Zipper

John Paul Davis

 

We were born in the era
of having to balance
our checkbooks

 

& we’ve lived
through that to the time
of tracking transactions
with handheld computers

 

which are also telephones
we only use when we must
though I’ll confess

 

when you were overseas
I’d call your voicemail
just to hear you
say your own name

 

which is my first favorite music.
Second is your keys
dancing in the deadbolt
when you get home from work

 

& third, the sound of your laugh
on the other side of a wall.

 

You mumble in your sleep
& do vocal warm-ups in the shower
& eat cereal in bed yes

 

this is the age of eating in bed
while watching the best television
on tiny screens, this is the era

 

of falling asleep in our clothes
with the light on holding
each other, this is the year
of staying home & mumbling

 

sweetly to each other locking
fingers & inventing novel
ways of expressing our feelings
without words for example

 

there’s the metallic
percussion when I tug
apart your zipper

 

in the doorway by the bucket
where we keep our outdoor shoes,
there’s the creak of floorboards
as I kneel, there’s the quiet rabbit
of your hand in mine.

 

Even when we’re miles apart
my body is a playlist streaming
to yours, my ankles & beard
& earlobes & forearms & belly button

 

& every hair, all of my pink
skin, I’m an afternoon of song
arranged in this specific order
for you. Dance to me, wash

 

dishes to me, sing along to me folding
laundry, read a play
with me on in the background
take me with you on your long commute,
dark of my voice in your headphones.

 

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On Love and Duty

Joyce Dehli

 

“Will you help me?” Michael whispered in my ear as plates of his mother’s rhubarb pie were passed around the table.

 

Michael had asked my partner Grace and me to join his family’s brunch one late-summer Sunday in 1995. Before others took seats, he’d motioned for us to sit on either side of him. I understood: we were his sentinels. As it turned out, he didn’t need our protection. Michael’s family had gathered for him, but they mostly left him alone. His three brothers ribbed each other incessantly, occasionally enfolding their mother into their banter. They hadn’t seen Michael since his AIDS diagnosis, though they lived only thirty minutes away, near the farm where they’d been boys together. Michael’s two sisters and a few friends cared for him.

 

Michael was really Grace’s friend. A decade earlier, they’d gotten sober together as part of a tight group of gay and lesbian AA friends. They were all in their early twenties then, except for Michael who was about ten years older. By the time I met Grace a few years later, her circles were widening. Still, her core group stayed tight, and I saw Michael at potlucks and picnics. We talked a little. In their boisterous group, he was the shy one. His hair was summer wheat, his eyes sky blue. I liked his field-worthy jeans and checkered, short-sleeve shirts buttoned over white tees. He reminded me of the farmers on organic cereal boxes, happy amid their grains. He tolerated discos but adored country line dancing. If he could, he would have traded his graphic-design job for tending gardens, hands in soil, and fresh blooms always in the offing. That’s all I knew. Grace was our only link; I had my own friends.

 

Things changed when Jonathan, the youngest of their sobriety group, died from AIDS. He was the one they’d tried to protect, the dashing and needy one who, in his late teens, had fled his small hometown in northeastern Wisconsin for Madison. Before long, his dreams of a writerly life with worldly men took him to Chicago, but he kept his ties to Grace and Michael. After Jonathan’s death, his parents whisked his body back to the town he’d despised and to a church that prayed he would be forgiven for the life he had lived. His friends drove two hours to his funeral. They did it for Jonathan, though they knew the ceremony would be brutal. I went along. On the ride home, our car overflowed with stories, hilarious and tender, of the man they loved. Michael didn’t talk much. We didn’t know then, but he was already sick. HIV had become AIDS.

 

One Sunday, not a year later, Michael called our house in a panic. He said his brain wasn’t right; it switched off and on, off and on, froze up and split in pain. Grace and I took him to the emergency room. After hours of tests and waiting, a doctor said he’d had a series of ministrokes called TIAs, or transient ischemic attacks. Blood flow to his brain had sputtered for a spell. AIDS was to blame, the doctor confirmed. He sent Michael home, warning him to expect more attacks.

 

Michael called us regularly to take him to the ER, usually on weekends. Looking back, I think he was being considerate of our time, knowing we worked long hours during the week. He contained his terrors until they burst on weekends. Most of his other friends—gay men and an ex-boyfriend with whom he still lived—were exhausted by the needs of those dying around them. They were devastated by relentless loss. Some turned away from Michael. Grace loved Michael like an older brother, but she sometimes grew annoyed when he called. Still, she remained steadfast. Unlike Grace, I could keep my distance. I wasn’t bound to Michael in the same way. I sometimes wondered: what is my duty here?

 

In the decades that followed, I asked myself that question often—when dying friends lingered in illness and when cancer took my dad, slowly and painfully, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. What was my duty, and could I bear it? Could I watch what dying inflicts on a human body? Could I bear the grief that precedes death, gathering into itself like darkness before a storm? Could I bear knowing that whatever care I gave, it couldn’t be enough? And when I wanted to flee, would I stay or turn away?

 

As Michael’s circle shrank, his anxiety swelled. The sicker he looked, the clearer it became to everyone: this man had AIDS. Nobody took open seats near us in the ER waiting room. If he’d wanted, Michael could have lived most of his life passing as straight. But as he grew gaunt and weak, he was seen as a man with AIDS. And, given that this was the mid-1990s, people assumed he was gay.

 

He wouldn’t have hidden if he could. When Michael got sober, he committed to being himself in the world. Grace lived that way too, but not me. Although I was generally out, I excelled at managing what people knew about me: more truth for some, less truth for others. I calculated the risks of being out against the pain of hiding. Standing beside Michael, I felt vulnerable to derision. I didn’t always speak up for him.

 

Once, two white-coated ER residents ridiculed Michael for being scared. As he trembled in a gown on the edge of a hospital bed, they—a woman and a man—stood several feet away, practically shouting their questions: “What year is this?” “Who is the president?” When Michael answered incorrectly, the woman laughed at him. The man accused Michael of seeking attention. Clearly, they wanted Michael to go away. Grace and I were outraged, but we said nothing. Perhaps Grace thought it was better for Michael if we didn’t complain. We didn’t want him to get kicked out. But maybe I also feared their disdain for Michael would extend to me. I’d speak up today, but I knew less of life then.

 

Michael’s regular doctor said he could stay home as long as he had people caring for him. A few friends set a schedule and divided tasks, until Michael’s ex-boyfriend-turned-landlord kicked him out. He said he couldn’t watch another death. That’s when Michael’s younger sister took him in. She lived alone in a small house nearby and delivered mail in the mornings. His older sister flew in from L.A. and stayed for weeks. Before long, the sisters proposed the family brunch. The family hadn’t gathered in a long time.

 

By then, Michael looked twice his age of forty-three—all bones, covered by bruised and mottled skin, with wispy patches of hair on his head. If his mother and brothers were shocked to see him, they didn’t show it. The brothers came in with fists jammed in their jean pockets. They didn’t hug Michael or even touch him. All morning, the sisters were up and down from their dining-room chairs, bringing out an egg-bake and plates of cinnamon rolls to the table, filling coffee cups, and clearing leftovers for pie. The brothers talked of the growing season and how farming had changed in the years since their father’s death. Mostly they joked, drawing out their mother’s laughter to the point that she had coughing fits. One of her lungs had been removed for cancer, and now the other had it. The family had known loss and soon would know more.

 

Michael spoke little and ate less. Now and then, he smiled, though seemingly not about anything in particular. His eyes held one person, then another. Grace jumped into family stories, asked questions, and laughed appreciatively. I could not. I was stunned, then furious that nobody asked Michael about himself. Nobody mentioned his illness. They knew he had AIDS, just as they knew he was gay—another secret that wasn’t a secret. Yet, his brothers barely glanced his way.

 

I was quick to judge Michael’s brothers as cowards. Quick to assume that what Michael needed from them were words. I was certain Michael needed to hear that his family knew him, loved him, and could bear his illness with him. Now, in the second half of my life, I wonder if I was wrong. Maybe Michael didn’t need words as much as he needed his family’s presence. His brothers came as close as they dared at the Sunday brunch. And he welcomed them, though with Grace and me and his sisters at his side. Michael didn’t speak the words: gay, AIDS, dying. He put aside radical honesty in order to receive his brothers’ love as offered. This was more than Jonathan got, and maybe it was enough for Michael. I don’t know. It wouldn’t be enough for me.

 

Much is expected of those who love the dying, and those expectations are often enough to scare a person away. But my role with Michael seemed limited and clear. At the brunch, I knew my place: the loyal sentinel, bound not by love but by duty. I fumed, but I kept quiet and refused my slice of pie.

 

When Michael whispered—“Will you help me?”—I was glad for a reason to leave the table. He clutched his cane and gave me his arm. As we shuffled down the hallway, the table talk faded. I expected he wanted to nap.

 

“I need to go to the bathroom,” he said.

 

All of my anger at his brothers turned into fear for me. I didn’t want to be afraid, but I was.

 

AIDS deaths peaked in the United States that year. Within several months, the FDA would approve antiretroviral drugs that would turn AIDS into a manageable, if chronic, disease for many people. But for Michael, like those before him, the diagnosis was a death sentence. We had brochures from the local AIDS Support Network to guide our caregiving since we didn’t have the Internet then. Touching was okay. We knew AIDS was transmitted through blood and semen, as well as vaginal fluids, but not saliva, sweat, or urine. But what if Michael had a cut, an open wound? He had thin skin and bouts of incontinence. When his sisters cleaned him, they wore gloves. Nobody was completely sure how careful to be. I tended toward caution and focused on doing chores and running errands for Michael, not bodily care. Mostly, he and I talked, often about gardening. Grace did more. I held back not only because I was afraid of AIDS. I was afraid to watch a person die. It was my first time.

 

I opened the bathroom door, and we squeezed inside. Toothpaste and brushes, soap, rubbing alcohol, and creams crowded a shelf above the sink. I guided Michael to a narrow space between the toilet and the tub.

 

“I need you to help me,” he said.

 

“Okay, with what?”

 

“Everything,” he said. He leaned heavily toward me, exhausted.

 

Why me? That was my first thought. I heard his brothers’ laughter, those men who had grown up with him and had bodies like his. Why not them? Why not the mother who gave birth to him? His sisters? Even Grace? Why did Michael ask me? How did I get here? 

 

“Okay, so you just need to pee, right?” I asked.

 

He nodded. I undid his belt, unzipped his fly, let his pants drop to his ankles, and pulled down his underwear.

 

“Okay,” I said again. But I knew there was more to do. Michael wasn’t steady, and I didn’t want to get wet. What if there was blood in his urine? I wondered if doctors were absolutely sure urine didn’t transmit HIV. If I got AIDS, Grace would be there for me, but not my family—I felt sure of that then, but I didn’t really know. It would be just Grace and me and, as it was with Michael, a few friends. The thought of dying, as Michael was dying, terrified me.

 

It’s strange how many thoughts can blaze through a mind in a second or two, leaving—one hopes—no outward sign. I did what I needed to do. I held Michael’s penis, aimed at the bowl, shook off the last few drops, and wiped him.

 

“Thank you,” he said.

 

The brunch ended soon afterward, and I don’t think his mother or brothers saw him again until his funeral several weeks later. In the weeks between, AIDS-related dementia took over Michael’s mind, slowly at first, then swiftly. When Grace and I came for our shifts during the week, or just to say hello, Michael was always in bed. He’d lost language and could no longer speak with words. But I felt sure we communicated even toward the end.

 

One rainy day, Grace and I found Michael agitated, rustling on his bed with gym shorts over his diapers. He was as small as a skinny boy, his body was withered and worn.

 

It was Grace’s idea to put something on the turntable. She thumbed through the dozen or so albums on a shelf, pulled one out, and dropped the needle. She nodded at me and smiled at Michael.

 

“If I should stay …”  

 

Michael stopped moving. Grace turned up the volume until Whitney Houston’s voice swelled through the room, through the whole damn house. Grace and I sang along to Michael: “And I will always love you / I will always love you…”

 

Ardent and loud, we kept singing. I fumbled the lyrics until we returned to the chorus, then I belted it, and Grace did too. “I will always love you.” We twirled at the foot of Michael’s bed. We drew our hands to our hearts, then threw our arms out to him. He flung his arms toward us with glee. His eyes shone. His smile was radiant. His sounds merged with our song. We hugged him, enfolding him, all the while singing. We were happy. I believe we were all happy in that moment.

 

Grace had to return to work, but I stayed a little longer. I sat on the bed beside Michael, who was half-raised against pillows. I reached for his hand, surprised to feel content. Michael curled onto his side and nudged his head onto my thigh, where he fell asleep.

 

I wondered then, as I still do, why Michael let me near in his dying days. It’s true that he needed help and I was there. Still, he kept plenty of people out. Maybe his trust in Grace extended to me. Maybe he’d decided I was basically kind. And with me, the stakes weren’t so high. Not like they were with the people he loved, the people he wasn’t sure would come, would stay. It’s the closest ones who have the power to hurt you most. He knew that, and maybe that was reason enough.

 

I gave Michael so little, and sometimes not enough. At times, he asked more of me than I thought I could bear. That was a gift, but one I didn’t appreciate until years later when friends and my father were dying. Every time, I felt afraid. Every time, a voice told me to run. Still, I showed up. I stayed. I made mistakes. Too often, I said the wrong thing. By the time my father died, I knew that while words matter, you can’t say everything at the end. You don’t have to.

 

I went to my friends and my father out of love. But love wasn’t what drew me to Michael, and love wasn’t why I stayed through his illness. He might have been at the edge of my circle, but he was there. I went to him as I go to my garden: duty-bound to tend what is in my backyard. That’s how I imagine Michael tended his garden, from shoots through blooms through winter beds at rest. Maybe that is what he and I were doing from the start—tending each other—from those early talks at parties, through the days of his illness, to the end when silence replaced words. I think that’s right. I wonder if Michael knew how much I grew, tended by him.

 

Sometimes love follows duty. And, as every gardener knows, tending offers its own rewards: the rhythmic turning of soil, pressing seeds, pulling weeds. You pray for sun one day and rain the next, as if you had a say in what lives and what dies.

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The Wedding Photographer Photographer

Matt Leibel

 

The wedding photographer photographer was busier than ever. Couples had decided that typical wedding shots felt too cliché; they wanted photos that merely suggested the existence of these moments instead. The wedding photographer photographer was acknowledged as the best in the business. He understood how to capture the essence of a wedding photographer at work because he’d been a wedding photographer before branching out to this extra, some would say unnecessary, level of remove. He’d always been interested in the art of looking: at museums he was less concerned with observing the art, and more concerned with observing the people observing the art. He made notes: “Woman folding arms impatiently; child with tongue sticking out; man pawing at his own goatee while looking at a chiaroscuro sketch by Van Dyck.” The WPP began taking pictures of museumgoers who were deep—almost erotically deep—in the throes of the act of looking. His fascination with the second-hand extended even to his own marriage. He had become interested in watching his wife engage in acts of intimacy with strange men. (By which he meant strangers to him; the men didn’t have to be particularly strange, and usually weren’t.) In fact, watching her excited him more than being with her himself. This was not a deal breaker—he’d explained his proclivities early in their relationship. They’d met at a wedding, actually. She was a wedding planner, and he was photographing the wedding photographer according to the nuptial couple’s very specific needs (with a focus on the WP’s two-toned bowling-style loafers, a particular fascination of the bride-to-be’s). It was at the WPP’s request that the voyeuristic scenarios with his own wife became more and more elaborate; a second-order element was added as a second stranger was hired to watch the wife’s encounters, and the WPP took candid photos of this stranger. The WPP’s wife especially liked these shots because of the expression the WPP was able to capture on the face of Stranger #2: usually a look of titillation mixed with confusion mixed with the terror of an interloper on the verge of being found out, even though he was an invited guest. Everything seemed to be going well for the WPP. His particular personal and professional desires were being largely satisfied. This is more, he thought, than most people could say—until he noticed what seemed to be a new set of characters at the weddings he worked. These weren’t the usual wedding crashers, nor relatives of the couple who’d grown antisocial after an intrafamily spat. No. It was only after a handful of these weddings, and after talking to friends in the biz, that the WPP realized the truth: these new faces were wedding photographer photographer photographers. The WPPPs were hired to photograph him, and him alone. And the sudden switch from observer to observed unnerved the WPP more than he might have anticipated. He told his wife that he couldn’t be part of a photography sandwich, to which she replied, rightly, that this was exactly what wedding photographers had been dealing with ever since the WPP became a WPP. And that if the WPP couldn’t handle the emergence of the WPPP as the next evolution of a fast-changing industry, maybe it was time for him to move on from the job—and for her to move on from him. And, indeed, just weeks after the WPP’s wife moved out, he quit working entirely. He parked himself on his sofa in front of the TV, where for weeks on end, he did little but watch a show about characters who do nothing but watch other characters on TV. Soon, word of the WPP’s downfall got around, and paparazzi (mostly WPs, a few WPPPs, and even other WPPs with whom the WPP had worked) gathered around the WPP’s windows to snap candid pictures of him. An exhibition of those photos, eventually, appeared at the MOMA. The wedding photographer photographer never attended the show, but he spent many hours online, looking at pictures of museumgoers, who themselves were looking at other museumgoers, who were looking at still further museumgoers, who were looking—from what he could tell—at nothing at all.

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When There’s No One Left to Point At

Eric Scot Tryon

 

On Fridays after school, we rode our bikes to the liquor store to buy sour candy, the kind in large plastic bins with big metal scoops. Sour peaches, sour rings, sour bears and worms and sharks, sour lips and sour rainbows and sour kids. Emily never had money, so I paid, which was fine.

 

With the bag of candy tied around my handlebars, we pedaled to the high school where we sat in the bleachers, on the top row, and pressed our backs to the metal railing. The first sour bite was the best. The way my jaw clenched like a fist even before the sour hit my tongue.

 

Meanwhile, the field below was electric with teams practicing and students buzzing, and we played a game called That’s Gonna Be You. Emily and I were still a year away from high school and joked that watching from above was like watching ourselves in the future.

 

“That’s gonna be you,” she’d say, laughing and pointing to the football player dragging his feet, half a lap behind the team.

 

“That’s gonna be you,” I’d say and shoulder-bump her, pointing to the cross country runner leading the team in stretches. Blonde hair pulled tight in a ponytail, she barked orders and counted to ten.

 

Besides pointing out our future selves and sucking the sour off gummy soda bottles, we also complained about our parents. To make Emily feel better, I made stuff up about my dad yelling and being an asshole, but really he wasn’t. He was the kind of dad who always listened, even if sometimes I wished he talked too.

 

But Emily’s dad was another story. Three months ago she found out he had another family. Family #2, she called them. She found a birthday card in his office desk with a drawing of a dad, mom, older boy, and a little girl with red curls. Emily was blonde and an only child. She didn’t tell her mom, but she told me as we pushed sour rings on the tips of our tongues. How many could we fit until one snapped? She didn’t cry like I thought she might, but instead pointed at a group of boys huddled like vultures under the bleachers across from ours, secretly smoking and punching each other in the arms. “That’s gonna be you.”

 

Emily started questioning everything about her father. Whenever he wasn’t home, which was a lot—work trips, golf trips, who-knows trips—she assumed he was playing catch with his son or teaching his redheaded daughter to ride a bike. When he was home, she tried to sniff foreign odors on his shirt as he hugged her goodnight. And when the light hit his mouse-brown hair at just the right angle, she swore she saw hints of red.

 

The more she shared, the less I shared. Having to deal with Family #2 was so much worse than my mom drinking too much white wine after dinner. My mom didn’t get silly-drunk like in the movies, but the next day she wouldn’t remember what we’d talked about. I had to get used to cloned conversations. Plus I was running out of bad things to make up about my dad, so mostly I just listened and searched the field for future-me.

 

Then Emily’s Dad called her Dylan accidentally. Twice.

 

Dylan doesn’t sound anything like Emily,” I said. “How can the dillweed make that mistake?”

 

With a mouth full of sour gummy bears she’d scrunched together until four became one, Emily said, “Whatever. That’s gonna be you,” and pointed to a funny-looking kid sitting against the goalpost doing homework alone.

 

“Yeah? Well, that’s gonna be you,” I said and pointed to a cheerleader practicing her leg kicks. She looked ridiculous, and I knew that would get Emily good because she swore she’d never be a cheerleader. She said cheerleaders were just decorations for guys, and how stupid was that? I was waiting for her to point out the worst guy and say it was me, but she didn’t. She just sat there working her tongue, unsticking bears from her back teeth. Finally, she said, “Shit, Dylan’s even a cooler name than Emily.”

 

#

 

Today, as I’m scooping the last of the sour fish into the bag, Emily says she has something big to tell me. But later, with our backs against the cool metal bars and one handful of sour keys already gone, she still hasn’t said anything.

 

“So, like, did something happen?” I ask, as the marching band marches in a giant circle.

 

“Nothing happened,” she says, tears in her eyes for the first time. “But, like…I realized something.”

 

I want to give her a hug, but I’m not sure if that’s the kind of friends we are. So, like my dad, I sit quietly. Waiting to listen.

 

“What if, like…” She stops to tie a sour rope in a knot, then bites off one end. “What if I’m Family #2?” She looks away. “What if it’s not them. What if it’s me that’s Family #2?”

 

The worst part is I don’t know what to say because she could be right, because who gets to choose? I try to imagine what my parents might say, but I’ve got nothing. So I reach into the bag and grab two sour cherries—her favorite—and give her one. Then she grabs two sour bombs—the strongest of them all—and hands one to me.

 

“That’s gonna be you,” I say and point to the girl walking like a horse with high knees, twirling a baton.

 

“That’s gonna be you,” she says and points to a big kid banging a drum hung around his neck.

 

And then we can’t stop. We point out everyone on the field. The football player doing pushups, the sprinter collapsing on the grass, the kid in crutches asking girls to sign his cast, the couple holding hands, the boy getting yelled at by his coach, the girl with pink hair. That’s gonna be you, I tell her. That’s gonna be you, she tells me. And we eat. We eat until the sour scrapes our tongues and cuts our gums.

 

Eventually the sun drops behind the mountains, and the lights of the field click, then buzz, then shine. That’s gonna be you, she says and points to a kid sitting alone, picking grass. And to the coach blowing his whistle. And to the boy trying to do a cartwheel. That’s gonna be you, I say and point to a girl sprinting as if she’s late, backpack bouncing side to side. And to the girl crying into her phone. And to the girl who was running laps when we first sat down and is still running laps, her face bright red, and she has not stopped, has not even slowed. That’s gonna be you, that’s gonna be you, we say until all the teams have packed up their equipment and left, until even the non-athletes, the randoms and slackers and stragglers have decided it’s time to go home, and there is only a pile of sour sand at the bottom of the bag, and our mouths are swollen and raw, and we have pointed at everyone until there’s no one left to point at, and still we have no idea what kind of people we are going to be.

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In Memoriam: Aurelie Sheehan

* The following essay is reprinted from The Florida Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1997, in memory of its author, Aurelie Sheehan, who died earlier this year. The essay is followed by reminiscences from two of the magazine’s editors.

 

Aurelie Sheehan

The Orange-Fish Heart of the Avalanche

 

I had a date with loneliness. I’d honed loneliness in my New York studio apartment. I’d done it there in a kind of salty paroxysm of soup making and blue bathtub evenings and La Boheme and La Traviata listened to again and again until the tapes were worn thin and scratchy and my neighbors were considering aria-murder. I’d been lonely before—for instance, during the long shallow lake of my relationship with Sam. But in New York, after a splendid heartbreak, I felt alone with new ardor. I cut up carrots and peppers and onions, and I stirred a pot of black beans and dipped a spoon in and added salt and garlic and thyme. I filled the bath with water and bubble bath, and I lay in the scalding water with a screaming woman in the background. Die die die or I’m dying I’m dying I’m dying. I didn’t know Italian, but, sure, they were suffering. I thought about making love to a lion. I let my arms lift corpse-like to the water’s surface.

 

Besides sensuous disorders, I could buoy myself into the grace of selfhood with good conduct. Diligence in all things, in particular cleaning and eating and saving. The last time Our Friend had slept over, I hadn’t changed the pillowcase for a week—wafting maleness does something for the soul. But then I washed the sheets and just kicked into a really clean lifestyle. There’s a beauty that’s almost sexy about lining up the books on your bedstand so they all face the same direction, the small ones on top of the big ones, and so on. I ate cheaply: peanut butter and jelly or a plain bagel or a slice for lunch, penne with olive oil and broccoli for dinner. Self-inflicted virtue coursed through my veins. There’s an extravagance in spending twenty measly dollars on groceries for the week, and sending a check to your credit card company that hurts and hurts good, all through those long, pasta-eating weeks until the next little paycheck comes in to be spent instantly.

 

Was I having fun at the law firm where I worked as a secretary, or was I in misery? It was hard to tell—to wear pantyhose, as we know, is tight and encompassing, but was this containment coming to something? Day after day, week after week, counting numbers, budgeting, allocating. Knowing it’s wrong to think about having sex with your boss on his big desk when he is dictating. Knowing that. Knowing that the clauses pursuant to and heretofore can’t possibly mean anything prurient, can’t possibly be laden with ulterior meanings, posterior meanings. Knowing that the guy you’re having phone sex with is dumb, not your type when it really comes down to it, but it doesn’t really come down to it, not with him, anyway, only with your own hand in the privacy of your beautiful palace of East Village solitude, love nest for one.

 

I went to the opera a lot that winter—the unbudgeted item. I tiptoed up the red swirling staircase to the upper banks of the Metropolitan river of desire and consummation. I trailed my hand against the velvety red wall like a girl on her way to a baptism (a dunk in the waters of belonging) or a confession (a confession of love) or confirmation (confirmation of the passionate in a world of word-processing and subway tokens). I sat in my red seat and ate chocolate and watched and listened. The libretto was always satisfyingly melodramatic, and it seemed that often enough the women were dying of tuberculosis/a broken heart/insanity—and this seemed accurate to some great truth about the world. I always had the cheapest seats in the house, so I was basically in a tower, dizzy with vertigo, peering down at the action. There I was again—traipsing around in an evening gown. There was the scary witch mother in her black swirling cape, and there was the distant and square-shouldered father emperor. There was the prince I’d read about somewhere. There was the chance to prove, once and for all, your love, and there was the chance to make great sacrifices and, in the end, to be compensated, no, wait, to be murdered. Everything was over-the-top, but it made sense. The absurdity of the human condition—wasn’t that the point of the striped outfits and flailing and dwarves and backdrops? I put another square of chocolate on my tongue, and, at the end, I was wrung out and exhilarated.

 

Yes, solitude had its advantages. You could plunge headlong into tragedy. You could save money at Christmas. The set outcome of hard work, little sleep, and frugal budgeting could be the actual outcome of the week. I got up earlier and earlier, made happy by the work ethic of my novel, the stumble toward it, the dream of being a writer. Time became the thing I grabbed to my breast and clung to obsessively. After awhile, I had a boyfriend and he came over—but not until late, around ten, and he left at six in the morning, so basically we just had sleepovers, which was fine with me, since time was my real lover. I sat at my desk and wrote about France. Blanket over my knees, second cup of coffee brewing, sooty New York dawn brightening around me, it was as if I were in the other country.

 

There was a second novel idea lurking, and it had to do with snowy mountains and a lost woman. A Cold Place, I was going to call it, and maybe it was inevitable that I’d get what I wanted. I was offered a job that took me to the orange-fish heart of the avalanche mountain, and I took it.

 

The sky was blue and vast in Wyoming, and the birds sang in the trees but you couldn’t see them, and if you saw them, you had to wonder how long they were for the world because some people there shot them as pests—building nests and all that crap. In your driveway was a big snake. In your bed was a spider. It was all very intoxicating at first—time had spread out and become space too, so it was a double-lover thing, which was exciting, but also daunting. Who knew it would be too much, all this unallayed freedom and time to yourself? A sweet man with a sexy Led Zeppelin swing asked if he could live with you when you came back from your semester in France (a surprise invitation to a residency program), and you—in the kitchen of your trailer, pictures of your friends on the refrigerator, first time you’d ever taped up photographs, first time you’d needed that reminder—said to yourself two things at once: I “love” this man and he “loves” me—why not make it happen? Take a risk? Do something irresponsible for a change? And in a tinier voice: This time and space business is too big. Why not line up a bedmate for when I come back? Done.

 

France is always across the ocean, I wrote, on the Mediterranean. I was writing lovelorn letters to the Led Zeppelin character back home. I realized that I was never happy anywhere, and that was kind of amusing, or poetic anyway. Wasn’t it ironic that I was in France but what I longed for now—after a year of wishing I were in France—was to be back in LZ’s arms? In Cassis, I smiled heartily at the poste and patisserie as I made hash out of the simplest sentences, gesturing and jerry-building my thoughts to fit my vocabulary—then I retreated back to my apartment overlooking the sea. I wrote diligently, and in that was a kind of English-language call and response: someone—the semblance of someone—was listening. But, in general, I took loneliness to new heights altogether. This was a kind of suicidal loneliness—oh, no, not real suicide, just kidding, but a kind of Woolfian, blood in the ocean, razor in the bathtub, glass-of-wine alone-at-midnight-by-the-French-window thing. It was me and Remembrance of Things Past—solid companions for the blue nights. Topping things off atmospherically, I reread the first two books, adding a kind of timelessness to the timelessness of time.

 

I moved from place to place: by the window, at the desk, on the couch, on the bed—clearly my days had not just order, but activity. The loneliness, which had a keening, drowning lull, a call from Cerces, abated with the blast of sun against the sailboats in the bay, against my body, and the crisp enveloping waves of the sea, and the lemon tarts and olives and bread and coffee. But the nights. I borrowed a radio from an old, lonely man I’d met at the café, and my rooms rung with French pop, even that a relief from the extraordinary silence and the waves—beat, beat, beat—against my solitary vocabulary, my turned-in-on-itself language. Writing LZ had appeal, but it was also wretched, an intricate theater of the imagination, romantic but unreal. The here-and-now was trotting my body from station to station during the course of the everlasting days. And the here-and-now pastries, I can’t forget them, the lemon tarts by the lighthouse and the seagulls and the waves.

 

I returned to Wyoming and my new home with my new boyfriend who really I hardly knew at all. Risk? Did it matter? There I was, and because we actually had very little to say, I found myself spiraling back into the kind of aloneness I had known could happen in relationships, and which I didn’t want to happen again.

 

We went to the Busy Bee luncheonette for breakfast, just like I had when I first came to Wyoming and it had been fun then, local color. Now we were the local color, and Lonnie, queen of the flipped burger, didn’t take to my long-haired, earring-wearing, Doc Marten-shuffling boyfriend, and the greasy spoon experience lost its appeal. Our neighbor had a big garden, and she trapped cats and brought them to the pound if they so much as strolled by her pepper plants. The Chamber of Commerce had a coyote hunt with fox as tie-breakers and t-shirts for all the good folks who participated. I brooded and brooded, then wrote a letter to the editor—always a sure sign of feeling pathetic. At the copy shop, the Hallmark Catholic said, So, you’re a writer, half-handing me the copies she’d made of my poems about abortion, sex with women, etc.

