela and Brian sat beside the creek, talking. Brian bent to
the mud, pulled something out, and swished it back and forth in
the water.

“Well, I’m not sure they understood exactly what
you’re doing here, Willard. When you’re the master
of ceremonies, it’s important you explain to folks what’s
going on, so they don’t nod off during the service.”

He swept his hand. “These things are to mark its grave,” he
said again.

Carlson opened his wallet and unfolded a little green award ribbon. “You
can put that on there, too.”

“What’s it for?”

“That’s its tag,” Carlson said.

Will flattened it in his palm and tried to read the gold lettering—maybe
Smiley could teach him–then he just put it with the rest.

“They all mark his grave,” Will was saying. “Especially
this one.” He picked up a sparkwheel and pulled its trigger. “I
should keep this one, to remember.”

“I think you better leave it.”

His eyes clouded. “Goon!”

“What?”

“Mommy says you’re a goon, Daddy says you’re
a goon. Everybody thinks you’re a goon.” He
pulled the trigger and turned away to watch it spin in private.

“Aw, that’s not true, Will,” I said.

Carlson waved and went down slowly to introduce himself to Angela.

“What else she say, Will?”

“We’re moving to another place. And you’re
going somewhere else. End of story.”

Angela shook Carlson’s hand, and he walked off like he
had business to do, check his fence, maybe. Brian called out and
come running past Angela up toward Will and me. He held out his
hand when he reached us. They huddled close, like kids will when
they’ve got something new to show. Will took a step back.

“To mark the grave!” Brian grinned. He laid it with
the other things. Some blanched bone. It looked like something
washed up from the sea.

“No!” said Will. “It’s not part of it!”

“Yes,” Brian said.

“No! Mom!” Willard flew down the hill, sticks kicking.
She sat on an old stump, smoking a cigarette, keeping her distance.
He was waving his arms, trying to explain the situation before
he even got there. He clutched her belt loops. The wind blew her
hair. The ground went lighter, then darker. Then lighter.

“She said I could ride back to the house with you,” Brian
told me.

“Then what?” We stood there. “Okay, let’s
go.”

We left without waving. The dog come running down the hill. It
shot out of the weeds when we turned the bend and chased us down
the lane. When I hit the brakes it come out in front of us and
stood with its paws out flat and lowered its head. It fell in to
chasing us along the passenger side, barking wild again. Brian
watched it beneath the window. I slowed a little so it could keep
up. Once it popped up high enough where I could actually see its
ears, and Brian called it a name. I put my right arm out to hold
him as I put on the brakes. My broken finger throbbed on his chest.

There was a yelp.

The wheels skidded in the dust and gravel.

“Oh mother,” Brian said. He looked over at me. “We
hit it!” he said. “You hit it.”

I could see the highway.

He opened his door and leaned to look, then hopped out. The dog
limped off into the high weeds. He didn’t call to it. The
weeds were still. He leaned back in the door. “He be alright?” he
asked.

“He’s still walking,” I said.

Brian stepped away from the cab. He looked down the road. Angela’s
car was coming way behind us. She stopped before they got any closer.
I made out the shape of her head over the steering wheel way back
there. We were staring at each other, backwards and forwards. Just
get it over with. I could still hear the way he said it. I
said it myself.

“What?” Brian asked.

“You go with her now. Tell her about the dog.”

“But she said-“

“Go with her, I said.” I opened the glove
box, and brushed the napkins onto the floor. “Here.”

“What?”

“Here. Take these.”

“Why?”

“You give them to her.” The bundle felt stiff in
my hand. “Just like this.” I wrapped his hand around
the straws. He shut the door and backed away as I pulled onto the
highway.

Chad Willenborg’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Believer, CityPaper, and Fugue, and has been nominated for Best American Short Stories. He is working on a new novel set in Philadelphia.

[img_assist|nid=695|title=Standing Still|desc=Standing Still is available wherever books are sold. To find an independent bookstore near you, visit booksense.com|link=node|align=right|width=112|height=175]In all things, I blame the husband.

