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The Writing Disorder is a quarterly literary journal. We publish exceptional new works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction and art. We also feature interviews with writers and artists, as well as reviews.

Fishbowl Frenzy

by Susie Potter

“You’ll never guess who I saw the other day,” my mother says.

“Oh really?” I am somewhat distracted. My mother likes to ramble. Before I left her and here, before I left her here, I don’t think I noticed it much. But, now that I’m away at college most of the time, whenever I come back, her chatter seems incessant.

“He was holding a sign, begging for money,” she continues.

As I pull her dusty-smelling Buick into a narrow parking space, something in my gut clenches.

“Kyle?” I ask.

She nods, painting a look of sorrow and remorse on her face. I want to smack it off of her.

She doesn’t know a thing about Kyle, about what he was to me. We weren’t true loves or anything like that, but he was a good friend, a good boyfriend, someone who rescued me from her all-encompassing, clinging need.

I don’t say anything as I help her unload her shopping bags. I’m silent still as we walk up the stairs to her apartment, the one she’d moved into after selling my childhood home, the home she’d always promised would be left to me.

I help her put away her groceries, the blouses she bought that look just like the blouses she already owns.

“Do you have to be getting back now?” she asks. There’s a look in her eyes like she expects me to say yes and like she’s already judging me for saying it.

I’m here less and less. I help her less and less. But it’s not my fault that my mom is seventy and needs help. She’s not forty or fifty like all of my friends’ parents. She’s old. She acts more feeble than she is. She still acts like she needs me. I don’t want her to need me. I never wanted her to need me the way she did.

“I don’t have to go quite yet,” I tell her.

“Oh,” she says,“good. I’ll make us some coffee.”

As she goes and bustles in her tiny kitchen, my mind wanders to Kyle.

We’d grown up together. We were best buddies in elementary school until, suddenly, all the girls had cooties.

Then, junior year of high school, I’d run into him at a kegger. He’d offered me a beer, smoked me up. We’d had a brief fling. We’d had fun, and God how I’d needed fun.

We’d lasted longer than anyone thought we would. He was too hot for me, too cool, everyone said. But we’d had a nice effect on each other. A calmness, a gentleness seemed to envelop us when we were together.

But still, a couple of months before graduation, things had petered out.

I had been kind of talking to Greg Olsen behind Kyle’s back. Greg was so nice and dependable, while Kyle smoked pot all day. He’d already dropped out of school, sacrificing a degree for delivering pizzas, at least when his gas money hadn’t gone to weed.

Before Kyle, Greg never would have looked at me. But dating Kyle, with his soft blonde hair and his Ryan Gosling features, had elevated me in the eyes of my peers. It had made Greg see me, and, the way I saw it then, there was nothing real ahead for Kyle and me. There were other options.

Kyle had called me one night.

“Listen” he’d said. “Are you into Greg Olsen? That’s what I’m hearing.”

“I don’t know,” I’d answered honestly. “Maybe?”

“So,” he’d said, “this thing between us, is it over?”

“I don’t know,” I’d told him, even though part of me did. “Do you want it to be?”

“No,” he’d answered, “not really.”

“Okay,” I’d said. Maybe we could drag this on for a few more months, at least until I left for college.

“I think it should be over,” he’d said, after a pause, “even if I don’t want it to.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”
            “I don’t know.” He’d sighed then, heavy. I could picture him raking his hand through his hair.“It’s just done, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.” He’d paused for a moment. I’d known he was toking. “I’ll always care about you.”

“Me too,” I’d said, realizing that I meant it.

When we’d first gotten together, there had been those teenage girl dreams. Yes, I’d scribbled Mrs. Kyle Johnson on a notebook or two. But, there was something in Kyle that wouldn’t let me dream too big, that wouldn’t let me make up an entire future. I just knew he wasn’t the one, couldn’t be the one, couldn’t help make me into the person I wanted to be. It didn’t mean I cared about him any less.

“You know,” I tell my mother, coming out of my thoughts,“Kyle is the only nice breakup I ever had. We didn’t fight or throw things.”

I think about my most recent ex, Dylan, who cheated on me at a frat party and then had a bonfire with his buddies to burn all the bras and panties I’d left at his house.

“Hmm,” she mumbles. “Do you want cream?”

“Yes,” I tell her, “a lot.”

 I remember Kyle making us coffee at his apartment.

“I’m going to make us a surprise,” he’d said.

“Okay.”

He’d come back with two cups of coffee, a scoop of vanilla ice cream floating in each. He’d looked so proud of himself.

“Delicious,” I’d told him, beaming. He’d smiled and smoked his morning weed.

That was the thing with Kyle. Morning weed. Afternoon weed. Pre-date and after-date weed. It was all the time.

He’d taken me out to a restaurant once, early in our relationship.

Over chips and salsa, feeling romantically swayed by the lilting music, I’d asked him, “What are you thinking about?”

I’d hoped he’d say something like “being with you” or “holding in you in my arms later.”

Instead, he’d said, “I’m thinking about going to get some weed after this. I wish I had it now. This would taste even better.”

I’d just shook my head, laughed it off.

Once I left for college, he quickly faded from a boyfriend-turned friend to a guy from my past, a harmless but sweet pothead. He’d be okay. There were plenty of guys like him, mucking their way through life at minimum wage jobs, smoking pot, partying. They’d stop at forty and get real lives, usually after finding the right girl. Or, they wouldn’t and they’d be slightly-sad, later-creepy dudes who partied with high schoolers à la Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused.

“Mom,” I say, as she brings in our coffees. Mine doesn’t have enough cream. Definitely no ice cream. “Did it seem like he was on drugs? When you saw him, I mean.”

“Oh, Hannah,” she says. “You know I don’t know anything about that stuff.”

“I know,” I tell her, “but he always had a thing for pot. It can’t be that. I mean, it’s just pot.”

My mother pauses for a moment, giving her coffee a blow-sip. “I’ve heard,” she says finally, a trace of a sensationalist thrill in her voice, “that we have a major meth epidemic in this town.”

I sigh. I hate the thrill in her voice as much as the smug look on her face.

“How did he look?” I ask finally, as if the answer can tell me something concrete.

“He looked like Kyle,” she says, “only his hair was all long, and he looked kind of dirty.”

I nod. I remember the time he didn’t have any toilet paper, any soap, any of the essentials in his house. He’d had weed and Ramen, but nothing else. So, I’d taken a few items from my mom’s couponing hoard.

She’d noticed. It was just a tiny dent in her stash that she housed in the shower, a shower we didn’t use, couldn’t use anymore because of her “bargains,” but she’d noticed.

“Why would you give that boy my stuff?” she’d raged, irrational tears streaking her eyes.

“It was just a few-”

“Hannah, you had no right,” she’d cut me off, angry that I’d taken from her. More angry that I’d wanted to give something to someone other than her.

“You never liked him, did you?” I say now, sipping my coffee.

“He was okay,” she says.

Without meaning to, I make a noise with my throat, a noise that sounds like scoffing.

“Where did you see him?”

“By the mall,” she says. “I think he’s staying in the woods behind it.”

I put my coffee down. I feign a look at my phone.

“Mom,” I tell her, “I do have to get back. I forgot about this project, and . . . ”

“I see how it is,” she says, “you’ve got more important things to do than hang out with me.”

I don’t answer her as I gather my bag, rush out the door, because, for once, she’s right.

I don’t really have a plan as I settle into my car, crank the engine. I just want to see if I can catch a glimpse of him.

I drive the few blocks from her place to the decrepit mall. Not many people go there anymore, haven’t for awhile. The small town is changing, dying even, but people like my mom don’t seem to realize it. And there are lots of people like her here.

I circle the parking lot, scanning for people, scanning for him.

After two times around, he’s nowhere to be found. I sigh. Why am I doing this anyway? I have a life now, a life that’s only two hours from here, but that seems like a world away. I wouldn’t even come back here if it wasn’t for her, and sometimes I think about abandoning this place and her as well. He doesn’t matter to me anymore. He shouldn’t matter to me anymore.

I’m telling myself all these things as I leave the mall lot, get in the line to turn onto the highway. And then, I see him.

At first, I don’t register that it’s him. It’s just a guy, and like my mom says, he does look dirty. Dirty and hard and old, much older than he is, which isn’t that much older than me.

He’s holding a sign that says “Homeless Veteran. Anything Helps.”

It’s a lie.

He walks up to the car in front of me, collects a dollar.

I will him not to look my way.

I wanted to see him, but suddenly, I don’t want him to see me. I can’t.

I look down, fiddle with my phone, the radio buttons, anything to keep him from seeing me.

The car in front of me goes, and I speed after it, too fast.

My hands are shaking. I shouldn’t care this much. It shouldn’t bother me so much to see him like this, but it does.

I pull into the McDonald’s, the one just before you leave town. I need a minute to collect myself, to get my hands and my brain to stop rattling.

Instead, I’m assaulted by a memory. Kyle and I went to this McDonald’s many times, but one particular time is jabbing at my brain, begging me to really see it.

It was a Friday night.

I was playing a free trial of this game I’d downloaded. It was called Fishbowl Frenzy, and it was awesome. You managed this fishbowl. You fed the little goldfish. They pooped gold coins that you collected. As the levels progressed, you had to buy a carnivore to eat the goldfish. The carnivore pooped diamonds.

I don’t know what happened next in the game because that was as far as I’d gotten. I’d only signed up for a one-hour free trial. And, while I loved the game, it hadn’t been worth spending money on, not when I had college to save up for.

I didn’t think Kyle had been paying much attention. He was high, watching television, zoned out. This was how our Fridays went. I was getting tired of coming over just to sit and do my own thing while he got high, ignored me. What was the point? I hadn’t yet said any of this to him.

But, when I’d closed the computer, he’d reached out a hand to stop me.

“What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I was waiting for my turn,” he said.

“Oh,” I told him, “you can’t. I mean, it was just a one hour free trial.”

“Oh man,” he said. “I really wanted to play.”

“Well,” I told him. “You could do it on your laptop. I think they track it by device.”