 

Aloneness took on societal proportions that maybe kept me together with LZ that winter. I drove my blue 1977 Grand Safari station wagon eighteen miles to work, listened to the scratchy country music radio station, looked out at the ravishing snow hills and black cows in a line, at the blue sky that went on forever, waited for my favorite tree to appear on the horizon, and looked for deer and bald eagles and found them. And there, on the highway, the ranchers and I waved at each other—four fingers up from the steering wheel, no smile—and I felt like one of them, like I belonged.

 

Maybe it’s always true that you take your inner state and throw it at your surroundings. In any case, everywhere I looked, cows were being trooped off to the one-good-steel-rod-in-the-forehead house; raccoons and fox and deer and elk were being shot as vermin or predators or trophies or meals. Bumper stickers read Clinton Sucks and No Wolves and Wyoming Native and An Unborn Fetus Is God’s Child more than they read I Brake for Animals or I Brake for Hallucinations or Women Against Nuclear Power. In the 1994 state primary for U.S. Senator, the county reported 192 local Democratic votes and 2,128 Republican votes. Whenever LZ and I walked in the forest, we heard gunfire.

 

As per usual with displaced New Yorkers on the range, I wrote about my surroundings. I’d gone to Butte, Montana—city of desolation, a mining camp gone sour—and the destruction of the land was visceral there. The story that I’d begun in New York, as a kind of Audrey-Hepburn-meets-John-Wayne comedy of manners, intensified into a crystallization of all I’d found alienating about this new atmosphere. Then spring came. On my way to work, I saw black calves, stumbling in their first sleek morning, and lambs scattered like dropped sweaters on the newly green fields. It was warm enough to take to the skeet range. I couldn’t help thinking about the beginnings of things, the other side of the pact, and to forgive the land, the ranchers, and the whole nine yards of it for the death part of the equation. I broke up with my boyfriend, ready to take on Wyoming alone, now, after a stall of almost two years.

 

I moved to a geodesic dome house a mile from my office; it was on company land. I took an airplane ride because I was scared of small planes, and when we whirred and shook over my house, the scant shadow of our survival passed kite-like over an amazing amount of nothingness. My house and my neighbor’s house were the only buildings for miles, and the creek bed our lots clung to zigzagged like a fractured artery. It was appalling to see how little water was around—how little of anything. When I walked down the road, I only knew the nothingness I could see, not what was over the next hill. Nothing becomes something when you walk over it, when you see how long it takes to go from here to there, boot marks in the mud.

 

My new house was airy: high ceilings, corporate furniture, no boyfriend. I walked around like a guest. At first, happiness clung to me in a way that was almost indiscreet. I luxuriated in the space that had once seemed too much entirely. I spread my manuscript on the floor like a hopscotch game. I looked out the window at the flat-topped hill and the two horses in silhouette, at the deer like camouflaged puzzle-pieces on the tawny field, and the magpie in his tuxedo on the wire. No one else, but the sky could save me here.

 

That fall, I lit the woodstove and sat on the couch and wondered what it meant to have this moment alone, reading by firelight in a quiet house on a crisp night in November. What does experience mean if it is unshared; does it matter, does it exist at all? Aloneness resonated in the house in a way I’d never felt before. It was a little like death, but I tried not to think about it like that. I lay on the couch and looked out the picture window and listened to Lucia di Lammermoor. Clouds moved across the black sky, trailing toward, then over, then away from the half-moon. The universe was moving around me; I was in the arms of the night. There was no anxiety in the opera then, only the beauty of the voice.

 

While my boyfriend and I had kept a scoffer’s distance from the coyote/cowboy debate, the battle got closer. My neighbor shot cats, “but not ones with collars.” (Could anyone see Fluffy’s blue and white flea collar?) The man who owned my house and all the land around me shot birds by the dozens—he shot the red-winged blackbirds that graced barbed wire fences along the highway, he shot flickers that flew at you out of the grass and gave ventriloquist calls to keep you away from their young, he shot anything that hooted or squawked or tweeted at the wrong hour of the day, he shot birds because he could. He shot foxes and cats and skunks and prairie dogs, and once in a while, he went to exotic locations to shoot doves, pheasants, or whatever winged creature was indigenous by the hundreds. Once he shot his girlfriend’s cat off her porch—but that was a long time ago. His ethic regarding killing was clear—what do you expect from an oil baron? I sat in my house, his house, and wondered: But what am I doing here? Whose side am I on?

 

I tried a little killing. I stalked pheasants and shot one. I had antelope haunches in my freezer. I watched my cat bring in mice, chew their heads off, then go to town on the rest of them, leaving the livers and intestines in pungent piles. I changed a little: I was no longer against hunting wholesale. It seemed honest to kill what you ate instead of buying it wrapped in plastic at Safeway. If you hunted an animal, saw it alive, and killed it, you’d become aware of what it meant to be a carnivore. I realized that the allegiance some ranchers had to their animals wasn’t all about money—it was also an in-the-trenches experience with birth, illness, survival. Things weren’t black and white anymore. Even solitude, which I’d associated with soup and opera and frugality in New York, became less absolute. It wasn’t great; it wasn’t horrible. A fractured image came together, and I loosened my hold.

 

In a barn on the edge of the cattle field, across the way from a hill tipped with red rock, sat an old letterpress. On Sunday afternoons or in the whistling dark, I taught myself how to set type. There was nothing better than holding the metal frame in my hand and picking out an a or a t or an l from the drawer, then placing it next to the other letters in an upside-down row in my palm. When I finished a line, I started another, and when the lead pieces weighed heavy in my hand, I smoothed the stanza into a tray, wrapped it with string, and started the next one. I dotted the steel rollers of the press with rubber ink, and the black blotches stuck to the rollers and made a sucking sound when I rolled and rolled and rolled them around. The poem was in the tray, squeezed tight by wooden blocks and shims. Then the rollers swept over the poem. On a white page, the image of words. I touched the letters with my fingers; language merged with the physical world. Everything took hours, and I didn’t know I was alone.


Jocelyn Bartkevicius

Notes on first reading “The Orange-Fish Heart of the Avalanche” 

 

It was the slush pile days, over-the-transom days, mailbox filled with envelopes packed with manuscripts (some smelling distinctly of cigarettes across the miles), SASEs with exotic stamps, and hope. I was the nonfiction editor at The Florida Review, back before my stint as editor.

 

We read through the stacks in coffee shops, dim offices, hallways, airports, and bus stops.

I remember the fear that so much reading would dim my senses, like getting tagged with too many cologne samples at the department store. The first one is distinct. The second one a little less so. Then they all blur together.

 

That was the minor anxiety of reading those stacks of manuscripts. Maybe my judgment would cloud over. Maybe I’d overlook something good.

 

The first line of the essay was heart-stopping: “I had a date with loneliness.” Even though I didn’t recognize it as a line from a pop hit of the early 1960s. The repetition in the first paragraph engaging, the relentlessness of loneliness enacted.

 

Everything was too good to overlook. So my second anxiety kicked in. Could this beautiful and original voice be sustained?

 

Page after page, the answer was yes. Beauty from despair. Insight from loneliness. A soaring worldview from isolation. The surprising turns of phrases continuing to surprise me.

 

Hilarious images: Opera as “a screaming woman in the background.” Virtue that is “self-inflicted.” New York City’s Metropolitan Opera as “the Metropolitan river of desire and despair.”

 

Heart-breaking images: “Time was my real lover.” Loneliness with a “keening, drowning lull.” The possibility that “you take your inner state and throw it at your surroundings.”

 

Terrifying realizations delivered—somehow—with a kind of acrobatic self-deprecating humor: “This was a kind of suicidal loneliness—oh, no, not real suicide, just kidding, but a kind of Woolfian, blood in the ocean, razor in the bathtub, glass-of-wine-alone-at-midnight-by-the-French-window thing.”

 

There is also action. Trips and boyfriends and relocation. Jobs and life in rural Wyoming.

 

Then, after some months in the new place, there’s a turn. The self-proclaimed New Yorker shakes off some of the focus on her despair and her self-described “displaced New Yorker” approach to Wyoming, something shifts in this narrator. Something small at first, but deep and compelling.

 

Every word in this vivid essay dazzles. No amount of cologne sampling or reading could dull a single sentence.

 

It’s one of the most original and heartbreaking and joyous essays I’ve ever published. And that I’ve ever read. Congratulations to The Florida Review for making it available once again.


David James Poissant
Remembering Aurelie Sheehan 

I was a student at the University of Arizona in 2005 when Aurelie Sheehan entered my life. She was my first graduate workshop leader, and she remains one of the best writing teachers I’ve ever known.

 

A single observation of hers made me the writer I am today. I was trying, at age twenty-six, to be a dark, gritty Southern writer. I distrusted earnestness, and my greatest fear was the label sentimental. I wrote vicious characters, and Aurelie quickly called me out on this (privately, after class). “You’re not a vicious guy,” she said. “You don’t have to lean so hard on cruelty.” I was writing against my own grain, exploring characters I didn’t understand. I told her I was afraid of sounding sentimental. “Then don’t be sentimental,” she said. “Risk sentimentality.” Different writers will interpret that advice different ways, but my mantra, in writing and in life, became just that: Risk sentimentality. It’s the first lesson I now teach my graduate students, and it’s a lesson they tend to hold dear when they leave the classroom.

 

Aurelie visited my class once, via Skype. My students had read the story collection Jewelry Box, and it was the class favorite of the semester. She was as kind and patient and generous with my students as she’d been with me, all those years before.

 

Sometimes, when we talk about teachers of writing, we forget that they are writers too. Aurelie was a tremendous teacher and mentor, but she was also a world-class writer. I’ve read her four story collections, and one of her two novels. They are beautiful lampposts lighting my way whenever I need examples of elegant craft and a gorgeous prose style. Knowing there may be no more books is heartbreaking. Knowing there is another novel, plus a Ploughshares Solos novella, brings me peace. I have at least two good reads on deck for dark days. I imagine that reading them will feel like hearing from an old friend.

 

I loved Aurelie the teacher and Aurelie the writer, but I’ll miss Aurelie the friend most. She was maybe the wisest person I’ve ever met, and she could make me laugh like no one else. The last time we talked, she spoke of a novel she’d written, or was writing, one set on a cruise ship, which remains a book I’d love to read. Short of that, it’s my great joy to bring you this uncollected essay from the archives, one written by a young writer just coming into her powers. The ending destroys me, but I love the portrait Aurelie leaves us with. Here is a person comforted by words. Here is a study in not being lonely while being alone.

 

At the risk of sounding sentimental, I’ll end with this: Aurelie is gone far too soon. The world is a worse place without her in it, but the world is a better place because of her words. I miss her terribly.

 


Jocelyn Bartkevicius studied literary fiction and nonfiction writing at The University of Iowa, nonfiction writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and completed a doctoral dissertation on the essays of Virginia Woolf. Her stories and essays have appeared in anthologies and such journals as The Iowa ReviewThe Missouri ReviewThe Bellingham ReviewFourth GenreThe Hudson ReviewGulf Coast, and TriQuarterly Online. She has won several teaching awards, and her essays have been awarded prizes from several literary journals. She is the former editor of The Florida Review. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida.

 

David James Poissant is the author of the novel Lake Life, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and the story collection The Heaven of Animals, a winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, One Story, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and in anthologies including New Stories from the South, Best New American Voices, and Best American Experimental Writing. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida and serves as Editor of The Florida Review.

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From the Jeopardy! category SPOILER ALERTS

Julie Marie Wade

First, the light & how to describe it—part Manila envelope, part Ticonderoga pencil. Casserole golden at times, then orange as a giant brick of cheese, then brown as tater tots crammed into cargo pant pockets. Idaho may make you squint & squirm, crave some nachos, drink raw eggs from a glass. Yes, the chickens have large talons. It’s an underdog state fit for an underdog story. Note the tetherball sun & the boondoggle clouds. Note the iconic llama cameo. (There’s a small chance our cat is called Tina because of this film.) Second, the plot & how to recount it—Uncle Rico never did throw a football over them mountains, never did strike it rich selling knock-off Tupperware or breast-enhancing supplements. But Pedro shaved his head & became class president. Kip & LaFawnduh fell in love online, then boarded a Greyhound bus together. And our eponymous protagonist, unlikely hero of the Gemstone State, won a talent show dancing to Jamiroquai’s “Canned Heat.” Preston seems a sparse, dry place, far from the grid, nary the site of a tourist’s pilgrimage. Dust coats bicycle tires & Rollerblades, hovers above the highways like an unholy halo. It would be nice if you could pull me into town. Third, the supporting cast & how we remember them—Grandma breaks her coccyx on a dune buggy ride; Starla blushes at a Bust Must testimonial; Rex dubs himself sensei of his own dojo while clad in Hammer pants fashioned from an American flag. Critics called it a “quirky charmer,” a “one-hit wonder,” a “weird-ass fairy tale.” They’re not wrong. If you got it, odds are you drew some ligers in your notebooks, too, took some Glamour shots in your basement once upon a time. Now just imagine you’re weightless, in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by tiny seahorses. If you loved it, you’re probably more Deb than Summer Wheatley to this day. More enterprising than prize-winning perhaps, but with a certain staying power, the paradox of which is the way it helps you leave. (Even then, Deb was earning money for college with her home-woven handicrafts.) What amazes me is how we all know a Summer Wheatley, don’t we? Mine was Marissa Sheldon, was Kendra Kostrich, was Julie Winder—who still lives in my town & works at the bowling alley. The other two are unfindable on Facebook. They were cheerleaders way back when, with ESPRIT sweatshirts slipping off their slender shoulders & Keds tennis shoes forever bright-white as the day they bought them. They washed their hair with exotic products like Pantene & VO5 clarifying shampoo. Somehow they always chewed gum the teachers never confiscated, ate Funyuns & SweeTarts by the carton but never gained weight. These were the girls who had it easy or made it look easy—it’s hard to know which. They never seemed to sweat or stink or spill on their clothes, let alone bleed. Whatever they said became Gospel. Whatever they did set the newest trend. But they don’t make many movies about the goodfits, do they? Summer Wheatley isn’t a film in my Netflix queue. I wonder about her, though, like I wonder about Marissa & Kendra & Julie, who shared my name but not my story. Is Summer snickering at her boss from behind her Steno-thin cubicle walls, sending NSFW memes at work, cyberbullying on the Moms of Preston message board? Or maybe she’s flirting with customers at Big J’s Burgers, some of whom remember her when, one of whom offered to pay for Botox if she’d spend one night with him. “What do you think this is—Indecent Proposal?” But then she did it because Trisha, her still-BFF, said she should. Both of them are tired of the old joke: “Is it I-da-ho or you-da-ho?” Tired of guys who stop by for some curly fries & to reminisce about the Happy Hand Jobs Club. “I swear that’s what it was called,” Don smirks, like he’s been smirking all his life. Maybe Summer married him right after high school. Maybe they have a tribe of towheaded children by now. Or maybe they’re divorced but still fight daily over the phone. Can’t stop running into each other in their one exit ramp town. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that you can make a piñata of whomever you like. Better, perhaps—a piñata of whatever you want. Don’t ask the principal for permission. Just go outside, close your eyes & strike with all your might.

“What is Napoleon Dynamite?

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Interview with Mark Powell, Author of Hurricane Season

Hurricane Season is a noir thriller about fighting and addiction, prison and drugs; but more than that, it is a love story set in the carnage of an America wrecked by inequality.

 

Hurricane Season was published by Shotgun Honey Books in October 2023. To purchase Hurricane Season, and support Orlando local bookstore Zeppelin Books, click here.

 

Below is an interview with Mark Powell, author of Hurricane Season, and Blake Sanz, a fiction writer teaching in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.

 

 

 

 

SANZ: At the heart of this novel is Shy, a young Florida woman who emerges out of poverty and obscurity to become a UFC fighter, and who attains some fleeting level of greatness in mixed martial arts. This passage, early in the book, struck me:

 

Professional fighting is a world of misogyny and expensive t-shirts, of collapsed sinus cavities and unhappy boys. But it is also a world of the occasional genius, someone who seems to have sprung from the skin of a Grecian Urn, nervous system as hair-triggered as a peregrine. That was Shy.

 

What interested you about writing this world and such a fascinating character from within it? What was involved in becoming well-versed enough in that world to feel confident in depicting it as you do?

 

POWELL: Fighting is something that has fascinated me (and that I have dabbled in) all of my adult life. There are many activities (for lack of a better word) that are both brutal and beautiful, and thus representative of the complexity of being alive in this world. But I don’t know of any that make that paradox so starkly alive and immediate. I wanted to sit with that, particularly since–at least as I see it–the job of fiction isn’t to smooth over moral complexities but to dig into them. I also wanted to sit with the idea that there are far more brutal aspects of the world around us. Perhaps, though, they aren’t quite as visible. Which, I think, speaks to a willful blindness on our part.

 

SANZ: As a newcomer to Florida, I found myself taken by the deftness with which you depict so many areas of this state in so many detailed and interesting ways. From ramshackle houses on the Saint John’s River to the workout scene in Miami, from political fundraisers at wealthy politicians’ homes to the drug-addled regions of rural central Florida, and from rare books shops in Winter Park to small-town churches, the state itself works on your characters in profound ways. What do you see as the connection between the places these characters inhabit and the changes those characters undergo?

 

POWELL: I spent eight years in Florida, and I think there’s a way in which those of us not born there see and experience the state a bit more intensely than native Floridians. People sometimes talk about Florida as this strange otherworldly place–and I get that. But, in truth, Florida is simply an intensification of the greater United States. Different cultures, different geographies, ridiculous wealth abutting shameful poverty—it’s all on full display. My sense is that living in such a place has a similar effect on us humans. Florida may be the geographical equivalent of what the theologian Karl Rahner called “limit states”: moments, and places, as the case may be, where human behavior moves toward extremes. It’s also possible I’m imagining all of that and just spent my time there drunk on all that sunlight and chlorophyll.

 

SANZ: The narrator of Hurricane Season spends many pages invisible to us, focusing largely on giving us the story of other main players: Shy the fighter and Thomas Clayton the drug-addicted doctor, in particular. Eventually, though, the narrator tells us the story of how he came across these and other characters—through teaching writing in a prison—and also describes various versions of this story that he considered telling. How did you land on this writer character, Jess, as the point-of-view character, and what did you feel he afforded the narrative that other points of view might not have?

 

POWELL: I didn’t want to tell the story like this. It felt cleaner to simply tell it in alternating third person points of view, and I had plenty of readers who told me as much. But the more I’ve written, the more I’ve gotten interested not just in the stories we tell but why we tell the stories we tell. Why do some stories or moments or experiences linger in our minds while others don’t? The story the narrator tells shouldn’t hold such power over him, yet it does, and he needs to find out why. If, as Joan Didion wrote, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, it seems equally relevant to examine which stories we tell ourselves. That was my hope with the narrator.

 

SANZ: Various characters have moments of solitude and quiet that seem elevated, somehow important to them and to our sense of their otherwise chaotic lives. I’m thinking, for example, about Doc’s routines in prison, which include reading philosophy and contemplating Kafka’s mandates to quietness, and also about the narrator’s romanticizing of his time in Thomas Merton’s monastery in Kentucky. Could you describe the importance of making space for quiet moments in a novel filled with intense moments of big action and dire consequences?

 

POWELL: So much of the book is physical—fighting, training to fight, Doc’s addiction, Doc’s violence—I wanted some balance to such. I didn’t want the book to be a thriller or crime novel that was all gas from the first sentence; rather, I wanted something that balanced the idea of an inner and outer life. And, of course, something that considered the notion that our distinction between the two may be no more than a false cultural inheritance.

 

SANZ: The novel depicts various forms of drug addiction in a contemporary setting. What are the challenges of representing lives altered by drug use on the page, and to what extent were you aware of writing toward or away from preexisting notions a reader might have about the various cultures of drug use and distribution that the novel portrays?

 

POWELL: Any book about opioid abuse is in danger of great cliché. But so too is any love story. Or any prison story. Or any whatever else. I hope I’ve taken situations we generally encounter in the abstract—statistics about overdoses or incarceration or what have you—and made those particular. I didn’t want to write a book that put forth the notion that “this is what drug abuse looks like” so much as I wanted to say “this is what drug abuse looks like in this particular place, to this particular person, in this particular moment.” I hope that specificity, that granularity of detail, humanizes the characters since it’s harder to condemn people, harder to damn them when you know them.

 

SANZ: Hurricane Season feels literary and reads like a thriller. Did you consider the notion of genre as you wrote this book? Do you hope the book will be read as coming out of any particular literary tradition?

 

POWELL: I certainly wanted a noir feel, but, more than that, my hope was to write a book that moved quickly plot-wise without sacrificing too much character or intellectual depth. My models for this are the great short novels of Joan Didion. Didion is rightly lauded as a writer of nonfiction, but I’ve always felt she was grossly underestimated as a novelist. She wrote serious meditations on politics and power but somehow packaged them as political thrillers. The writers I find myself returning to do the same: Robert Stone and Denis Johnson. Dana Spiotta and Francisco Goldman. I once heard the great Bob Shacochis say he wrote thrillers for people “paying attention.” I aspire to the same.

 

SANZ: You invoke Don DeLillo with your epigraph: “If you think the name of the weapon is beautiful, are you implicated in the crime?” How is this book in conversation with that question?

 

POWELL: When you write about suffering, when you write about people who have been exploited by large structural systems as well as by each other, you like to think you are writing against such, that you are part of a sort of resistance standing for basic human dignity and against faceless, soulless, aggregated power. But I think one has to be mindful that in exposing suffering or exploitation that you aren’t also participating in it, that you aren’t wallowing or glorifying. This is another way in which fighting lays bare the truth of the world, the way it can be both beautiful and abhorrent at the same time. There are times I’ve watched fights and thought, as Joyce Carol Oates put it about the third Ali-Frazier fight, that I was watching the analogue to King Lear. There are other times I’ve watched fights and thought, as Shy thinks late in the book, I was watching two poor kids trying not to die. An honest book about fighting, an honest book about anything, I suppose, has to be willing to sit with the moral paradoxes that exist around and within us. Which means acknowledging that we are all deeply implicated in suffering.

 

SANZ: In how you pace action, you often toggle between scenic detail and a quickening of action via summary, all while keeping us bonded with the consciousness of the characters whose actions you describe. I’m thinking particularly of this paragraph:

 

Her mother died on the tenth of May and was buried two days later across town in the great retaining pond that was Memorial Gardens. Shy stayed alone in the house for several days but this was not a good thing. She let her phone die, got distracted and left the refrigerator door open, the lights on, and the food she never ate forgotten and dissolving on the shelves.

 

Here, we pass over a death and a funeral with style and grace, but we also get a scenic sense of Shy’s emotions in the week thereafter. This fluidity, this ability to dip in and out of days and into moments is a hallmark of how the book moves. Can you speak to your instincts for when to zoom in on action and when to zoom out, and how and when one versus the other (or both) seems like the right way to tell part of the story?

 

POWELL: I think a lot about how time compresses into realized precise moments and how it expands and slips by us, both in fiction and life. My usual sense is that if you want a reader to simply know something, you tell it as economically as possible. But if you want the reader to feel it, you have to slow time and show it in a scene. When to do which, though, is a tricky matter. No one is better at this than Alice Munro, and I’ve tried to read her in such a way that I absorb some of her technique. It hasn’t worked, by the way. But I do think that the more I’ve read her, the better intuitive sense I’ve developed of when to move quickly and when to linger.

 

SANZ: What did you think this book would be about when you started it, and how much did your idea of the book change over the time it took to complete? What core ideas carried through the drafts to the final version, and what new ideas emerged?

 

POWELL: Hurricane Season began as two distinct books. I had written a short story for Hunger Mountain about Shy, and I felt like there was more to say. At the same time, I was still haunted (I guess haunted is the word) by the years I’d spent teaching at Lawtey Correctional in North Florida. I thought maybe that was a different book. Then interesting parallels, interesting connections between the two stories, kept popping up (or maybe I kept imagining them). I was sensing some thread between the idea of addiction (and pain management) and fighting (actively seeking pain). Whether I was hoping or imagining these, I don’t know. But without fully realizing it, I began to merge the two stories. And the deeper I got, the more I felt like one complimented the other so that only together would each be fully realized. That was the idea at least. But as Denis Johnson put it, writing a novel is like trying to cross a large ocean in a small boat. Success is making it across, even if you don’t make landfall where you intended.

 


Mark Powell is the author of seven novels, including Lioness, Small Treasons–a SIBA Okra Pick, and a Southern Living Best Book of the Year–and Hurricane Season. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Breadloaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and twice from the Fulbright Foundation to Slovakia and Romania. In 2009, he received the Chaffin Award for contributions to Appalachian literature. He has written about Southern culture and music for the Oxford American, the war in Ukraine for The Daily Beast, and his dog for Garden & Gun. He holds degrees from the Citadel, the University of South Carolina, and Yale Divinity School, and directs the creative writing program at Appalachian State University.

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The Star Buyer

Will Musgrove

 

 

The cop told me it was a Hollywood myth that you only get one phone call after being arrested. He said I could call anyone I wanted, even a lawyer. But I only needed one call. I called my son and asked him to put my granddaughter on the line. He did, and I told her to go outside and look at the stars.

 

A few weeks ago, I bought a bunch of stars at fifty bucks a pop. After reading a few science articles on space travel and Dyson spheres, I calculated how many greats were needed until humanity left planet Earth behind. I’ll never be rich, not on a bus driver’s wage, but my great-great-great-great-grandchildren could be.

 

The stars showed up yesterday in the mail. Well, their locations showed up, written on filigreed certificates. You get to name the stars you buy, so I named them not after people I know, but after people I want to know, my future grandchildren. I read each name aloud and placed the certificates in a Folgers coffee can. With the can in one hand and a shovel in the other, I walked outside to bury the stars in my backyard as a sort of celestial inheritance.

 

My next-door neighbor, Frank, raised his head over our shared fence and asked if I was digging for treasure. I shook my head and told him I was burying it, told him about my not-so-quick get-rich scheme. In a few hundred years, what would be the difference?

 

“Oh, Bridget and I saw the same infomercial,” he said, pointing at the ground, a gesture I took as stay there.

 

Frank disappeared into his house, which looked exactly like mine, like everyone else’s on the block, and returned carrying a picture frame. He turned the frame, revealing a star named after his grandson, George.

 

“His birthday is coming up, and we wanted to get him something special,” Frank said.

 

His star’s location seemed familiar, so I opened the coffee can, and, sure enough, Frank’s star matched one of mine. Frank scratched his chin like, How do you have my grandson’s star?

 

I went in and dialed the infomercial number. A man answered, and I explained the situation.

 

“Stars are really big,” the man said. “Can’t you share?”

 

I imagined my future relatives traveling light years in stasis only to wake to a flashing sign reading: Welcome to George, the Brightest Star in the Universe. I said no, I couldn’t share. I said I wanted my money returned, and the man hung up. When I called back, no one answered.

 

Online, I looked up the address of the star-selling company and scribbled it on a Post-it note. I got in my car and drove. I wanted a refund, or else a different star. I imagined the man on the phone searching star maps for a replacement, imagined him describing the light each star gave off. I wanted to make it right. I wanted my future grandchildren to point at their stars and say, “Boy, my great-great-great-great-grandfather sure was a savvy guy to make such a smart investment.” I wanted them to look at their stars and think of me.

 

Driving down the highway, I considered light, how it takes millions of years for the light of a star to reach us, how, by the time it does, the star might not be alive, how the light might be nothing more than a memory. Red and blue stars pulsed behind me, and I thought about light, about going so fast I stretched for millions and millions of years.

 

I imagined my future relatives basking in my light, saying to one another, “Can’t you share? Can’t you share?” And me, by then no more than a bundle of particles and photons, replying, “No need. Don’t you see all this light? Look at all these stars I bought you, and for only fifty bucks a pop.”

 

“Pull over,” came the voice over a speaker.

 

In my rearview, I counted half a dozen cop cars. My speedometer read 110 miles an hour. Not quite the speed of light. A line of yellow barrels protected the median. Swerving, I bumped one, then grazed the side of a police car, and, boom, I went supernova, exploding into a burst of glittery stardust.

 

Guns drawn, the cops approached my car and ordered me out of my vehicle. I did as they said, and they cuffed me before bringing me here. Now, I sit beneath humming florescent bulbs, telling my granddaughter to look up, look up, to never stop looking, to remember that, one day, the light of those stars will light her children’s children’s children’s children’s way.

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At the Delachaise


Julia Johnson

You tell me your husband is really a leopard.
I tell you that you've had too much wine.
You insist that he has all of the qualities and attributes and characteristics
and the coloring of a leopard. And that he loves you for your beauty.
I ask why you didn't know this when you first met him
and you insist you did and I ask why you would marry a leopard.
You say that you knew no one would want to meet him but that you
had to marry him. I tell you I can't wait to meet him
and I promise I really do.
I really do want to meet him.
We share a tall cone of fries in white paper.
At the end of the night, we take off our masks and step onto the sidewalk,
and kiss each other in the air instead of touching.
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Review: All Bird: Brandi George’s The Nameless

Review of The Nameless, by Brandi George. 
Kernpunkt Press, August 2023, 199 pages, $18.00
Review by James Brock.

The late Dean Young famously instructs poets, “We are making birds not birdcages,” in The Art of Recklessness, expressing a gravity-defying Warner Brothers Cartoons ethos and New York School surrealism. Young committed to those ideas since his days as a graduate student (and one year as a nursing student) at Indiana University, some forty years ago. His ideas about recklessness broaden the scope of poetry, embracing creative processes that are truly disruptive, chaotic, comedic, and thrilling. (Anne Carson, Thylias Moss, and Denise Duhamel were busy with their own poetic larcenies those days as well.)

 

Meanwhile, there lived a punk-goth farm girl, haling from Ovid, Michigan, with living visitations from faery tale creatures and Old Testament demons; a Lady Gaga little monster who survived exorcisms and sexual abuse and suicide; a love-wrecked and love-worn lovechild of Walt Whitman and Thumbelina; and, eventually, a professor and Ashtanga practitioner. She would write unlikely long books of poetry, improbably to have them published. And that poet, Brandi George, has now gifted us with an incredibly demanding, rewarding, pleasurable, harrowing, and funny book of poetry, The Nameless. It is a monumental book that is all bird.

 

Part bildungsroman, part memoir, part enfevered vision, part nature study of fungi, and so, so much more, The Nameless is also the work of a serious, careful versifier, one whose mastery of iambic meter is as light and feathery as hydrae. It is also a book that runs some 200 pages, a visionary accomplishment published by Kernpunkt Press—a press that must be praised for its faith in the most unlikely.

 

Structurally, The Nameless operates ostensibly as a memoir, divided into two sections, and subdivided into short, individual chapters. And while one is to distrust the autobiographical in poetry as being merely factual, clearly the effort here by George is to construct a poetic record of her life. The speaker in her book is self-identified as “We”—and while that first appears to be a nod toward a gender-neutral self-naming, the “we” who speaks is a dissembling of voices, polyphonic, amorphous, and morphing. This expansive idea of self, certainly Whitman-like, finds its operative metaphor in the mushroom, in fungi. Yes, inside the pleats of the cap of a mushroom are ungendered spores, where 10,000 individuals can fit on a pinhead, and a single fungus constitutes the largest organism on earth, covering an expanse of over four square miles.