Women who sleep with teenage boys, women who shoplift collectibles, Yes. Their rotten husbands drove them to it.

And that is why, when the kidnapper cracks open our new skylight like an oyster and slithers in, I don’t blame the defective latch, the alarm system, or the thin bronze shell of the new tin roof. The dotted line of fault doesn’t lead to my architect or contractor or engineer.

And oddly, lastly, I do not blame my intruder. And that explains everything that follows, doesn’t it?

I am angrier at my flawed ambitious husband than the man who crouches among my daughter’s stuffed animals.

I stand at the top of our stairs with the portable phone in my hand, my thumb on the button that should produce dial tone, and doesn’t. Now there is no other sound but pounding heart and pouring rain. He is here, and He is smarter than I imagined.

I should have been happy. The renovations were nearly complete. I had what I wanted, my maze of hickory floors and cage of pale earth walls. But in the kitchen, my new French windows rattled in their open frames, as if they knew something foreign was already roaring across the crisp gardens and green backyards.

I walked from room to room. I kept checking the burnished latches in my daughters’ rooms upstairs. Re-locking, re-tucking. A mother or a warden? Jordan, my baby, was curled into her Raggedy Ann, blond silk hair against bright red yarn. Next door, Julia’s mop of curls were almost indistinguishable against our Maine coon cat, Willis. Across the hall, Jamie was asleep with her finger holding her place in her book. I slipped it out of her hand, went back downstairs. I was wearing a path on the new Berber carpet, but couldn’t see it yet. My footprints would appear to me later, with enough time and close attention, like the shape of things only visible from the sky.

As the storm came inland, I gathered candles, matches, flashlights, laundry to fold, old mail to open, and spread it out in the den. I bit my nails in front of movies I knew the endings to. I let myself worry during the commercials. Every flash and boom in the sky was an assumption: that the lightning would find whatever was metallic and brittle in me.

On the television, Hugh Grant carried Sandra Bullock through traffic. I couldn’t find the scissors—art project? School poster?–so I opened a Neiman’s package with my teeth. Inside were three floral bathing suits for the girls and the pink silk nightgown I’d ordered to surprise Sam.

The gown looked impossibly skimpy in my lap. I slipped off my tank top and shorts and pulled it on without bothering to close the shutters. The bodice was as tight as a pair of hands. But the silk brushing against my legs was intoxicating after my cottony week. I fell into it like a hotel bed, allowing myself. I slept.

They’d installed the new skylight the day before, but Sam hadn’t seen it yet; he was off somewhere again, gone three or four days—I couldn’t remember which– to somewhere. Golf outing, conference? I knew all I needed to know: that someone was serving him steak and fetching him towels, and I was home sorting his socks.

At two a.m. something hits the roof and I wake up. Shaking, I go to the kitchen and wrestle with the childproof bottle of Xanax. The wind picks up, flinging small branches on the noisy new tin roof above me. The pill finally gets swallowed through my tears. I’m not the kind of person who can live in a noisy house.

A small but hard noise makes it way through my sniffing. I look up, as if the answer is written on the ceiling. It comes again, and I start to replace negative thoughts with positive ones. People don’t break into houses on nights like this. It’s the wind. It’s squirrels on the new tin roof. As I say the word ‘tin’, something above me snaps, then shatters. Not squirrels, I know in my bones.

The portable phone blinks on the other side of the room. The tongue and groove is silent as I move to it, but my limbs rattle in their sockets.

On the landing, I stare into Jamie’s bedroom across the jungle of stuffed animals against one wall. I smell rain, damp cotton, leather. His boots, I will think later. His wet shirt. I imagine He can hear me shaking in the doorway, molars like maracas in my mouth. Finally I make out the contours of His face and eyes, human skin among the plush bears and nylon-lashed dolls that line Jamie’s floor.

I shake but do not gasp, do not scream. Of course He is there; I expected Him, I heard Him coming for years, each night when Sam left me alone with my obsessions. I conjured Him, fear by fear, bone by bone until He showed himself.