“Oh yeah.” He smacked his head. He ran into his messy kitchen, retrieved his laptop from the table, plunked it on his lap as he sunk into the couch.

I helped him download the trial and, for the next hour, he didn’t stop playing. He couldn’t take his eyes from the screen. He clicked. He made it way further in the game than I had, but I was bored, watching television. All I know was there was something about a “Queen Fish” who saved all your money so you wouldn’t go bankrupt. Going bankrupt meant your whole tank died.

I knew when his trial ended because he let out a loud, “God damnit.”

“What?” I asked him anyway.

“I can’t play anymore,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, “too bad.”

“Maybe they track it by email,” he said. “I had to put my email in to play.”

“Maybe.” I was thinking about leaving. Kyle didn’t know it, but I was texting Greg.

“Nope,” Kyle said, after a moment

“Sorry.” I was completely distracted now.

“Did you download the game here?” he asked

“No,” I said, “at school.”

Greg had texted a funny picture of himself at a bar, holding up his fake ID with a wry grin.

“I googled it,” Kyle said, after a minute.

“Googled what?” I was busy telling Greg that maybe I’d come out, if he thought he could get me in without a fake.

“How the free trials work,” Kyle said exasperatedly.

What I wanted to say was, really, you care that much about this, but I bit my tongue.

“They work based on connection, not device,” Kyle explained. “So, if I get on a new connection, I can download another free trial. I can get further. I can win.”

“That’s cool,” I said, “but I was thinking about heading home.”

“No,” he said. “You can’t. Please. I have to play.”

I sighed. He had that look in his eyes, that desperate want that you could never say no to.

“Drive me to the McDonald’s,” he said. “They have free Wi-Fi.”

“Kyle,” I told him. “I don’t feel like it. I had a beer . . .”

“Just one,” he said. “You can drive. Please.”

I sighed.

“Okay, but after that, I’m dropping you off and heading home.” Greg had already promised he could get me in, no problem. He’d done it before, he’d said.

So, I drove Kyle to the stupid McDonald’s. It was closed, at least the inside part was. So, we’d parked, getting as close to the building as we could for maximum WiFi exposure.

He’d started the download and then, a few minutes later, before it could complete, his computer had died.

“Shit,” he’d screamed, suddenly irrationally angry.

“I just need to charge it,” he mumbled. “Let me see if they’ll let me in.”

“Kyle,” I put a restraining hand on his arm, “you can’t. They’re closed.”

“They might let me in,” he said, and there was a fierceness in his eyes, a determination like I’d never seen before.

I hunkered down in my car, as low as possible, not wanting anyone to see me. Kyle had marched right up to that door, knocked. When no one came, he’d yelled out a loud, “Hey.”

Finally, a bored looking girl came to the door, didn’t open it. She just mouthed, “We’re closed.”

I could hear Kyle, loud, trying desperately to explain what he needed, but she was already walking away, shaking her head, ponytail swishing.

He came back to the car.

“Fuck,” he said, slamming my door.

“It’s no big deal,” I told him. “It’s just a game.”

“Not to me,” he’d said, “not to me.”

I’d driven him home, and that night had marked the decline of us. Our connection, once so real and vibrant, had faded away, bit by bit, after that night.

And now . . . he was this guy I didn’t really know, who I heard about from my mom. This guy begging on street corners in our hometown.

I look at the phone in my hand. I think how, now, just a couple of years later, you can download a game in an instant . . . if you have the cash. You don’t even need WiFi. You have data . . . if you have the cash. The world, I think, is different, but Kyle is not.

I think for a minute about what I could do for him. Brief thoughts of bringing blankets, food, all the things he might need, out there, swimming alone in the world, not eating enough to poop gold.

I decide against it. I hate to admit it, but a part of me is scared, doesn’t trust him. Sure, he’s Kyle to me, but he’s also a homeless guy, and homeless people steal. They hurt you.

I hate myself for thinking it, but I think it nonetheless.

Ultimately, I just pull out of the McDonald’s, head back toward the safety of my college campus, the friends who laugh and who only smoke pot recreationally.

When I get there, collapsing in the warm safety of my room, my soft bedspread, the familiar pictures tacked up on college-chic corkboard, I feel weirdly panicked for a moment, like I’m gasping for breath, flopping around and confused. I don’t know where the feeling comes from, but it’s terrifying, like a weight pressing down on me, telling me I’m going to die. And, then, just like that, it passes. I take in a deep breath. I take in the non-threatening room. I’m not dying. I’m fine.

It’s then that I decide, firmly and immediately, that I won’t be going home again for awhile, maybe not ever.


BIO

Susie Potter is a writer with works in The Colton Review, Broken Plate Magazine, Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, the Chaffey Reveiw, NOD, Existere, and Grasslimb. When she’s not busy writing, she enjoys spending time with her family and pets and volunteering in her community. She wrote this story to open a discussion on the drug epidemic affecting her hometown.



Full coverage

by Donna Dallas


siphon these little varmints
from beneath my skin
they’ve done nothing for me – these depraved little muses
softly killing me
an awful curse
this constant barrage of music
and the words – the never ending words
their songs part me through the middle
slice down to the birth thoughts
I cannot sleep
I write like a beast
eat little
then wait to hear a sonnet
a song
perhaps a riddle…….
something to fill in the blanks


Gods of a Bonehead 1

I am your fortuneteller
                        I whisper
the song of a future
                        star
born to the sky on the day of
                        a year
in your bones you know
we are a layer of a layer
we walk among bodies
                        with minds
we think we are gods
but we are as vulnerable
                        as a baby bird
yet we hold such power
as to wield weapons – but let me get back to your palm
that long deep line with so many breaks
so many crackled dips
I cannot find the end
                        nor the beginning
the future speaks
the wind blows secrets at us
the rain bleeds on us
the eagle seeks your forearm as if
                        you were a G-O-D
a falcon grips the serpent – do you remember anything my love?
I only know that you are here flesh
and blood and I’ll hold you
                        cradle you


Gods of a bonehead 9

I put makeup on so it looks like I’m not wearing makeup
I don’t know any real reason why I cried at 5:28am
I know the motion of my gut
I know the wave of a feeling that we
are all moving in this direction…….
this dreaded direction
I drive a car with monthly costs
that could feed a village
if I’m blank it’s because
my rip tore the universe
splitting it in two
we long for the other half
never the one we are in
while we dry ourselves up
to bone dust
yearn for the thing out there
missing all the things in here
along the way


Gods of a Bonehead 11

All is the same
maybe it will always be             the same
and is that so bad?
what’s worse than the same?
only death
only end
to anything that is substance for
breathing
I know I will end
with my last breath upon a window
as the steam forms
my fingers sculpt out an awkward shaped heart
later
another breath steams that very piece of glass
and the carved heart reappears
will it be the depth and magnitude
of a universal bonding             I don’t know
I only know we are all
in motion
twirling around in a circle of carnal lust
from Dante’s Inferno
those lovers lost in the wuthering tunnel
can’t stop to catch you
yet need you so desperately
sick joke                that Inferno
so well thought out it rocks centuries
into the millennium as if Beatrice
could walk in at any minute
we would all stand in awe of her
ethereal face and cow soothing eyes
and the only time we learn to live again
is when something so terrible              or so epic
occurs
yet days later                        when the dust settles
we crawl back into our cave
and sit on the edge
of our own skin with
boredom
because those tender times
when we were rocked to sleep
have disintegrated into the frivolity
of our aged bodies




BIO

Donna Dallas studied creative writing and philosophy at NYU. She has most recently appeared in Red Fez, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Opiate, Beatnik Cowboy, Burning House Press and several other publications. Her recent novel, Death Sisters (Alien Buddha Press) has just hit the market. Donna serves on the editorial team of Red Fez.
donnaanndallas@gmail.com
@DonnaDallas15

Save Me and I Will Be Saved

by Riley Winchester


It was late in the morning on a day in late December of 2010. I was in a waiting room with my mom at The Johns Hopkins Hospital Pediatrics Center. One of the walls of the waiting room was made entirely of windows, and natural light lit up the room. Outside was the scene of a normal Baltimore winter: mounds of muddy snow pushed up against walls and corners; the wind was whipping and could be heard through the windows.

I was scanning through the most recent edition of Sports Illustrated Kids and I remember thinking two things. The first was I wished the magazine was the regular Sports Illustrated, not the kid’s edition, because I was thirteen years old and had been reading the regular editionfor over four years now. The second thought was of back home. I wondered if I would have been playing in a basketball game later that day if I was home, 660 miles back home in Michigan.  

A nurse called my name and I stood up to walk into the back rooms where I was to have blood work done and tests run to see if I was right for what I was getting into. It was when I stood up and made my way toward the nurse that I saw what had been around me. It was like I was in a painting, but not a Matisse or a Monet. There were kids—all younger than me—in wheelchairs, with breathing tubes, with IVs hooked into their arms. I saw heads with the fuzz of peaches, smooth heads with no hair, skinny arms and legs, bony faces, and jaundiced eyes.

Through this painting I walked, and I walked with all of my health. I had my hair, a full head of it. I had tissue and flesh covering my bones. I had no machines fixed into me, nothing external needed to provide me with life. I walked; I wasn’t rolled around by someone else’s push. My body was healthy, but I was scourged with guilt.

———

Over the course of forty years Edvard Munch painted six different renditions of The Sick Child. Each time, the content of the picture remained the same but the style changed. The picture is of a young girl, propped up on a white pillow, on her death bed. She is staring at a dark curtain. The curtain, it’s believed, is a symbol of death. By the young girl’s side is a woman, presumably the girl’s mother, who is so distraught and grief-stricken that she can’t bear to look at her dying child, so her head is down, looking at the floor.

The original version was painted with mostly whites, grays, and greens—giving it a dark hue and a somber tone. When Munch debuted the painting at the 1886 Autumn Exhibition in Christiana, critics and spectators dismissed it. They said it looked unfinished and disparaged Munch’s abandonment of line. The hands of the grieving woman, according to critics, lacked discernible details and looked like blobs. In his defense, Munch said, “I don’t paint what I see but what I saw.”