 

George’s “We” constitutes a self that is wracked with auditory and visual hallucinations, an identity we might consider as post-structurally fractured or profoundly schizophrenic, but one that becomes a representation of the poet, a being who is something of a receiver, without the usual filters, who hears the language of air and death in everything and who must then sing.

 

The book begins with death, where We, as a child, is the victim of sexual molestation—her parents instruct her to forget it—and, from that moment, death’s spores enter We’s body:

 

                          so now when we
completely forget      it Happened

the Thing forms      a fairy ring
inside our body     Now Death

lives inside us

Invariably, then, Death attends, embodies, and accompanies We through the book—a fact of her life that she has long been taught to ignore and deny. And, of course, in Ovid, death is everywhere, within and without, but with the promise of change and metamorphosis. For We, this means enduring an exorcism at her parents’ behest, the parents convinced their adolescent daughter is possessed by demons. They burn her poems. The irony, it seems, is that We is indeed possessed, but by Death in all its recombinant manifestations.

 

The book chapters are often prefaced by George’s brilliantly fractured tales of Thumbelina dying a new death with each iteration. We clearly identifies with Thumbelina—the strangest of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales—whose queer desires and chaotic imaginings are continually corrected by her elders. George’s Thumbelina is “genderless, many-faced, guiltless, green, and as mysterious as twilight,” a runaway spirit who meets death recklessly, fully, casually, and intentionally.

 

And in this large book, there are abundant touchstones for We beyond Thumbelina: Kurt Cobain, tarot cards, success and the po-biz, and even animal husbandry. This is a poet’s memoir, after all, a testimony of the empathetic spirit, and here, with death living inside her, We’s empathy is almost debilitating. She feels too much (and this seems to be her chief sin, at least by her family’s reckoning). For instance, We recounts her work at a dairy farm, where her job is to separate the male calves from the female calves, after which the baby bulls will be sold for veal:

 

back in the barn we try to console the new calf
name him     Bocephus    after Hank    but without his mother

                                            he’s petrified
trembling    we hold him to our chest like a child

           his grief is so deep we can feel it    glacial    nothing will ever
absolve us of this

 

As much as We disassociates herself from her family, from middle-America banality, and from the grind of capitalism, she is inescapably complicit. Where others in her family and community routinely deny responsibility, she feels it keenly—it is the death in her. The poet’s task, it seems, is to receive everything, to name it, to own it.

 

Even so, much of the book is doomful, doleful love poetry, a tribute to We’s beloved Annette, an equally wild spirit (and later to We’s husband Michael, who co-authors several poems in the book). Here, the poetry is tender:

 

In the backyard we practice
flipping our hair
She-Ra mermaid rock star
it’s our thing hair      then eyes then

will we ever be beautiful?

          our longing for beauty is
crush of petals down our shirt
     leaves under our feet
dandelion heads on the sidewalk
                       sunburn like a hand

 

So, amid all the chaos, the disorientation of hallucinations, and the broken wheel that is the self, George’s reckless poetry continually finds its purchase in these fleeting moments. This unguarded work seems the very product of Muriel Rukeyser’s question: “What would happen if one woman told the truth of her life?” The world that Brandi George has split open contains all the invisible names of death, all the fecund beauty we long for, and a billion seeds that will germinate from the dead.

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Announcing Our 2023 Nominations for the Best of the Net Anthology

Aquifer: The Florida Review Online is thrilled to announce the nominations for the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology! The Best of the Net is an anthology created by Sundress Publications that accepts pieces first published online in the categories of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art. To read more about the Best of the Net anthology, check out their webpage.

Aquifer receives many wonderful pieces each year, and we are so excited to showcase our 2023 nominations. Best of luck to the nominees! 

Poetry Nominations:
“Nurture” by Jacques J. Rancourt
“Cool Side of the Pillow” by Cynthia Atkins
“Blues for King Kong” by Sihle Ntuli
“Content” by Allan Peterson
“Christmas Eve“ by Chelsea Dingman
“Witness Statement” by Kyle McCord
Fiction Nominations:
“Junior Steaks” by Anney Bolgiano
“75 Simple Steps to Positive, Growing Change” by Andreas Trolf
Nonfiction Nominations:
“Mythogenesis” by Suzanne Manizza Rosak
“What Comes in the Night” by Ariél Martinez
Visual Art Nominations:
“Heirloom” by Catherine-Esther Cowie
“The Queen of All the Dirt” by Catherine Esther-Cowie


 
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“Modern Ancestors” by Anne McGrath

Anne McGrath’s “Modern Ancestors,” is a series of pieces constructed from mixed materials. See more of Anne’s work on Instagram @TheAnneMcGrath.

 

 

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The Chili Cook-Off

In the ninth grade my face got all trucked up in a car accident. The next year my high school let me be a judge at their annual chili cook-off. Ever since, on the eve of the season’s first freeze, I make a big pot, the beginning of two months of competition. I find the process soothing. My recipe changes from year to year. I’ve never written it down and being prone to heavy drink, I invariably forget something. My maxim is to keep it simple. This is Omaha. Don’t need to be showing up at the American Legion Hall with braised short-rib chili.

            The onset of winter around here is a curious thing. There’s excitement in the air despite everyone knowing that in a month we’ll all be begging for spring. My chili season routine goes as such: on Wednesday I hit the grocery store. Thursday, I dice everything up: onions, peppers, garlic, and tomatoes. Fix a drink. Brown the meat. Refill my drink. Add everything to the stock pot, stir it real good, and let it rest in the fridge overnight. All day Friday I cook it down, adding beer/coffee/broth as needed. On Saturday I bring it to whatever cook-off is happening. Sundays I’m hungover. Monday and Tuesday are pretty inconsequential.

            I’ll be up front about it, one of the buddies I was in the car wreck with didn’t make it out. He was sixteen, two years older than me, and he was driving. The other buddy, Tim Slobowski, was my age. We were on a rural stretch of road, what we called out north. Slobowski was ejected from the car. His brain went without oxygen for forty-five minutes, and he spent the next six weeks in a coma. After that they moved him to the Madonna House Rehab Hospital, where he doesn’t know who he is or where he’s at. I used to visit, but it’s been a while.

            People at the Hy-Vee see what’s in my cart and give me looks of approval, the man making midweek chili. Such jaunt in my step. My go-to protein is a mixture of Italian sausage and ground beef (1:3). In the past I’ve done some wild experimentation, depending on how frisky I’m feeling. Have used everything from elk to pulled pork to brisket. Where I draw the line is chicken, white chili, which I won’t do. In a few weeks my hunting buddies will start getting last year’s venison out of their deep freezes and I’ll make a few batches with that, but until then, I’ll keep it simple. Italian sausage and ground beef.

            As I exit the store, the Salvation Army bell ringer is going at it like he’s John Bonham. I wasn’t planning on donating (no idea where the money goes), but I admire his tenacity. I stop the cart and fish around in my pocket. The drummer does a triplet. He’s wearing fingerless leather gloves. The bell is vise-gripped to a hi-hat stand. He goes at it like a trap set. I bend down with my dollar. He looks at me. We recognize each other. He grins in a way that says he knows it’s me, and yeah dude, it’s him: my old friend, Doogie. He stops mid-song, looks in my cart. “Whoa motherfucker,” he says. “You making chili?”

            Aside from family, I’ve known Doogie longer than anyone else. His stepdad coached our little-league team, this mustached dude who’d pitched collegiately and was obsessed with bunting. Later, Doogie and I did drugs and played in punk bands together, which is when he dropped the name William and took on Doogie.

            “Doogie,” I say. “What the fuck man, I thought you were in Denver.”

            “Made it nine months out there, but I’m back. Been so for a few weeks.”

            I nod at the tithing bell. “The hell is this?”

            “The fuck’s it look like? Denver’s not cheap.” He lowers his voice. “You still…”

            “Gave it up,” I say. “Coming on two years.”

            “Congrats. That’s why I moved. Worked for a while too, but you know that junk is everywhere.” He puts a hand on the case of beer in my cart. “Haven’t kicked this, I see.”

            “Technically that’s for the chili.”

            “Fuckin A.”

            “Hey man,” I say. “Is this what it looks like?”

            “Not really.” He looks around. “Actually, maybe.”

            Ninety percent of my friends from his days are gone. Some left to reinvent themselves and some passed away and some got married, had kids. I spent a decade moving around. Whenever things came close to falling in place, something came up. Emergency dental surgery or a bad breakup or x, y, and z. I pull a twenty from my billfold. Doogie pockets it on the sly and gives the bell a thwack, thanks me for being a good friend.

            In the three years I’ve been back in Omaha, I’ve entered forty chili cook-offs. Placed in the top three at thirty of them, fifteen of which I won. I know it’s a weird hobby, but if my biggest proclivity is an obsession with making chili, I consider myself healthy. It’s Thursday morning and my stomach is weightless in anticipation. Been since March that I last made a batch. I hone the chef’s knife, ready the cutting board. The tips of my fingers get prickly. I start my audiobook: Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s been my soundtrack for the last two chili-cooking seasons. Over the next couple months I’ll take it to the house three, maybe four times. Put it away for the year, recharged.

            I am in control of what defines me. Covey hammers that. Don’t have to be defined by my past. Humans have the power to choose. That’s why I moved away. Fuckers all saw me as the dude that had been in the car accident. For many years I was erratic. Covey helped me regain control. It’s like he says, so much about who we are is determined in the split seconds between stimulus and response. And never forget that you have the power to choose.

            The baseball team that Doogie and I played for—the Omaha Tornadoes—the summer after sixth grade we made a run at the Little League World Series, the event that’s televised on ESPN. All season we used the thought of ourselves on TV as motivation. A communal fantasy that grew out of control. We made it to the final round of regionals in Wichita, KS. One more and we were in. We could practically see ourselves in the nation’s living rooms, dominating with small ball. The hope for a better tomorrow. We ended up losing in the last inning of the championship game and shortly thereafter found out that we hadn’t even been competing in the tournament that climaxes on ESPN. We’d been in some rinky-dink knockoff version, lied to by our parents and Doogie’s stepdad, who knew we’d be motivated by TV. The whole experience ruined baseball for me.

            I love waking up on chili cook-down Friday. Last night it was hard to fall asleep, similar to the last day of school as a kid, a memory I barely remember, but it was embryonic, the windows open to perfect weather. I put the pot on the range and slowly bring it to a boil, stirring in cumin, cayenne, and paprika. Half a Hershey bar. A quarter cup of cold brew. Couple tablespoons of Mexican coke. Last year I fucked around with soda syrup as the sweetener. It was close to what I wanted, but the line to toe was thin and it made me feel like I was trying to be something I’m not, unbearably pretentious.

            All told I spent a decade away from Omaha. Went from Tampa to Lake Charles, Asheville and Pensacola—once for love, once for a bar, and the others for no real reason, reinventing who I was every few years. One of the things I consistently missed were the chili cook-offs, nothing like they are in the heartland. To the credit of Lake Charles, they had a bunch of well-attended gumbo cook-offs around Mardi Gras, but I only like that stuff in extreme moderation. At the last one I attended I was eating a bowl in front of the guy that made it—duck and andouille—and on my second spoonful I bit square into a piece of buckshot. I pulled the BB from my mouth and the guy started laughing like a goddamn maniac. I didn’t think it was funny, though. That incisor is still chipped.

            I bring the chili to a hard boil and kill the heat. Add in some bone broth and work it to a simmer. I can’t stress enough the importance of a quality stock pot. I’ve got a top-end chef’s knife as well, German forged steel. Those Japanese brands look sweet, but I’ve heard they require a ton of maintenance. Even though it’s been years since my last relationship fell apart, I still fantasize about the gift registry she and I put together, sorry we didn’t stay together long enough to see it through. The kitchen we would’ve had.

            The cook-off they let me judge after my accident was our high-school’s big annual fundraiser, climax of the blue-and-white weekend. The three judges are usually big-time alumni. It’s considered an honor. That’s what my mom kept harping on after I was invited. I was hesitant, but she insisted. And she was right. Whole crowd gave me a standing-o when I took my place. I was seated next to a famous movie director, class of ‘79. He’d just finished filming something with Matt Damon. It’d been the talk of our high school. The emcee put two flights of chili in front of me. The director noticed my shaking hands, leaned in and said that Matt Damon had found my story very compelling. By the time I reached the next taster, I’d settled down. I took a bite and pretended to gag, real cartoon-like. At that moment everyone in the audience knew I’d be fine. They beamed up at me, proud of the way they’d rallied around the poor kid. Helped him overcome adversity. Many years later I drunkenly tried getting in touch with the director to see if he could help me out. His people said he was on location in Hawaii, and that if he didn’t get back to me in a few months, to follow up. But he didn’t and neither did I. The whole thing was stupid. What was I expecting, him to cast me in some fucking Jason Bourne movie?

            After three hours of simmering, I give the chili my inaugural taste. Swish it around like a wine snob. As anticipated, there’s something missing. Always happens with the season’s first batch. Last weekend I emptied my pantry, which I do at the beginning of every October, keep the spices and toss the rest—hard to innovate while constipated with yesterday’s shortcomings. The pitfall is that this chili needs something I don’t have. It’s no problem, though. Hy-Vee is close and maybe I’ll get to see Doogie again. Been thinking a lot about how I got off the path we were on and he didn’t. The emptiness he must be feeling. I’ve been there.

            After the dust from the car wreck settled my parents hired an attorney. The hairpin turn we wrecked at wasn’t labeled. No guard rail either. Everyone’s assumption was that we’d been drinking, but we hadn’t been. My buddies and I were just out for a joy ride, Nebraska in early April, looking for sandhill cranes. When we launched off the road my stomach shot through my throat. Time elongated into milliseconds I could see and touch. There wasn’t any calm or clarity, or whatever people tell you they feel in the moments before death. It’s all a lie. I only felt terror and all I wanted was to be alive. Then we crashed in a soy field and started rolling. My attorney was a real bulldog. The county was on the hook. My folks put my settlement money into a trust. Every month until I turn forty I get two grand. It’s been a blessing and a curse.

            This time when I approach the entrance to the grocery store there’s no Salvation Army bell ringer. Honestly, I’m disappointed. The vision of Doogie’s face has been in the back of my mind. How worn down it looked, like an old catcher’s mitt. I shouldn’t have left him in the lurch all those years ago when I up and moved away, cutting ties with who I was. From eighteen to twenty-five, he and I travelled the country pursuing punk-rock fantasies. Taught a bunch of shit-hole bars a thing or two about having a good time. Made caricatures of ourselves and called it profound. Swore we were pursuing the life we wanted, fast and hard. Paycheck to paycheck. Then the pixie dust wore off and I moved away without saying much. Just needed a change.

            I meander through the grocery store. Grab some high-end bone broth, a couple ghost peppers, another can of tomato paste. An orange (for the zest). When I’m leaving the store I hear someone wailing on the bell. I’m thrilled. Can barely contain myself as I turn toward him. He’s wearing a necktie as a headband, Judas Priest long sleeve under the Salvation Army vest. Drums a line of blast beats.

            “Doogie!”

            “My dude. Back again.”

            “Needed a few things for my chili,” I say. “How’s it going, man?”

            “Nice as shit out today. I’ve been trying to figure out if there’s any correlation between weather and generosity. Far as I can tell, it’s random.” He swings the donation kettle back and forth. “Bunch of fucking cheapskates.”

            “Dude, you know what I was thinking about after I saw you the other day? Remember that year we almost went to the Little League World Series?”

            “Twenty-three years ago,” he says. “It’s like they say, time flies when you’re having fun.”

            “You want to ditch this and come over for some chili?”

            He fidgets around. “Got any of that beer left?”

            “Eighteen at least.”

            He removes his vest and says, “I’ll hop in with you.”

            The neighborhoods we used to live in are nice now, full of street tacos and cocktail bars. Our drug house was gutted and turned into a vinyl-listening library, $79 a month, one of the best record collections in the Midwest. When we lived there, we were constantly having to scrape together extra money to get the utilities turned back on. Place had revolving doors. My room was on the top floor. Doogie’s drum set was in the basement. Despite sound proofing it with egg cartons and junked mattresses, I heard every beat of his practices, and he was always at it. Ever since I’ve needed a box fan to sleep, that dump was so loud all the time. Makes me glad it’s something pretentious now.

            Immediately upon entering my house, Doogie says, “Good fuck. It smells fantastic.” He checks out my trinkets. I’m a collector of several things. Bobbleheads and postcards and koozies, most extensively. When I started accumulating them, I stopped getting tattoos. Win-win. I’ve got koozies from all over the country. Some from places Doogie and I went together, like the bar in the lobby of the heart-shaped hot-tub motel in Jackson, MS. First time we tried meth.

            “You really hate having a warm beer and a cold hand,” he says, looking at all of them. “I’ll give you that much.”

            “See the one from Slims in Raleigh?” I say. “That place was insane.”

            “Oh man, I still feel bad for that guy. Dude who put us up. He didn’t deserve that from us.”

            “Yeah,” I say. “I forgot about that. Certainly not my proudest moment, but he had money and was an asshole to begin with.”

            I get us a couple cans of beer. The chili is simmering on the range. I prepare the fixins: a bowl of Fritos, Crystal and Tabasco hot sauce, fine-shredded cheddar. In Nebraska it’s customary to serve cinnamon rolls with chili—they get us started on it in elementary school—but I don’t play by those rules. Fuck that. I put the chili in front of us, normal fixins. Before taking his first bite, Doogie wafts it under his nose. “What’s that I detect,” he says, “nutmeg?”

            “Maybe.”

            He wolfs the bowl down without another word. I’d go so far as to say I knocked it out of the park. Again.

            “Well,” he says. “Pretty decent.”

            “Pretty decent? Variations of this recipe are going to win a ton of cook-offs.”

            “I’m no chef de cuisine, but it seems like you over handled it a bit. Folks want a robust, simple chili. This tastes like it doesn’t know what it wants to be. You know what I mean? It lacks an identity.”

            “Yeah?”

            “The fuck do I know, though, I’m a Hormel man.”

            “Get out of here with that. Seriously?”

            “You like what you like.”

            The guy’s got dirt under his fingernails, sniffles a lot. Almost forty-years old and still rocking a Judas Priest shirt. He’s as lost as I once was, an addict. I shouldn’t fault him for the Hormel comment. He doesn’t know any better. I grab us another couple beers. “Listen,” I tell him. “I think I’ve got something that could help you out.”

            “Less cumin in the chili?”

            “Funny,” I say. “I’m trying to be serious for a second.”

            I keep several copies of Seven Habits around the house for this very occasion, a friend in need. I hand him the multi-disc audio edition. He holds it like a problem child with the body of Christ. “You might think it’s bullshit,” I say. “But it worked for me.”

            “Worked like how?”

            “Helped me get in control of everything. I had a victim’s mentality for pretty much my whole life. Bad things kept happening to me because bad things always happen to me. You know what I mean? That type of philosophical outlook.”

            “Fuckin A,” he says.

            “Friend to friend, I’ve been where you’re at.”

            “Look, man,” he says. “I thought we were here to eat chili. If I wanted to be proselytized, there’s any number of people more qualified than you that I could’ve gone to. No offense.”

            “Trust me, I was the same way. This shit, it can take a load off.”

            “That’s not the point.”

            “What is the point?”

            “I don’t want unsolicited life advice. Especially from someone like you.”

            He’s the same way I was, hardheaded. Covey helped me realize that.

            “Just take it,” I say. “Do whatever you want with it. Doesn’t matter to me. But take it, just in case.”

I won the first two cook-offs of the season. Spent three weeks honing my recipe and then boom, I took O’Leavers on the first Saturday in November—$100 bar tab—and The Winchester the following weekend, where this biker in his seventies finished second. By the time they announced the results the biker was damn near incoherent, prison-sleeved and in the throes of what appeared to be a psychedelic trip. For winning that one I got a toilet trophy and fifty bucks. The biker got a bottle of blackberry brandy. He had a tough time figuring out what it was.

            I am a well-oiled machine. My house smells delicious all the time. If they made a chili-scented candle, I’d be the target demographic.

            I kicked the shit out of The Sydney’s cook-off. They never stood a chance. Two different yahoos had chickpeas in their chili. To them I said, “Why does the sexual deviant like your chili so much?”

            Huh?

            “Because the chickpeas.”

            And I rode off into the sunset, gift card in my pocket.

            Bribery and ass kissing are rampant in the competitive chili scene. It’s always better to have a panel of judges than audience voting. No telling whose team folks are on. Another pro tip: invest in a decent crockpot. Nothing too expensive, but nothing too shitty. People judge at either end. What can I say, they eat with their eyes. And if the cook-off benefits charity, do a little research first. Or just avoid them altogether. They bring out some serious amateurs. The ones at old-school bars are where it’s at.

            Oh, and don’t show up with bean-less chili. Whenever someone does, we talk shit behind their backs.

            I open the year six for eight. Lost two to charity, but what the hell, they were for good causes. Not like it’s my fault that the parents of the Kingswood Athletic Association have unsophisticated palettes. Keep your crown, you well-done assholes. And never again lie about how the baseball season could end. None of those cook-offs matter anyways. My green jacket, the creme de la creme, is this weekend at the Homy Inn. Culmination of the season. The place is an institution, beloved by the types of lawyers/doctors/rich folk who give big at my high school’s annual fundraiser. While most cook-offs get between ten and twenty entrants, the Homy will have upwards of fifty, judged in stages. $500 on the line. I’ve never won. Last year I took third. For it I’m breaking out the big guns. I started my prep work a week ago. Went and bought a pork butt that I cut into inch-thick strips. They’ve been curing in crab boil and canning salt in the fridge, a cup of sugar. I’ll smoke the slabs into tasso a few weeks from now. What I’m after in the meantime are the shoulder blades. Left a good amount of meat on them. They’ve been in the curing solution. I’ll add them to the chili at the very beginning, let them season everything. All told it’s a two-week process.

            They ought to crown me champion now, Friday afternoon. This batch is incredible. The pork bones worked wonders. After a few hours of simmering, I was able to shred the meat right off. It’s got a feathery texture, packed with flavor. Perfect complement to the Italian sausage and ground sirloin. I should’ve been writing down my recipes all along. For posterity. Maybe open up a chili parlor someday. Write a cookbook and have Matt Damon blurb it. At the very least, I’d be able to see what the changes say about who I became, no longer the brooding dude on the verge of an episode. I am the chili master now.

            On Homy Inn Saturday I wake up at the crack of the sparrow. Begin the day with thirty minutes of yoga on YouTube. Follow that up with fifteen minutes of mindfulness, guided by YouTube. Then I take a hot shower. After the shower I pull the chili from the fridge and put it on the range, slowly bring it to temperature. I eat a bowl straight up, no garnishes. Phenomenal stuff.

            The cook-off starts at two. I show up at one, bring it in the front door. The bartender takes it to the back, where they’ll transfer it to a quarter tray, to be labeled and served from steam tables. The right way to do things. Total anonymity. I settle into the bar, have a beer and a shot. My chili might be superfluous, but when it comes to drinking, I’m a meat and potatoes guy. More and more people arrive with chili. Some look like straight-up yokels. I rule them out. The rough looking ones are the ones I’m worried about. That old-timer with the neck tattoo, for example, he ought to get a first-round bye. Respect for the lifers. The bar’s capacity is a tight 175. Today they’ll reach that. The bartender brings me another beer and addresses me by name, asks how my chili turned out.

            “Pretty good,” I say.

            I’m tempted to tell him how awesome it is, but I’ve overheard a bunch of contestants running their mouths and in this arena I want to be the strong and silent type. As Covey would say, the choice is mine.

            Forty chilis have been entered. The bar is wall-to-wall. A couple sore-thumb tourists pump money into the claw machine, nothing in it but a big pink dildo. What a dive, they laugh. Folks always act surprised when they realize said dildo is greased, which should probably be a given. The Homy has been putting this on for over twenty years. They’ve got it down pat. Chilis have been separated into groups of ten. The first round will be judged by the audience. Every attendee has been assigned a flight and given a scorecard. Top three from each will advance.

            Minutes before it’s about to start, the front door swings open. Standing in the gust of frigid air is my old friend Doogie. He’s carrying a greasy crockpot, balances it against his stomach with one hand. Fist bumps the door guy with the other, who then hustles it to the back. Doogie catches sight of me. I raise my glass. He gives me a stern-faced thumbs up, goes and registers with the event coordinator—the octogenarian proprietress who takes absolutely no shit from anyone. For the past fifteen years she’s made a pot of chili for people to eat during Monday Night Football and for my two cents, it’s pretty good. I expect her to give Doogie a hard time, but she doesn’t. In fact, they seem to have a rapport. He comes to my side and orders a drink and I say to him, “Didn’t know you were into making chili. Which number is yours?”

            “You know it’s against the rules for me to divulge that information prior to the completion of first-round voting. I may be a fuck up, but I’m no cheater.”

            “What do you say we get a little side bet going?”

            “I don’t approach making chili with a results-based mindset. I trust what I cooked. For me, the joy is in the process.”

            “You listened to the book,” I say. “Awesome, man.”

            It’s vintage Covey. Always act with the end in mind.

            “The hell I did,” he says. “What’s the bet? I’ll take your action all day.”

            “Forget about it. You’re right about being process based. It’s all in good fun. I’m glad to see you’re doing well.”

            “Five-hundred,” he says.

            “You’re good for that?”

            “Here he goes again, Mr. Shit-Together.”

            He does look healthier. Not as strung out.

            “Fine,” I say. “Five-hundred it is.”

            I’ll take this dickhead’s money. Kickstart him into helping himself.

            “I don’t even care for chili,” he says, “but having tasted yours, I know I can beat it. Someone has to put you in your place.”

            “Yeah?”

            “See you at the finish line, asshole.”

            I’m starting to remember why we had a falling out. Dude’s kind of a prick. Only reason he started at second on our little-league team was because his stepdad was the coach, the mustached man who orchestrated the whole ESPN lie. I’m sorry to say it, but his stepson is about to lose five-hundred bucks.

            Will I make him pay?

            Goddamn right.

            The emcee starts the event. First round will take an hour. It’s warm in the bar, spirited. These things aren’t really about winning. They’re about Midwestern camaraderie. The shared misery of another winter, born to die in Nebraska. This bar regular I’m friendly with, Rat-faced Johnny, plays Motörhead from the jukebox. He knows I’m a fan. “Here’s to pissing in the wind and shitting where you eat,” he says. Motörhead ends and Iron Maiden comes on. Rat-faced Johnny does it again.

            I sample all ten chilis I’ve been assigned. Have a sip of Aperol spritz between each. Don’t care if the drink looks ostentatious, it’s a great way to cleanse the palette. Three of the chilis are decent. Four are palatable. And three are downright lousy. If they’re any indication as to how these people eat at home, I feel sorry for them. No doubt I’ll advance to the next round.

            Doogie shuffles to my side and says, “I know which one is yours. Heavy on the cumin again.”

            Before I can retort, the bartender cuts the jukebox—Rat-faced Johnny is not amused, middle of his favorite Black Sabbath song—but they’re ready to announce the first-round results.

            “You think you made it through?” I ask Doogie.

            “At this point,” he says, “it’s outside my control and therefore, I am unconcerned.”

            Another of Covey’s tenets. Even if he’s mocking it, at least he listened.

            “By the way,” I say. “That was a bullshit move your stepdad pulled. Convincing us we were going to the Little League World Series.”

            “You’re telling me,” he says. “I had to live with the fucker.”

            The emcee fumbles around with the PA system. People are mirthful. Days are getting longer. We’re past the peak of winter. In no particular order, the emcee calls the numbers of those that have advanced into the finals. Of course I am among them. Doogie stays calm throughout. “You make it through?” I ask.

            “Man,” he says. “Why’d you have to bring up my stepdad? I’m not trying to think about that guy right now. Fucking ruined my day. That’s a bullshit move.”

            The last thing I expected was tenderness. “You’ve been a prick all afternoon,” I say. “I was just giving it back.”

            “I know why you’re obsessed with this chili cook-off bullshit. It’s because they let you judge that one in high school after the accident went down. Got me thinking, man, when’s the last time you’ve been out to see Slobowski?”

            He knows not to go there. I shake my head.

            “Just a question,” he says. “I’m genuinely curious.”

            “You know the answer.”

            It’s not a conversation I care to have with anyone, let alone an old junky buddy.

            “Anyways,” he says, eagle eyeing the barroom. “I’ve got to go catch up with some folks. Good luck with the next round.”

            The bartender kicks the jukebox back on. Rat-faced Johnny raises hell, says it skipped his songs and ate the remaining credits. Now it’s playing some bullshit Aerosmith song and everybody in the state of Nebraska knows he hates them. Johnny’s nickname isn’t flattering, but it sure does fit. The bartender tells him to settle down. Not like the jukebox is going anywhere.

            The judges take their places at the head table. Two of them I recognize, the chef from the Boiler Room and this stout guy named Dario, owner of Dario’s. Best steak frites in town. The third judge I’ve never seen before, some lady who teaches culinary arts at the community college. Over the years I’ve learned not to overthink what the judges might be thinking. There’s nothing their reactions can tell me about chili that I don’t already know. I lean back and enjoy my spritz. Peace be the journey. I order a refill on Doogie’s tab.

            The judges head to the backroom to deliberate. I sample all ten of the finalists. Seven are solid. Sometimes I get too cocky and underestimate my competition. Wouldn’t be the first time hubris has fucked me. Three of them even, I wouldn’t be ashamed to lose to. One seems to have hit exactly what it’s going for. Perfect combination of heat and flavor. This brilliant texture to it. Oh wait, it’s mine.

            Nice.

            The judges emerge with their results. The emcee has an envelope in hand. He delivers a little hoopla. Thanks us for being here. Says they couldn’t have asked for a more qualified panel of judges. And what a way to kick off the homestretch to Spring. My nerves ratchet up, suspended in the in-between while this guy finishes his spiel.

            No matter the outcome, I know in my heart of hearts that I am a winner.

            I advance into the top five. Those that have been eliminated go and collect their consolation ribbons. The emcee whittles out two more. I’m in the top three. Soon they’ll be etching my name on the plaque, forever part of something bigger than myself. Doogie is stone-faced. I have no idea if his chili is still alive.

            Just name the goddamn winner already.

            And then they do.

            William “Doogie” Donahue.

            The audience gives it up for him.

            Son of a bitch.

            He tries to accept it stoically, but has a teenager’s sheepishness when he takes the trophy. Looks out into the crowd and raises his arms. I’m pissed off, but oh well. I’ve got to admit, his chili, #6 of the finalists, was good. Nice and hearty. Midwestern. I put my hands together for him, my old friend.

            There’s always next year and the next year and the one after that. Adapt and survive. Maybe I’ll open a chili parlor when my two-grand allowance runs out, call it Slobowski’s. I’ll go out to the Madonna House to see him soon. It’d be nice to catch up with his mother as well. I know she was bummed when I quit visiting, disappeared in pursuit of something I never found. Didn’t even bother returning her calls. But I’m back in control now, helping old friends win chili cook-offs. Some much-needed meaning in Doogie’s life.