The plush zoo muffles our sharp breathing, my heart pounding. I don’t dare cast my eyes in my daughter’s direction, don’t want to point her out to Him. I feel her sleeping, hear her soft breathing, out of rhythm with His and mine. I look only at Him.

It is beyond intimate: past sharing a bathroom, past putting your child’s bloody finger in your mouth. He stares at me. I stare back. He holds a finger to His lips, a warning, and glides soundlessly, on cat burglar feet, to Jamie’s canopy bed.

“No,” I cry, but it comes out mangled and small. He scoops her up and though she is groggy she looks oddly comfortable draped in His arms.

I drop to my knees and utter the only fearless words I have ever spoken:

“Take me,” I say. “Take me instead.”

I’m ashamed to admit I wasn’t completely relieved when He did

 

Read our interview with Kelly Simmons

[img_assist|nid=252|title=Cosmopolitan Lounge by John Gascot|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=106]In a previous life, my husband was an alley cat in Rome who lived in the Colosseum and whose purrs originated in his scrotum. Now he finds love in the belly of compost heaps and in the folds of Burpee Seed envelopes—fixed and declawed as he is. These thoughts are typical of the private games I play each morning before I visit Karen’s grave. The content of my mental life is the Swiss-army knife of daily cemetery goers: it snips, scrapes, uncorks, screws, and whittles its way to consecrated ground.

I complete another day’s visit and walk the skinny road that
weaves in and out of the gardens. The slight incline interests
me. I wonder if the designers of this place want visitors to
feel the upgrade as they walk away. Feel their losses farther
behind, farther beneath them.

Out the corner of my eye I see a truck on the lawn, workmen.
They are behind me now, at least three men, one in the driver’s
seat, the others swaying in the back of the pickup. I stumble
slightly as I walk, which is very unlike me. Someone whistles
and I know it’s at me because no one else is around. At sixty-six
I’m a tiny woman. No one has admired me in years. It’s the men
in the truck, and now they make other sounds. If I turn around,
show my face, I know they’ll shut up. My age from the front is
white and laced, extravagant as a wedding gown. Excited and frightened
I walk faster. Again someone whistles and I’m glad.

I come to a fork in the road. Left leads to the parking lot,
right to a series of paths and groves. As I veer to the right,
I think of my husband working at home in his garden. He’s a good
man; the old guy worries about me; he’s afraid of losing me since
Karen died. Luckily, he has what I call his scallion diversions.
From his immaculate garden he creates wonderful salads, and I
poke fun at his hobby—annoy the hell out of him. "With
greens like these we’ll live forever, God forbid.” He controls
his annoyance by listening repeatedly to Sara Lazarus’s jazzed "I’m
Thru with Love.” If he were watching me now, I wonder if
he’d let the garden go to seed, actually call a halt to his greens.
But other than making a simple turn toward the trees, I’ve done
nothing.

[img_assist|nid=253|title=Young Girl Wearing Lace, Tressa Croce|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=94|height=175]

 Since I don’t want to turn around and hear no additional sounds, I’m in the dark about the workmen. Maybe they know my age and this is all a big joke. I glance at some headstones, the names are familiar, Yarkas, Luvenvirth, and realize I’ve come this way before. In case the men are watching, I feign interest in a marker by cocking my head left and right. A stone hits me in the back of the head. I spin round, feel something in my hair, and untangle an acorn. Another falls from the tree above me. Now I see the truck at the fork move in my direction. I want to scream my daughter’s name, want her to help me. Mercilessly I whip myself for this stupid, childish desire. The men gain on me. I hide behind a tree.