What Munch saw, and what inspired The Sick Child, was the death of his fifteen-year-old sister Johanne, who was only one year older than Munch at the time of her death in 1877. She died from tuberculosis in the Munch family home, and the memory of his sister perniciously losing her health, and ultimately her life, stayed with Edvard Munch.

Munch became obsessed with the picture, and he continued to rework its aesthetic for most of his life. He abandoned Impressionism for Expressionism, and every successive version became brighter. Munch never explained the change in brightness, but he said Expressionism allowed him to express what really stirred his mind. When writing about The Sick Child late in his life, Munch said, “It was a breakthrough in my art. Most of what I have done since had its birth in this picture.”

———

I was at Johns Hopkins to donate, not to be treated. My dad was suffering from Paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH) and had been for as long as I could remember. PNH is a rare disease found in the red blood cells that causes hemolytic anemia in its sufferers. Hemolytic anemia is when red blood cells are destroyed at a rate much faster than they are produced. Over time this is deadly, and the average life expectancy after a PNH diagnosis is only ten years. My dad’s ten years were approaching. But his ten years were approaching at an auspicious time.

My dad had been on the bone marrow donor registry for over four years and couldn’t find a full-match donor. Fortunately, however, haploidentical bone marrow transplants were gradually becoming more accepted in the medical field. In haploidentical transplants, the bone marrow of a half-matched donor is used. Because of developments at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, half-match donations were now safe and came with very few side effects. The Johns Hopkins Hospital was the first American hospital to perform haploidentical transplants, and at the time it was the only American hospital to perform them.

The half-match in a haploidentical transplant is typically a family member of the bone marrow recipient. For my dad, this meant he would be receiving bone marrow from either his mom, his dad, his brother, one of his two daughters, or me—his only son. In the fall of 2010, the other potential donors and I were tested to see whose DNA closest matched my dad’s. Our blood was drawn in an outpatient lab at a Spectrum Health Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was then shipped to another lab to be examined. I remember thinking the whole process felt very casual and almost mundane. We filled a vial, no bigger than the size of a fat crayon, with blood, and that was it. A life was at stake and one of us would be responsible for it. But it didn’t feel like it.

The tests came back and I was the closest match. Years later, I learned I was always going to be the match and the tests were done only to ensure my DNA wasn’t an anomaly and somehow severely different from my dad’s. In haploidentical transplants, the ideal half-match is young and healthy, as the recipient should receive the healthiest bone marrow possible. This eliminated my dad’s parents and his brother. Also, the donor should be the same sex as the recipient, otherwise hormonal issues can arise. It’s possible to do cross-sex transplants, but they’re avoided if they can be. This eliminated my sisters, leaving only me left. Yet I didn’t know any of this at the time, so I was surprised when I learned I would be the donor. In the end, however, it was always going be me and it was always going to be at Johns Hopkins.

———

On my way to the nurse, a young girl in a wheelchair stole my attention. She was maybe five years old, and she wore nothing to cover her bald head. She had on a little purple dress, and in her hand was a stuffed monkey, which she held closely. A doctor was talking to her and her parents, who were standing beside her. The doctor knelt down and asked the girl if it would be okay if she came back on Christmas Eve for more testing. She didn’t hesitate. She said, Yes! And she was happy to come back whenever, she said, because all her friends were there. Her parents didn’t object, and an appointment on Christmas Eve was settled. As I approached the nurse, she greeted me. I followed her through a set of doors, leaving the waiting room behind, and down a hallway.

After a standard checkup of my height, weight, and blood pressure, I was sent into another waiting room where I was to wait until the doctors were ready to run blood tests on me. This new waiting room was designed specifically for kids. There were Rubbermaid tubs filled with Legos and other toys, small tables—with the tops brightly graffitied and etched into—that had coloring books and colored pencils on them, puzzles, picture books, and a TV with an Xbox 360 plugged into it. I turned on the Xbox and the TV as I waited for my name to be called again. I hadn’t yet started playing a game when a boy, around seven or eight years old, walked into the room. He wore a hand-knitted hat on his head and had a bandage on his cheek.

Before him or I said anything, he picked up an extra controller that had been on one of the small tables. I asked him if he wanted to play with me, and he shook his head yes, but he remained silent. It was a hockey video game, and I set it up to where we would play each other. In the game the puck dropped, and we started playing. No goals were scored, and very little time in the game had passed, when a new nurse came in and called my name. I paused the game and stood up to leave. The boy finally spoke, and he asked me if I was leaving. The question halted me. I wasn’t prepared; all my mind could think of was the truth. I could make no excuse or give no palliative answer. I told him, plainly, I was sorry and that I had to leave.

———

Bone marrow is spongy tissue found inside the bones that produces hematopoietic stem cells. Red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets develop out of these stem cells. Sometimes, hematopoietic stem cells turn cancerous or defective, slowing down or completely stopping the life-providing function of bone marrow. A bone marrow transplant is then needed to replace the bad bone marrow. It wasn’t until 1956 that a bone marrow transplant was successful. Doctors had been attempting transplants since the early 1900s, but Dr. E. Donnall Thomas was the first to perform the operation successfully. He extracted bone marrow from a healthy boy and gave it to the boy’s twin, who was suffering from leukemia.

The process hasn’t changed much since Thomas’s successful transplant in 1956: Bone marrow is extracted from the donor’s hip bone using bone marrow harvest needles—which closer resemble a drill bit than a needle—and then transplanted into the recipient’s bloodstream. It’s a safe process for the donor. Health concerns usually only arise in the recipient after the procedure, when their body is adjusting to the new bone marrow. 

Despite knowing the safety and efficacy of the procedure—doctors from Michigan to Johns Hopkins had all informed me of it—I had feelings of trepidation when I saw the needles that would be stuck into me, that would be driven into my hip bone, and that would suck the healthy marrow from me. But I was already at Johns Hopkins, I reminded myself; there was no going back now. And I had seen and been surrounded by so many hurting people, hurting kids, whose bodies were determined on destroying themselves from the inside out. It wasn’t fair to them. I had to do my part at Johns Hopkins.

———

The bone marrow transplant happened in early January 2011, and it was a success. After the transplant, when the anesthesia wore off, I woke up miserable and confused. My vision was sandy, it felt like a steel band was wrapped tightly around my head, and my mouth was so dry and coarse that I wondered if a small rodent had crawled into my mouth and died while I was unconscious. There were thick, bone white sheets hanging from the ceiling, separating me from the others who were also recovering in the same room.

The first thing I heard was the voice of a young boy who was talking to his dad. From the sound and timing of his voice, I could tell he was in the bed next to mine, to the right. He told his dad he wanted pancakes and he asked him when they would be able to eat them next. The dad promised that as soon as the boy recovered and was ready to leave the hospital, the first thing they would do is go out and eat pancakes. Shortly after he said this, the dad made the promise again, to make sure the boy knew.

I was supposed to lie in the hospital bed and recover for only two hours, but I stayed for over six. The surgery was harder on my body than I anticipated, than even the doctors anticipated. My body was weak, and every time I tried to stand and walk—walking was the true test to see if I was ready to leave, I was told—my legs gave out and I had to be caught by a nurse. To use the bathroom, I had to wrap my arms around a nurse and my mom and be guided to the toilet. At the toilet, I had to be held up by my mom because my legs couldn’t support my body.

As the hours went by, a new nurse was assigned to me—the original nurse’s shift had ended—my stomach started accepting food, things in my head became clearer, and my legs felt strong again. Finally I was able to walk on my own, and the nurses said I was okay to leave. I held onto a four-legged walker and shuffled, my mom beside me to catch me if my legs failed again. When I left, I could still hear the boy talking to his dad, but he was no longer talking about pancakes.

———

I spent many hours in The Johns Hopkins Hospital Pediatrics Center. I watched kids go into rooms to receive treatment, have their bodies prodded with needles and filled with radiation, swallow prescribed pills at calculated intervals throughout the day. During these times, I often found my mind stuck on a passage from a book I had read shortly before I left for Johns Hopkins: The Catcher in the Rye. The passage is from when Holden tells his sister Phoebe about a recurring dream he’s been having.

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

I wanted to be the catcher in the rye at Johns Hopkins. I wanted to stop all the sick kids before they went to receive treatment. I wanted to tell them they didn’t need it because I could help them. I wanted to give my kidneys to the kids with Wilms tumors. I wanted to give my liver to the kid with hepatoblastoma. I wanted to give all my bone marrow to the kids with leukemia. I wanted to give my eyes to the kids with retinoblastoma. I wanted to give my brain to the kid with brain tumors. I wanted to give my heart to the kid with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. I wanted to give myself to every sick kid until there was nothing left of me—until there was nothing left of me but there was all of them.

And with every kid I would say, Take it, take this! You can do more with it; you will do more with it! But I couldn’t. Like Holden, all I could do was think about it. All I could do was think and not do. 

———

I left The Johns Hopkins Hospital and was pushed through Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport on a wheelchair, because I still couldn’t walk at full speed or for long periods of time. I left with my grandparents who had also been staying at Johns Hopkins. Our seats were upgraded to first class because of me. One of the airline workers saw me, a young teenager in a wheelchair, with two elderly people and she kindly told us our seats were now in first class. I was able to walk onto the plane, so I walked through the corridor that connected the terminal and the plane and found my seat in first class.

For a strange reason that I cannot explain, it felt good, at the time, to leave Johns Hopkins having experienced some pain and discomfort. Perhaps it was a combination of guilt for being healthy and feeling that I had done nothing for the kids, that I had even abandoned some, who I had so badly wanted to do something for. Of course, I couldn’t have done anything for them, but even at thirteen—an age where I should have known this, and I think I did know this but still told myself differently—I felt that there was something I could have done, even if I didn’t know what it was.

But I had done something at Johns Hopkins, and it was the reason for my pain and weak legs and fatigued body. I donated bone marrow to my dad; his PNH was cured and he was healthy. My grandparents still had their son, my mom still had her husband, and my sisters and I still had our dad. None of that would have been so if it weren’t for what I had done, but I wasn’t thinking about that.