            The bar settles down. Empties by about half. It’s 4:30 now. In an hour it’ll be dark. For finishing second I got a $200 tab, which I’m putting to good use. Gave rat-faced Johnny permission to drink on it until it’s gone. Would’ve thought he won the lottery when I told him.

            “It was a well-fought battle.” Doogie comes up and shakes my hand.

            “You showed me,” I say. “I apologize. Got ahead of myself.” It’s important that I be the bigger man. “You do Venmo?”

            “Cash only, bucko.”

            He follows me to the ATM. I hand him the five hundred and say, “I guess we’ll see each other when we see each other. Until then, be well.”

            “You know what my chili was?”

            “What?”

            “Just Hormel that I doctored up a little bit, you self-righteous son of a bitch.”

            “Motherfucker.”

            He walks away—middle finger up—out into the dregs of winter, a champion.

 

 

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Review: Origami Dogs by Noley Reid

Autumn House Press, 2023.
Paperback, $17.95, 216 pages.

Origami Dogs, Noley Reid’s fourth book and her second short story collection, is not about dogs. Through Reid’s clean, often razor-sharp prose, the characters’ animal companions trudge alongside their emotional turmoil, both witnesses and hostages to the ways they love and harm each other.

 

Still, even as the animals are not the focus of these stories, they often serve as vessels, important points of connection that convey the characters’ emotions. In the title story, a young girl, Iris, is overwhelmed both by working in her mother’s breeding farm and by her first experiences with boys. After losing her virginity leads her to be ignored and neglected by her two romantic prospects, Iris names every dog and pup in the barn, breaking her mother’s rule to only refer to them by numbers. The pain of her own objectification leads her to break the cycle of distance and humanize those around her, reclaiming her own agency in the process. Similarly, in “Movement & Bones”, even as the narrator, a recent amputee, struggles to connect with her husband, her dog mirrors her movements, offering physical comfort and also representing the barriers between them: “He moves his body up against mine, as much as the dogs in between our legs allow.”

 

The connection between human and animal doesn’t always provide consolation. In “The Mud Pit,” when the narrator’s boyfriend’s old dog, Kizzy, passes away, she offers to replace her as an emotional safe haven, but he rejects the offer. “You can’t be my safe haven from you,” he says. Indeed, there is no safe haven for these characters: their relationships float on the page, tinged with melancholy and an unfulfilled sense of longing. Devotion, from human to human, manifests as a heavy weight that the characters struggle to carry.

 

In the more experimental second-person narrative “How Trees Sleep,” Reid carefully paints the portrayal of a young girl lying next to her mother, stopping herself from asking more of her. And in “Once It’s Gone,” a husband grapples with his wife’s past infidelity, having raised a child that isn’t his. As he contemplates leaving his family, he watches an elderly woman from the neighborhood feed a group of ferocious stray cats. “I don’t stay to see her scared to cry out for fear of chasing them away,” he says. Instead, he returns home, since, as all these characters, he must sit with his hunger.

 

Amidst the longing for human connection, perhaps inevitably, parenting emerges as a major theme. The narrator of “Once It’s Gone” is partially motivated by his hurt over his stepdaughter’s decision to have an abortion—not out of a religious stance, but because, as he says to his wife, “it could have been ours.” It, the nameless fetus, could have been what the narrator craved, something to fulfill his desire for a deep relationship. Similarly, the protagonist of “The Mud Pit” hopes to use her unborn child as a way to connect with a dead childhood friend. Another piece, “No Matter Her Leaving,” features a father grieving his runaway daughter, waiting alongside her old dog Malone. In her absence, the dog withers. Before the narrator is forced to put him down, he watches Malone put his nose inside a bowl and glimpses a trace of hope: “Have I found something he can love?”

 

This question looms over the collection. The characters search, untiring, for the love they crave, whether from a distant partner or a conservative mother. When the narrator’s daughter returns in “No Matter Her Leaving,” the piece—and by extension, the collection—ends on a note of hope. Brimming underneath, though, there is still the sense of something inherently tragic, in an unrelenting, animalesque sort of love.

 

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Two Poems

Halloween: Ends

Michael Myers at the 711 filling up his SUV.
Michael Myers at Home Depot buying fancy drill bits he doesn’t really need.
Michael Myers sitting in the back of the room at the PTA meeting, scrolling through Tinder.
Michael Myers doing taxes.
Michael Myers scrolling through Facebook in the movie theater.
Michael Myers at couple’s counseling.
Michael Myers letting the dog out one night and telling the kids it ran away.
Michael Myers killing all the sex workers in Grand Theft Auto.
Michael Myers sitting in the back pew at church, scrolling through Tinder.
Michael Myers mowing the lawn on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
Michael Myers wearing an apron that says I Rub My Own Meat.
Michael Myers getting drunk at his Superbowl party.
Michael Myers explaining the differences between a bratwurst and a sausage to a woman looking at her phone.
Michael Myers renting Saw IV again on Amazon Prime.
Michael Myers taking his mask off to have sex but leaving his socks on.
Michael Myers toweling off in the locker room.
Michael Myers rubbing against people on the train.
Michael Myers at the hotel bar explaining the difference between bourbon and whisky to a woman looking at her phone.
Michael Myers calling up toiletries and answering the door in his bathrobe each time.
Michael Myers ordering his burger well-done.
Michael Myers sending his food back twice.
Michael Myers not tipping.

 

Another autumn

                        after Mikey Swanberg

 

walking the mile
to work,

 

freezing in the morning,
sweating on the way back,

 

each step a stitch
quilting the heavy blanket

 

of our unhappiness.
Nothing has happened,

 

and still—

 

I imagined my lover

might show up

 

in my office
before I left,

 

shut the door
and we would fuck

 

quietly on the desk

 

to the rhythm

of the copy machine.

 

In another version,
he’d walk out to me

 

halfway along the mile,

stitching his own path,

 

and say something
he was never going to say,

 

that he had changed, and I
had changed, but

 

all for the better,
and we were stronger for it,

 

as though love
were a sourdough,

 

dying then restarting,
grown through being given away.

 

How long did I believe that time
was the most costly thing.

 

What a hard bargain
to find it is the only thing.

 

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Mrs. Tsai

It was past eleven at night when my mother called. The rain came down in great big sheets, and I’d been curled up under three blankets with the heater on for hours, reading a book about digestion.

            “You’re still up,” she said.

            “It’s not that late. What are you doing?” and before she could answer I started guessing, “Watching a crime thriller?”

            “Ha,” she said. “A western. The one with the good-looking sheriff who’s in your yoga class. What are you doing?”

            “Reading and resting,” I said.

            “It’s raining a lot,” she said. “Reminds me of winter in Pingtung.”

            “CeCe and I planted bell peppers this week, so it’ll be nice to have them watered without me having to do it,” I told her.

            “Is she asleep?” she asked.

            “Of course. She’s right next to me,” I said.

            I thought about my mother sitting on her green corduroy sofa in her new apartment with Tuo-Ba, her mop-like dog, watching the Western. From time to time, she must wonder what she would do next now that she was alone, except for the dog. A dog was good at filling holes in a schedule. A lot of walks to punctuate the day. Random and intermittent socializing with other dog owners here and there. Buying dog food and treats, vet visits. My mother took Tuo-Ba to volunteer at the library with a team of other service dogs. Children arrived to read to the dogs once a week, eagerly sounding out syllables on a bright blue carpet lined with drowsing dogs.

            She cleared her throat a little. I heard Tuo-Ba by the tinkling of his little tag.

            “Are you okay?” I asked.

            “Fine,” she said, but cleared her throat again.

            “Are you sick?” I asked.

            “No, I’m not,” she said and cleared her throat.

            I heard her walking around, opening a drawer. A faucet turned on.

            “I need your help with something,” she said.

            “What?” I asked, my voice perched.

            “Someone came over earlier today,” she said. “And they fell. They’re still here.”

            “What do you mean?” I asked. “Who came over?”

            My first thought was that she had invited a man to her place.

            “Wen-Ting, from the building,” she said, and drank water. “I invited her up to have tea after dinner.”

            CeCe flipped her arm in the air and smacked my pillow. Had I been lying down it would have been my nose. Lately I had heard snippets from all kinds of parenting gurus via podcast or Instagram about not letting your kids sleep in your bed. Boundaries! Sleep hygiene! Blah blah, I thought. But how about a black eye or a broken nose as deterrent?

            “How did she fall?” I asked.

            “She was leaving and she fell down the stairs,” my mother said.

            I had often been frustrated by my mother’s opaqueness, but this was really a new level.

            “Is she okay?” I asked. “Did she have to go to the hospital?”

            “No,” my mother rebuffed gently, as if I’d asked whether she wanted to try paragliding tomorrow.

            “No, she’s not okay, or no, she didn’t go to the hospital?” I closed the book and set it against my lap. The heater clanked and I could hear it clank below, too, in the downstairs neighbor’s apartment.

            “She didn’t go to the hospital. I brought her back up here,” my mother said.

            I was already setting and resetting the scene. Mrs. Tsai had fallen down some of the stairs, and crying in pain, had hobbled back up the stairs to my mother’s apartment? Maybe the injury was a sprain, a fracture. Maybe my mother had iced her ankle or wrist, and Mrs. Tsai had fallen asleep on the couch, not wanting to sit in the ER all night.

            “Did she break anything?” I asked.

            “I’m not sure. She’s resting. I need your help. It’s important, but don’t come now. Just come in the morning,” my mother said. “It’s late. No need to wake up CeCe.”

            I moved some of the hair out of CeCe’s face. Her skin was creamy as a cashew aside from the little white dots that sometimes appeared on her cheek. The corner of her mouth glistened with spit.

            “Okay,” I told her. “I’ll come right when we wake up.”

 

 

            Driving in the rain proved to be difficult. A car accident jammed all the traffic into a single lane. CeCe complained from the backseat booster about having to leave home without getting to play Barbies. But when I told her that Nai Nai would probably have some delicious moon cakes there and that she’d get to play with Tuo-Ba, she eventually changed course.

            We circled the block and meandered up a side street before finding a parking spot. And then we trudged through the rain under CeCe’s clear umbrella. Rainwater gushed down into the gutters.

            The slippery lobby was posted with a sign about the elevator not running, so we climbed to the fifth floor, one floor smelling like paint, another of boiling cabbage.

            “We’re here!” CeCe announced when my mother opened the door.

            “Oh! Come in,” she chirped, the heat from her apartment pouring out into the hall. Tuo-Ba shuffled forward happily, rubbing his moustache on our shins.

            The small dining table was arranged with plates of sliced fruit and moon cakes, covered in plastic wrap.

            “CeCe, will you help me feed and dress Tuo-Ba? I’m going to give your mom some books,” my mother said. She showed CeCe the food scoop and bag and pointed to a green diamond sweater for the dog.

            I followed my mother into her bedroom and found Mrs. Tsai face down on the bed with her knees on the ground. She was completely still.

            “Is she dead?” I asked in disbelief.

            My mother nodded, frowning.

            “Why did you bring her up here?” I hissed. “Why didn’t you call an ambulance right away?”

            “She can’t pay an ambulance fee,” my mother said crossly. “And her son doesn’t work.”

            “But now she’s here, and her legs are–” I swept my hand over Mrs. Tsai’s body, “like this!”

            “I need your help to bring her downstairs,” my mother said. “She lives on the second floor. We can put her on her own bed. Like this. Then I can call her an ambulance.”

            “The paramedics can’t help her now,” I said.

            “That way it won’t look suspicious,” my mother said.

            “I can’t get the sweater on,” CeCe was calling from the kitchen. And then as if she could teleport, appeared behind the door. “What are you doing in there?”

            My mother stepped out and led her back into the kitchen. The dog sweater was on halfway, but backwards. They laughed. I shut the door.

            If we carried Mrs. Tsai’s body back to her own apartment, would it seem strange that my mother was calling an ambulance? They were having tea and she’d fallen down the stairs on the way back home. If my mother had called for help, Mrs. Tsai would be in a hospital, or maybe she’d still have ended up in the morgue.

            “It’s me,” my mother said and quickly opened the door. “CeCe is watering plants on the balcony. We can cover Wen-Ting with a sheet, take her down to the apartment – I know the keypad code to unlock her door. We can put her on her bed. Then I’ll call the ambulance later.”

            “Well, we can’t do it now, with CeCe,” I said.

            “We can do it tonight,” she said.

            “But what about her fall?” I asked. “Won’t the paramedics see she has an injury from falling down the stairs? And won’t it be strange that her knees are like that? What if they match the sheet fibers on her body to your bed?”

            My mother scoffed. “That’s stuff they do on murder shows,” she said. “This was an accident. I should’ve just dragged her to her own apartment when it happened. Come out.”

            She closed the door behind us and we called CeCe in. Sitting at the table eating fruit and cakes, and drinking tea, I felt like I was in a bad dream. And had my mother said dragged?

 

 

            I returned to my mother’s apartment in the evening as soon as I dropped CeCe at her dad’s. The rain had ceased long enough for me to walk through the cold without getting wet. I was thankful since CeCe had taken the umbrella with her.

            My mother and I pushed Mrs. Tsai into a seated position on the bed. She was absolutely rigid and startlingly cold. When I finally dared to look at her face, her eyes were open!

            “Oh my God!” Her eyes were hazy, grayish.

            My mother reached out and had to push the lids down twice.

            Draped with a sheet and in a permanent yogic chair pose, we lifted Mrs. Tsai to the door and then hurriedly shuttled down one flight after another.

            “What if you’re questioned by the police?” I asked.

            “I’ll tell them we were going to meet for tea last night. She never came. This morning, I go to her door and she doesn’t answer. So I get worried and call the police. In case she fell. And she did fall.”

            We passed the floor that smelled of boiling cabbage. A dog barked behind a door.

            “If someone sees us, we’re screwed!” I whispered, running around the curve so that I could keep Mrs. Tsai level.

            My mother started to laugh her silent laugh.

            “Imagine someone comes out of a door right now. ‘What are you carrying? Looks heavy. Let me help you,’” I said.

            “No one is going to help us,” she said between our shuffling.

            When we got to the second floor, we hurried down the hall to Mrs. Tsai’s door and my mother trembled, lifting her side of the body with one hand while punching in the code with the other. She got it wrong the first time and I started to panic, sweeping the hall and staircase with my eyes.

            “I really hope you know the code,” I said. “We can’t go up and down, up and down like this.”

            When the door opened, we hurried in and followed the familiar floor plan to the bedroom. Like my mother, Mrs. Tsai lived alone. Her little apartment was tidy and smelled of cedar and camphor. A rattan living room set with red cushions crowded around an old TV.

            In the single bedroom, a big red calendar with a single date on each rice paper-thin page, and a black and white photo of her family of origin hung on the wall. We lowered Mrs. Tsai onto the bed, face down, and then maneuvered the sheet out from under her.

            “Won’t it look strange to find her like this?” I asked.

            “Probably,” my mother said. “Probably strange to find anyone dead.” She patted down Mrs. Tsai’s hair and smoothed her blouse.

            A narrow gray cat slithered into the room.

            “Tu zi,” my mother said, folding up the sheet.

            “Rabbit?” I asked.

            “The cat jumps like a rabbit,” my mother said. “Mrs. Tsai was funny.”

            “Should we feed her?” I asked.

            My mother turned on the kitchen light. We rifled through the cabinets and found it well stocked with tins of sardines in tomato sauce, pickled vegetables, rice, pork floss, dry noodles, and a variety of soy sauces and vinegars. Nice French wines frosted in the refrigerator, along with glass containers of cooked porridge, poached chicken, and tea eggs.

            “You two drink together?” I asked.

            “Sometimes tea, sometimes wine,” my mother said.

            “Will you miss her?” I asked.

            “Yes,” my mother said, clearing her throat. “She was a nice woman.”

            Finally, underneath the sink, I found the cat food and scraped it into the cat’s dish. We slipped out then and locked the door behind us. My mother had always been friendly and likeable, lighthearted. She had friends from before my father’s death, a few she still met for lunch or coffee. But Mrs. Tsai was a friend she’d made in this new life on her own.

            “What will you do tonight?” I asked as we walked back through the hallway.

            “Maybe go on a walk with Tuo-Ba,” she said. “It’s not raining.”

            “I’ll walk with you and Tuo-Ba,” I told her.

            She looked tired but pleasantly calm. I followed her up the stairs and back into her apartment. I pulled on my jacket as she leashed Tuo-Ba and straightened out his sweater. On our way out, I picked up her old umbrella that sometimes opened too far out, but still worked.

 

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Junior Steaks

We both order junior steaks, and she asks the waiter to turn on the fight. She says it just like that, “the fight,” and he understands. He’s got a lumpy, bald head, peppered with drops of sweat and he goes over to tell the guy behind the bar. We are seated beside a wall. Across the restaurant, people are seated beside windows.

            She asks, “How’s your summer been?”

            I say, “I moved.”

            “Oh yeah? How was that?”

            For my last month or so living in the old house, they played the same Tom T. Hall song every day and suggested I didn’t leave. “Call the whole thing off,” they’d say, “It’s not too late.” And I would say it was fine, that people moved all the time, people just moved. Anyone who found somewhere that cheap so much closer to the city would be stupid not to take it. Then I’d go up to my room, close the door, open the window, and cry. I give her a brief lesson on the geography of the suburbs. Bridges I drive over now.

            She begins to tell me that her summer was fine, except that the guy she was seeing drowned. She glances at the fight, frowns, then back at me. Yes, it was pretty sad. Pretty shocking. Pretty tragic.

            “The guy you were seeing drowned?” I repeat. I can see it clearly. I must be remembering a scene in a movie. The man is wearing a 1920’s style bathing suit and has center-parted hair. A British accent. British teeth. We have whiskeys and are pushing the ice cubes around with black stirring straws. I think of the Titanic. Now that’s drowning.

            “We don’t need to dwell on it,” she says.

            “How long were you two together?”

            “A month and a half,”

            “Oh,”

            “See? It’s strange. It’s strange. I’m not sure what I’m grieving – a summer fling? A future? The children we could’ve had, I mean.” She looks down at her drink. It’s gone. So are the steaks. I wish we had just stopped talking long enough to enjoy them. We order more drinks, doubles this time, and fries to split. The sweat drops on the waiter’s head are bigger now, as if he’s crying from his scalp. “So now you’re on a trip?” She asks. That’s why I’m here. Passing through and staying at her place. Before we came out here for steaks, she laid a folded mattress topper on the floor beside her own unmade bed, then said “It’s like a side-car bed.”  Her place is down the road from the restaurant, close enough to walk. She’s got a window box herb garden and a rabbit named Misty and the whole place, an unairconditioned studio, smells like it. Her linens are the color of surgical scrubs and I can tell, somehow, that she took them from the hall closet the day she left her parents’ house.

            “Yeah,” I say. “Just, you know, to shake things up.” We were never very close. I realize this now, downing half my whiskey. It was only ever proximity and I try to conjure an image of it. There was the time we drove an hour away to see our professors present at an Environmental Studies conference. All I can remember is coming back, her maroon station wagon cresting a hill in the springtime. And I think we had discovered a commonality, lactose intolerance or left handedness, something that seemed to matter then. And now we are here, looking down at the wood laminate table, a little uncomfortable because lonely people are afraid of each other.

            “There are three rounds,” she says, picking up her steak knife and pointing it towards the television, “and a one-minute break between them.” I nod but don’t turn around. I am not sure if I don’t care, or if I do care and that’s why I can’t look.

            “So, tell me more about the house,” she urges, using her knife’s tip to draw a smiley face in the juices left on her plate.

            “The house?” I ask.

            “Yeah, the house, the one you just moved to.”

            I stare at her and nod and think about the place. How all of the cabinets are labeled and none of the women wear bras and at night we sit around with our breasts falling in all directions and talk about dogs until one of us cries – cries about how good dogs are. Then we talk about talking, about ourselves and our habits. We talk about how we always talk about dogs until one of us cries. How strange this is. How special we are. Then bedtime, and we walk around the kitchen without looking into each other’s eyes. “There’s a big front porch,” I say.

            “Hey, that’s great,” she says. Then I sigh and look at the wall. There is a small, framed map of the state. That’s all there is. If we were really friends, I would’ve insisted we sit by a window. I study the image of the state, floating on a white page, trying to remember the borders. Was it landlocked? Was that a lake coast, up at the top?  “It was a long, Catholic service,” she says, through the ice cube she’s chewing. I turn in time to watch her wipe a drip of water from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. “Catholic with an open casket. And I hate open caskets and I hate Catholic services because all their songs sound like Broadway hits – I was raised Methodist, have I told you that?”

            “No, you haven’t.”

            “I was, and the music is better. Anyhow, I didn’t have anyone to sit with. None of my friends would come with me. I asked one and she said it wasn’t appropriate. She wasn’t family.” I finish the watery whiskey left in my glass. She does the same.

            On my last Saturday at the old house, I said that Tom T. Hall’s voice had an adolescent quality. It was a particular note, a strain of startling, boundless grief – the sort we are no longer capable of feeling once we reach adulthood but might be reminded of in a plotless dream. None of the others agreed, “not quite adolescent,” they said, frowning, “not adolescent, something else.” But there wasn’t much debate before we put the matter aside and drank coffee in the yard until only two of us were left. The shadow of the house was beginning to creep across the tufty lawn when he started in on it again, with waning conviction, saying it wasn’t too late.

            The whiskey floods me with affection for her – torrents of buoyant sympathy. I float on it like a lazy river at a waterpark, filled with Band-Aids and hair and timid children, too scared to ride the real attractions. The waiter wants to know if we want another drink. We don’t. He wants us to leave but doesn’t say as much. The droplets on his head are even bigger now, and they have multiplied. I take her hand. It is puffy and claw-like, with fingernails filed to points and I think of the man who drowned and wonder how it was to be attracted to a woman with hands like this. She’s going on in a stage whisper, leaning across the table, like a conspiracy theorist. She had nothing to wear to the service, she’d never met his mom, she didn’t know what to do – bring flowers? She’d been thinking of breaking up with him (actually, she’d decided on it).  She wasn’t close with his friends, and they were grieving so hard (that’s the adjective she chose: “hard”), harder than her. Should she have tried harder, she wants to know, tried harder to grieve harder? Should she have made some sort of performance? The front of her blouse is dragging in the ketchup on her plate.

            At church coffee hour as a child, I used to take the jelly donuts, suck the filling out, and then put them back on the platter. Their appearance was perfectly preserved, perfectly innocuous. But there was a backwash effect. With the saliva, I mean, if you can imagine that. It wasn’t kind.

            “Why are you crying?” she asks, a little incredulously, withdrawing her hand and leaning back in her seat.

            “I don’t know,” I say. She looks over my shoulder at the fight and I can see it reflected in her glasses, not in any great detail, of course – just flesh and bright lights.

 

            A few months after I make it back home autumn arrives over the course of a single weekend and in advance of the first frost, I ferry all the tropical plants from the big front porch into the living room and she texts me late one night to say that she found a dead opossum at the end of her street, that it was sweet, that it looked like it was sleeping. Before I can reply, she writes more, she says: “At any rate, it made me think of you.”

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On the Levee Once Again I Walk to Sharpen

my body to a blade. Weapon for nothing. Recall my first diet,
66 pounds, my proud refusal of a fist-sized milk carton.

My mother’s sister at 40, spooning Gerber peaches
into her mouth at the family table. Recall the game

my mother taught me when I was a teenager—
—find someone on the street who has my body—

Now without her how I will sharpen. Will be
vapor. Smoke. Furious at the world for nothing.

Rushing down the year’s dark corridor, street unspooling
every morning, tracking miles.

How I craved my mother’s judgement. Be vapor. Be smoke.
Be blade. Remember how it feels to desire

nothing, not even touch’s static. Remember why
emptiness still comforts like nothing else.

I will shrink myself down to where I don’t matter.
Thumbelina, tight and safe in a walnut shell.

Yet grief thickens everything. Even the imprint of my body.

Who’s keeping count.
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The Wounds of Childhood

We are the last to arrive. Jonathan parks on the gravel shoulder and is halfway out of the car before he remembers to help with Ellie. “Go,” I say, though I will cash in on his choice later. Jonathan is shouting greetings to his buddies who are lobbing sacks at the cornhole boards while I crate Ellie across the lawn to a picnic table covered in gingham. Here are the remains of the adults’ dinners, empty glasses and crumpled napkins, though the women, Peggy and Andrea, are still spooning puréed foods into their babies’ mouths. I leave Ellie in her carseat on the grass and reach for the open bottle of rosé.

            “You made it,” Peggy says, deadpan.

            “Barely,” I say. I’m allowed one glass of wine because I am nursing, so I must drink it slowly. “Why didn’t we stay in Duck again? This place took so long to get to.”

            “It’s better up here. Quieter,” Peggy says. She looks tired. The skin under her eyes bags down like an old basset hound’s.

            Andrea plays her part, like she did in college, smoothing things over between us. She reassures Peggy that the house is cute and super nice, ignoring what I can see from here, even in the dwindling daylight: this rental is a downgrade, old and unwanted. Its siding is worn and salt-baked. Spiderwebs glaze the floodlights while weeds eat through the driveway. I can already feel how damp the bedrooms will be, with loud ceiling fans that can’t compete with the humidity.

            As Andrea praises Peggy for getting the house on such short notice—we hadn’t coordinated our schedules until late April, when most houses were already booked—her son sucks his thumb and stares at me. He is a dull, lifeless weight on Andrea’s knees. He wears a blue helmet that is reshaping his skull, which was mushed on its journey through Andrea’s birth canal. With his helmet and dulled expression, he looks like a stoned NATO peacekeeper.

            “What’s so funny?” Peggy asks me.

            Instead of sharing my thought, I say, “Remember the house we got after graduation? It had seven bedrooms and a hot tub. Remember that hot tub, Peggy?”

            Peggy reddens and glances across the street, toward the sound of waves crashing on a shore that we can’t see. In her firm but forbearing, good-mother voice, Peggy says, “No thank you, Tommy,” to the child in her lap, who is trying to rip the buttons off of her shirt.

            Peggy’s dutiful husband, Seth, appears then and picks up Tommy, throwing him in the air so that he squeals. Peggy is gearing up to lecture me, the last of them to get married, get pregnant, accept my fate.

            “We’re not twenty-two anymore,” Peggy says, as if I could forget. “We don’t need to be close to the bars. We need a place that’s family-friendly. This house is small, sure, but there aren’t stairs for the kids to fall down or, heaven forbid, hot tubs to drown in. If you really feel cramped though, there is an extra bedroom between our rooms you could use. It’s got a crib.”

            “Great,” I say. “I absolutely will. Ellie hasn’t slept in our room for three months.”

            While Jonathan plays one last lawn game, I find our bedroom, which contains a musty double bed and a particleboard dresser. Ellie is fussing, as usual—she is always fussing—and the spit bubble between her lips and the blushing skin under her eyebrows tells me she’s hungry, again. The mattress sags and the frame creaks as I lower myself onto it, wincing at the scrape of Ellie’s single tooth on my nipple.

            While she nurses, I take in the room. There are coarse wood planks, nailed diagonally across all four walls. I squint at one and notice black outlines, here and there, peppering the planks. At first, I mistake these half-circle outlines, upturned at both edges like crescent moons, for irregularities in the wood. Rotted whorls, maybe, or carpentry mistakes, but then I lean over and touch one and my finger is coated in ash.

            When Ellie’s eyelids sink, I scoot to the edge of the bed and lug myself up, then walk through the door that leads into the extra bedroom, which is so tiny that a crib and rocking chair crowd each other like commuters waiting for a train. The odd planks cover these walls too, only here, the blackened crescent moons appear in uniform rows up and down the planks.

            The room is cramped, but the crib looks clean enough, and Ellie, exhausted from the drive, is snuffed out like a match.

When I hear Ellie’s throaty cries just two hours later, I nudge Jonathan. He groans and rolls away from me, but I won’t let him win this. I had her all evening. He can deal with her at night.

            “Your turn,” I hiss, before squeezing my eyes shut and trying for sleep. “Dammit, Jonathan, go in there before she wakes up the whole house.”

            But then, the noise stops. Ellie has gone from hungry crying one second to complete silence the next. There is a void of sound, as if Ellie has disappeared.

            I shoot up in bed, deciding that Ellie truly has disappeared: suffocated, fallen out of the crib, that she is suddenly, infantly, dead. I rush through the door between the rooms, and my hands are gripping the crib’s rail. I look down and see Ellie, and see that she is okay. She is so okay, in fact, that she is practically glowing in the moonlight that streams through the window’s wavy panes, her chest rising and falling with each breath.

            I take a few steps back until I am standing in the doorway. I am watching her breathe and marking this night in my mind: the first night Ellie has soothed herself back to sleep.

            Jonathan won’t believe it.

            I have nearly turned away when a flicker of movement catches my eye and I realize that Peggy is here, in the room with Ellie. Peggy is standing in the corner, between crib and window. The black of her high-necked, long-sleeved gown has merged with the wall behind her so that I might not have noticed her at all if it weren’t for her pendant. The pendant hangs on a silver necklace and is big and gaudy, for preppy Peggy, wide as the palm of a hand, but curved like a crescent moon with sharp points. It is creamy white, its edges a garish red.

            “Peggy?” I whisper.

            In the shadow, I can’t see her face, but I see her hand as she lifts it to the pendant. I hear her as she breathes out, “Shhh.”

As soon as Jonathan hands Ellie to me with a grumble about missing tee time, she is clawing at my left breast. I shift her to my other arm and seek out Peggy among the adults in the kitchen. She is pouring coffee and humming softly. I touch her shoulder and say, “Hey, thanks for helping out last night. How did you get Ellie back to sleep so quick? She’s impossible.”

            Peggy looks like a beachy angel in a silky white cover-up, her hair blown out. “What are you talking about?”

            “You took care of Ellie,” I say, but I hesitate at her confused expression. “Remember? I went in to get her, but you were already there. You were wearing black.”

            Peggy blows across the top of her coffee and rolls her eyes. “Who wears black at the beach?”

            By evening, my woman in black is a joke. Around the picnic table, Peggy asks if the woman not only calms babies, but changes their diapers, too. Andrea wonders aloud how much ghosts charge an hour for babysitting. Jonathan shakes the ice in his glass and calls into the dusk that he could use a top-off.

            I spray on more bug repellent and keep my mouth shut. I know what I saw. At least, I think I do, though surrounded by the nursing babies, the ball-busting fathers, the woman in black doesn’t seem so real. Could she have been a product of my sleep deprivation, of post-partum whatever?

            When we all head inside, I change Ellie’s diaper and dress her in her pink pajamas, then pick her up and walk toward the door that links our room to hers.

            “You’re letting the ghost have her again?” Jonathan says to my back, an audible smirk in the question.

            “I don’t believe in ghosts,” I say.

             But hours later, I wake up sweating, the sheets tightened around my knees. I grope for Ellie, then remember that she is not here. She is sleeping in the crib in the little room because I don’t like to sleep with her. I relish the time that I am free of her; Jonathan does, too, though he won’t admit it.