#

Elderly bodies of the living lack the dignity of corpses (or so I think as Richard kneels shirtless in the garden, his pasty torso mocking his green thumb). As he digs I watch his breasts—one higher than the other—and wonder how things come to be. The phone rings, but the caller hangs up once I answer. It’s the fourth such call today. Making prank calls was the big thing when I was eleven, and I think back to huddling with my girlfriends and squealing with joy as we clicked on the unsuspecting. But I doubt girls are dialing today. I worry that the workmen have lifted our last name from Karen’s stone. The thought is absurd, but like the trellis my husband is working around to gather his last pole beans, it’s firmly planted. Richard sees me at the kitchen window and winks. Again the phone rings. This time I lift the receiver, but say nothing.

"You there? I know you the one," he says. "Tell
me and I’ll hang up."

I start to hang up, but don’t complete the action and bring
the man back to my ear. Richard leans over something in the garden.
His toneless skin and muscle collapse this way and that.

"Jus tell me."

As though this voice will pump testosterone—something—back
into my husband, I stay on the phone.

"You still on?"

"Here."

"Talk to me."

A strange kind of pride—a blast of wild music—body-pierces
my lips, eyebrows, cheeks.

"I gotta get off."

"No, baby–"

I hang up. My husband looks at me and waves with fingers the
color of pancake mix. How does he keep the dirt off of his hands?

#

[img_assist|nid=694|title=eXpressway, Indigene© 2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=126]I frequently wear a turban to the cemetery. That or scarf or rain hat. Something akin to what Henry Fonda wore in On Golden Pond. Regardless of the weather these past few days, my Henry-near-death cap has been my pick. No one will whistle at a sad Henry or awaken old-lady urge. Standing at Karen’s grave, I hear a whistle. She and I make the tiny sound in our noses that always turns into a laugh. Our private joke is the impossibility of life and death, sex and sad hats. 

#

On her birthday my husband and I stand by Karen’s grave. Richard
comes with me to the site a couple times a year. He crouches
down and with a soft cloth polishes a section of the marker.
The moment he finishes, I crouch to rub. Then we arrange and
rearrange our flowers.

"The most beautiful spot in the park," he says. "The
most peaceful."

The marker looks brilliant, but I want more shine. I touch
the cloth to Karen’s name much as the mother of an infant dabs
her child’s perfect mouth. Vibrations from a truck pulling up
behind us wind up my spine. I turn my head and they are there,
out of the truck, three men, each with a lawn mower. Like a geisha
on speed, I lower my eyes and quickly turn to more perfectly
service my marble—but not before I notice their smooth,
flawless skin.

So this is how it is. Across a road no wider than the root
of an ancient tree stand my dark-skinned lovers. There’s no way
to know if they’ve spotted me. Their mowers scream to high heaven;
I would like to scream. My husband reaches down and takes my
hand—the noise has cut through his peace, and he wants
to go.

"In a minute," I say.

"I can’t hear you."

"In a minute!” I yank my hand away. Afraid they’ve
seen me, afraid they’ll let on that I may have—it sounds
so ridiculous—wanted a liaison with gravediggers, I stay
put. Richard grabs me from behind, reaches under my arm, and
pulls me to my feet. The move, his strength, his resolve, surprises
me.

"I can’t stand this noise. Come on."

We walk away, invisible, two elderly people, chimerical as
the parents of every lost child. Richard becomes distracted as
we move toward the fork in the road. His tension and anger transform
into desperation. It’s the familiar kind you see on the faces
of tourists come Sunday in quaint little towns. Richard looks
eager to find diversion in any nook or cranny. Fun, any fun,
to keep Monday at bay.

With wrinkled features that resemble a jigsaw puzzle pressed
into random alignment he says, "That stone, remember that
stone? You know, the one with the weird epitaph?"

"Let’s go, please. You said the noise—"

"It’s in the distance now. What was it? Kiss Me?"

"I don’t know."

"It was," he says, " Kiss Me. "

"Something like that."

"Over this way somewhere."

"Let’s not."

"Come on."

"It’s abominable. I don’t want to see it."

Momentarily ugly, Richard laughs at me. "’Abominable’?
I’ve never heard you use that word."

"There should be laws, rules. It should be ripped from
the ground."