———

Abraham Jacobi was born to impoverished parents in a small town in central Germany in 1830. Jacobi was a sick child from birth. In fact, he was so sick and his parents were so poor that they were advised by a doctor to not spend any money on treating the infant Jacobi, because there was little chance he would survive into adolescence. His parents listened to the doctor, but Jacobi survived. In his early twenties, Jacobi earned his Doctor of Medicine but shortly after was arrested for his radical political beliefs. After two years in a Cologne prison, he escaped and immigrated to New York, where he set up an affordable pediatric clinic.

Jacobi found success in America. His clinic was visited by many and he gained popularity in the medical field as both a physician and a pioneer in the field of pediatrics. In 1859, he published Midwifery and Diseases of Women and Children—the first medical text to take an earnest interest in treating sick children. Jacobi was one of the first physicians to understand the importance of treating sick children differently than sick adults, stating, “They are not merely small adults.” He was also the first physician to emphasize bedside pediatrics. Before Jacobi, the treatment of children was often emotionally distant due to high mortality rates among sick children and an overall vein of pessimism in pediatrics—losing multiple patients a week was normal for a pediatrician in the nineteenth century.

By the end of his life, Jacobi had written over 4,000 pages, collected in eight volumes, on pediatrics. He wrote on the etiology of diseases in children, the treatment of children, the philosophy of the pediatrician, and the necessity of pediatrics. In addition, he opened pediatric wards in hospitals across New York, and he served as the first Chair of the Section of Pediatrics of the American Medical Association. Today, Jacobi is known as the Father of American Pediatrics.

But even the Father of American Pediatrics could only do so much for his patients. The first pediatric disease Jacobi became interested in was diphtheria—a bacterial infection in the nose and throat—and he’s credited with inventing the indirect laryngoscope to examine children for the presence of diphtheritic membrane. Jacobi was considered an expert on the disease by his medical contemporaries. But at the age of eight, Jacobi’s only son, Ernst, contracted diphtheria. And, for Jacobi, there would be no saving Ernst. By the time the disease had been discovered in him, it was too late. Ernst Jacobi, the son of Abraham Jacobi, died at eight years old.

———

We landed in Grand Rapids and I was wheeled through Gerald R. Ford International Airport in one of their provided wheelchairs. Every time I caught someone’s attention and they looked at me for longer than a second with a stare of sympathy, I wanted to stand up. I wanted to stand up and tell them I was fine and I didn’t need them to feel bad for me and that there are kids all over who you should feel bad for but I’m not one of them. There are kids who you should feel bad for and I was with some of them but I couldn’t do anything for them.

I was wheeled up to the doors of the airport where there was an area to drop off the airport’s wheelchairs. I found a spot for my wheelchair and left it there; I was eager to abandon it. It was early in the morning, around 4 a.m., and outside everything was bright and lit up by streetlights and headlights from cars and buses. My grandma offered to help me walk as we looked for the car. I told her I was fine and I could do it on my own.

In the car, going south out of Grand Rapids, I started to feel different. It’s a source of stress and physical exhaustion to be in an environment like I was in, and now that I had been out of it for some time, I could feel myself recovering. I didn’t think I left Johns Hopkins a victim of any kind or that I had been unfairly exposed to something I shouldn’t have. I thought I had seen something, something unpleasant, and there were things that could come of it. What they were, I didn’t know, but I knew they were somewhere.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have known what those things were. That no matter what you do, you’ll always wish you had done more or think you could have done more, so it’s best to find pride in the things you have done and be kind to yourself. That hurt isn’t transferred like currency, and you being hurt won’t abate anybody else’s hurt. That you can’t make the world better all on your own, but you can start small, do what you can, and hope it makes your part of the world better. That when you sit and try to think about the big, profound things, your mind will get hung up on the little things like a stuffed monkey or a hand-knitted hat or pancakes, and then you’ll realize those were the big things all along. And a lot of what you learn will sound familiar, and that’s because it is; it’s not new, they’re old platitudes. But until you find something real to attach them to, they’ll never make any sense.

———

On the way home, we stopped at a McDonald’s drive-thru because we hadn’t eaten since we left Baltimore and no other restaurants were open. We waited a long time for our food, very long for being the only customers. It was quiet in the car—there was no radio playing and we were too tired for small talk. When our food finally came out, my order was wrong, and my grandpa said his coffee was cold. But none of these things seemed important or worth talking about, not now.


BIO

Riley Winchester lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He recently graduated from Grand Valley State University, where he earned a B.A. in History. His work is forthcoming in Waymark.

The New Reality

by Tom Whalen

I told everyone the new reality would be easy to understand, there was nothing to worry about, our lives were soon to be made richer, fuller of promise, strange songs we would sing throughout the rest of our days. The new reality would eliminate self-isolation and the difficult. Hard to grasp concepts, four-dimensional chess, calculating the recession rate of stars would be a breeze. And the new reality wouldn’t play favorites, wouldn’t have citizens who would benefit more than others or look down upon those who were dumber, because no one would be dumb. The new reality would elevate us all.

Then the map of the new reality arrived, we pored over it, and I had to eat my words.

I visited the Museum of the Old Reality with its long arms of lists and thick blue veins. I walked through the Door of Ego and down the Corridor of Why with its vines trailing away into a horizonless distance. I looked in the glass cases of the Museum of Old Reality, hoping history would answer some of my questions, my doubts and anxiety about the future of life and the afterlife. In the stairwells of the museum I paused to admire the paintings of the wisdom of the pre-Socratic masters wherein donkeys and sheep grazed and slept in meadows and the sun peeped over the hills. In the closed stacks of the Museum of the Old Reality that I snuck into, I took delight in a moment of prayer. An inestimably sweet infusion of eternal praise, full of warmth and learning, hummed in my bones. Later, in the museum’s coffee shop, Cardinal Newman and I had a long, edifying chat on the cultivation of the intellect and drank several pots of black tea. Then, after I used the toilet, I stepped back into my own unchosen century, none the more prepared for the new reality.

The new reality has cracked my skull, said Edmund. The new reality has cracked my skull, too, said Yoshi. Mine, too, said Richard. It’s cracked my skull and the organ of cognition contained therein, said Gilbert. And mine, said Naguib, scratching behind his ear. And mine, and mine, and mine, and mine, and mine, and mine, said Eunice, Mechilde, Maeta, Dino, Ilse, and Gottfried.

Everywhere, as best I could tell, people walked around lamebrained by the new reality.

Meanwhile Gertrude was unhappy. I’m unhappy, she said. Which is to say I’m sad. I’m not happy about anything. I’m not happy about this book I can’t read. I’m not happy about social networking which changes its apps and offerings by the minute. I’m not happy that our children are being weaned on Jack Daniels by nanny-bots, though often I’m not not happy about it either. I’m not happy that the cost of air per ounce has increased by several creds, and if it had not been I wouldn’t be happy about that either. I’m not happy that the eternal coming of the bridegroom has been indefinitely delayed, I even expected as much. And I’m not happy that the postman has died on our stoop of COVID-919, it displeases me that he died on our stoop rather than another. And I’m not happy that Lowell’s Memoir on a Trans-Neptunian Planet is out of print, never to be printed again. And let me add that I’m not happy that you’re an idiot. I’ve always known that that was what you were, and I’ve never been happy about it. And I’m not happy that I’m not one, too. I’d love to be an idiot, but I can’t deny my smarts. And I’m not happy that I’m not larky, even if I don’t believe larks are really happy, though I bet they’re not unhappy. In a word, I’m like totally fucking miserable. In fact, I think I’m depressed.

Are you happy about the new reality? I asked.

How can I be happy or unhappy about it, she said, when I don’t know what it is?

I received a catalogue of new courses offered at the University, a catalogue on parchment with a gold trim and fish head insignia. Courses now required included New Genetics (for those born under the old genetics, the system of the lamb, the catalogue said the course was free), Basic Banking, Mysticism 101, and Twirl. New electives included Gestalt Text Messaging, Swiss Soups, Color Separation, and Life Cycles of the Ootid, a haploid cell formed by the meiotic division of a secondary oocyte, especially the ovum, as distinct from the polar bodies.

I flew to Zurich to visit Neue Zentralbibliothek and was led by an assistant down a flight of stairs into a cave-like enclosure where its mainframe was incaved.

Of what does the new reality consist? I asked it.

The mainframe sang a vaguely familiar theme I couldn’t place; its lights lit up, followed by a sound like the clacking of a typewriter, then its answer.

Of this that and the other, it said.

That’s it? I asked.

Only one question allowed, the assistant said, ushering me out.

At night we sit cross-legged on the floor in a circle, damaged and adrift in the glow of our screens.

Then the Professor spoke to us.

Fluidics, he said. Fluidics and algorithms. First, wash your face, then wash your hands, then your face, then dirty them up again. How have the questions come to be so confused? Don’t ask the darlings of this earth, darlings with lapwings for shoulders and interstitial eyes. Have you consulted the ghost in the machine? If your comments have been tabulated, investigated, digested and interfaced with the sounds of the year 1918, then slip into your harnessed minds and proceed with your development, first cutting the semantic cord. The ozone is the occult, the sky detonates. There has been a categorical error, I repeat there has been. Once wonder seized me, then faded away into introspection. I have come to you with news, a shower of tweets and hoaxes, veritable observations that the path you lead is not of your own making. If you believe there’s no good to resist, then why resist it? My heart aches, penance may afflict you, Venus has vanished. Now look at life non-optically. The mind reports its own affairs, Ryle tells us, and nothing else. Isn’t that enough? Are you sipping the spinal fluid through plastic straws? I’m lonely. I don’t feel well. You’ve been warned—then he collapsed over the podium, and a thick blue fog descended from the rafters and devoured him.

I had imagined that once we had obtained the new reality, had taken it fully in, it would replace the outworn, message-laden, utilitarian old, crises would dissolve like clouds and a new life would flourish on the planet like a garden grown wild. But I was wrong. The question is: what can we do to ward off the feeling of helplessness that comes upon us when confronted with even a portion, a script, a remnant of the new reality no one seems to understand? A qualitative analysis of imprecision might help, as might making sure the lenses on your glasses, if you have glasses, are clean. It’s possible the so-called new knowledge will help, but I have my doubts. Isn’t the new always only wrapped in the old, like a child decked out in a tuxedo? Still, I sense there’s much to be done, this side of acquiescence. Disasters to prepare for, dreams to disentangle, deaths to mourn. The orange rain, for example, that has begun to fall—orange, triangular rain the size of birdcages—might also bear examination.