            That, and I don’t believe in ghosts.

            When Jonathan rolls toward me, vapors from his ginny breath mist over my face. I prop up on my elbow and listen for Ellie.

            After a few seconds, I hear the slightest whimper, or maybe it is a coo. Or it could be a whisper.

            In the little room, the rocking chair’s runners creak against the floor as the woman gentles my baby. Ellie’s hand reaches up for the pendant, and the woman accommodates her, letting the necklace fall so that it almost touches the space between Ellie’s collarbones, her pink pajamas burnished in the moonlight. When the woman bends down, her gowned body covers Ellie up, blots her out, swallows Ellie into her shadow until I can see no part of her, not her cloth-covered feet or fisted hands.

            Half of me is panicked, horrified by Ellie’s consumption into this woman’s shade, the other half embarrassed at the sentimental nonsense that is pouring from my mouth. “She’s mine,” I am pleading with the woman, but I am whispering too, because something about her demands that my resistance be quiet, like I’m negotiating with a nun or a grieving great-aunt.

            “She’s mine,” I whisper again. “She’s mine.”

            At this third plea, the woman’s torso rears back against the hard dowels of the rocker, and I am tripping over my feet, wrenching Ellie from her, not looking at the woman’s face, this woman who smells of dust and oleander.

            When Jonathan sits up in bed, I am clutching Ellie like she is my purse and someone tried to snatch her. Her chest is so warm that it burns.

            Dinner that evening is steaks on the grill, Peggy’s salad. I don’t help. I don’t pass out forks and knives, or pour the wine. I cuddle Ellie and sniff her hair. Instinct keeps drawing me back to the skin of her chest, which is the vulnerable shade of thawing ice, the blue blood coursing under it like a spring stream.

            Across from me, Peggy is tipsy, urging Jonathan to tell it again.

            As he tells it, I am the lunatic. I am the confused, attic-wandering mommy searching for her baby, one step from the asylum. “So then, she comes running into our room and tells me I have to scare away the ghost,” Jonathan says. “Only when I go in…”

            “…No one was there,” Peggy finishes. “I mean, obviously.”

            “Might explain why no one else had rented this place,” I snap back.

            Peggy groans. The wine has loosened her. She is no longer tolerating me, even though we once shared a kiss, immersed in a rental hot tub. When I put the tip of my tongue on hers, Peggy moaned and reached for me. She liked it more than I did.

            “It’s all in your head, and I’ll prove it,” Peggy says.

            “Oh, yeah? How?”

            “I’ll put Tommy to bed in there tonight.”

            She smiles up at her husband, who is swaying, the yellow liquid in his glass threatening to spill over. “We could use the night off, couldn’t we, babe?”

That night, in the salt air leaking through our bedroom window, I dream of ovals that flatten and bulge and wane to become crescents, of the moon juttering through its phases so quickly that it catches on fire, causing typhoon, mud slide, hurricane. I dream of a naked woman who has captured the moon and held it between her lactating breasts, can hold it there even though it burns. I dream of threes, of fairy tales, of the third night, when the humans fail and the witch wins.

            I wake up gasping, my throat burning. I yank off blankets to search for my asphyxiated baby but find her, soundly asleep, tucked against Jonathan. I breathe out, then ease myself back down, careful not to wake them, but I don’t sleep again, not for hours. Whenever I close my eyes, the phases of the moon whir by, full back to full again.

            Toward sunrise, I think of Peggy’s little boy, quietly asleep in the crib.

            I think of checking on him.

            I think of these things, and perhaps the thinking of them alone pulls me back into sleep, because soon I am drifting on soothing black swells.

The next morning, Peggy looks fresh and free in a purple tank top. She looks like the Peggy of old, who used to grind against strangers at The Wreck, who used to be a wreck herself. I am fuzzy from my dream, which feels silly now, in the dazzling gold of the morning, with Ellie happy in my arms, full of milk and tenderness.

            I am gathering myself to apologize to Peggy for a few things: for giving her crap about this sea-roughened house on the unfashionable end of this barrier island, for bringing her down with a ridiculous ghost story, for mocking her devotion to her son.

            I am about to apologize when Seth rushes into the room, holding Tommy around his belly as the child wails and rubs his chest, keening, mama mama mama, an incantation that starts quietly and expands to coat the walls.

            Peggy is a comet streaking toward them. She barks at Seth to put him down, and he does, holding him on the counter so that Peggy can unstick his pajamas from his body. When the little boy sees his own blood on his mother’s fingertip, he is stunned out of his wails. In the unholy silence that follows, the rest of us take in the blood and the charred, red-rimmed crescent moon now exposed on Tommy’s chest.

            I slap my hand over my mouth and do not say what I am thinking, instead rushing to gather up what Peggy needs, her phone, her insurance card, her shoes. And in the aftermath—through Peggy’s anxious updates from the burn unit, through all of the disappointments about the failed skin grafts and infections, through the questions that the skeptical woman from child protective services asks all of us—I never say what I am thinking.

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Mother and Child

Kyle is on her way home for Christmas. Home home, as in, where she grew up. She sits stiff in her bulkhead window seat, chewing on the teat of her water bottle and watching other passengers file in. She’s got her dog with her on the flight, her big retriever, the first time she’s flown with him, and she almost wishes a stranger would complain about it. Just enough for an excuse to get mad back at someone out loud. The only reason she didn’t take Iggy when she flew home last year was because her mom doesn’t like dogs, and this time—well.

            A flight attendant presses a coffeepot button and Iggy whines at the beep. The attendant turns, looks maybe admonishing, and Kyle puts a defensive, ready hand on Iggy’s neck. The attendant just winks and says, “He knows the coffee’s bad.”

            Kyle sighs. She grips Iggy’s collar’s leather strap. She could ask to have a drink before takeoff. Even at twenty-nine, airplane mini-whiskeys always seem riskily grown-up. She raises two shy fingers, but the attendant is looking away now. He’s smiling at the cabin doors. Another attendant escorts a young girl onboard.

            The girl has stringy blond hair, and a backpack, and a plastic pouch of papers on a lanyard around her neck. An unidentified minor—isn’t that what they call it? She could be five or she could be ten. Older than Kyle’s sister’s twins, but by how much? Kyle’s girlfriends would be able to tell, probably. Those trivia games at baby showers these days when everyone else knows, without guessing, about diaper tallies and babies seeing in black and white. Last time she was home, when she’d just broken up with Saul, Kyle’s sister asked over dinner, Was it because he wanted kids? and Kyle couldn’t explain how it didn’t feel that simple.

            That night, at that dinner, Kyle’s dad switched the subject on her behalf. He took her out for ice cream after and got her mind off things.

            He’s in Reno this year, with his brother’s family through New Year’s.

            Kyle prays the attendant will walk this little girl past her row—the airline has open seating—but the girl sees Iggy and her face lights up.

            The attendant whispers, “Do you want to sit with the doggie, sweetie?”

            The kid takes her seat slow. Her feet don’t touch the plane floor. She says, “Can I pet him?” and she puts her hand out carefully, calmly, settling her fingers on Iggy’s taut forehead. Kyle almost tells her, Be gentle. He’s anxious.

            Iggy nuzzles, softening under the girl’s touch.

            The girl says, “I’m Pearl.” She points at Kye’s wrist, the Series 6 Kyle bought herself as a holiday present. “I like your fancy watch.”

            Kyle shakes her wrist to adjust the band.

            Pearl asks for Iggy’s name, and then Kyle’s. “I knew someone named Kyle who’s a boy,” she says, not good or bad, the way Kyle’s nephews say, I am dancing. “Boston’s where my mom is and she had a dog Polka who couldn’t go with her when she moved.”

            “What happened to her?”

            “She went to live with Roger.”

            Kyle nods, like, Okay. But, the mom or the dog?

            The sky’s going dark outside the porthole windows. The aisle jams with elbowing passengers. A graying man in a safari shirt stops at the bulkhead row and asks Kyle if the aisle is free. “I like the legroom,” he says. He stows a camera bag in the overhead, leaves the satchel’s strap hanging down without seeming to notice. He’s about Kyle’s dad’s age, with crow’s feet and an easy grin, and a ring, the soft of his finger grown comfortably around it. His arms and legs fall lazy, splaying into Pearl’s seat space, and he registers Iggy with lukewarm surprise, as if, impossibly, obliviously, he hasn’t noticed the dog until now.

            The man nods at the lanyard around Pearl’s neck. “You must be a professional flyer.”

            Pearl grins. She tells him, “It’s my first time on an airplane.”

            The man looks at Kyle, an impressed face. Why didn’t you say so! He assumes they’re together, Kyle can see. She wishes she could just read her book. She wonders about her own first flight, vaguely remembers some long-ago trip where she’s small in a middle seat, her parents on either side playing rummy across her table. The memory hurts.

            “Pearl was just talking about going to see her mom in Boston,” Kyle says, to clarify.

            “Well, Pearl. I’m Roy.”

            When the plane lurches, beginning its taxi, Iggy cants forward unprepared. His nose bumps Pearl’s knee. There’s a rip in the knee of Pearl’s jeans that Kyle hadn’t noticed, a rim of dried blood on the denim hole and a scab on the skin underneath. Pearl sees Kyle looking and says, “It’s OK.” She touches the scab with a careful finger. “I was supposed to fly yesterday, but we missed it. I fell when I was running with my bag.”

            And no one put her in a new pair today, Kyle thinks. That’s bad, right?

            Pearl points at an old scar on Kyle’s elbow, as if to say, You fall too.

            When the attendant asks for Kyle or Roy’s confirmation they’ll assist Pearl—in an emergency, with any big problems—Roy looks at Pearl and smiles and raises his eyebrows. He says, “I don’t know, kid. You can swim, right?”

            Pearl frowns. “Like at the Y?”

            It’s the same as when Shannon texts teasing, haha videos of the boys doing things they don’t get are funny. Kyle feels bad. She gives the attendant a nod, but he needs to hear her say it. “Yeah,” she answers. “Yes.”

 

 

            Yes, Kyle’s mom has been seeing someone. That’s the sadness, the great Donne family drama. But the problem is that Kyle knew about Brian years ago, and her mom promised it had stopped.

            One night, when she was seventeen, Kyle burned through a computer cord and went to her mom’s office after hours, to pick up a spare. She found her mom and Brian, the receptionist, in an exam room, on a table. Kyle’s mom was beside herself afterward. She apologized, profusely. She called it weakness. Her humanity. Something Kyle would understand when she was older, a frustrating cliché Kyle has kept hoping will come true.

            Kyle’s mom said if the rest of the family knew, it would destroy everything, for nothing. And Kyle needed to believe her. She didn’t know how she could tell anyone—like, actually tell them. So, when it came out in June about her mom’s “mistake” with “Brian who she used to work with,” Kyle couldn’t say to her devastated father, her blindsided sister, that she knew more than they did. That she’d known, without knowing it, for twelve years. That it was so much more and worse than they thought.

            If you’ve been long holding a bomb that goes off in a crowd, probably no one forgives you if you tell them, I’m hurt too, or, But I believed it was dead.

 

 

            The plane wobbles going up. Pearl squeals and clasps her hands.

            Most people settle apathetic into books or sleep or laptops. Roy puts his headphones in and snags his bag from the overhead—Pearl gasps, pointing at the seatbelt sign—and begins cleaning his camera with a little swab. The kind of leisurely routine you’ve perfected on regular flights to worry-free destinations, Kyle thinks, a little indignant.

            Pearl tap-dances her feet across Iggy’s back and says, “Look at the clouds!”

            Pearl asks Kyle how cold it is outside the airplane window. Cold enough for snow? Will Kyle do snowy things over Christmas with her family in Massachusetts? Kyle asks has Pearl ever seen snow before, mostly to bumper the talk away from her own family’s activities, and Pearl shakes her head no. “There was snow in Boston last night that Daddy said I missed because I made us late,” she says. “He drove me three hours to the airport twice. Yesterday, and today all over again.” She adds this proudly, like it was nice that he went out of his way.

            That’s something Kyle’s dad always says—Need anything from the grocery store, Dad? What do you want for your birthday? Don’t go out of your way, as in, Let’s not worry about me.

            Kyle keeps Pearl talking about herself. Pearl likes school. Her best school friends are Lee and Ty. She likes this school better than two others she’s gone to because they hold after-school outside, and her favorite school subject is science, because they did an animal unit last month—“Mammals are all different kinds but they all have fur and the mothers do nursing.” She lives with her dad in Louisiana, and they had to drive so far because Houston is the nearest airport.

            When Kyle asks Pearl if she’s always lived in Louisiana, Pearl says yes, and Iggy sits up.

            “Mom used to live there too, before she went to live in Boston. I stayed with Sasha and Jax for a while until Daddy found out and I went to live with him.”

            Kyle asks slowly, “How long ago was that?”

            Pearl is matter of fact. “Two years.”

            While Kyle works out the sad math—never been to Boston, Mom’s in Boston two years—Pearl bends and stretches for a book by Kyle’s feet, the one Kyle planned to spend the flight reading. Kyle watches Pearl study the angry cover, a young woman smashing an old clock.

            Kyle clears her throat. She tells Pearl, whispering, just the two of them, “My dad’s in Nevada for Christmas.”

            Pearl considers this a moment. “Yeah,” she says, nodding. Understanding. “Las Vegas.”

            The metal drink cart rouses Roy from his camera screen. He pulls out his headphones and reaches for his wallet, announcing to the attendant, “Ian, let me treat my friends here.” Kyle just wants a water, but her will to pick a fight has faded. When the drinks arrive, they’re chocolate milk for Pearl and cranberry soda for Kyle, with a little airplane vodka for Kyle on the side. Roy winks and says, “I took a guess.” He ordered a tea for himself, and he turns to chat with Ian as he dips the bag in the hot water.

            The plane shudders. Iggy sniffs the rippling liquid in Pearl’s cup. Pearl whispers, “Kyle” and leans toward Kyle’s shoulder. “I only like strawberry. I don’t like chocolate.”

            Once, in the grocery store, when they were picking out a cake for Shannon’s birthday, Kyle’s mom said kids who don’t like chocolate aren’t kids. She said it like a joke. Kyle’s older than Shannon, and she remembers thinking, If she’s not a kid then what am I?

            Roy gets up for the bathroom. Kyle slips the tiny vodka in her purse. She hands Pearl the pink soda and tells her, “We can switch.”

            Pearl twirls the soda straw. “Like what Daddy makes for Joy,” she says.

            The surprising tastes and smells that evoke old memories are never the ones Kyle thinks they’ll be. She cradles the chocolate drink and takes a slow sip. She’s eight, at the kitchen table after day camp, drinking Nesquik with her pancakes. A nice morning. Simple. Black and white.

            The first mouthful of flavor fades away, and she takes another sip to try and get it back.

 

 

            Kyle has been mostly ignoring her mom’s texts and emails, after a few accusatory phone conversations right when the part-truth broke. So Shannon called, Mom’s envoy, to summon Kyle home for Christmas. She guilted Kyle for acting childish about the separation. “Marriages are long,” she said. “Mistakes happen.” Shannon, who’s twenty months younger than Kyle, and doesn’t know she doesn’t know the full story, and has only been married four years herself.

            When Kyle said it wouldn’t feel like Christmas, Shannon said, “There’s more about Christmas than walks with Dad.” Normal Christmases since Kyle moved away for college have meant walks with her father around the old neighborhood, sometimes several loops a day. He gets sentimental over the holidays, calls her Kylie and waxes nostalgic about when she was young enough that he knew her friends. He always points out new construction and says, They must have just put that up! If he does it to make her feel like the place isn’t changing too much without her, or because he actually hasn’t noticed the changes before, Kyle can never tell.

            Kyle sat on her couch, on the phone, Iggy nudging her with an orange boomerang toy. Shannon said, “Give me one good reason for staying in Houston by yourself.” Her tactic was, You are alone. You are not a girlfriend or a partner or a wife. You are not a caregiver. This was partly what Kyle was afraid of—face to face with Shannon for the whole Christmas week, Shannon taunting, Give me one good reason, and Kyle unloading what she knew about good reasons, making things worse just to prove Shannon’s insulting theories wrong.

            “It’s not as easy as just blaming Mom. You not talking to her is making it worse,” Shannon said. “What am I supposed to tell the boys if you’re not here? They’ll say, Aunt Ky’s not here for Santa, and where am I supposed to tell them that you are? What do you tell kids about something like that?”

 

 

            Kyle and Pearl share a bag of airplane pretzels and take turns feeding Iggy. One from Kyle, one from Pearl. Happy Iggy takes each bite like its own treat. Roy, watching over a magazine, smiles and says, “Poor thing doesn’t know they’re just pretzels.”

            Kyle feeds Iggy a big piece. “I think it’s nice.”

            Pearl cocks her head at Kyle’s brusque tone.

            They all watch Iggy lick the salt from Pearl’s little palm. The dog’s loved salty food since he was a puppy. The vet said he’d grow out of it and he hasn’t yet.

            The plane bumps over a surprise air pocket and Pearl says, “I bet my mom will pick me up from the airport in Boston.”

            They’re somewhere above Charleston—the cartoon arc on the TV map says it’s just over halfway. Roy turns his magazine page, and laughs, like Pearl was kidding, but Kyle rummages in the pretzel bag for a few more broken chips. She hands Pearl a piece carefully. “Was there something that had you thinking she wouldn’t?”

            “She was supposed to visit over the summer,” Pearl says. She holds her hand out for Iggy’s tongue. “We did the bed on the couch all made up for her. The other sheets because that’s her favorite, purple. And she never came and when we called her she said she had to take care of Mr. Petrezzi, but I know they were the days we planned because Daddy let me put the stickers on those days on my room calendar.”

            Roy picks a pretzel piece from up off the floor. He crumbles it absentmindedly into a dust that falls back down. He says, “Your mom will come get you,” and Pearl says “Okay” so easily convinced that Kyle hates to think what will happen if Roy’s simple promise is wrong.

            The guy Kyle really dated, Saul, said once toward the end that needing promises and being in love were opposite ideas, and Kyle asked him what promises he resented making. He told her she was proving his point.

            Pearl says, “Iggy’s thirsty” and holds out her empty soda cup. Kyle pours it full from what’s left in her Nalgene and Pearl tilts the cup for Iggy like a baby bottle. Pearl tells Iggy, “You’re a mammal.”

            Kyle wonders how old Pearl’s mom might be—Kyle’s same age? A Kyle-sized Pearl with Pearl’s stringy hair? Imagine Pearl walking into baggage claim and there’s no one there for her. Kyle hopes it would be true if she said to Pearl, Things shouldn’t be this complicated for you already. But what does she know?

 

 

            Kyle’s dad’s car waits for her in airport parking. He left it when he flew to Reno and mailed her a key. It will be after midnight by the time Kyle finds the car, and warms it up, and drives it out to the house. She’ll park in her dad’s old spot in the driveway, by the tree her mom once planted.

            Everyone will be asleep inside, so Kyle will try to be quiet, keeping the lights off, guiding Iggy upstairs in the dark—muscle memory—and slipping into her old kid bed. Her parents have never changed her room much at all. Still the same ratty stuffies and pre-teen wall posters and striped sheets from high school. The headboard has a worn patch where she used to rub her thumb when she went to sleep nervous, and she’ll try it, to see, but it won’t work like it used to. Iggy will take up the foot space, and Kyle will feel big in a small bed.

            In the morning, Christmas Eve, Kyle will get up first. Before even her sister’s little boys. She’ll put on a pot of coffee and wait in the kitchen for people to come down, elbows on the island counter, studying the water as it boils. The twins’ rocket toys have been left out on the floor by the table, and a pot is soaking in the sink. She’ll have expected them to make a bigger deal of her arrival, but maybe this is better. More real. Maybe it’ll help that it almost feels like a regular day in the familiar house.

 

 

            Over Baltimore, the pilot turns off the cabin lights. Roy pulls his camera out again. He scrolls Pearl through his bright pictures and talks to her about his Hanukkah plans, the gelt and video games he packed for his grandkids’ presents. Pearl squints at the glare of the digital screen in the dark. Before she can ask about one image, Roy is on to the next.

            He describes his daughter’s farm in Sherborn where his family is gathering. “It’s like the Cape without the water.”

            Pearl asks, “What’s the Cape mean?”

            Roy smiles. He picks up his jacket and tosses it over his shoulders like a cape cape.

            Pearl touches the jacket fabric.

            Kyle says, “She’s actually asking.”

            A man across the aisle falls asleep. His head tips back, and he starts to snore. Looking at him, Pearl points one finger at Roy’s camera and another at the overhead compartment and asks, “Am I allowed to get something out?” It’s clear by the way she receives her backpack from the attendant that the bag is light, and she extracts a single plastic folder. She lays the bag down on the floor and says to Iggy, “A pillow.”

            Kyle reaches for the seat light so Pearl can see.

            Pearl tilts the folder toward Kyle’s seat.

            The folder looks empty at first. Pearl pries back the pocket to reveal an assortment of photographs tucked below the flap. They’re softened, worn, but clean. No fingerprints. Handled with great care. Like Kyle’s mom with Kodaks after childhood trips—By the edges! Pearl searches for a specific photo, filing through them individually, and about ten prints in she stops and says, “This one!” She positions it under the spotlight. An image of a man asleep on a couch, a woman behind him doing bunny ears. Pearl whispers, “Cody was sleeping!” and holds the photo up toward the snoring man across the aisle, like, They look similar.

            Kyle says, “Can I?”

            She accepts the folder as if it’s fragile. The photos are glossy, on professional stock. She can’t think when she last held a developed picture, and it’s unsettling. Time-traveling, almost.

            There are school photos of friends, little rectangles with kid signatures on the back. The mismatched rectangle sizes and backdrop colors make what Pearl said about changing several schools feel real.

            There are a few candid group shots. One of Pearl at a bonfire in a whole group of children, the rest of them older. Middle or early high school, even. The most teenaged-looking girl with a plastic cup in her hands. One photo in a raggedy waterpark, a young woman dangling a laughing, bathing-suited Pearl off a deep-end diving board.

            “At night in the summer,” Pearl says. “Me and Nina at the pool.”

            In the photos of Pearl by herself, she looks so eerily unattended. Alone in a field with a water gun, shot from across a busy street. Posing thumbs-up for a New Dawn “All Gave Some” plaque. Cutting her own hair with brown hedge shears. Kyle accidentally presses her thumb on the haircut picture and the oil of her fingerprint sticks to the picture gloss when she pulls it back, leaving a smudge.

            Kyle tells Pearl, “I’m sorry.”

            Roy reaches for the waterpark picture. “Fun in the sun!”

            If Kyle could just shake him and say, You’re blind! You’re blind! Imagine Pearl packing all of these to bring with her, like show and tell. Mom, this is where I live. This is where I go to school. This is when they waved at me across a speeding boulevard. But, at the same time, who looks better—the mom-person who wasn’t there when these were taken, or the one who was?

            Kyle says, “Thank you for letting me see.” She hooks a wary finger through Iggy’s leather collar and tugs. It’s not her business. If she disapproves, she can’t tell of who. She has Pearl walk her through each photo one by one until the plane lands in Boston, and still she isn’t sure she’s done Pearl’s unknowing vulnerability justice.

 

 

            Christmas Eve morning, Shannon will come down first, and then her husband with the boys, and then Kyle’s mom. Kyle will hug her mom because it would look weird not to. Her mom will smell the same, the Baby Soft perfume her dad’s been gifting since forever. She’ll still have her ring on.

            Other than asking about the trip, Kyle’s mom will mostly hang back, watching the twins wrestle with Iggy. Kyle will pour Shannon coffee and tell her, “I did the roast half and half.”

            Shannon will say, “Two years ago we couldn’t get you up before noon.” She’ll point to their mom in the corner, mouthing, Talk to her.

            Kyle’s nephews say Houston like Ooston. “What’s far away as Ooston? Santa’s far as Ooston?” The T-shirts Kyle gave them last year still fit, so she must have guessed their size too big before, which is funny—they seem like babies now, compared to the fresh idea of Pearl on the plane. Kyle will tell them they have to come visit Texas and see it’s not so far, her brother-in-law looking at her like, We’ve heard that before.

            When the boys say, “Aunt Ky plays Duplos?” and Kyle’s about to say yes, Shannon will tell them, “Not Aunt Ky, boys. Go easy on Aunt Ky. What did we say?”

            There will be a lull in the late morning, the time Kyle and her dad would usually take one of their Christmas walks. Kyle will think about driving his car around the neighborhood instead, but then the idea seems cheesy. Like what she might have done if she was mad in high school. She’ll go from room to room noting the persisting signs of him. She imagined the house scrubbed Dad-clean, cut and dry, but he’s still in the pictures on the wall. His cereal’s still in the pantry. Some of his coats are still in the closet, tucked toward the back.

            Shannon will find Kyle in the Florida room, thumbing through an old Guitar World of his, and she’ll ask, “Where’s Mom?” accusingly, like Kyle’s banished her mother somewhere.

            Kyle will say, “I’ll go look.”

 

 

            They’re the first ones to deboard, because of their row. Pearl leads Kyle and Iggy down the jetway, saying, “You get to meet her now!” and Roy trails behind them, on the phone, unconcerned. The more Pearl skips and pulls her along, the more it convinces Kyle that even if Pearl’s mom does show up, she’ll be late or unexcited in a way that will complicate Pearl’s familiarity with disappointment.

            They emerge from the passage and Pearl’s mom is there, beside a TSA agent, shifting from one waiting foot to another. She’s just different enough from what Kyle was picturing to be surprising. Despite her hard face, Kyle guesses the woman is a few years younger than her—around Shannon’s age. She has a lanyard around her neck that matches Pearl’s. She has well drawn-on eyebrows that have smeared a bit throughout her day, and a shoulder-bag that saddles her skinny frame. Her clothes are black shoes and black jeans and a white dress shirt that bows open between the buttons, the kind of outfit that is probably a uniform and makes Kyle guilty in her leisurely plane clothes. Pearl’s mom looks tired and nervous. She holds a pink milkshake, in a cup with an orange TSA sticker, like she went through special screening to get it past security.

            Pearl sees her and runs forward. They hug, a tight hug, and stay holding each other for several seconds. Pearl’s mom says tenderly, “You’re taller,” and she wipes her cheek. She touches a finger to the knee rip in Pearl’s jeans. She hands Pearl the strawberry drink.

            Pearl says, “You remembered.”

            Iggy pulls his leash and Kyle holds him back, embarrassed at the choke in her own throat. Roy strolls past waving a contented, told-you-so goodbye.

            Pearl calls Kyle over, saying, “Kyle’s from my flight! And her dog!”

            Kyle inches forward, trying to keep a respectful distance. She snaps for Iggy to sit. She wraps her right hand around her left wrist to cover the fancy new watch, but then she’s afraid Pearl’s mom saw her do it. Pearl’s mom frowns and puts a protective hand on Pearl’s shoulder.

            Kyle says, “She did great,” and it sounds presumptuous out loud. “I mean, the plane didn’t scare her is all I meant.”

            Pearl’s mom says, “They assigned you to sit with her?”

            “I think they just thought she’d like my dog.” Kyle coils Iggy’s leash tight around her arm. “All she talked about was how excited she is for Boston. For your guys’ Christmas.”

            Pearl’s mom says, “I know.” She hoists the heavy purse on her shoulder, ready to leave.

            Kyle stands there with them. She knows she should say goodbye, and she doesn’t understand what she’s waiting for.

 

 

            Kyle will find her mom in bed, on top of the sheets, curled away from the door. Kyle won’t immediately step forward, but she also won’t back away. She’ll hold out her mug and say, “Do you need coffee?”

            It will be clear her mom’s been crying by the careening way she says Kyle’s name.

            Iggy, who follows Kyle in, will hop onto the end of the bed and sit, glancing between them. Kyle’s mom won’t shoo him off like she might have last year. Kyle will walk around to the other side of the mattress—her dad’s side—and get in. Face to face.

            Kyle will scoot forward, reluctantly. Nervously. She’ll budge one hand between her mom’s head and the pillow, wrap it around her mom’s back. She’ll use her other hand to lift her mom’s top arm and drape it across her own shoulders. They’ll lie that way a few moments, each of them holding with one arm and being held with another.

            “Iggy’s on my feet,” Kyle’s mom will say. “It’s warm.”

            “She’s good at that.”

            They’ll both wait for the other to say something more. Downstairs, the boys yelling something and Shannon yelling back. The metronome clock on Kyle’s mom’s dresser ticking. The stiff pillowcase cotton crinkling under the weight of their two heads.

            Kyle’s mom will say, “I know you’re mad at me.”

            “Yeah.”

            The clock clicks. Her mom does look pretty when she cries. Have men told her that? Kyle will wonder. How many? And who? And where? And when?

            “I’m mad at me too,” Kyle’s mom will tell her.

            “I can see that.”

            One of them squeezing the other one. Hard to tell which, their long, close limbs.

            “The last time you climbed in bed with me,” Kyle’s mom will say, “you were small enough to tickle my shins with your socks.” A shaky breath. “It doesn’t feel like Christmas.”

            Kyle will study her mom’s sad, pretty face. Up this close, it’s hard to tell the parts that have aged and the ones that haven’t. Kyle will say, “I miss him too.” She’ll wish her mom would say she’s sorry. She’ll want her to say it the two ways—I apologize, and also, I know you do sweetie. There, there. Child and mother, mother and child. Both, at the same time.

            Kyle’s mom asks, “Will you let me talk to you about it?”

 

 

            While they linger at the gate, Pearl’s mom says, “—Well.” And Kyle wishes she could apologize to this tired, unknown woman. For interrupting the moment. For having believed she might not come. But Kyle also wishes there was a way she could ask, What kind of mother are you? Half in the shameful, condescending way of still judging for the bits she does know, and half in the way of really wanting—needing—to understand about the give and take. The moving away, and the showing up. The strawberry milkshake remembered. The long road getting here. The full story.

 

 

            With her head crooked on her arm on the pillow, Kyle’s neck will ache, but she won’t move. She’ll stay, hurt, listening, for longer than she would have thought she’d be willing to.

 
 
 
 

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Two Poems

How It Is Now, How It Was

as a boy panning the stream behind my house 
         for the minnows that drilled 
down the current in schools. They moved as one—
         muscular, thick, sequined—
so if I dipped down, I could nearly scoop 
         handfuls of their bounty up

to my chest like some dream of my hunter ancestors
          lost in the currents 
of my DNA. I imagine desire like this. 
          But whenever I stabbed 
my hand into that glacier water, they dispersed 
          at once, every one. And this entertained me 

until the day I did catch one, held its slim, jeweled body 
          inside my fist. The thrill 
of its tail flickering inside my palm 
          like candlelight, like a snake’s forked tongue
until I unclenched my hand to let it go and saw
          it was already gone.

Nurture

 

As souls in heaven, before inhabiting their bodies, children choose 

           their mothers. I heard my mother say this exactly twice. 

Once after we had fought in the car to cut the silent ride home. 

           And once on the phone with my aunt after my cousin shot himself 

through the mouth. I was born after a summer solstice 

           under a new moon. Rain thickened the green outside my window. 