"Clare, sweetie, what’s wrong with you?"

"I don’t want to gawk at a stone that says Kiss Me!"

Richard studies me and sees that my lungs have pushed themselves
up and now lie beneath the skin of my face. His words are old-husband,
each, impossibly gentle. "We’ll go home. It’s okay."

I sit on the curb until Richard brings the car. He ejects the
Sara Lazarus CD and pulls my seatbelt around me.

#

Prior to Karen’s death, the occasional thought that I may be
an absurd woman or more precisely a woman who has her moments
of absurdity never bothered me much. Since she is gone, whenever
I feel the slightest bit eccentric, the sensation takes on an
added dimension. A feeling of permanence as though I’ll always
be odd with nails driven into the silly living coffin I’ve become.

I feel ridiculous at the entrance to the cemetery because I’m
sneaking in today. By this I mean I have no intention of visiting
Karen’s grave. I’m going to the Kiss Me stone instead, and though
I know the feeling is foolish, that I am at this moment laughable,
I sense that I’m betraying Karen by coming to the grounds without
visiting her.

I move toward the fork in the road in search of the grotesque
thing and what it might mean. A workman is kneeling by the goldfish
pond; he’s feeding the fish and does not look up. Another is
raking leaves (I want to tell him I’ve raked leaves forever)
and does not look up. A third is sitting in the back of the pickup
drinking coffee and dunking a doughnut. Dunker looks up, seems
to recognize my age, my sexual obsolescence, and moves his eyes
back to the sweet, moist thing at hand.

The stone is not an easy find. Names surround like impoverished
children begging tourists for pennies—but where’s the chiseled
command? I remember that Richard and I found the thing completely
by chance soon after Karen’s death. Thinking back to my first
reaction to the stone makes my stomach flip-flop. Imagining the
contents of a mass grave spilling out of me, I move toward the
office and the restroom inside.

#

I stare at the letters cut in the rock as though the thing
used to carve the message is flirting with cutting me. The time
spent searching and the discomfort are meaningless now. Here
is the stone. Kiss Me. Here is the springboard for a thousand
stray thoughts. Elementary school, sixty or a hundred years ago.
I hit a boy who is shocked and hurt by my fury (he asks the crossing
guard to kiss his black and blue). A chubby girl who hums incessantly
bends over the water fountain, and we laugh because her panties
show. Teenagers moon me on route 309 the day after I get my driver’s
license. And in the fun house, the one you move through in a
chair on wheels, the chair that smacks through double doors into
darkness and screams, my cousin, who I barely know, whose skin
is repulsive to me, sticks his tongue into my mouth.

There’s a bench behind me, a cool and uncomfortable slab that
bathes the backs of my thighs and puts them to sleep. John Malson
is the name engraved low and tiny and happy on the stone. I study
the word kiss, dominant, pressing, and experience a new
sensation: my eyeballs bounce in a bucket of flashbulbs—impossible
white lights that prick my optical nerves. Karen’s funeral. Flash.
Choosing her dress. Richard sitting there, helping me to breathe.
Paparazzi snapping at the closing of the box. There’s a whistle
in the middle of this, a ripcord that bounces me out of free
fall. I turn and see a woman on a path close by. She’s thirty-five,
lithe, blonde, a walking Grace Kelly. Someone whistles a second
time. She quickly kneels, places her flowers, and glides over
a hill and out of sight. I close my eyes and see her disappear
again, this time over a hill in my mind. But not before her dress
flirts with the wind, and lawless colors kick up; I fall in love
as her form melts into the horizon.

My husband’s hands on my temples surprise me at first. He stands
behind me and massages.

"How’d you know where I was?" I hear myself ask.

"You’re not hard to find."

"One of the few above ground.” I indicate Malson’s
grave. "This son of a bitch. Bet he was a professor. Taught…let’s
see…Shakespeare? He liked the obscene jigs some players did
to please the crowds after a play. He was that or a pedophile,
with his invitation so low to the ground. Whadaya think?"