BIO

Tom Whalen’s books include The President in Her Towers, Elongated Figures, Winter Coat, and Dolls. His translation of Robert Walser’s Little Snow Landscape and Other Stories is forthcoming from NYRB Classics in 2021.

Photo © Kim Graser, 2015.

And the coldest tree takes root

by Daniel Aristi


They’ve come late
In the evening 1,000 ants
Like ninjas –
Felled this ole Gulliver
At the ankles
(Tomorrow we expected both sunshine
And war).

            Body load is distributed flat
            On minute tribal shoulders
            In a poised, expert manner
            That suggests experience –

Why don’t ants grace humbler flags, they
The Dark Rivers?

            Skin had grown brownbag
            Over the wedding ring –
            That’s how old he
            Were:

                        A fist of twiggy fingers sworn together into a pyre

                        No more running-faster-than-the-bridge-crumbling-behind-you

                        You know, you can measure time in teeth

                        And I want to be buried in my playground – furtively, at night, by loyalists
                        A tad bit drunk.


La violencia

No better, thinner. No better,
Taller. No better,
Got a gun:

                        – Goes Unchallenged Now (GUN)

                        – Gimme Ur Name (GUN)

                        – God’s Urgently Needed (GUN)

                        …

Qué macho es el
Gun, you’ve got another
Dick, hombre mío.

                        In Spanish victim is female – la víctima – and

                        Bullet is female – la bala – and bullseye

                        Is female – la diana – and death is female –


                                                                                                    La muerte.


More of the same

Bullet-pierced milk
Mixed
With you know
Made the street
Pink

                *  

                RE: [Exit wounds] –
                The barrio exhorts:
                Güey you better
                Toughen up, and the bullets
                Stay in

                                *

                                Bullet (n.): nocturnal, burning,
                                Flies quickly from dark to
                                Dark

                                                *

                                                Experiment #54:
                                                Emptied box of guns
                                                Down brownstone
                                                Staircase. Only
                                                The young run fetch them.
                                                All adults
                                                Have one already.


Agamemnon

Order: espresso & beer.

Whatever is necessity

At this time of

History: Tick-tock-tick-

Tock: 73% of respondents

Answered, “Bomb”.

A reciprocal

Perpetual blood

Transfusion:

That’s what I had

With my first wife – the one saving

The other to then be saved back

Again & again.

I’ll have beer first –

Espresso is a

Full stop.

BIO

Daniel Aristi was born in Spain. He studied French Literature as an undergrad (French Lycée in San Sebastian). He now lives and writes in Belgium. Daniel’s work is forthcoming or has been recently featured in Main Street Rag, Berkeley Poetry Review and Cold Mountain Review.

Three New Names

by Masie Hollingsworth

An umbrella. I’m about to lose eight years of stealing, saving, and lying through my teeth to my own mother because of one stolen umbrella, may the moons curse me.

The officer jerks me forward, and I clench my jaw tighter to swallow down more than just the pain of my shoulder being practically ripped out of its socket. I feel his cold gaze on me again, and I risk a glance in his direction. It’s the same teasing glint in his eyes, the corners of his mouth curling upward in a cruelly pleased sneer—one I want with every fiber of spite left in me to match, but even I wouldn’t dare it in this place, every square inch alive with legions of bored and armed officers. It’s the same expression he wore when he first snagged me from behind by the hood of my jacket; I hope whatever muscles hidden by the fat of his face are as aching as I’d imagine they’d be to hold such an expression for so long.

But then again, maybe I deserve what’s coming to me. I’m disappointed at my own self that I made the bright decision to try and escape. Resisting arrest; I hear it’s a pretty major offense, enough to drag out the minor offense of stealing an umbrella. But if they find out the reason why I stole it, why I resorted to petty theft to hide from the rain, why I was wandering the streets of the capital this time of night alone and without a job as far as they could tell, at least…

A large man at the front desk waves away a woman in front of us, her report of a crime apparently not worth their time. I’m not-so-secretly rooting for her to lose it and make a scene to distract everyone, but I’m not so lucky.

Which means it’s our turn to step forward. Me, the dreaded umbrella thief.

Another jerk from my officer, and I’m for once thankful for the handcuffs serving as the impulse control I certainly lack. The officer and the round red bull’s eye of his nose better be glad too, whatever his name is. My eyes flick to the pale formation of sylwei marks curling over his forehead: “Urilhispaisolian,” in common letters. Giving him the sole ability to communicate with swamp-joie birds. My eyes almost water as I disguise a snort; letting on my fluency in the patterns of sylwei would be about as incriminating as strolling in with five case-fulls of stolen alpit spilling from my pockets.

Or wearing nothing but a thin layer of non-waterproof makeup to hide a whole scribble of stolen names crowding my face outside, in the rain, in broad evening daylight.

Dakotyzen will kill me if Sol doesn’t.

I try to cast the thought from my mind. But one tear in my sleeve, a flash of my unpainted collarbone, even if they make me pull up my hair to reveal the back of my neck—a day’s mission’s worth stolen names, powerful or not, killed for or pledged with albeit forced compliance—they’d finally lock up their sylwei thief before I could even get the name “Lord Sol” out of my mouth. Not that he hadn’t made it clear he wouldn’t spare a coin to claim me if the event of my capture ever did arise.

If. I savor the hope of the word, chewing my lip in feigned boredom. I still have a chance, a good one at that, to get away without much more than a fine or even a night in prison. Right now, I can’t afford to let my fear or pessimism shake me. Or the damp pressure on my wrist of one old, brutish officer and his apparent lack of a responsible anger management outlet.

The whole front desk sags at the weight of its occupier, as well as the fierce boredom reeking from the clerk man’s tight-lipped expression and watery eyes. “What’s this one done?”

It’s as if the whole area emanates the weight of his apathy; I try to let it soak into my bones to calm them if I can’t hope to cry my way out of this one. He asks the question more like he thinks he works in a cheap second-rate market vendor than a police station. “Tysedelphawen,” the name on his forehead would appear to the untrained eye. But those swirled symmetrical sylwei letters all combined would mean… the ability to know a person’s heart rate by simply looking at them. Despite the subordination his name’s length might suggest, it could be useful—to detect extreme nervousness. Or lies. Whatever parent named him must’ve been clever to find such a useful name that hadn’t been taken yet.

Officer “Urilhispaisolian” clears his throat, shoulders already set with alert but confident ease, interrupting my internal debate of whether his friends would call him “Uril,” or “Soli,” or whatever else. “Caught her sneakin’ around, trying to pickpocket folks on the streets. Gave me a good chase when I went after ‘er.”

I change my mind. He probably doesn’t have any friends. Awen, as I’ve elected to call the clerk officer, huffs a bored sigh as if to confirm my conclusion. “She take anything?”

“Mm hm. She had this,” Uril’ continues, hoisting the umbrella into the air with enough triumph to spatter a mist of raindrops and startle me (but not to make a dent in my concealer thank the moons), “And who knows what else!”

I let loose a little eye-roll, not enough to seem undermining of his authority but just the right trick to sell myself as a bored, moody preteen. Despite my height, I can easily pass for one.

The front desk man, Tysa-delph-whatever, narrows his eyes at me, then to my forehead. I stifle a shiver.

“Sat-i-al… kala.” He purses his lips, suspicious of the relatively short name that usually earns me extra respect, orjealous stares. I can only pray he can’t read what my power really grants me. “Explain yourself.”

It’s common knowledge anywhere that the recipe for a man’s sympathy is runny mascara and a pair of extra-pouty lips, but there’s no way I’ll be able summon tears with the mood I’m in at the moment. So I settle on a different approach.

“It was just the umbrella.” I turn out my pockets, shrugging off my satchel and dumping all the contents on the front desk for effect. He visibly winces as my Official rations receipt plants face-up on the desk, and I bite down a smile at my luck. And the status working for Sol all these years has brought me. “And I’m not a pickpocket, I just ended up at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

This had better be worth having to pick up all those dropped alpit coins once this is all over.

Awen reclines back in his chair as he clasps his hands together, and I’m not the only one to wince at the strain it squeaks under his weight. “Just the umbrella. Hmph.”

 I’ve changed my mind—the risk of them discovering my various pistols and back-up pistols disguised as a squarescreen and two compass-tracker sorts of equipment was definitely worth it. But Uril officer doesn’t seem as convinced. “So I suppose the umbrella just happened to fall into your hands?”

I struggle to keep my breathing easy. It’s a question I can easily explain, one I actually expected, but it’s his narrowed gaze on one of the spilled items that offsets me; there’s suspicion there for sure, stuck on the compass-tracker-gun like a splinter in my chances of escape, the one weapon slightly less artfully hidden. The pressure of my eyelids as I close them in an attempt to collect myself doesn’t do much to calm me, in a situation where calmness is key.

But I tell myself it’ll be okay anyway. Let him search the blasted gadget; it takes a whole pattern of buttons to lock into place as a weapon, a clever design by whoever Sol pays to plan his dirty-work. And besides, the bright red button in its center still works as a tracking beacon—unless it stopped working in the time between now and about five minutes ago when I sent a little SOS to Dakotyzen. I only wish my partner could spare the effort to arrive just a little bit faster.

I set my jaw, reminding myself of the current predicament. “I didn’t say I took it by accident.” The officer copies my stance, crossing his arms in suspicion. “What I meant was I shouldn’t have hung around with… a certain group. Forced me into stealing the umbrella on a dare, and I’m sorry, but I really didn’t feel like ending up a stain on the sidewalk, so,” I scoop up most of my coins, piling enough to be a worthy fine in front of Awen’s lamentful expression, and pick up my satchel to leave.