Above my crib two portraits of angels hung.
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What the Dolls See

I come from a long line of nervous women. The nervousness started when my great granny’s brain cracked. I never met her, but here’s what I’ve been told: it was the Great Depression. She and hers were down to cornmeal and dandelions. She chased her husband with a meat cleaver until he promised that he and the kids would go without supper. She wanted to buy genuine taffeta. She wanted a pretty dress.

 

And my granny, she had broken thoughts, too. When my mama was pregnant with me, my granny climbed the sugar maple in her yard. Before Mama burned bridges with the men in the family, they swore Granny mistook the telephone wire for a branch. My mama said otherwise. Mama said Granny eyed it, and right before she took hold, she said: Goodbye, little life. She shook with the spirit.

 

Two weeks ago, my mama joined them in their crumbling. I told her I graduated and that made me a woman. I told her I was leaving Tennessee. I told her I was going north because I was in love. That was that. She said, “Dumplin, he don’t love you. He ain’t even a man.”

 

I bit my tongue. He drove a mustang. He had thick sideburns.

 

“He only likes you ‘cause you got that exotic look.”

 

I said, “You just don’t like him ‘cause he’s white and ‘cause he drinks up all the Coke.”

 

“Dumplin, you watch your mouth.”

 

“You don’t even got a man.”

 

She set my baby sister down, safe in a swaddle. She chased me, tank-top tugged down. Tried to squirt me with her milk. Pinched nipples—yellowed streams of milk from her chest. I hid in the safest part of the trailer. Her closet. The door gets jammed sometimes. She hunkered and tugged at the knob. That stuck sheet of pine was my savior. She gave up and sprayed the wood until Nevaeh cranked up her colic. Mama’s footsteps creaked away. Nevaeh’s whines rattled. We haven’t seen our mama since. She went with my man to Ohio.

 

It’s just us. Baby Nevaeh and me. We splay on the futon. She nurses the bottle just fine. I feed her until she wiggles away from the flow. The first time, I hurt her. Her squalling carried into the blue minutes of dawn. That lip-burn better not scar. We’re okay now. I nestle her in my arms, breathe in the vanilla malt on her breath. I coo. “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Your mama is a fucking turd.” I rock her into dreams. “And since she up and went cuckoo, I’m gonna stay and care for you.” I settle her in the crook of the futon. What goes on behind those pretty eyelids, dark and thin as petals? What do those flittering eyes see?

 

My dreams have been haunted with mad women. Mostly it’s Mama sneaking up the slope of our yard in shadows. Meat cleaver swinging from her grip. Sometimes I’m the one who’s lost it, pushing Nevaeh into bathwater murky as sin. But I’m not like my family.

 

I dig in my old toy bin by the recliner and pick a Barbie. Her white face tattooed with purple marker. Hair chopped short. Clothes long-lost. I prop her on the windowsill behind the lace curtain. Beside her, a Cabbage Patch doll I stationed yesterday. They sit on pink doilies and watch the yard. At the end of the gravel driveway, the postal woman stuffs letters in the box. Her stomach bulges. Her mullet stiff in the breeze. She studies the window, shakes her head.

 

I pop in a VHS tape: Labyrinth. While it rewinds, I cook popcorn on the stove. The cabinets and pantry will hollow soon. Mama left her WIC papers, food stamps. I’ll need to get a job. I’ll keep Nevaeh fat. I sit on the carpet and start the movie with salted fingers.

 

A soft tapping on the door. I peer through the peephole. A plump, light-skinned girl stands in a windbreaker. Her hair tied in thick plaits. A Blow Pop pocketed in her cheek. She lives in a fenced-in house across the street. She knocks, louder.

 

I swing open the door and hush her. “I got a baby sleeping.”

 

“Why you got dolls in the window?” She smacks her tongue against the sucker.

 

“Business is better when it’s minded,” I say.

 

“My name’s Elma. What’s your name?” She cranes her neck past me, into the living room. “Can I hold your baby?”

 

“She’s sleeping,” I whisper.

 

“Hey, you got any ice cream?”

 

“You sure don’t need none.” I step in front of her.

 

She backs onto the porch. “That ain’t your baby.” She crunches the candy to shards. “My mama said that your mama is a easy heifer.”

 

Nevaeh cries. I shut the door on Elma and scoop Neveah from the futon.

 

Elma presses her face against the windowpane. She fogs the glass with her words. “What’s a heifer?”

 

By the time I get settled, the sister on screen tries to know the difference between a truth and a lie. Nevaeh sucks butter from my fingers. The movie ends at sunset. Dusk reaches up to the porch, to the windows. I lock the door and turn on the porch light. All that swimming darkness. I scoot with Neveah pressed to my chest, to the toy bin. A clay girl, strawberry-sized. Her cheeks freckled. Her arms pocked by the old gnaw of my baby teeth. She joins the others on the windowsill. I cuddle Nevaeh on the spread futon. We sleep.

 

In the morning, I give Nevaeh a gentle wash in the kitchen sink. Her soft scent: lavender, baby powder. I dress her in yellow cotton. She babbles in her stroller. Before we step out, I check my pockets—ID, WIC, pocketknife. The walk to the grocery store isn’t far, but if anyone tries anything, I’ll stab. If the sharpness won’t kill them in the moment, the rust will, later. I wait by the door and steady my heartbeat. No demons stalk in daylight.

 

The sun bakes the porch. It rained last night. The tulipwood swells, dark. I pull the door halfway shut before I see it—below the window, a teacup with a chipped brim. It sits on a saucer. And in that cup, ripped dogwood blossoms and twigs float in rainwater. I rush back inside with Nevaeh and lock the door. My hands shake in the toy bin. I fill the windowsill with watching eyes: porcelain, paper, wood. A doll with acorns for eyes. A little girl with chewed bubblegum eyes. The last doll is a nesting doll. Eyes on the outside, eyes on the inside. I place her in the middle.

 

We step out. The stroller’s sunshade protects Nevaeh’s eyes. She sucks a binky. I lock the door, tug the knob three times, slip the key in my pocket. I kick the teacup and saucer. They shatter on the sun-bleached lawn. The day is humid.

 

The air conditioner of IGA kisses our skin. My muscles ache. My breathing throbs. I walk slow in the coolness, lean my weight into the stroller. Sleepy saxophone notes slide out the speakers. I push past dewed produce, by towers of toilet paper, keeping distance from strangers. The white women with beauty parlor curls smile at Nevaeh with pity in their eyes. I shop: a pound of cheese, low-fat milk, whole wheat cereal. Nine cans of formula. A stocker with a stain of a mustache helps me carry the food to the cashier. The cashier is a little older than me with glossed lips.

 

“This is WIC,” I say.

 

The stocker lingers, helps stuff plastic bags. The cashier totals. I give her the papers and ID.

 

The stocker peers. “Name doesn’t match,” he says.

 

“She’s my sister. My mama’s sick,” I say.

 

“Have your mother come in,” he says.

 

“She’s on her deathbed,” I say.

 

“I’ll get a manager.” He huffs and struts away.

 

The cashier whispers: “There’s a shift change at five. I work a double today. If you can come back around six, I’ll ring this up for you, no problem.” She gives a half-dimpled smile.

 

My thanks: pressed lips, a nod. We leave our food in the bags, walk back down the backroad to our trailer. The lock twists open with a click. I undress Nevaeh in the dim living room. She’s drenched with sweat. Her tiny body lolls. I settle her on the futon in front of a dusty box fan. She takes the bottle. I eat macaroni. She sucks the cheese from my fingers. At 5:45 Nevaeh slips into sleep. I work the binky in her mouth and tuck her into my old bassinet. “I won’t be long,” I whisper. I lock the door and pound my feet on mud, to asphalt, to tiled floor.

 

When I reach the base of our yard, the bags sag from my wrist and arms. My back and shoulders full of ache. Elma crouches on the porch below the window. I toss the bags to the ground and jump up the two steps to face her.

 

She squints at me. “You broke my mama’s teacup.”

 

“What the hell you doing?”

 

She sprinkles bits of bermudagrass in a cup of milk. “The dolls told me they was thirsty. The dolls told me, Elma, come feed us tea.”

 

“They did not,” I say.

 

She sprinkles more grass and stirs with her finger. “They woke me up last night. They was mad. They told me you don’t help their thirst.”

 

“Go on and get before I tell your mama.”

 

“What’s a heifer?” she asks.

 

I give her a mad-mama look. I give her a look that tells her I’m three seconds from beating her with my flip-flop. She scurries away. I cart the groceries in and go straight to Nevaeh. She looks at me, eyes wide as quarters. Her cheeks tear blotched.

 

“Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. I’m the sorriest.”

 

I plant feathered kisses on her forehead until she whines. She takes the bottle. While she sips in the bassinet, I harvest our mama’s things: jeans cut into shorts, tank tops crusted with milk, balled rubber bands twisted with her dead ends. A ceramic ice cream cone full of pennies. I dump the change on the floor and toss the cone in a trash bag with the rest of her things. A pair of scissors. A globe of yarn. There’s no more room in the bag. Hell, everything in this place she owns. I tie the bag, run down the porch, to the backyard. I toss it to the hem of the forest.

 

I talk to the bag. “Tomorrow, I’ll get a job. What I need you for?” I shoot spit to the mud. “What Nevaeh need you for?”

 

I fall asleep, naked, to Nevaeh’s light breathing and the lullaby on TV: You remind me of the babe. The babe with the power. The power of Voodoo. You do.

 

A sharp clanging rips me from my Mama-with-hatchet nightmare. I jolt up, throw on mama’s robe. The clock above the flickering TV tells me it’s three in the morning. The finished VHS tape sends out a steady bleat. I kill the TV’s power. Another clang outside. The rummaging sound leads me and the jut of my pocketknife into the black. Silence. Plastic crinkles. I run to the backyard. Elma hunkers over strewn clothes, rolls the ice cream cone between palms.

 

“What’s this mess?” I ask.

 

“The dolls told me there was a treasure.”

 

“You lie.” I fold the pocketknife. “You been watching me.”

 

She yawns. “I only been watching my dreams.” She pushes past me.

 

“That ain’t yours.” I reach for the cone. My thumbnail snags on her wrist.

 

She squeals. “You made blood.” She slams the cone to the ground. It chips on a stone. “You the heifer, ain’t you?”

 

Her feet pitter-patter away. I scoop up the mess, pile it onto the torn bag. Something leaps near my foot. I fork my fingertips through the dewed blades of grass until I feel it. The bumped skin of a cricket frog.

 

“Hello, little friend.” I carry his chirps inside and put him in the bassinet.

 

All the sleepiness leaves my bones. I shuffle to the kitchen. The magnet calendar on the fridge stops me from searching for pickles. Today is my birthday. The cabinets have what I need to mix. The sun peaks past the horizon when I finish: sweet cornbread with chocolate icing.

 

I take a tea candle out my room and put it on the cushion of chocolate. I suck down air and blow. The nineteenth wish of my life: let me give Neveah the care I’ve never known. I leave the treat on the counter and go back to my babies. The frog hides between two stuffed bears. I smear a little icing on the feet of the toys. The frog stays. “You just eat that when you get hungry,” I say. I cuddle with Neveah. Before I can close my eyes, she screams.

 

My morning is swampy diapers, warm bottles, two baths, back pats. At noon, she shuts her eyes and mouth. I find a white dress from our church days. I haven’t worn this since I graduated middle school. I squeeze in. My chest hugged flat. The short sleeves push out my arm fat. I slip into a black, hooded jacket. One sleeve is burned at the wrist. If I push the stroller just right, no one will notice. I nibble a slice of cornbread in the bathroom while I pretty my face. My choice of shoes: flip-flops, a pair of sneakers. Flip-flops will do.

 

Something thuds in the living room. I bolt into the hallway, to the futon. Nevaeh rests with a bottle poking out her lips. She’s safe. I look for what fell. The nesting doll, her innards split open. I put her together and return her to her post. The door is locked. The yard is empty. My steps can’t be heavy in this home. Something always breaks.

 

The mean heat of the afternoon makes me sweat. The sweat makes my skin lick the polyester. I itch. Nevaeh’s stroller wobbles over pebbles and sticks on the backroad. We cross the burning parking lot, into IGA. I go straight to customer service. A man with a moon belly stands at the register.

 

“I’d like to apply for a job.”

 

His thin-lipped smile stretches.

 

I stop filling out the application three times to feed Nevaeh, to change her. Emergency contact: N/A. Have you ever worked before? All my life.

 

“Come in a couple of days for the interview.” He takes the papers. “You’ll want to find a babysitter.”

 

I nod. The frog will keep her company. The dolls will keep her safe. I stroll her out into the early evening. The sky pink as taffy. When we reach the driveway, Nevaeh sputters out grunts. By the time I get her to the futon, her wailing hurts me. She won’t take the bottle. Rocking doesn’t soothe her.

 

“What you want?”

 

Her screaming eats at me. Her words formless as poor dough, but I know what she says. “You ain’t mine. You ain’t nothing but a heifer. You ain’t nothing.” Our fight is worse than throwing knuckles. She cries, I stroke her back. She wiggles away from milk, I sway. She calms a few minutes past midnight. She rests with puffy eyes.

 

I pace. My nerves won’t settle. I flick on the porch light. A mourning dove coos. That lonely sound feels like cold marbles in my belly. The frog still nestles between the stuffed bears. I take one. “She’ll be right back,” I say. I put her beneath the window, facing the wall. Pine and corkwood can’t block the sight. An extra pair of eyes offers me peace.

 

When our mama would get in a bad mood, she’d light a roll-up cigarette and fill the home with stink. In her room, the machine sits on a nightstand. My sloppy hands gut the first. Dry tobacco spills. The second cigarette is more paper than tobacco. I bring it along with a lighter to the door. I tap my pocket. Knife there, folded and ready. I unlock the door and open—just a crack. Nevaeh doesn’t stir. I blow smoke out into the sliver of night. It burns to the filter. I step on the porch to toss it.

 

Puddles of honey on the porch. Crowds of ants in a frenzy-march. Elma is a girl full of wrong. She’ll say, “The dolls want honey for tea.” The dolls don’t want anything to do with her. She knows that and hates me for it. She gave me bugs.

 

I drop the ember and filter to the porch. I creep as fast as I can to the bassinet. I cup the frog. “You a gift,” I whisper. It chirps. I go outside. The door clicks behind me. The frog squirms. I keep a tight grip and run down the driveway, across the street, to Elma’s mailbox. “Remember, you nothing but a gift.” I try to make it quick. The frog twitches after the second stab. My pocketknife shines inky in the starlight. I put his leaking body in the mailbox, on top of a grocery store’s ad paper.

 

I leave the knife in the kitchen sink to soak. I join Nevaeh on the futon. She reaches out in her sleep, brushes my mouth with her fingertips. “I hope you dream about nice things,” I say. I kiss her nails. “But don’t dream too nice. Don’t see pearls and taffeta. Dream about what you got, or you’ll wake up sad, baby.”

 

I wake up to the sugared singing of birds. Nevaeh’s eyes wander around the ceiling. I lift her. “You want breakfast, don’t you?” I bounce her in my arms, walk over to the window. A heat bubbles in my chest. I’ve never felt a fear like this in my life. Elma’s newest gift to me: on the porch, a wooden puppet sits with crossed legs. Ants trail up and down and up her stiff limbs. Her head is fixed up. Glossed eyes, knowing and never-lived, aim at the window. I meet her gaze.

 

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i don’t know

 

if i’ve ever been happy

 

joy for me, a Rectory

 

built next

 

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Fugues

Pumpkins rattling in the bed of a wagon. Paper crinkling around hot apple turnovers. Hay crunching under the weight of children crowding around the teenage girls serving them hot cider. Marjorie’s friend Raylene hummed through a bite of caramel-drizzled donut, nodding as she licked the fine dusting of brown sugar and cinnamon that clung to her lips. She’d waited over half an hour for this, inching past pies and cakes and generous jars of jams and butters made with fruit grown right there in Wilson’s Orchard. Raylene had suggested the outing—clearly intending it as a date but never technically using that word—and Marjorie, just fifteen days shy of her fifty-third birthday, had acquiesced in spite of the fact that she hadn’t been on a first date since her late husband Greg bought them tickets to Dune in 1984. She was twenty-one then, and broke, and the fact that he took her to Dune charmed her, as Raylene’s pumpkin patch charmed her, because she hadn’t expected to be known so well, so soon. She had been smiling gently since they arrived and was cradling a cup of apple cider to her chest, inhaling the warm, fragrant steam, when her phone started buzzing in her coat pocket, where she couldn’t feel it. Raylene had to tell her.

 

“What? Oh. Sorry, I thought I turned it off.”

 

“It’s been ringing for a full minute.”

 

“Stupid thing,” Marjorie muttered, shifting her cup to her right hand so she could take the smartphone out with her left. This particular phone was brand new—a much-needed upgrade that she’d been putting off for years while she debated getting rid of her phone entirely—so it still felt large and unwieldy to her, its smooth, flat face looking more to her like a tinted window on a car, maybe, or a sheet of thin black ice on the road. She flashed the screen. “See? Unknown. Probably just some telemarketer.”

 

Raylene groaned softly around her donut. “You want some?”

 

Its last shallow curve appealed to Marjorie, and she broke off a piece just small enough to tuck into her mouth like a marshmallow in front of a campfire. While Raylene ducked behind her toward a trashcan, Marjorie found herself longing for the smell of leaves burning inside of a steel drum and the sound of crackling as paper was tossed into the flame. This orchard was just remote enough and just spare enough for her to feel that she’d stepped back into her childhood and found herself standing at the edge of a wooded forest, crunching acorns with her boots. From where she stood, she could see hundreds of apple trees, dozens of dirt paths, and two large pumpkin patches speckled with orange fruits that appeared to glow in the soft autumn light. “Shall we?” she asked, finding Raylene suddenly beside her.

 

Without discussing it, they agreed to go the long way around, winding past the pond, then picking their way through the orchard itself, taking great care not to step on one of the many fallen fruits left to rot along the path. Raylene leaned close to whisper, “Smell that fermentation,” and wished aloud that she’d brought a bit of whiskey to spike their apple cider. Its warmth had begun to dissipate, but Marjorie still clung to her cup, finding its presence soothing, oddly, and familiar. In the course of their walk she’d learned that Raylene had two brothers (one older, one younger) but didn’t have any nieces or nephews and had lost both her parents to pneumonia within two months of each other. “They hadn’t spent more than a day apart in sixty years.”

 

Marjorie smiled tearfully. Greg had died just three years before—from kidney failure, not pneumonia—and she’d never let go of him. Sometimes, she still curled up in his big red chair and read him the newspaper. She wondered what he would say of this middle-aged woman who wore ripped jeans and bomber jackets and thought nothing of turning fifty in December. Careful. She’s the kind that likes to make herself at home.

 

Raylene had just picked up a pumpkin. “What about this one? I could see it with a face.”

 

Marjorie shook her head. “Too soft on the bottom. It’ll rot in less than a week.”

 

“You’re right.” Raylene nodded, turning the pumpkin over. “Good eye.”

 

Pickings were slim, and what pumpkins were left were typically small and misshapen, the lingering little runts that had survived weeks of culling by adults and children alike. Marjorie had thought there’d be more left, and walked around the patch with one hand in her pocket, toeing the smaller ones sullenly with her boots. Nobody else appeared to be interested in the pumpkins. The families had all gone for a ride on the tractor train, and when Marjorie heard any of them at all, it was only because a kid had tripped and skinned his knee on a rock. Raylene was kneeling, lifting a decent-looking specimen by the stem, when Marjorie’s phone started buzzing again. “Geez,” Raylene said. “Someone’s persistent.” She eyed Marjorie carefully. “Do you have a boyfriend I don’t know about?”

 

Marjorie shook her head, frowning down at her phone, which told her she’d received over six hundred texts from an unknown sender. I know you’re with her, the first read. I know you lied to me. Marjorie’s mind immediately flashed to Sharon, her work friend and technical assistant, to whom she’d lied in order to skip brunch and spend time with Raylene. But Sharon would’ve been overjoyed—ecstatic, really—to hear that she was going on a real date; she couldn’t possibly have written Ann said she saw you at the Co-op. Marjorie dismissed the possibility that these texts were meant for her after she read that. She didn’t know any Ann, and furthermore she’d never been to the Co-op with Raylene, so no one could’ve seen them there. Marjorie tucked her phone into her pocket, determined to ignore the texts and enjoy her time with Raylene, whose bright and complicated happiness seemed even more attractive after the little scare she’d had. She marveled at the ease with which Raylene inched into traffic and headed toward Marjorie’s house, as if she’d done this a thousand times before. This could be my life, Marjorie thought, then turned to look at Raylene and realized it already was.

 

 

It took them the better part of the afternoon just to carve, hollow, and rig the pumpkins on Marjorie’s porch with lights, and in all that time she forgot the messages only once: early, around 1:30, when Raylene gasped and said they should roast the pumpkin seeds and eat them as snacks. This prompted a bubbly half hour in which they sifted through the pumpkin pulp, plucked out the seeds, then attempted to rinse them off in a plastic colander ill-suited for the job. Cheeks flushed, hands sticky with juice, Raylene leaned in and with a faint smile invited Marjorie to meet her lips with her own. The kiss was gentle, close-mouthed, and lingering, and when it was over, Marjorie was so surprised that all she could say was, “I’ll heat up the oven.”

 

Raylene smiled at the jars of cardamom pods on the counter, brushing her thumb over the little red dish where Marjorie kept her plums. “You have a beautiful kitchen,” she said.

 

Marjorie shrugged, suddenly shy. “Greg liked to cook. I’m afraid I’m pretty helpless.”

 

“I doubt that.” With wet fingers, she touched the oyster shells stacked in one corner of the windowsill, where their dark, nacreous shells appeared almost bruised in the light. Marjorie liked their white ripples, their way of looking just like an eye encased in bone, and collected them like some people collect vases or coins. Greg had treated her to oysters whenever there was reason to celebrate: her promotion to Audio & Lighting Engineer at The Englert, his cleanest bill of health to date, the birth of their only granddaughter, Lily. Every occasion called for a different recipe. Fried oysters with tomato remoulade. Grilled oysters with a citrusy fennel butter. Smoked oyster chowder, and the best: raw oysters with a shallot rosé mignonette. “You ate raw oysters in Iowa? That’s brave,” Raylene said.

 

“I haven’t died yet.”

 

Raylene pointed to the pumpkin seeds, smirking. “These should go in the oven.”

 

While the seeds baked, Marjorie and Raylene dug around in the basement, looking for the Halloween decorations Marjorie had collected over the years. “Greg used to do all the organizing down here. I can’t find anything anymore.” He’d fancied himself a tinkerer, and the basement was littered with his unfinished projects: stalled watches halfway fixed, rocking chairs minus the rock, pebbles he’d forgotten to run through a tumbler to unlock their little gems for their daughter, Anita, the professional jeweler. “Anita was always a princess for Halloween—she loved tiaras. All those little stones, you know.”

 

Raylene brushed the dust off a box. “You said Anita was coming to visit?”

 

“She’s flying in on the 29th.” It was a tradition of theirs: dinner on the 30th—for Marjorie’s birthday—and then trick-or-treating with Lily. “It’s safer here than in New York, you know. Plus, Lily being here gives me a good reason to go out. It’s never as fun staying in and playing haunted house.” Marjorie put on a pair of slinky glasses and pulled the eyeballs straight ahead of her until the steel coils began to creak. She thought this would make Raylene laugh, and when it didn’t she finally heard the disappointment in Raylene’s question and knew she’d been hoping to ask her out to dinner for her birthday. She sifted through the decorations, searching for something to say.

 

“What is this?” Raylene lifted a kind of marionette out of the box.

 

Marjorie laughed, as if it should be obvious. “That’s Mr. Chainsaw. Greg liked to rig it so he’d dance down the steps whenever someone opened the front door; really freaked the neighbors out.” Mr. Chainsaw was a grinning, dancing skeleton standing just over two feet tall and wearing a brown plastic apron with a set of miniature gardening gloves. His chainsaw could be controlled with wires that pulled it up and down. Raylene mimicked the roaring sound as she faked slashing at Marjorie, who shielded herself with her arms. “Oh no, Mr. Chainsaw, don’t hurt me!”

 

“Give me all your candy!”

 

“But I don’t have any candy! All I have is pumpkin seeds!”

 

“That’s right,” Raylene breathed. “I almost forgot.”

 

Once the pumpkin seeds had cooled and Mr. Chainsaw was in position, Marjorie set out a pair of comfortable sienna-colored floor cushions so she and Raylene could sit on the floor of her living room and share a bottle of hard cider she’d bought at the Orchard. Marjorie was quiet then, listening to Raylene describe her job in the Admissions Office and thinking, all the while, of how loud her house used to be, of the rocks turning into gems, of Anita playing with her friends in the front yard, up in her room, and back in the kitchen, where Greg had taught them how to make pancakes, letting them clatter the bowls and whisk the eggs and spill milk on the floor; she hadn’t invited anybody new into their house since he died. It had been silent.

 

Raylene pointed to the sunset. “What color do you think that is?”

 

“Coral. Persimmon. Rust.” Marjorie’s phone beeped, but she ignored it.

 

“Whoever that is, they must really want to talk to you.”

 

“Oh, I think it just needs to be charged.” Marjorie didn’t check. She couldn’t bear it.

 

Her unwillingness to acknowledge her phone seemed to signal something to Raylene. She said, “Well, I should probably head out,” then finished her cider, glancing around the living room as if it were a fantasy she’d been indulging in despite knowing it could never really come true.

 

“You could stay a while,” Marjorie said, but Raylene shook her head, disengaging.

 

“It’s okay. I have to feed my dog, anyway.”

 

“You have a dog?” Marjorie followed Raylene into the foyer.

 

Raylene’s smile flashed and disappeared. “Yeah. Lucky. The dumb lug.”

 

Only then did Marjorie think to grab Raylene’s arm and prevent her from saying goodbye. When her fingers closed on the cool brown leather of Raylene’s jacket, Marjorie wasn’t quite sure what she’d say or how she’d fare under Raylene’s reserved yet hopeful scrutiny, but somehow she found the sense of mind to ask Raylene out to dinner that week. Her relief when Raylene said yes made it easier to face the messages on her phone.

 

653.

 

Marjorie made herself a pot of tea, snuggled into her favorite blanket, and began the slow process of unraveling the story behind these texts: they’d been sent by a woman; this woman was dating or had dated another woman, Sophie, and it had gone badly or perhaps was still going badly (she couldn’t be sure). What she did know was this: the texts were completely untraceable—there was no name, no callback number, nothing, just that day’s date (October 15th) and the timestamp (11:42 a.m.) indicating that all 653 messages had arrived at the exact same moment, like a swarm of bees. Her phone wasn’t supposed to do that. In fact, technical support said this was impossible, and yet—they couldn’t find Unknown either. Her messages had left her phone, bounced around a satellite, and arrived unexpectedly in a stranger’s coat pocket, where her cries of love and longing and frustration were wasted. Marjorie read the messages again and again, but always came to the same conclusion: that it was over.

 

Whatever relationship Unknown thought she was having, it was with a void.

 

 

Marjorie never stopped thinking about the messages. On her morning walks, as the winter light stretched like icicles through the clouds, she considered the corners of her town, seeing it as if through Unknown’s eyes. Here, the store where she’d picked out a birthday card; there, the café where she’d waited two hours just to realize her girlfriend wasn’t coming. Marjorie recognized all the landmarks: the bar on Market Street, that park with the swings, even the small hospital where Marjorie had seen the very same handprint as the sender (on a window by the children’s ward, on the inside of the glass, where Marjorie thought a febrile child had pressed their hand in farewell). Unknown’s texts referred to many dinners, parties, and dates that may or may not have happened, and may or may not have been happy; one even mentioned a concert that Marjorie had worked at the theater just that spring. She might’ve seen them there, Marjorie realized—their upturned faces might’ve swelled with laughter and gone quiet without her even knowing.

 

She threw herself into work at the theater, preparing for four different shows: one modern jazz-inspired ballet produced by the university, one reading and Q&A with a visiting writer, and one screening each of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu with original scores performed live by the Alloy Orchestra, a group famed for composing on unusual instruments like sheet metal, garbage lids, and pots and pans. Of the four, the jazz ballet required the most attention, necessitating that she sync light cues to music in 5/4 and 7/4 time, whereas the writer just needed a spotlight and a microphone, and the Orchestra would most likely take care of itself. Matters were made worse by the ballet director, who didn’t know what he wanted. “Maybe a pink filter here?” His hands waved toward the dancer’s face. “Or the orange?”

 

Sharon dutifully replaced the optical filter on the third floor light stage left.

 

Up in the balcony, Marjorie muttered into mint tea, “Insufferable.” She shut her eyes for a moment, thinking again of Raylene’s hands: how they felt touching her own, how they’d hovered just above her cheeks, afraid to touch down for fear of smearing her with sticky pumpkin juice as their lips touched. She found it charming—that hesitation, that desire to get it right. Marjorie had made so many mistakes, when she was young and new to love, and this felt like that, like she had to relearn the rules, be careful not to get too attached too soon. She didn’t realize when her phone was ringing. Sharon had to wave up at her from the orchestra.

 

“Marge! Hey, Marge! Your phone’s blaring! Want me to get it?”

 

“Nevermind. It’s probably just a wrong number. I’ve been getting a lot of those.”

 

Sharon plopped herself down by Marjorie’s jacket. “I’m this close. This close,” she hissed, pressing her thumb and pointer finger together as Marjorie drew near. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

 

Marjorie nodded and retrieved her phone from her coat pocket. “He is tiresome,” she said, hesitating over her phone, which she’d yet to unlock. She felt sure it would be Unknown, but as it happened, that missed call was from Raylene—she’d called twice, actually, then left a message to see if they were still on for dinner. Marjorie’s pleasure at hearing this was marred by the fact that, immediately after playing Raylene’s message, her phone queued up a voicemail left by Unknown the night before: Sophie…Sophie…please, pick up….

 

Sharon leaned forward, worried by the strain on Marjorie’s face. “You okay?”

 

Marjorie shook her head. “I just need to make a call.” She retreated into the dark stairwell next to the stage, where she could ramble on in private about how work was really hectic and she couldn’t do dinner with Raylene that night. Or the next night. “I’m sorry.”

 

There was a long pause. “It’s okay if you’ve changed your mind.”

 

Marjorie sighed. “I haven’t.” She tried to make this clear to Raylene, keeping her tone low and affectionate as she explained that this just happened to be the busiest week of the season. She wasn’t lying. “Look—why don’t you come to the show tomorrow? It’s at eight.” She shut her eyes happily when Raylene said yes.

 

Sharon was stretching when Marjorie came back out. “I’ll need a wheelchair pretty soon.”

 

“You’re twenty-five.”

 

“That doesn’t mean I’m not infirm. You don’t know my body.”

 

“Indeed, I don’t.” Marjorie dropped her phone into her pocket.

 

“You’re blushing,” Sharon said, pointing to her cheeks. “Was that a man on the phone?”