Richard sits and tries to smile. "You’re funny today."

"A scream."

"It’s late. Come home."

"No."

"I don’t like the way you look. Let’s get out of here."

I get up but not to go. My eyes are engorged Satchmo cheeks
as I blow toward the stone. The ground feels diaphanous as though
the death beneath it were boneless, boxless spirit. Circling
round I come back to Richard. "I want to deface this stone."

He winces.

"I’m not kidding. I want to deface it."

"Come with me."

I grab his arm. "You carry a knife with all kinds of attachments."

"You belong at home."

"I’ll come back alone with paint or shoe polish. A hammer—swear
to God."

"I’m taking you out of here."

"No," I feel my tongue tear at the roof of my mouth,
hear the wrinkles above my upper lip crackle, "you’re not."

"We’re leaving now! You want police here? I don’t know
what to do!” He swings his head away. Tears fly out of
his eyes like a burst from a machine gun. "What do I do?"

"Treat me for once like your prized garden soil."

He shakes his head and starts forming another "what" with
his face. Holding the word half in, half out, he grasps the bench
to brace himself and coughs. He motions with his fingers for
a tissue.

I fish in my purse, find an envelope with a moist towel, and
put it in his hand. He wipes some mucus from his face. I hate
myself for what I’ve done to him and blurt a confused request
for help as I sit.

Richard looks at me as though he’s been told I’ll die in the
next thirty seconds. "How?"

Every nerve in my body stammers. "You won’t like this.
I don’t think you’ll understand. Forgive me for embarrassing
you?” Talking eases my trembling, but a gust of Alpine-thin
air from Davos-Platz—he took me there right after she died—I’ll
never know why—makes it hard for me to breathe. "You
must know I don’t mean to embarrass you.” I look around. "But
no one can see. Richard? No one can see."

Richard looks around and squints at me. "No one can see
wha—” His voice fails for a second. "What do
you want me to do?"

"Something you used to do long ago in the most unexpected
places. I love how your voice cracks when you get excited."

"Hey!"

Feeling as insubstantial as the afterlife under my feet, I
beg my husband: "Put your hand up my dress? Quick, before
somebody comes?” I start to cry. "Do it and I’ll come
home with you?"

He shakes his head. "I can’t. Our daughter—"

"Is what? Buried on the other side of the park?"

As though troubled by the thought that the dead watch all our
movements, my husband jerks his head in the direction of Karen’s
grave. He turns back to me, closes his eyes, and sucks in his
lips. Richard moves his hand as far as he can and holds it there.

#

At the kitchen window I survey the midwinter garden. Richard,
who now shares space with Karen, detested the hard February view.
Too much hunger in the eyes of rabbits, too many icicles hanging
from eaves above windows—he always complained about icicles
and the dull and constant drip. He’s dead four months. Two months
after our open-air adventure he quickly slid. Feeling certain
I’d make it to ninety, he spent his last few days telling me
what a tough old lady I’ll be.

When I visit the grounds, regardless of whose spirit I’m reaching
for, all conversation, intimacy, is now compromised. What’s between
Karen and me bleeds into Richard and vice versa. Our family plot,
like all gravesites, is a compost heap. Here at the window, warmed
by the baseboard heat, I think of the invisible trellis that
lazes above Karen and Richard. How it traps me like the web of
an incontinent spider that no longer eats but spins because it
has yet to learn how not to be. Ninety, Richard said. What a
jazzy old lady I will learn to be by ninety. Even without surprise
whistles, yes, what a great old lady I’ll be.

I can’t bring myself to deface the stone. Instead, I use Richard’s
Swiss-army knife to stab the grass above Malson’s bones and leave
the blade buried there.

Barry Dinerman’s plays have been seen in Seattle, New York City, and Philadelphia. An Edward F. Albee Foundation fellowship supported many efforts. Dinerman wrote scripts for TV GUIDE and published work in The Wall Street Journal. Selections from his prose were recently performed by Philadelphia Readers Theater. Flourtown is home.