The old man sighs, accepting the alpit and reaching for a records file most likely to log my name in. I try to remind myself that this was the better alternative to every other disaster that could’ve happened. It takes Awen a painful amount of time to find my name, and I curse Kota for being so slow to come get me. I’d rather be out of here before the swell of rain from outside succeeds in its plan to ruin my life, by sweeping in to reveal each of my hidden names or whatever other reason it seems so intent on pounding the roof in right from above.

Awen’s chair groans as he finally sets the file on the table after finding my name. Good. maybe they won’t think twice about me when it shows that my power is nothing more than rapid-healing: powerful, but nothing too threatening. After all, I didn’t lie when I said it was my gift. It was one of them and at some point, at least. I just left out the part about killing that drug lord to get it, and selling it months ago to the corrupt estate lord of my hire. Awen’s almost hefted the enormous file onto the desk, but the grumpy officer, Uril, hasn’t had enough.

“Sir, I hardly believe—”

“We’ll still have to log this on your record,” his co-worker, who apparently must out-rank him in this field, says. Completely ignoring him. I’m beginning to grow deeper and deeper indebted to Awen, though he wouldn’t miss the chance to lock me up if he knew it.

Sure enough, he gives a slight nod of his head when his eyes fall upon my name and its meaning. “How’d you get it? Your name? It’s pretty short, I mean.” and therefore powerful.

“Oh,” I have to snap myself out of my reverie. I can’t afford to be complacent at the moment. “My grandmother was a nurse, back in the war. A higher-ranking general pledged it to her before he died, and she passed it on to me before she passed away some years ago.” I look up, with a smile almost as small and tender as the melancholy I’ve poured into my voice.

And only then do I realize my mistake in telling the truth rather than just lying to be over with this. “Well, of course, he was so deeply wounded his gift of healing couldn’t fix him. It was a tragic war, really was, really was.” I curse myself for babbling on like an old gossip, but I can only hope it’ll work. And that neither of them recall about two minutes ago when I mentioned not wanting to… what were my words? ‘End up a stain on the sidewalk.’ My luck’s just getting worse.

Awen’s eyes narrow from across the desk counter, and I look down pretending to be bashful. But now I’m met with another gaze; the countertop’s shiny enough that it’s my own reflection like a wide-eyed shrum caught in a trap staring back at me. I quickly snap my ridiculous gaping mouth shut, and look back up.

And then my eyes catch something I wish for the sake of my heart rate they didn’t. It’s a mighty feat if not an impossible one not to wince as Awen’s sylwei mark glows slightly red; he’s using his gift, reading my pulse at the very moment.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths.

“Oh, Kala, mom’s going to kill you.”

The words catch me off guard as much as they do the guards. My mom would kill me if she knew what I’ve done to send them money all these years.

My tight-lipped smile when I whip around isn’t anything short than threatening, but it’s real and relieved. “Only if she finds out.” I say, walking with stiff joints away from the front desk, but at least I’m not shaking.

Dakotyzen even ruffles my hair in the way an older brother would, smile wide and unfaltering. “I’m deeply sorry for any damage this little mell-monger did. We’re both sorry. I’ll be taking her home to let our mother deal with her.”

“Will not,” I punch his arm. It’s something I’d do if my real brother had said as much, and the nearest officers buy it with low chuckles.

Kota mouths something like, “Don’t worry, I will,” to Awen, and he nods to let us go. Once again, the age-old sibling act has proven successful, and I’m battling down a smug grin on our way back through the line from the front entrance. At least this time, it’s my own colleague jerking me by the arm, and he’s even brought his own umbrella.

“That was too close for comfort.” Any trace of humor in Kota’s voice is gone, abandoned for a light but dry inquisitive tone. Though I wouldn’t have it any other way; either this, or his wrath. Which I probably deserve, having risked both of us and Sol’s whole band of sylwei thieves at that, all because of a stupid mistake. Or two.

I tighten my jaw, voice low as we join the horde of side-walkers, though it’s not like anyone could hear us through the conundrum of the storm. I knew this was coming, but I still would rather avoid more criticism. “Yeah, they barely bought it. Next time you ought to be my little brother.” Thanks to our conveniently similar dark eyes and hair, it isn’t true that the officers barely believed that we’re siblings, but I needed something to bring the conversation away from my mess-up.

Kota makes a sound like an unimpressed snort, clearly having caught on to my attempt at diverting the blame. But I risk a glance next to me, and sure enough his pride has taken a hit; I almost regret that it worked. Almost. Though he knows I was just teasing, he takes about as kindly to remarks about his height as he does mentions of his… less-than proud origins. Just as I predicted, he doesn’t say anything for at least another minute.

When he does eventually ask the dreaded question, I explain the umbrella situation with as much dignity as I can. I’m just glad I at least had time to relax my tense muscles and feel myself fade into the crowd, a network of busy street folk snaking around every corner under a roof of all shades of umbrellas that almost look like multicolored scales in the distance. It’s times like these when the streets are really dangerous; so much pushing and shoving it’s not uncommon that some passersby meet disaster under the wheels of speeder-traffic, and it wouldn’t be a safe gamble at all to assume anybody with as powerful a gift as some sort of healing would be wandering these streets.

• • •

“Where are you going?” I quirk an eyebrow, though I follow Kota around a curve too soon to be the turn that leads to Sol’s hidden domain.

Kota offers the slightest of grins. “While you were busy getting arrested, I found a short-cut.”

“Alright then.” I highly doubt he actually did, but whatever he’s got up his sleeve, I’ll play along.

Another turn, and we’re in an even less-populated alley-way. No road, nothing but a sidewalk only three-persons wide. I haven’t heard this much quiet, or had this much personal space on the street since a particularly successful mission during last year’s Moons’ Festival.

“So what really happened? Before your genius act of getting yourself caught in the rain, not the other even brilliant-er idea of petty theft, I mean?”

I jerk my chin up away from him, buying a little more time to organize my thoughts, and then allow myself another pause to wrinkle my nose as a particularly fat shrum darts away through the shadows, sending ripples in the puddles in its wake. This is a sketchy side street if I’ve ever seen one, and the darkness from storm clouds overhead doesn’t help.

“Found my targets soon enough, and then a couple of unexpected targets. The four original ones were members of a small little gang, but who knows who they killed to get such powerful names.” Not that anyone Sol would target would have a name any less than priceless, of course. Kota hisses an understanding laugh along with me. “They had two others who weren’t on the target-list with them, so I, ah,  convinced them to pledge their names to me easy enough, too. Sol never objects to extras.”

Extras. For a moment, I wonder if he’ll ask what they are. For a moment, the last decent part left in me wants him to.

But he doesn’t. Maybe he really is cursed.

I bite back a relieved smile, cursing my own wickedness. Though when I turn to him, something in the subtle smirk of Kota’s expression unsettles me; nonetheless, I keep going. “My turn now. What job did Sol have you on today that had you forging your sylwei again? Or should I start calling you… ha, Eglezdipalien?”

I’ve gotten Kota to laugh for a second, the fake name drawn onto his forehead creasing as he raises his eyebrows. The ability to gauge how long it’s been since someone has picked their nose, just by looking at them. An effective alias for Kota in diverting suspicion I’m sure, but I hope for the sake of whoever that it’s not a real name; I’d sooner be nameless.

But then, just like that, Kota’s lost all his humor again—I hope he can’t see that I’ve nearly frozen in place, biting my lip. “How’d you know I was on a mission? Thought you left HQ early?”

“Sorry. Sol tells me everything.” I’m cursing myself inside for the mistake, though I didn’t technically lie after all. Omission of details is a sort of guilty specialty of my own, it seems.

Kota huffs. “‘Course he does. I don’t see how you can stand him, let alone being his little pet.”

I purse my lips, holding back a laugh that could end this all if I let it tumble out. Sometimes I forget how little he—they all—know. How little I’ve told him. There it is again—that little knot of guilt in my stomach, a knot I myself am tightening with every word I’ve said these past few moments. I tell it to go to Harva—I don’t have time for this. Let him think I was just startled by his comment, that I’m still sucking up to Sol for better pay, or whatever the rest of what he’s got in his head that I’ve been doing for months.

“Don’t talk like that,” I hedge, and it’s true. Kota himself once stole the ability of super-hearing for the man, and who knows what else.

Kota’s expression falters, only for the moment that he adds, “I just thought Loma meant more to you than that.”

I have to suck in a breath not to recoil at the mention of our late friend. Of course that’s why he’s been of so little patience with me lately. I should’ve known. I should’ve expected it, seeing as how I’ve manipulated his view so much that I really do deserve such shame in his eyes; but the coward in me still won’t let the act go, even after this. And not to mention his worsening relationship with Sol; it’s really no wonder. The man didn’t even bother to hide his sudden gain of the power—Loma’s power—of emotion-reading, even a day after her mysterious disappearance. Salomachieth deserved more, if not from him then from me.

“It’s not like that,” I shrug away the accusation. “I just need you to trust me for now.” I let my stare linger, once again conflicted as that one last uncorrupted part in my mind begs him to ask just one right question. But soon, it, too, is drowned out by the rest.

And to my surprise, Kota takes it after one long, hard stare. “Alright then.” He even changes the subject, causing me to even cringe on the outside. “My turn to ask questions again: what’s got you so upset about your mission today? I can tell something happened, don’t bother lying.”

Back to that again. Of course he can sense my hesitance. I force myself to relax my shoulders, taking a second’s pause as we dodge around a speeder parking to purse my lips against the thirst in my suddenly dry mouth. “The last one I was assigned to, the most powerful, refused to pledge his gift to me—temperature manipulation. I was lucky I’d snuck up on ‘im without any problems, but in the end I was forced to kill the vain—” I shake my head, stopping myself. Mom always told me to respect the dead.

We continue on a few steps, Kota saying nothing. He just swallows a deep breath. It’s no secret our job has its difficulty; and he knows I don’t like being forced to kill. I just have to remind myself the now cooling corpse mustn’t have felt the same about whatever noble-blood he must’ve murdered for the name’s gift in the first place.