 

Marjorie smirked, knowing what Sharon would do, waiting for the slow, happy smile that would spread across her face when she said, “A woman, actually.” Marjorie had been waiting for this, for this moment of comfort, and finding it made it possible for her to relax, to breathe a little after a stressful week. Time passed quickly then. Music jittered out of the speakers, dancers leapt off the stage, and pretty soon it was the next day and the show was about to begin.

 

Doors opened at 7:30 p.m., when Kent, their volunteer doorman, stationed himself happily in front of the theater like a shepherd guiding his flock through the gates. The show was sold out, and Marjorie had to climb up toward the balcony to pick Raylene out of the crowd. “I might have to duck out,” she said, after leading them to their seats.

“Have you had dinner, at least?” Raylene frowned, slipping out of her jacket. Underneath, she was wearing a black fringe dress with a small pearl necklace. Marjorie was so unprepared for this sight that she just nodded and blushed as one of the ushers came by with a program and gave her a wink. Evidently amused, Raylene scanned the program.

 

“Am I going to like this?”

 

Marjorie smiled. Then, when Raylene looked unsure, she said, “Just wait.”

 

Soon, she was enraptured of the film, of the sweet, gentle Maria who captures the heart of the young, naïve Freder, the son of a wealthy industrialist who profits off the hard work of others in his employ. Much of the plot had eluded Marjorie when she last watched the film, but this new restoration, paired with the orchestra’s score, made it very clear that this film was less about class and privilege and more about chaos—that driving force that leads men to lust, machines to break, and cities to flood where no one can escape the flooding alive. Marjorie felt the drums pounding, the metal screeching in her heart, hollowing her out to better accommodate the sound. All at once she realized that she wanted to live exactly like this: in silence, in the theater, accompanied by an orchestra that could translate her every thought into great and terrifying music; there would be no miscommunication then, no chance of her saying the wrong thing or pushing Raylene away, only this hand holding onto hers, only this touch keeping her warm and this fear of the word Sophie… Sophie…Sophie…

 

 

Hermit thrushes had built nests in Marjorie’s backyard. She heard them singing, their high notes rising through the branches and piping into Marjorie’s bedroom, which overlooked the west side of Hickory Hill Park. Raylene had commented on it early one morning, asking, “Does one of your neighbors play the flute?” while listening to their melancholy tune—Oh, holy, holy, sweetly, sweetly. Theirs was an eerily human music. Marjorie taught Raylene how to hear it right: a single whistle followed by a series of notes in varying pitches, in a minor key, so that the thrush seemed almost to echo itself. She often lingered in bed, listening to their singing, but was awoken the day of her birthday by Lily’s boisterous call, “Grandma! Grandma!”

 

Anita followed Lily into the room. “I couldn’t hold her back any longer.”

 

Marjorie chuckled, sitting up in bed. “Hey there, Lily Pad. Who’s this?” Lily was showing off her favorite doll, telling Marjorie to say hi to Mr. Toad—he was shy, she said. This was Toad from the popular children’s book series Frog and Toad, and when Marjorie saw this doll, her first thought was that it was sad to see the two separated, after all the pages they’d spent quietly sitting together. She pinched the doll’s foot. “We must get Mr. Toad a friend.”

 

Anita settled in the armchair by the window. “There’s a Mrs. Toad back home.”

 

“Is there?” She tickled Lily’s stomach. “How incongruous.”

 

Anita smirked; the fragrant steam of her coffee had turned the tip of her nose faintly pink. Her legs were crossed at the ankle, and she’d straightened her naturally curly hair already, though Marjorie couldn’t figure out where she’d found the time. It was wise of her to move to New York, Marjorie thought—that city was more her speed. Anita always had a million projects. “She asked me to make some dresses so she could dress Mr. Toad up.”

 

“That’s my granddaughter—always ready for Halloween.” She strummed her fingers over Lily’s leg. “Guess what Grandma’s costume’s going to be.”

 

“A piano?”

 

“A princess!”

 

“Talk about incongruous,” Anita muttered into her coffee. “Let me guess—Ariel?”

 

“Princess Wensicia, actually. From Children of Dune.”

 

“Ahh, yes, Daddy’s favorite.” Her smile faded at the mention of her father. “You okay?”

 

Marjorie glanced up thoughtfully, wondering why Anita was the only one who ever asked that question. It seemed to her that she hadn’t been really okay for a very long time—since before Greg died, perhaps before he was diagnosed—and that she had instead been performing a kind of simple diminuendo, lowering her voice, softening her vowels, in preparation for that slow, lonely glide into the unknown. Until she received those messages, she’d been content to go quietly, even peaceably, bringing nothing with her, not even music; and then came the shrill, insistent buzzing, sounding like an alarm on her hip. No, Marjorie thought, she couldn’t tell Anita about this, so she ducked the question, asking Lily, “What would you like for breakfast, Lily Pad?”

 

Lily flung her arms open. “Pancakes!”

 

“How about pumpkin pancakes?”

 

With a gasp, Lily jumped up and ran down to the kitchen to get started. Marjorie laughed.

 

Her birthdays were always more or less the same: breakfast with her family, a little cream in her coffee, a nice long walk through the park, then a couple hours in between lunch and dinner when she could just sit at a piano and play Lily some music; sometimes, she chose Shostakovich, Fugue No. 4 in E minor; sometimes, she chose Mozart, Requiem in D minor. And then again, she sometimes liked to go to Nodo inside the Ace Hardware on N. Dodge St. and order a corned beef and pastrami sandwich to eat while she walked around the graveyard and visited the Black Angel under the gray Iowa sky. This year, she traded her coffee for tea, her walk for a romp through the leaves in her backyard, and her somber fugues for the gayer waltzes of Chopin. These were some of the few pieces that Anita still knew how to play, and when Anita took over, Marjorie started to guide Lily through a neat and happy waltz, letting the girl stand on her shoes so she wouldn’t fall. In the midst of this, there came a knock at the door.

 

Raylene had come to take her to lunch. “Am I too early?”

 

Behind them, Lily ran up the steps, excited to see Mr. Chainsaw in action.

 

Marjorie laughed. “No, no—we were just playing. Come in.” She guided Raylene into the foyer, touching her sleeve lightly as she leaned in for a kiss. Anita saw this from the living room, and when she came and joined them, she had a look on her face like this was the most interesting thing that Marjorie had ever done. Introducing Raylene was surprisingly simple—even Lily, who didn’t always take to strangers, slowly edged up to Raylene and plucked the thin white threads on her thigh, where her jeans had frayed. “We were just going to go to lunch,” Marjorie said.

 

Anita was quick to protest. “Stay, stay. We’ll order in. Do you like Wig and Pen? They’ve got a carnivore pizza that has all the meats.”

 

Raylene glanced at Marjorie. “Sure,” she said, very carefully, in case Marjorie objected.

 

Marjorie wasn’t quite prepared for this, but she accepted it easily and with a kind of grace that pleased her, because she hadn’t expected Raylene to fit so readily into all the facts of her life. Raylene held up well during Anita’s dutiful interrogation, detailing how they met (at the Saturday farmers market in the Chauncey Parking Garage: Raylene had been buying fresh mustard greens; Marjorie, turnips) and what their first date was like.

 

Anita’s last question was a simple one: “Where do you live?”

 

Raylene pointed over her shoulder with her thumb. “A few blocks that-a-way.”

 

“That’s pretty close. Maybe we’ll come trick or treat at your place.”

 

Raylene smiled. “I’m actually going to a party. But I’ll leave some candy out for you.”

 

Anita didn’t know if she liked this answer. “Is this a costume party?”

 

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll be going as Annie Oakley, Little Sure Shot.” She mugged a bit for them, pointing her fingers like mock pistols and engaging in a little shootout with Lily, who aimed with one hand and clutched Mr. Toad with the other. When Raylene faked falling, Anita shot Marjorie a quick smile of approval. Yes, Marjorie thought, Raylene would do. When the doorbell rang and Anita followed Lily to the door, Marjorie paused a moment to think of her happiness, of the hand pressing hers, the receipt being signed, the plates clacking against the counter as everyone helped themselves to sausage and pepperoni pizza. It was a good birthday—the best in recent memory—and for that afternoon at least she didn’t think of Sophie or Unknown or the bright, brief joy she’d felt when she woke up in the morning and thought Greg was there beside her. Instead of dwelling on it, Marjorie took the board games out of the bureau, breezed through Lollipop Woods, and got mired in Molasses Swamp, too warm and loud and pleased with herself to hear it when her phone started to ring. This time, Unknown didn’t leave a message.

 

 

Trick-or-treating started at dusk, when the candles in Marjorie’s pumpkins lit up. Outside, wayward teenagers were roaming around, half in costume, half in jest, wearing vampire masks to hide their identities while decorating houses with toilet paper and robbing children of candy. Lily had been head-to-toe ready since 10:15 that morning (she’d dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood and required nothing in the way of real make-up), but Anita took her time, mixing her face paints and gluing her eyebrows in order to transform herself into Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. This process was slow and methodical, so after Marjorie attached her own elaborate headpiece, she sat off to the side and watched as her daughter become the evil witch from the movie. Anita was still gluing on her nails when she asked, “How heavy is that thing?”

 

Marjorie brought her hand to the back of her head, where thin gold wires extended out of the crowned dips of her headband, shivering like the filaments of an incandescent bulb whenever she moved or breathed. “I’d say three pounds. Maybe four.”

 

Anita lifted one hand, studying her nails. “Let’s hope there isn’t any wind.”

 

Thankfully, the night was cool and dry, and the streets were lit with small orange lanterns flickering like ghosts in the moonlight. Marjorie walked in the grass, listening to the earth squish, while Lily walked hand in hand with Anita. “Mommy,” she said, “are there wolves in Iowa?” She was staring at a dog then, peering down his chocolate snout as he sniffed her tentatively.

 

Anita said there were no wolves. “Just corn. Lots and lots of corn.”

 

“That’s not true,” Marjorie said. “We also have fossils. And…football players; they might as well be animals.” Only last week, one of them had been caught urinating on a statue in the Ped Mall. And just a week before that Marjorie saw a group of tailgaters playing beer pong on a table they’d dragged out onto the sidewalk. It was 7:00 a.m. then, and she was walking to the river to meet Raylene. She was tired, and cold, and declined the tailgaters’ offer of a game, but gladly accepted the thermos of coffee Raylene handed her upon arrival. That was a good day, she thought.

 

Lily tugged her sleeve. “Grandma, can you hold my basket? My arm’s getting tired.”

 

“It isn’t even six yet.” She took the basket, weighing it contemplatively.

 

Anita tilted her head. “You’re thinking of going to that party, aren’t you?”

 

Marjorie smiled softly, glad that she’d been caught. “I’m just not sure I want to meet all of Raylene’s friends while I’m pretending to be somebody else. What if they don’t get it?” Marjorie’s Halloween costume painted her as a manipulative, fair-haired, middle-aged princess continuously plotting against her enemies; to look at her then, one would think she was a murderer, employing genetically modified tigers to hunt children through the desert. Princess Wensicia wasn’t who she wanted to be, wasn’t the right costume for her. She’d only worn it out of love for Greg, who listed the princess third in his top ten characters from Dune. Marjorie wished he could’ve seen her then. He would’ve known what to do.

 

“Lily won’t notice if you go,” Anita said. “She’s all about the candy.”

 

Marjorie nodded to herself, as if finding the courage. “I’ll walk back with you, then go.” It would be quite some time before Lily tired of filling her basket with sweets. Her riding cloak had pockets stitched inside the flaps and a large hood into which Lily snuck half a dozen Crunch bars and Snickers without Anita noticing. Marjorie saw their wrappers gleaming when a pale, ethereal light fell on them inside a haunted house. Poltergeists were hovering over them, she realized. The house’s architect had rigged them to descend from the rafters and glow in the dark. Like Marjorie and Anita, Lily seemed to find these ghosts soothing, their soft green glow like that of fairies in a forest clearing. Anita lifted her face, and when the light touched her cheeks it looked like she was staring at herself in an enchanted mirror. Marjorie watched Anita and Lily disappear into her house and then set out alone to the party.

 

It was a mile, maybe a mile and a half, across the train tracks and down by the river to the party. Marjorie wondered when the trick-or-treating would end and watched as the small children living next door toddled into the street, chasing after a golden, rounded truffle. She stopped about five blocks from her house when she saw the pale red siding of a house she’d passed many, many times before. Unknown had said she lived in a red house: no, it’s the Red House next door. I have my light on. Marjorie had imagined a tidy, one-story house, one with a porch swing and gas stove and rhododendrons out front, but this house was larger—emptier—the windows darkened as if in protest of the holiday. Just looking at it filled Marjorie with panic. Quickly, she walked down the road, turning left and then left again to check all the houses. To find the one Sophie had found on a night not unlike this one: bitter and cold and terrifying.

 

She stopped on the corner of East Bloomington and North Johnson. She’d been there before, on that late night walk when she’d seen the handprint in the window of the hospital. Mercy Hospital, its ambulance doors opened wide outside of its emergency room. There was a red house directly across the street—tall, handsome. Its paint was blood red. Its pale white columns as lustrous and polished as bone. This was where Unknown lived, she thought. In this house, on the first floor, in what sounded like a state of perpetual anticipation. Had it killed her? Marjorie wondered. Had all the waiting finally driven her mad? If only she knew. Marjorie wished she’d picked up the phone, wished she’d heard it ringing while she sat playing Candyland with her family. She’d changed her ringtone since, chosen something grand, orchestral, and easily recognizable: Mozart, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, the dramatic allegro cued to burst from her phone whenever Unknown called. She’d been waiting for that sound all day, taking care to always keep her phone within earshot. When it didn’t come, Marjorie turned away from the red house. She walked a block, maybe two, and then paused to listen to her phone, its silence broken only by the distant cries of children whose voices followed her into the night.

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The Second Story

I got the call from Liam just before dusk, and the sun shut down by the time I made it back to Times Square, to that bar with the tiny sagging stage, where Liam and I stood waiting for the first joke, Short, the six-foot-seven owner of the club who had pink tattoos and a mean resting glare. (This is a comedy club? I’d asked Liam when we’d walked in days before. No, it’s a comedy cellar, he’d corrected with a smirk.) Short had been the one to call Liam, and the point of their conversation was that none of it could wait, that coming back was urgent. “Urgent” was the word I’d have used to describe the conversation I’d been trying to have with Liam for months, a conversation he had avoided with some real talent before we took our seats in that same cellar days before. For a moronic moment I thought the whole reason I was back in this place seventy-two hours after drunkenly yelling You’re not David fucking Sedaris! in the post-punchline quiet at the man I claimed for sixteen years to love was to turn back the clock and find a way to save it all. To save us. To follow Liam to the broken plate of our relationship (which okay, I had thrown), and put it back together so I could keep laughing at his archive of jokes over dinner, which were somehow both colder and deader than whatever discount bass he’d brought home from the market.

 

“It’s the footage,” Short said. “Come on back, I’ll show you.”

 

I waited for Short to walk out of earshot, his head ducking under a low partition and into the other room. I looked at Liam, who looked away.

 

“Do either of you need anything?” Short yelled. “A drink?” The real joke, and I let myself laugh.

 

The back had the feel of a photo darkroom—just enough light to see, the caustic smell of something like bleach making it hard to breathe and harder to focus on the small television monitor Short was looking into, the pixelly blue glow of it on his concerned face. I had spent the entire train ride down to 42nd avoiding the idea that I was obviously the one to blame, which had begun to metastasize out of nowhere, blunt and irrefutable, into a fact.

 

The video showed the audience, and sure enough, there were Liam and me, at a table in the far corner. After thirty seconds, I heard Short inhale sharply and pause the tape.

 

“There,” he said quickly. “You see that? On the wall—”

 

Liam gasped.

 

“I don’t see anything,” I said. I had been intently watching myself, my face, to see if it gave away my disgust about midway through the set, catching the petering trail of laughter after a few efforts at a punchline.

 

“Watch the wall,” Liam said. “Rewind it, watch the wall.”

 

Short cut the footage back fifteen seconds; I watched the wall. After a few deep breaths, in the clip, three white marks appeared over our heads, clawing in jagged lines up for a few seconds before turning a blood red hue, then vanishing.

 

I looked at Liam. “Do you remember this?”

 

“I was right next to you. I didn’t feel a thing.”

 

“What do you want us to do about this?” I said, turning to Short, who held one hand over his mouth, though his demeanor was oddly calm, as if he might have realized it had been nothing at all.

 

“Well, we saw what happened afterward,” Short said. He cut forward on the clip. “It doesn’t come back. The marks I mean. But a few lights burned out. We caught it because we were gonna put it online, the show.”

 

“Sorry, what?” Liam and I said, in different iterations.

 

“We were going to, and then we saw this, so we’re not going to. I want to know what happened the rest of your night.” Short sat back, then stood, his head hitting a hanging bulb; its flicker made us jump. “If this place is haunted we aren’t renewing the fucking lease.”

 

Short clicked off the small television with a fresh expression of concern. What had happened later that night, moments after those marks, was coolly blurred by the martinis the host had served, one after another, and only barely memorable now: the speeding cab howling up the interstate alone, the high pop of a cork echoing quickly in my kitchen, and somewhere among all of this, or between it—before it?—whatever lines I had said, the point of which were that I no longer loved Liam, that wasn’t it time to get honest about our lives, and give up the act? Give up the act was the phrase that hooked on me as I had uncorked that old bottle of port, a sickly sweetness sliding down my throat, like sugary blood. And later that night I was sleeping so well, but when I turned over in bed, my arm had reached instinctively for Liam and landed on a pillow, startling my body awake. As if I’d encountered a ghost.

 

 

I had moved to the West Village with Liam halfway through our twenties, in a middle-of-the-night stunt that I felt would change us. And to seem like the kind of people we in truth already were back in Western Mass: well-off, well-dressed, well-poised to, on any given Friday night, blink and find ourselves among affable investment bankers and lawyers and their children, whose idea of danger was wearing white pants to a catered fundraiser they playfully called a barbecue.

 

I did not return until nearly sixteen years later, after my father simply stopped breathing in a reclining chair after drinking one too many bourbons, heart racing from one too many arguments. What I’d heard from a family friend, the pitiful gossip, was that his brain had gone to dementia, and he’d spent the last few years spinning family histories, weird, incoherent stories about his grandparents; his death was a shameless relief, the small home he had left me a burden.

 

After a long morning drive north, Liam and I stood with a man named Greg, whom we’d hired to help with the take/toss for my father’s rusted shovels and peeling horseshoes, whose dumb obliviousness to our gayness made him seem vaguely bisexual. The oil paintings had been done on expensive white canvas and fell with a loud wooden clatter to the ground when I first pried open the old door to the shed in my father’s backyard. Liam took each painting out of the shed and laid it very gently in the grass, a few dozen squares gridding the lawn. Greg took hold of a wheelbarrow in the back and made a surprised “oof.”

 

“Unlucky guy,” Greg remarked at the carcass. He screeched something metal along the floor. “Raccoon, maybe possum. When’d you last get in here?”

 

“Few years,” I lied. I’d last been in the shed as a child, when I caught my finger on one of my father’s deep sea fishing hooks, bleeding a line of red to our front door.

 

The gallery of paintings growing on the lawn—their swirling browns and blues, psychedelic neon reds splashed across cream, the loud pops of yellow like splatters of blood—puzzled me. My father decorated his bedroom with heads of bucks mounted on the walls with rifles and flags. There was a long pause, punctuated by the sound of Greg sweeping up the remains. A pigeon shit on a shingle. For a while, I tried to let the purging register as cathartic, but ultimately I felt nothing. It was like helping a friend move from one side of town to another, if that friend had decided to cut out the hassle of propping their life back up someplace else.

 

“These all say LT, in the corner,” Liam said. He squatted to the ground, eyes flashing from one painting to another. His body registered the name, shocked alert. He looked up at me. “Oh my god, Mark. Laura. Your mom did these!”

 

 

The next morning I shuddered awake, as if shaking something off me. I washed my hands. I avoided my reflection in the bathroom mirror and then stared intently into it, two bulls locked by invisible horns. I called Liam and hung up after one ring, two rings. I texted him to be sure he knew it was an accident. I waited for him to reply. I asked him if he had noticed anything strange. I watched, from the window, a man dressed in a tuxedo walk slowly into the foggy park. I tried to make sense of this. I waited for the man to return. I sat down on my bed and noticed a long scratch on my arm. I panicked. I made a note of every trio of things in my apartment, which held their haunted charge. I became suspicious of soup bowls. I vigorously cleaned my counter and sink. I drank a bottle of cheap, caustic wine. I wrote a note apologizing to Liam and dramatically burned it with a lighter, the flame singeing my fingertips. I called Short at Comik. I listened to him tell me he was scared. I missed Liam terribly. I missed him with an addict’s love, in a way outside my own body. I sensed myself cooling, like ice. A knock came at my door—a young man holding a handle of vodka, looking for a party. He apologized and left.

 

For a long while I stood at the sink, my face unrecognizable in the shining metal, and then I slept on the couch. I knew Liam wasn’t coming back.

 

 

Twenty-three paintings, stacked neatly in the garage. As Greg pulled out of the driveway for a last haul to the garbage dump and we both sat down to a discount lemon cake for Liam’s thirty-fifth, Liam asked which I wanted to take. The question felt like a test. What I wanted Liam to know of my mother was what I knew: almost nothing. She was sweet, and motherly, in what I could remember of her. It seemed like a lie, that this was all I could recall. There had to be something more, underneath so much else I did not know either. Clues under clues, and all I had were a few photos in their silver frames, tinted slightly with age.

 

“Keep the blues, the quieter ones, the forest green?” I asked him. “The others are so loud. I still doubt she did them, by the way.”

 

“LT,” Liam said, communicating again the obviousness of the attribution.

 

“Anyway, I vote blues, maybe greens.”

 

“They’re nice,” he said.

 

“You don’t sound impressed.”

 

“I have secret hobbies too,” Liam said.

 

I’d later learn the secret hobbies included hoarding VHS tapes of old standup comedians’ late night sets, which played with a fuzzy static so many years later behind the confession that this was what he wanted to do: pursue comedy. When it finally came out of him, it was in this seriously unfunny way, so desperate it nearly made me laugh. The pursuit of anything held the edge of the ridiculous. In that kitchen, Liam embodied the pitiful warmth of someone who thought I was on his side, who would let us grow together.

 

I rejected the playfulness by asking about the cake. Liam said it was fine. Greg showed back up with his empty pickup, and we took three of the paintings with us—two deep ocean blues with fine gray lines as if to indicate breaking waves, a green with translucent ovals, a forest seen through raindrops—clacking against each other as we began the hundred miles or so back to the Village. When we got home, I couldn’t sleep. I walked to the kitchen and took a slice of cake from the fridge. It was awful, and when I went to spit it out, Liam was behind me, his eyes closed in sleep. As I dropped the plate, he woke from a trance. He hadn’t sleepwalked before, or since. We went back to bed. Liam lay awake as I regarded the fine waves, rising in their dark block from the corner of the room, until I could smell a salty breeze, until I felt the sun shimmer sweetly on my closed lids, until finally, at last, I slept.

 

 

Liam and I met our first day at Granite High, a collection of brick buildings that at night resembled the hospital both our dads worked at, without the orbit of screaming sirens or freak deaths from the nearby ski resort. Liam was shy in an easily ignorable way, and we successfully ignored each other often: during phys ed and pre-calculus and lunch, but both found ourselves in the same mindlessly easy home economics class junior year, taught by a jittery, white-haired woman named Suzie who frequently stopped class to talk about a summer in Paris that seemed to exist outside of time. The elements were almost absurd in their inconsistencies. The selection of Paris was the sort of desperately romantic lie you really couldn’t help but pity, and Liam got to making various references to his Parisian upbringing whenever Suzie was within earshot, testing the limits of her patience.

 

“These cookies remind me of the croissant I had on the top of the Eiffel Tower,” Liam said one day while stirring a bowl of over-floured dough, powder spitting from the bowl with each stir. “That time the wind blew off my beret onto the Louvre, and I was wearing black and white stripes for no reason.”

 

I only joined him in detention to ask him if he ever got the beret back. He told me it was run over by a wheel of brie. It felt as if I’d met someone entirely new, and later that day, we stood next to each other washing our hands in the bathroom, avoiding the dangerous desire we eventually confronted the night after prom the next year. College together, the same dorm, down the hall, roommates, all the late nights with pizza and cheap vodka that burned our fingernails and turned our eyes bright red. And then the day after that Liam was stepping out of the shower and asking if I planned to make the bed before we headed down for his set at Comik.

 

Sometimes, when I was in a good mood, I told him I couldn’t hear him from across the Atlantic.

 

 

A week passed since that night with Short, without Liam, and each time I began to forget, or heal, or complete whatever transformation was required of me to get from life with him to someplace where this was all behind us, something appeared, briefly and cruelly, to remind me of his gentleness, his sweetness, his love of ducks and the color purple, the way the subway doors shut so suddenly they can trap you in their grip, as they’d done just years ago with one of Liam’s leather photo bags, dragged down to Soho exposed to the dirty, frozen air. My heart spun back days, or weeks, a stranger to the breeze outside my apartment, the snow falling on the familiar trees.

 

I opened Liam’s bedside drawer one night to discover The Standup Standup, an annotated paperback guide to becoming a comic. I tore ravenously through the different steps one is meant to take to find themselves as a comedian. Again and again the author advised that the whole point of any joke is to flip expectation, as extremely as possible. Most of the advice to this end seemed to boil down to various broadly applicable platitudes, but Liam’s earnest notes suggested he took the text to heart. Most interesting to me, though Liam hadn’t marked any of it up, was the glossary, all these terms. A “roll” was when a comedian delivers jokes in rapid succession for sustained laughter, a “topper,” alluding to and building off a previous setup that itself had to be assembled with just enough strength to be memorable, without requiring extensive explanation. The “first story”—what the audience imagines based on a joke’s setup—and the “second story,” what they see after the punchline, when the joke is complete. I presumed Liam had not noticed the glossary or felt it was not of great value. He had scrawled the beginnings of presumably original material on the margins throughout the chapter “Getting to Know the Comic in You.”

 

I was driving down the interstate and I saw a [illegible]

 

New York apartment prices [crossed out]

 

And then:

 

My ex’s mom was a painter, let me tell you something about painters

 

 

The lemon cake disappeared from the fridge, which we forgot about easily enough. It seemed possible one of us had disposed of it, just tossed it, unthinking. But then came the nightmares for Liam, of hearing dirt fall over the thick wood of a coffin, of waking in a cold forest of pines that glowed with low, white mist when he walked. His dreams, as I began to refer to them, seemed to possess a certain unspeakable vividness that made me uneasy.

 

We set the paintings on the curb one night. By morning his visions were gone, and so, by lunchtime, were they.

 

 

And I had begun to think of his friends. Liam’s closest was a psychic and medium whose string of messy relationships Liam had occasionally disclosed. I’d met him several times, despite frequent efforts at avoiding him—Adaem, lanky and spikey-haired, who had amended his own name at thirty-six, “for intrigue,” and enjoyed a high-paying client roster of gay men who needed healthy friendships and wives who desperately needed to know if their second husbands were really attending this many corporate retreats. (They really are, Adaem had told Liam. It’s quite absurd.) His services were highly rated, and as much as Liam liked to play off his divinatory powers, Adaem had once been featured on a popular morning show with a grieving widow who gasped at each vague, perfunctory message from the beyond, and though I once could only ever roll my eyes at his ordering from a cocktail menu, I found I now could not summon the slightest skepticism of any potential prophecy. Whatever had repulsively magnetized me from him had suddenly, unstoppably flipped, and now, I was pulled to him. I needed to know what he knew, urgently. I found myself awake late, watching clips online entitled “Walk into your soul’s mist.”

 

“Oh sweetie,” he said, regarding the space he’d seen before. “I’m just going to say it. You know it. I know it. You have terrible energy. What’s been in here? This place is full of rot.”

 

“I don’t agree with that?” I said, certain he was right. “Can you fix it?”

 

He gave me a look, slow, as if to say he was getting to that.

 

“I was getting to that. No.”

 

“I’m paying you fifteen hundred dollars.”

 

“I couldn’t do it for five times that. Can’t. Your heart is not pure. It is, however, as I am sure you know, a very reasonable rate.”

 

“My heart is ‘not pure’?”

 

“No.”

 

“How do you purify a heart?”

 

“Have you ever been in love, dear?”

 

“What?”

 

He put a hand on the counter, then lifted it quickly off, as if it were a metal hotter than he had expected.

 

“That was acting, the marble is nice; it’s really held up. Other people will wow you with theatrics, not me. Love, my dear!”

 

“Yes. I’ve been in love.”

 

He eyed me skeptically. “I don’t think that is true. Be careful what you call things, dear.”

 

“Then what?”

 

“Listen.”

 

“I’m listening.”

 

“What did I tell you just a moment ago?”

 

“You told me to listen.”

 

“I asked,” he said, barely concealing a deeper annoyance than he wanted known, “for you to be careful what you call things. Return in half an hour. I am starting in the bathroom. I will do what I can.” I opened the door to leave, and he added, “I really should charge you more for this, hun, but. He’s not coming back.”

 

“Excuse me?” I hesitated in the frame, shocked by his boldness. “Who are you to be giving me advice?”

 

“Ah, Liam filled you in. You know, it’s true. There’s such a thing as saying too much.” He paused for a moment, and ran the sink. Over the sound of rushing water, as I closed the door, he added, as if just to himself, “And, of course, knowing too much.”

 

 

The reorganization project was Adaem’s idea, or his prescription, to cement the bond I shared with this new space. He suggested, very briefly, that I place the old life behind me. Have I changed the lighting? My morning routine? Have I changed the shower curtains, the laundry basket, the meals I make at dusk? I’ve tried it, I had told him, but in fact I had not ever thought about abandoning those habits which were mine all along. There was no difference, or if there was, I was not aware of it, and I began to obsess over the way I had been unpacking boxes with Liam at twenty-six. The candles without their holders, the cheap bulbs busted in their box. The way I could recall in an instant the scene of that empty living room and shining wood hallway, the vine growing in through a crack in the brick, but could not remember his face then, or when I had last seen my mother, and what’s worse, very nearly did not care, as if the life I’d yanked us into had been her parting gift to me, penance for her absence, an inheritance I was owed.

 

I put the television on the other side of the room. I moved the desk drawer, placed the espresso machine and blender opposite their usual spots on the marble counter. I set the small fig tree with its wilting leaves in the kitchen and the steel trash can in the living room. When I was done, it looked as if I’d tossed the contents of my apartment randomly about the space.

 

Later, I realized the porcelain Madonna Liam had forgotten to take lay in its regular spot on the mantle. I laughed until it hurt to smile.

 

 

It was hard to make out Short’s voicemail. It sounded as if he was laughing through strangulation. When I rang him back, it was that same voice.

 

“Buddy,” he said, though we were in no way friends. “Buddy, too funny.”

 

“What’s going on?” I asked. A nervous break—I’d feared one myself.

 

“You know that video? Those marks.” He paused very deliberately to take a breath. “One of the interns fucked with the tape. Final Cut Pro. Can you believe. We’re all dying here.”