Kota finally regains his voice, though it’s as dark as the alleyway we’re in and much more dry. “Some of them just… would rather have their throat slit than their name taken. Sometimes I wonder if that is better than living nameless…” I risk a glance at Kota, admittedly shocked by his mention of the nameless. Sol himself plucked him out of the Syltana district of the city’s overflowing nameless population, where Kota’s own parents had been graced with the extraordinary luck of few: finally finding a name that wasn’t already claimed, and a powerful one at that. A true Syltana to Sylwei miracle. They kept his gift of shadow-bending a secret on behalf of their son over the course of several years, but in the end no one can keep the secret of a powerful name from Lord Sol.

Since his ability’s pretty powerful for even Sol’s standards, I’ll admit that I was initially smug that he was impressed, ever-so-slightly jealous, even, when Sol brought me for hire into his band of name-thieves. Dakotyzen’s a full letter shorter than my name, but my namesake grandmother’s namesake had resourceful parents; Satialkala, the gift of being able to share a name with someone else, is similar in a way to Sol’s gift. Until me, only Sol could possess more than one gift at once. But here I am, sharing hisgift, after countless years of training and building trust, his greed having finally out-weighed his pride. Or maybe my offering of the first name I ever stole for him—the power to read sylwei and the only other power he allows me to share with him—was just icing on the cake of my cycle of endless dependence on him to feed my family. Even the ability to shape darkness to one’s own will isn’t as effective as the ability to steal multiple names at once, and thus I owe Kota my loyalty at least for the fact that he doesn’t hold too much envy in his heart to even associate with me. Unlike all the rest of Sol’s personal band of sylwei-smugglers. For that I owe him my true honesty—and only that. If only for his sake he knew the right questions to ask.

I’m about to ask where we’re going once more when Kota speaks again. “It wouldn’t have to be like this, if Sol allowed you to use your power to share with your victims. You wouldn’t have to kill them, or even threaten their lives.”

A long pause, more splashing shrum up ahead. The dirty rodents must be nearly the size of men creeping through the darkness—downright obese off of city-scraps and who knows what else.

Snapping out of my distraction, I tilt my head, reminding myself to act puzzled by the suddenness of such a profound notion. And a dangerous one, too. “Yeah, and? He can’t let me, because then someone might actually trace it back to me, and then to him.” And he likes the power of it, to have thousands of names all to himself anyway. Though I wish I could, I can’t say that last part, of course; Kota’s mocking me for “sucking up” to Sol was one thing, but undermining Sol’s own methods? The both of us are rather fond of our heads. One can never be too safe when it comes to Sol’s various surveillance abilities. And I can’t have Kota realizing just how shallow my true loyalties really are in the interest of our employer.

“We both know that isn’t why.”

I feel my brow twist in confusion. “What’s—” I meant to finish with “gotten into you,” or “crossed you with a death wish,” or something, but my words die in my mouth when I see his teeth bared in a grin—and then a flash of silver almost as bright as the glint in his eyes, and then—nothing.

The first thing I register is my eyes are closed. So I open them.

I’m on the ground, staring up at Kota and… Ennerilsha? And Kaltsyll? That explains the ringing in my ears, and why I can even see through the fog of my blurred vision that I’m on the ground. Drenched with rainwater, and—so that’s what hit me. I flinch at the sight of a small bloodstain on the brick in Kaltsyll’s hand—my own blood washing away in the rain.

My breathing speeds up even more when it dawns on me. He’s brought Sol’s other top smugglers to help him threaten me. Two people he’d claimed to hate with me. Two people who are working with him now, who have been for who knows how long. “You—” the words choke in my throat as it constricts on my panting breaths.

Neither Kota nor Ennerilsha nor Kaltsyll even flinch when I wake up, don’t do a thing to stop me from standing. Maybe they know I’m in no shape to, after what must at least be a minor concussion. Or maybe they know that just the three of them is enough. Shadow-bending, lie-detection, and illusion-manipulation, respectively.

I do best to juggle between the three stares, each their own shade of cruel smugness. But each twisted smile is calm. They’ve been planning this for a long time, I think. “Whatever you want, I won’t give it to you.”

More movement, more pressure and disorientation as Kaltsyll lands another blow with a kick to my chest, meant to force my head back into the alley sidewall. I expected the strike, but was in no position to block it or even dodge it—all I can do is bring up my hands behind my head to cushion it from the surface of that grimy wall. They’re careful to leave me conscious, though; they want me awake, they want to see me cowering below them in an upright fetal position. I feel not much more than dizziness and stinging—and cold. I can’t even hear the rain any more with the sharp pulse of my ears. The pain hasn’t quite penetrated my damaged brain yet, but the adrenaline has.

In a blink of movement, Kota jerks me up by the collar, a shiny dagger to my throat. So that was the flash of metal I saw. Not a gun. No, a gun’s too quick, too clean, too merciful for his practice. His eyes reflect the cold metal like a pair of mirrors; he’d always had the slightest tendency toward a deeper-held cruelty—one I should’ve feared. He punches me again, but I just smile through the blood raining from my nose. I hope my face cut his knuckles good too.

“Did you trust me?” His voice is a taunt.

I refuse to take the bait, to look down at the knife he holds right under my jaw. I can feel as its liquid coldness reaches into my skin, but it hasn’t drawn blood, not quite yet. “I—”

I almost say no. Almost.

But that would be too harsh a truth, too soon. So I tell him… not a lie, but a different sort of the truth. “I trusted that you weren’t as shrum-brained as you look. That you weren’t actually stupid enough to do something like this. That you… were better than…” I stop myself. I can’t afford to pity him, not any longer. He’s torn my trust to more pieces than there are stars in the moontime sky, and it was my own foolishness after all that led me to hope that… I’d be able to fit him into my plans. Another cough wracks my body as I struggle to stay sitting up.

I look to the ground, regaining my composure in a disappointed laugh. “I was wrong.” He goes for another punch, but this time I turn my head to miss it, baring my nearly knocked-out teeth like a crazed animal. I hope they’re as bloody as they feel, my smile as wide and gruesome as I can make it to startle them.

I brace for another hit, but Kota just smiles. And something glints in his eyes again, too—I don’t like it. “Pledge me all your names. Maybe we’ll let you come with us, be the nameless little tagalong.”

He doesn’t smile as widely when I spit in his face, deep scarlet with blood. But to my surprise, he doesn’t bend the shadows to his face to hide his shame.

They want me to cower, to beg for mercy. Or put up a brave and valiant-hearted fight, only to fail. I’ll give them the satisfaction of neither. “Do you care about me? Do you want me to live?” I let loose a hacking laugh this time, shifting acute eye-contact between all three traitors. Kaltsyll glares back with menace, but I relish in my success in making Ennerilsha flinch. She knows this isn’t just an act.

“Maybe I should be honorable—come with you and get torn to pieces by Sol. Or I could just stay here—It’s a shame to die at the hands of a bunch of soft-hearted traitors, but it would sure hurt less—” I’ve got to buy myself time, and fast. Lucky I know just the words. “Poor, sad Syltana over here can’t even land a punch—” the pain of the next blow, which Kota does land, brings tears to my eyes. I can only keep my split-lipped smile with the knowledge that they won’t see my tears through all this blood. I pray the rain doesn’t wash it all away—and it’s almost as if it listens, still showering down from outside the covering but not too loud that they can’t hear my taunts.

“Last chance.” Kota jerks my collar even higher, choking my already-shallow breaths. I would’ve laughed in his face if he glared, if his eyes darkened with hate. But they’re bright—not just with cruelty of bloodlust, but with something else. Arrogance. Confidence. Like he knows what he’s doing.

And then my malicious grin fades, every sore and stinging muscle in my face pulsing with the effort. “You found it.” I don’t have to pretend to be surprised. Or intimidated. Maybe I really am becoming a coward, having second thoughts about my own plan.

He seems to thrive on the fear in my eyes, the shock released with the drop of my jaw.

“You shouldn’t have called me that name.” His dark eyes tear into mine, still the same brown flecked with bronze, ringed with black. But now I see another dark shape, my own silhouette close enough to reflect against the menace of his eyes. I breathe in and out, the smell of my own blood so strong it’s as if I’m breathing it in, that it’s what’s choking me by filling my lungs. Rather than the grip of someone I’d thought was a friend.

He found it. He found the name, the power I’ve been searching for ever since I discovered it’s already been used. Immunity to outside powers—yes, I’ve been waiting for this one.

I’m careful not to let the look of terror in my eyes waver. I’ve always been a good actress. But in the end, my smugness wins out in a silent grin.

Kota flinches with the rest.

So that’s why the shadows now betray him—he abandoned his shadow-bending for the new name.

But I’ve still got a few tricks of my own. And he still thinks he found that name all by himself.

I breathe in a last deep inhale, reviving on the feeling of lightness, finally rid of a weight I’ve carried for the past years of waiting for this. Kota’s confidence flickers as I let my smile expand, breathing out a small, disappointed sigh, even shaking my head just the slightest bit. If only he and the rest of them had learned patience. I wish they had, I really do.

“You shouldn’t have threatened me.” My voice sounds unhinged, drunk—and maybe I am, high off of my imminent victory.

I see the focus dissolve from Kota’s eyes, pupils dilating in panic as I toy with his balance, but not before they flash his surprise that his new little name hasn’t worked—even immunity isn’t perfect. Just like Loma had first guessed, the name apparently can only be cancelled out by one other name. One name of the two I found unexpectedly just hours ago.

But I’m not finished. “You should’ve asked what the two extras were,” I say to his slumped form on the ground, writhing out of control with wave by wave of vertigo. Who knew intense dizziness would be almost as useful a tool as name-stealing?  I hear the groans of Kaltsyll and Ennerilsha on the ground, but don’t bother to look their way. Thanks to Kota, theirs or any other powers in existence won’t be a problem any more. Three unexpected targets, now, three new names—one for vertigo, one for name-swiping, and now, one for immunity. Three test runs at once. I think it’s safe to say they all work.

I would have told him if he’d asked. I would have joined him if he asked with his words instead of his knife. I sigh again, allowing myself to pity them all one last time.