 

I heard boisterous laughter from the bar. “You can’t be serious.”

 

“Tell your boyfriend,” he said. “I tried to call him but he’s recording something for radio. NPR? He hung up before I got to it. Big shot. After that set we did not see that coming.”

 

I thanked Short and hung up. I imagined him replaying the tape, a joke behind our heads each time. I clicked open the DVD player I’d rarely used, removed an instructional cooking series Liam must have been watching, and replaced it with an intense at-home fitness plan someone had gifted me years ago during the peak of the fad. The console made a loud crunch as it processed the disc. A tan man with synthetically blue eyes appeared on the screen. “Heya,” he barked off the main menu, thrilled by his own energy. “I’m Rick. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” He said this while striking his knees against downturned palms.

 

For the next forty-five minutes I pressed my body to the floor in increasingly straining positions at Rick’s command, lagging every so often behind what seemed more like backup dancers than athletes. Rick never broke a sweat, but at the end of my last set, I felt a hard cramp up my chest, a tightness just under my heart. The living room clock struck midnight. I lay on the floor, pleasantly sore. A gust of wind made a fast ghost of the curtains. I fell asleep there, with the same effort I had used to punish myself into another set of pushups. I made myself think, as I watched that porcelain figure, at least now it’s the second day of the rest of my life.

 

 

Later that night, I waited on my sofa with an old radio turned to the station, listening to eccentric, lonely people phone in with wrong answers to sports trivia, eager to hear Liam’s voice come through over the air. At last, he was introduced, and the sound of applause came through behind him, one of the audiences from a recent show. I wanted to know, insanely, if Liam would mention me, if an inflection might offer a tell. But he was different. He was solid, unwavering, and warm. He sounded as if all his years had been leading to this moment, and I was shocked to find that beyond all jealousy, all the ruthless memory I could drudge up from the rotting detritus of our past, I was proud of him for what he’d accomplished, and more than that, I believe he deserved all of it.

 

“The show is called Three Strikes,” the host said.

 

“Well,” Liam said. “I am out.”

 

“In all seriousness, it really is uncanny,” the interviewer said with genuine admiration. “Your knack for this vulnerability that just… explodes into something hilarious.”

 

“Expires even,” Liam said. I was relieved to feel Liam come across charming but, ultimately, basic. The host laughed, then thought aloud—“I’m trying to think of someone with your style for this, and I’m coming up empty. But of course, my colleague and I were reminded of Sedaris.”

 

“I’ve found,” Liam said with a thoughtfulness that verged on condescending, “that it’s about extending the set up past its obvious punchline, its easy resolution. The joke is always someplace you didn’t think at first. Usually, if you just keep going, it’ll come to you.”

 

I think we need to talk, I texted Liam. I found something.

 

I knew his thrill at the segment made him susceptible to engagement. He replied a moment later: I can come by around nine.

 

 

Liam arrived a half hour late, proving his ability to act like me. Cold, hard rain had begun to fall, knocking the roof. If it had been a few degrees cooler, it would have been snow, melting against the warm window. Instead, brown leaves shook violently with the wind, thunder growling across the dark sky.

 

He hung his raincoat and sat down across from me, the formality set, like an interview. I hoped something would loosen the knot in the air between us, but each of our movements seemed to tighten it like a noose. I stayed perfectly still. A branch cracked loudly outside.

 

“You got all your things?” I said.

 

“Oh, yeah. Or I could live without them. Thanks. That was a rainy day too,” Liam said. “But not like this.”

 

“It was.”

 

“I was so freaked out. The thunder made me jump into the bathtub.” Liam laughed.

 

“I slept with the lights on,” I said, pretending this no longer humiliated me. “You left stuff though. I read the joke book. I still have it if—”

 

He grimaced. “I read a lot. Used to at least. Something to learn in the mess, you know.”

 

“I like the thing about the Second Story. About building up to a punchline,” I said. “How you can give it a name like that. I didn’t know there’s terminology. Comedy’s a science too.”

 

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s storytelling. It’s really not easy.”

 

“Almost hard,” I said, with a recuperative edge of rudeness.

 

Liam smiled, very kindly. “Did you invite me here to insult me?”

 

“Incredibly, no,” I said. “In that book you wrote this joke, about my mom, and painters.”

 

“The ex comment, god,” he said, flush with genuine apology I couldn’t pretend was something else. “I’m sorry.”

 

“How did you know?”

 

“The same way you did,” he said.

 

This felt true but I rejected it. Whatever happened that night had been my mistake, though I wasn’t ever able to fully recover it. I felt nauseous from the idea he had wanted it too.

 

“I just keep thinking. That day, in home ec,” I started, frazzled and unraveling. “Like what even was that? You never even spoke before then. I had never noticed you.”

 

“I noticed you,” Liam said, a bit too sadly. He wet a cloth and began to wipe down the sinkhead, then the blender in its corner. “God, I can’t believe I remember it. It’s like, embarrassing.”

 

“Oh, come on,” I said.

 

“Well, I did.”

 

“Why did you say that stuff?” I asked. “It was like a whole different person. It was amazing but, I don’t know. I didn’t know you at all, and I wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for that day.”

 

“Honestly? I knew you’d like it.”

 

“What?”

 

“I wasn’t being funny,” Liam said, swiping the marble counter where he’d already polished it to a reflective shine. He turned to look at me. “That day? I know you don’t believe anything I say, but Mark. Honest to God, I was just being mean. Anyway, I need to go, but I had something to tell you. I’m moving. Sydney, next month. New job.”

 

“Wow,” I said. “Congrats. Kangaroos punch, by the way.”

 

He laughed sweetly. I believed everything he said. I wanted him to keep talking. The knot tightened one last time, and he shrugged on his raincoat and left me there with it, along with those drying bootprints I followed, later that night, pointless and imbecilic, to the foot of the elevator. He might as well have been across the ocean.

 

 

The part I have to underline is that I had intended to break up with him, in public, which I thought (I recognize the irony now) ran the least chance of having us make a scene. A few weeks before those marks at Comik, before terror streaked bright red onto the walls of our lives, I had met Liam after work at the bar next to his office, where suited men and their wives spoke over each other until the sound of a full plate dropping on the floor was rendered inaudible in the din. I had felt my desire to see him waning, inventing excuses and then dismissing them, cowardly, throughout the day. Breaking up with Liam would require, in the space, a degree of shouting that was sure to unnecessarily escalate whatever conflict was to follow, and the apathy into which I had settled became comfortable whenever I wasn’t actively considering it, like a splinter that had begun to live in skin.

 

After three cocktails, we stepped outside, the cold wind howling around us down to the Hudson. We walked, and he told me jokes that he hoped to try out at some open mic. They were offshoots of previous jokes he’d told at the few mics I’d attended, ones that made audience members loudly and uncomfortably “ha.” Liam confessed that he’d been placed on a performance improvement plan at work, was caught in a recent meeting smirking at something he’d written, which had then turned into something else. The casual way he disclosed these things, as if they were the setup to a joke, astonished me. He had worked for years to be at those meetings, to sit where he did at those tables, and now, he could not be bothered to care. There was an agreement here, unspoken if hard as the concrete we walked, that for as long as we were together (and it didn’t matter what I’d been about to do), we would incur the suffering and indignity and pain of the lives we’d chosen without discussion or even recognition.

 

The memory of alcohol stung me from the inside, lashing the back of my throat. We walked until we found ourselves in front of the Whitney, its bright lobby crowded for a newly returned Warhol installation. Liam and I maneuvered through the clusters of families inside, numb from the cold. The lights grew dim near a glow-in-the-dark installation, before our eyes adjusted to a loud pop of light. We moved from room to room, avoiding then re-seeing each other, when I heard Liam gasp. On a far wall behind red velvet rope, those three paintings. A small plaque on next to the blue: Original Lana Tristan (b. 1880). Work of the painter and murderess, who was rumored to have been buried alive. Discovered next to garbage, West Village, New York, 2019.

 

Bile-coated laughter rose in my throat. “OK, you have to admit,” I said to Liam, whose face had gone pale. “Now that’s kind of funny.”

 

 

Comik didn’t renew the lease, something I learned on my way to meet Clark, an overdressed friend of a friend visiting from Miami who owned a string of condo complexes and posted jokes about eviction on his social media. We were supposed to meet at a place a few blocks away from my stop; I took an accidental left out of the subway onto that wrong street. Of course I thought of the club often (cellar, I sometimes corrected on Liam’s behalf), but hadn’t expected to see it now. Its exterior looked usual but advertised a large sign in bright yellow script: Improv now! An acting school. One large room through the window, a streetlight reflecting off a long mirror, my silhouette standing dumb in the back of a laughless room.

 

Later than night, over a third cocktail, while Clark went on about a tenant’s cocker spaniel that had gleefully leapt into the community pool from a third floor balcony, I found myself thinking of that room with its oak floor, the groups of students learning to make each other laugh. All those years. I blinked and saw myself in front of that dark mirror, waiting—wanting?—for those marks to appear behind me, and finally mean something. I blinked again, and Clark asked me if I was okay. At his place, while he slept, I watched the ceiling change from yellow to black as the cars passed from headlights bright on the interstate. After a few hours, I got dressed and left, careful not to wake him, and rode a jostling subway home next to a discarded plastic bag that read I LOVE NY. I could see it caught between the doors, flapping wildly. I could feel Liam’s laugh inside me, or maybe it was my own.

 

 

Rick with the fake blue eyes was right; the next day it really was the rest of my life. I started visiting my mom in her cemetery, driving up the interstate late, listening to weather reports, adjusting the dial whenever the host attempted a joke. I brought her pink and yellow tulips in spring, wreaths that collected snow like sugar as it fell late one January, headlights veering out behind me, breaking the view as the headstones cut one after another with their long shadows for me to be with her, alone. I spent time looking up Liam on the internet—the little photos I could see on his profile of him with a short, wide-mouthed man named Tom whose integrity felt evident in his selection of polos and lack of online footprint. Photos of koalas and sunsets, so many memories. Then suddenly, one day, as if it were just the next, the marriage, Liam’s hand, which I was chilled to find I could recognize, on a shining silver blade making its clean cut into a large white cake. And the flowers on Valentine’s Day, all the kindnesses I withheld from him, or offered at a belated time, proof he had never been enough for me to remember, cursing me now that I could not forget him.

 

And that was around the time I met you, yellow crocuses and melting snow in Central Park, catching each other on the wide lawn. Coffee followed by drinks, a lifting feeling that made me aware of my body. Like thawing out, madly. I waited months for you to return, to meet you at this hotel, to be in this bed. And even though I know you’re leaving for Boston tomorrow, and to Chicago with your wife after that, I wanted to try to tell you, in this hotel room, maybe just to practice it in front of a mirror, this first story of how we never know what’s really true, or maybe just get to decide what is by living with it, or through it. And even though maybe it’s something people just say—When did you know you were in love?—you were the one who asked, and for once I want to answer. For once I know.

 

When you went to the bathroom for a towel, I watched the hairs on my forearm stand up in the sudden cold, the churning air conditioner compensating for that crazy heat outside making gray mirages of the street, joyful screams around a broken fire hydrant gushing water, neon lights from Times Square turning the curtains blue, then orange, then a bright, holy red. My second story—well, I guess it was easy to see now, impossible as it was to explain. It was the story of me—the man who fell in love and out of it, the whole time without a clue of what love really was, not the faintest idea he was living it. And feeling the real force of that love hit him in the gut, like a fit of uncontrollable laughter right now, out of nowhere from across the sea, all these years later. And the funny part is that even though in a moment you’ll be right next to me, and even though you asked, I won’t be able to tell you. From now on it will always be the one story, and then it’s three: you and me, and the him behind the mic—a ghost just out of my vision, shapeless marks I can’t quite see.

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The Call of Gideon

The deacon’s arrival was unexpected—a Tuesday morning, pounding at the screen door, trying the doorbell (which did not work). The deacon said he called Father Thomas B. Durr on the drive from Syracuse, but there had been no messages, no missed calls. The deacon sits in the kitchen, still in his boots and coat. He has come to tell Father Durr, at the request of Bishop Cunningham, that St. Matthews Catholic Church of Tunis, New York, will close.

 

“I guess we’ve reached a sort of…point of no return here,” the deacon says. It sounds like the finance council has talked to you about the possibility, and of course the bishop has talked to you about it, but I wanted to get your blessing before we actually started moving on anything.”

 

The deacon wears a black and maroon bomber jacket and a skull cap fronted with the green shield of the Syracuse Diocese. In one hand he holds a blue folder, in the other a folded newspaper.

 

Maintenance had a contractor come out just to assess the roof,” the deacon says, “and it’s, we’re talking six figures alone there. Plus sub-zero temps in the mornings, the heating this winter has just soared.”

 

Contributions wont hold up until summer?

 

“They’re barely covering the church downtown.”

 

The diocese bungalow is spartan and cold, mostly furnished with bookshelves and plastic idols of Jesus and the apostles. There’s a clock above the sink, a gift from a parishioner in Nevada, with a different songbird at each hour. And the kitchen table is a padded folding table, the one Father Durr has carried with him since he first left Tunis, which he’s never wanted to replace because he knows the church would buy him one.

 

The deacon slides off his hat. “We’re looking at less money everywhere in the diocese. We’re certainly not alone in this, but we’ve got to let ourselves accept the idea that it’s only going to get worse. Plus there’s the, I’m sure you’ve seen the bill in the state legislature that opens up the look-back window for priests.”

 

Father Durr offers the deacon a cup of coffee, but he declines. So Father Durr makes one for himself in a machine he bought for Christmas—he lifts a lever and a small mouth appears, and this is where he puts the little cup filled with coffee grounds.

 

“There’s no doubt there will be effects to the diocese,” the deacon adds, “and it’s sad, really, but we’re at a point where decisions like this have to be made. All I’m asking is that you acknowledge it’s going to close, Father, and maybe just start mentioning something at Mass.”

 

St. Matthews was the first Catholic Church in Tunis,” Father Durr says. He clears his throat. “Did you know that?”

 

The deacon opens the blue folder. “I didn’t.”

 

Father Durr explains that the turn of the twentieth century established the entire cultural trajectory of Tunis. In a ten-year span the city’s population had almost doubled with European immigrants, who were lured away from New York City by the prospect of more lucrative construction and manufacturing jobs (and aided west by the advent of the electric railway). In 1912 the bricks that would become the foundation of St. Matthews were laid by a handful of Sicilians and Campanians, agrarians who had fled the penury caused by Crispi’s colonization policies. Many intended to work in America for a few years and return home. Few actually did. Instead, they recruited their families to cross the Atlantic and live in a twenty-block radius around the church, a neighborhood that exploded with schools and bars and restaurants that filled with second- and then third-generation Italians who learned English at school and Italian from their grandparents—Italians who discussed the legacy of DiMaggio and the correct amount of baking powder in struffoli dough. Most of the third generation eventually moved to Tunis suburbs like Elmfield and Van Buren, leaving their ancestral homes for new waves of immigrants: Bosnians, Vietnamese, and Syrians (among others). That was partially why Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church was built downtown, really a kind of sociopolitical backhand to—

 

“There,” the deacon says. He slides a piece of paper across the table. “The estimate for the roof.”

 

Father Durr looks down at the paper, looks up at the deacon. The deacon’s head is a tuffet of white gray, smoothed back. Teeth too large, too aligned to be original. His pale neck like the melted coil of a car’s suspension.

 

They are all old. Every one of them, old and tired.

 

“I guess my point is that the church has history,” Father Durr says, “and that I’d be remiss if we didn’t explore any other option to keep it open in some capacity.”

 

The deacon slaps the newspaper on the table. “History! I remember Easter masses at the Cathedral, people sweating through their shirts, damn near fainting from the body heat. Part of the reason we printed out the hymns were so people had something to fan themselves with.”

 

“The stations of the cross,” Father Durr says. “We’ve the stations built into the windows at Matthews. How do you replicate that?”

 

“The bishop says not even half of Matthews was full for Christmas.”

 

Father Durr nods, sips his coffee. In the deacons hand the newspaper unfurls, in slow stretches, like a pulp snail. Father Durr looks at the clock, then out to the backyard, which is covered in snow.

 

“I will have to let you go, deacon. I have confession at eleven and I try to pray my hours before it starts.”

 

The deacon stands. “I am not trying to be cruel here, Father. These are simply hard times, you understand?”

 

“I do.”

 

“Then you will tell them?”

 

Father Durr places his cup on the counter. Inside: shattered spangles, roiling coins.

 

“It’s probably selfish of me to say, but if it were going to be anyone to say anything, I would…rather it be me.”

 

“I am sorry.” The deacon rolls the newspaper, places it under his arm with the folder. “No one, and I mean no one, is happy about this.”

 

The deacon opens the door. He makes a slight, respectful bow before he closes it tightly behind him.

 

 

And really it was the sound more than anything that kept Father Durr up at night. This was long before he had come back to Tunis, long before the deacon visited him on a morning in January. It was the summer after graduating seminary at St. Bernards; after Bishop Joseph Hogan, who had studied canon law with an ordained archbishop in Washington, had assigned Father Durr to a small church in Logandale, Nevada. Bishop Hogan had told Father Durr there was the possibility he could return to Tunis when there was a vacancy for priests, which Father Durr had recalled the first time he crossed the Arizona border, into the region called the Valley of Fire, an irony that seemed especially apposite considering the sun and the endless sky and the dark ridge of the Arrow Canyon Range that met it.

 

The Reno bishop was a spirited man named Norman Francis McFarland; he had round, ruddy cheeks and cotton-white hair that belied an intensity for order and accountability. The bishop had told him the biggest challenge for a priest in Logandale was the ability to blend in—the parishioners, he said, did not respond to anything that challenged their sense of alienation. So Father Durr spent a majority of his first few months trying to ape the mannerisms of the fifty or so regular men who came to Mass wearing flannels and jeans stained with tobacco chaw or elaborate suits of garish plaid. (At the same time he tried to learn Spanish from a series on cassette, tried very hard but ultimately gleaned only a handful of phrases he awkwardly deployed to his growing Latino members.) The women, meanwhile, frightened him. He was nervous of their allure and flighty in their presence, as if he needed, for his sanity, to tell them he was a priest bound to spiritual laws, and as such forbidden from any immodest propositions (as if they didn’t already know).

 

Which is to say that the entire transition and subsequent adaption to Logandale was brutally stressful, dangerous in how it changed him. He began eating less. He caught himself grinding his teeth at idle moments of the day, and for a few months drank gin to stop it. He spent hours on walks behind the church, on dirt roads that snaked through creosote bushes filled with cicadas and scorpions, returning when the streetlights flicked on. His prayers before bed became convoluted, inane things. Because once they were done—once he was on his mattress, in the quiet of his bedroom—he began to hear the drops.

 

The drops began small, a slow, hollow pluck in a dry sink. But they always grew louder, wetter, a splashy echo to them like a basin filling with something viscous. In his first few days in Logandale Father Durr would get out of bed to see if he had left a faucet on (the kitchen, the bathroom, the shower stall always dry). It started again when he sat down—became faster, the drops multiplying in number, uniform in sound. Something filling, filling, until Father Durr heard an entirely different set of drops filling an entirely different space. Another room, a farther room. The drops varied in pitch, like words he could not understand jousting each other in a busy street. Dropping and plucking and growing until they became a torrent. Pushing into invisible places, filling turbulent pools. By then the pain of digging his fingernails into his palms migrated into a band at the back of his head, creating an array of phosphenes on the ceiling—wide, vague circles as transparent as the shadows of stained glass. Pinks, teals, golds spinning in the sound of falling water, falling into a pool of inscrutable width and depth, until everything faded in the sun and Father Durr stepped out of bed, clammy with anxious sweat.

 

The seminary had not made him credulous to the possibility of miracles. What happened at night was certainly an oddity, an enigma. But it was not inexplicable. After Masses he waited for parishioners in the church vestibule (as he had been trained to do), but instead of the usual course of small talk Father Durr asked them about the dripping. He figured it was from planes or helicopters passing overhead, the roar of their engines warped by radiation (there were rumors of a nuclear test site nearby). At first the parishioners ignored his questions, dismissing them as tasteless jokes, but they soon became suspicious. Attendance began to drop. One woman, whose husband had borrowed Father Durr a copy of The Keys of the Kingdom, wondered if he wasn’t suffering from a prolonged kind of heat stroke.

 

He prayed for a way to decode the sounds, and when this didn’t work he prayed for them to cease. He analyzed his pallor in the naked light bulb of the bathroom, rubbed the hollows beneath his cheekbones, felt the novel sensation of his ribs through his skin. Perhaps God was speaking to him about his calling. Perhaps other things were happening in his head, like a psychologist had suspected when he was a teen.

 

The answer came to him the day he decided to talk to Bishop McFarland. What he would have told the bishop, what he would have asked if he had arrived in Reno, he wasn’t sure. On his drive Father Durr stopped for gas at a Chevron in Crystal Springs. Inside the store, on a small rack below the counter, he spotted a foldable map of Nevada. He paid for the gas and the map. In his car he approximated the location of the parish house, drew an imaginary line out of his bedroom window, through county highway markers and t-crossed railroad routes, into an intricate cross of major thruways. Within this nest was a large dot with a circle around it for Las Vegas, and to the right of this, at the end of a blue crescent that began near Logandale, a red star that marked the location of the Hoover Dam.

 

He laughed hysterically and turned the car around. On his way home he bought a pair of ear plugs and a cassette of nature sounds. He never asked himself how the dripping might have transmitted all the way from the Colorado River; how it might have bent and twisted over fifty or so miles of undulating land. He was simply relieved that it had stopped — relieved he could sleep again, eat again, and talk about anything else.

 

 

Modern heating, cooling systems, lighting. Sure, Our Lady of Mercy has all of that, but it has a lowered ceiling, too. Put the organ and the woman who’s practicing it in a business park for a sense of how the sounds die. Like Muzak, Father Durr thinks, listening to the muted chords from the confessional, a small room on the back wall of the church.

 

His second confession of the afternoon knocks before entering. Because he is behind the large screen used for anonymous confessions he can only see a small pair of white sketchers. A woman’s voice asks if he is still holding confessions. He says that he is. She kneels on the bench before the screen. She makes the sign of the cross, then places her nose between her laced fingers and thumbs.

 

“Bless me Father,” she says, “for I have sinned.”

 

The voice is young, maybe late thirties. East Coast without the nasal twang found west of Albany. He straightens in his chair. “How long has it been since your last confession?”

 

“Ten, fifteen years, maybe, I’m not sure.”

 

“And what sins do you confess to since then?”

 

The woman says nothing. He rubs his knuckles, which are sore at the joints. They’ve been sore since noon.

 

There is no need to be nervous,” he says. There is no such thing as a bad confession, only one that isnt—”

 

I have engaged in sins of detraction against members of the church.”

 

Father Durr nods so that she can see. It is nothing he hasn’t heard before, nothing he won’t again. But the nod helps them get it out, helps them clear their conscience. He leans forward in false gravitas and looks directly at where her face would be without the screen.

 

“How did you perform detraction?”

 

“I am an editor at a newspaper.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“And we’ve published stories like them before, Father.”

 

“Okay.”

 

Her breaths gain weight. Her head vacillates. She unfastens her tongue from the roof of her mouth and inhales.

 

On what?” he finally asks.

 

On sexual assaults by priests of the diocese.”

 

The sounds of the organ fade. Her shadow collapses to a single point on the screen, as do the walls and floor, his knobby hands — form a single waving mass like a mirror on a riverbed.

 

“What diocese?”

 

“This one.”

 

“What priests?”

 

“The ones we’ve written about before.”

 

“And the paper? The paper this is going in?”

 

She does not respond, which is how he knows it is local.

 

“A story,” he says.

 

“Like a look-back,” she says. “A—a retrospect, something that combines all the things we’ve reported on while also looking ahead.”

 

“Something big,” he says.

 

This is not expected, not allowed. His questions are out of the normal routine of confession. They have taken away his vestments and presented him as something simple and pathetic. Something small.

 

He digs his thumb into his palm.

 

“I mean it’s, the whole thing isn’t for sure yet,” she says, “but one of our reporters—every week a reporter has to present a Sunday story package to editors like me. And we have to decide whether it should be printed.”

 

“And you’re here because you think it’s fit to print.”

 

“Yes.”

 

He thinks about the church. Thinks about any one of the parishioners leaving Sunday Mass to kitchens and living rooms, to televisions or computer screens. He imagines them all as the deacon pulling open the rolled newsprint and seeing the names and pictures of priests they’ve known. Priests that have baptized them, confirmed them, their children. The connections they will make to St. Matthews.

 

The editor says, “Right now the new angle is that the story will look at the impacts of the allegations on local Catholics. The reactions, the attendance. Since the abuses happened for years.”

 

“They did.”

 

“And the stories of the abuses need to be told, but I see the impacts they have on the churches and the dioceses, and I wonder if this is too much. I know feeling bad isnt always indicative of a sin, but it just feels like a sin does. And it’s painful, Father, it’s all just deeply painful.”

 

He sits back in his chair, runs his fingers over his scalp. “What about the closing?”

 

“What closing?” she asks.

 

Really the first thing he thought of was St. Matthews. The Easter Masses full of people in pastels, shoulder-to-shoulder, the miasma of perfume and sweat. The baptisms and funerals, the weddings he’s officiated. He thinks about a night many years before Nevada, before the seminary, when he was just a boy, maybe twelve, after midnight in St. Matthews. No exit signs above the doors then, no ceiling fans hanging from the vault. There was only him, eyes closed, teeth vulning his shoulder—no sound but the blood pushing through his ears and the small mutterings he occasionally made to hear himself pray.

 

“I’ve gone to church for years with my parents,” the editor adds, “and all of this stuff is just killing them, which is part of the guilt, part of the reason it feels like a sin.”

 

“Do you believe it’s a sin?”

 

“Is it?”

 

He was praying to forget. Father Durr remembers that. Something that happened on a farm that belonged to a soybean farmer north of Tunis. The farmer’s land bordered a clutch of acres purchased by Father Durr’s grandfather, who was in the process of building up a dairy farm (he had owned a buffalo farm in Italy). Father Durrs dad sent him there to work over the summer. He fed chickens, cleaned horse droppings from the stalls, and sat through long, tedious conversations about Italian politics.

 

It was one of the weekends his grandpa had given him the day to play with the soybean farmer’s son, a boy Father Durrs age with an almond-shaped head and bleach-blond eyebrows. Inspired by a Jean Latham novel Father Durr had read, they traipsed through the uncleared brush at the far end of the farmer’s land. This was how they found the pond—a long extant body of water that fed into the Mohawk River nearby.

 

“Father?”

 

“Yes, I’m sorry.” Father Durr wipes his face with his hands. “Detraction, as a mortal sin, centers around another person’s reputation. It’s like gossip that’s true, that truth being what separates it from calumny.”

 

“But these are—”

 

“Knowing that you will damage someone’s reputation, and knowing that act will constitute detraction before you do it, makes it a sin. Unless there is a more pure intention behind the act, is how I interpret it.”

 

She unlatches her fingers, scratches her nose, reconfigures.

 

“So how do you interpret the story?”

 

And Father Durr cannot remember whether he had wagered the boy to swim to the middle of the pond or if the boy had boasted that he could. Instead he remembers the water, black and wind-raked, and the dead tree limbs around the shore, speckled with green like moldy fingers. The way the boy had grinned and said that it was nothing to him to swim to the middle. The way the boy walked into the water in his overalls and shirt.

 

“In Job it is said that wicked men are tormented for the rest of their lives,” he says, “that they live in houses that crumble to clay.”

 

“Job,” she repeats.

 

The boy swam choppy and slow, his cupped hands pulling a heavy, spumous wake. Father Durr could see what would happen, how it would happen—the boy’s trajectory, the slowing rate of his pace, how his arms and legs compensated for those conclusions. A matter, Father Durr remembers thinking, of simple math. The boy had almost made it halfway before turning around. Spitting water, more and more of it, flailing, trying to lift himself above the waves he made. Father Durr saw the boy recognize the distance to the shore, saw him recognize Father Durr, who was unsure what to do. He tilted his head skyward, and the muscles in his face slackened. Like a person in sleep. It was something Father Durr would see many times again, when he was called to perform last rites—the painful recognition of the self as a mess of bones and tendons and its brief place in time.

 

Then the rough bark of the stick Father Durr grabbed from the shore, the water’s screaming cold as he swam to the boy. Seeing the boy’s head, and then not seeing the boy’s head, instead a knot of bubbles that had healed by the time he arrived.

 

“And Father?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“If that’s the case, do you think that sins are sometimes necessary?”

 

I think Im not in a position to really…make those kinds of decisions.”

 

“I see.”

 

Father Durr runs his thumb nail through a channel of palm skin. Looks up at the shadow on the screen. He asks, “Are those all your sins?”

 

“What?”

 

“Are those all the sins you’ve made since your last confession?”

 

“I think so.”

 

“Pray an act of contrition and ten Hail Marys.”

 

She bows her head and makes the sign of the cross. She turns to the door.

 

“Ma’am?”

 

The editor turns around. She walks close to the edge of the screen, so close he can see the toes of her sneakers. He considers it a miracle that she does not walk into view.

 

“Please be kind,” Father Durr says.

 

The door opens, closes. The room is quiet. Father Durr feels his fingers, the bones. Feels the joints, the bumps like beads, knobby but soft in their sleeve of wrinkled skin. He turns his wrist, expecting his watch, but instead finds a pressed mat of white hair. The watch is in the pocket of his jeans, the place he’s kept it for confessions since he became a priest.

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God Ain’t Here & Tourniquet

 

God Ain’t Here

This house we built with its abundance

Of suffering, a hundred sealed windows.

Where do your prayers find you? No, no!

The waters keep on running in this hell &

The birds were all plucked of their tongues

As if saying to all the quiet, tongue-less birds

Who’s to save you now when your rituals

Are plunged deep into the tall, red ground?

He walked for miles down a narrow hall

With no doors. His feet grew tired. He fell

To his knees without a tongue to give voice.

Foreign body, those aren’t his hands no more.

He’s building this house. God ain’t here,

Just a procession of breathing wings

Trying to find their way out. There’s no escape.

Prayer by prayer trapped in a wooden box

& spilled over Just one more time, one more.

He’s breaking a nail into his wood, one by one.

The waters keep on running, spilling into him,

One by one. He continues to drown with his

Sealed off mouth. Not a prayer to let go of.

No. Not now. Not ever. He’s too tired

Building a home with broken glass & raw hands.

 

Tourniquet

Not quite out of the woods, he’s got a funny

Walk. Tender was the word I ought

Not to have used but I’m here with twigs

Scattered throughout my hair like a myth.

Wanted dead, I coughed up blood while

The man fucked me with a handful of Lubriderm

& a pocketful of change.

My voice sounds different with so many

Tongues locked inside of my mouth.

This isn’t about sex. This is about the tender

Crunch of each step I make moving toward

Something. But, first, more spit.

After, I zip-up my pants. How’s that for conclusive?

I have a pocketful of coins: the fruits

Of my labor. My thighs, mango puss.

See me differently. This tourniquet hurts.

Stop, you’re hurting me. There’s the clearing.

 

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