I can’t say the idea doesn’t cross my mind, but I decide not to kill Kota that easily. No, that wouldn’t be a proper enough revenge—just as how just killing Sol won’t suffice enough on behalf of Loma, once I get the pleasure of cornering him. But I’ve stolen Kota’s name, without having to kill him or force him to pledge it to me—a useful gift indeed. Same for the others, I think, as I bend down to touch Ennerilsha on the forehead, gentle as I take her precious lie-detection, Kaltsyll and his prized illusions next.

“Thank you.” I say, finally drained of any sarcasm, my voice now brittle with condolence. Even if I remind myself they wouldn’t have spared the same courtesy to me.

I really hope they don’t drown in the pools of liquid gathering on the alleyway ground, its clear rust color just diluted enough to reflect the coming moons; gold even through the conflicting blend of rainwater, my blood, and the grime of the city. The Sylwei side of the city, that is, that they’ll never see again if they don’t drown. I hope their fellow Syltana treat them well.

At the glow of the first night’s star, I remember the final remark I’ve had planned, the one I’d been dreaming of saying, practicing in silence for longer than anyone knew. “And lastly, you should’ve known that Sol would never send the likes of you after the power-immunity.”

Poor Sol might not have even known such a power existed. What he does know, by now, though, is that I’ve broken his topmost rule, I’m sure.

‘You are mine. The names you steal are mine, too—don’t even think about using them.’

‘Of course, master.’

I laugh after my last parting grace, smearing the blood from my chin onto my sleeve. But then I drop my smile, one more string of words on the tip of my tongue. And I’ve decided I think I will say them, whether or not Kota can even hear me any more. “Loma wouldn’t have been proud. I was right not to let her tell you.”

I glance at my twisted reflection in the pale red puddle at my feet. Vibrant even through my thick but smudged layer of concealer, the mark of Satialkala glows bright red. But this may be the last time it will.

Why share a name when one can take without asking? The three marks around my wrist glow even brighter. No, Sol won’t like that at all.

My giddiness is back. I laugh in time with the swift splashes of my footfalls through the rain. Salomachieth may indeed get her revenge. And after that?

Mother will never lack money for the family ever again.


BIO

Masie Hollingsworth is currently a High School student at Hillcrest High School, as well as the Creative Writing program at Greenville Fine Arts Center. Masie is an avid writer and reader in her free time and enjoys making and sharing all kinds of art as one of her many hobbies. She currently contributes as a reader for the Crashtest magazine and hopes to continue to pursue her passion for writing in the future.

A Survival Guide to Christian College

by Rachel Belth



Dear Meredith,

I hear you are thinking about attending my alma mater, a staunchly Baptist university in the plains of central Ohio. There are a few things I didn’t tell you during our conversation yesterday. For example, what you may not realize now is that eventually, you’ll crack, some small or large or medium-sized part of you. The place is a little bubble of Christian perfection. You can only take so much of girls with clear skin and name-brand shoes and perfectly curled hair even coming in out of the wind. You can only take so much of polite boys with trimmed scruff and pomaded haircuts who hold doors open for girls. Sure, for a lot of them it’s a façade, and sure, there are some awkward, frizzy people like me—I’m just talking about how it feels. How it felt to me.

You can only take so much of required Chapel—every student band perfectly mixed without a single missed note, the worship leader reading an applicable Bible passage while a guitar or keyboard plays emotionally in the background. Not to mention university-mandated room checks (when your RA goes through your room once a week while you’re away, to check for illicit substances, which for Baptists includes alcohol). It really does a number on your faith.

Of course, I must remember who I’m talking to. You’re pretty, big eyes and soft hair, always so gracefully dressed from your flats to your loose scarf. You’re generous of spirit to everyone you talk to, and you speak so earnestly of your love for your parents, your sisters, your God. You seem fearlessly innocent, as if anything dirty in the world would bounce off you without leaving a mark. I try to be surprised by nothing, but I sincerely can’t but believe you’ll be fine.

So, let me re-phrase: what I didn’t realize when I was your age was that eventually, I’d crack (in a small-to-medium-sized way). It was a philosophy professor with a beard and a baritone so epic that everything he said carried the finality of absolute truth, and it was J.L. Schellenberg’s argument of divine hiddenness that collapsed my faith finally like the last brick of a Jenga tower.

I’m sure your faith is stronger than mine was. But if you do crack, here’s what you need to know. What you can get away with:

  • You can cut off the middle finger of your winter gloves. Like those fingerless gloves with the pullover mitten tops, but just for the middle finger.
  • Similarly, you can paint your fingernails lime green except for the middle one, painted red. It will totally go over everyone’s heads. People will even compliment you (“I love your nails!”). You can choose to point it out (“You realize which finger is painted red, right?”) or smile smugly and say, “Thanks.”
  • You can brew kvass in an old coffee syrup jar. Nobody will notice even though it smells distinctly yeasty. You can keep vodka in a travel-size Jack Daniels bottle in a box under your bed. You can probably keep a whole liquor cabinet under your bed, but I wasn’t brave enough—you can get expelled for that.
  • You can scrawl Russian swear words on your arm with a Sharpie, a temporary tattoo. Maybe дерьмо (that is, bitch). Not so much because you believe yourself to be one, although you do, but because you can flaunt a word that everyone would be shocked to see in English.
  • You can keep the handful of Band-Aid wrappers in the trash, right on top. You can keep on your dresser—right there sitting on your perfume bottle—the Bic razor you so tenaciously wrested from its plastic casing, wedging it between the laundry room laminate and the heel of your stoutest pair of pumps, between the carpet and the back leg of your desk chair, leaving tufts of blue between the blades. You can slice the skin on your lower left abdomen where no one will see and worry. (You can cut your arm and most people won’t notice, but those who do will get hysterical when you tell them not to worry, it’s not that big of a deal, so it’s best to keep that stuff hidden. Except, of course, for the razor blade, which you can keep in plain sight.)

What you cannot get away with: throwing your converse against the cinderblock wall, again and again until all the frustration is out and all the swear words have been muttered. Your RA, a peppy girl who flatirons her blonde hair and wears a lot of pink, will hear and come to the door concerned, and she will not believe you when you say everything’s fine.

Or maybe it will be your friend across the hall who hears you, who knows pain better than you do, and she’ll sit on your roommate’s chair and wait for you, even though she doesn’t know what’s going on because you can’t find the words yet.

Maybe, in the thick of this, you will try to write a poem, and you will send it to a friend for feedback, but instead of commenting on its cadence, he’ll ask what’s going on because he knows you’re not OK and that’s more important. And you’ll tell him what you can, even though you still haven’t found the words. You’ll wait for them to stack in the air between you and they still won’t come. And he’ll say things to help that won’t. And he’ll hug you as long as you need him to, which will not make everything better but will begin to help and will comfort you even years later, after you have begun to find the words.

Whatever university you choose to go to, may you find friends like that.

It seems horrendously inappropriate to be telling you this, Meredith, so innocent. To think, my story, benign as it is, may be the first block in your Jenga tower. That is not what I want for you, and I don’t want that responsibility—please let this story bounce off you. But if your faith does crack or crash altogether, I hope you’ll find peace in the rubble. I hope you rebuild, if that’s what you want, or burn it, or learn to carry the mess along with you. Any of those can be beautiful options too. And if you find any new ways of flipping people off or cursing them without them knowing, please tell me; I still enjoy doing that.

Stay strong.

Best,
Rachel

# # #


BIO

Rachel Belth is an instructional designer, creative nonfiction writer, and poet. Her work has appeared in Hypertext Magazine, Crack the Spine, and The Critical Flame, among other places, and she volunteers as a copyeditor at the literary website Identity Theory. She holds a B.A. in Technical and Professional Communication. She writes from an east-facing window in Columbus, Ohio.

Five Questions for Thomas Pynchon

by Nathaniel Heely



The conspiracy was in. The first reaction from the literary public was one of impending death. Why else would a hermit break silence? For there was no new book coming out, no new tome that might define and brand an adolescent century. Thomas Pynchon was sick. Thomas Pynchon was dying. Finally being sent off to see what was beyond the zero, soul ready to investigate the deep web of religious afterlives.

It was even more peculiar whom he had chosen. The young writer/coffee barista had no prior familiarity, indeed had only published a handful of George Saunders knockoff stories, and was more famous for her voluminous output of book reviews on Goodreads. Her most notable contribution to the literary world was a Salon article roasting James Frey and a listicle on Electric Literature: “10 Underexposed Indie Press Female Works of Fiction 2016.” As far as anyone could tell she had never even mentioned Thomas Pynchon by name. Her lone review on Goodreads of his work was a brief paragraph on The Crying of Lot 49—seemingly the book Pynchon had most derided, saying of it years earlier, “I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up until then.”

Rochelle [J’est un] Autry’s full review of CoL49 to wit:

Funny story overall. Afraid much of it went over my head, or else I feel as though the feeling of much information going overhead is required reading for this novel based on reviews I’ve seen. Am told the unusual names (uh, Mike Fallopian? Oedipa Maas?) are kind of par for the course. Was a fan. This book about conspiracy invites us to conspire over its own bookness by use of several MacGuffins factual and counter-factual, real and imagined. It reads like a circus performance. At no point did I feel the crushing disappointment of mystery—of failed detecting—I think I was supposed to on Oedipa’s part. I felt like too much of a watcher.

Further hypotheses were postulated. Rochelle lived in Williamsburg, only a half hour’s drive from The Hermitage. Paths could be crossed, backroom deals long in process. A rumor was traced back to an editorial intern at Penguin that Rochelle had a novel-in-progress that Pynchon believed his interview would help elevate. A literary agent publicly pondered on Twitter whether Autry was a long-time mistress to Pynchon, perhaps inspiring—at least in part—the character of Maxine Tarnow. A white male blogger accused Autry of being a notorious bed-hopper, providing a list of authors and editors she had dated, and was then attacked viciously himself by the Internet horde over everything from his unprofessional and libelous conjecture to his white male blogger privilege.

It was Melanie that contacted Rochelle on Tom’s behalf. She acquired the email via Rochelle’s personal website and stated merely that she was Pynchon’s “agent” and nothing further, and that Tom was interested in exploring the “landscape of digital interviews.” His stipulations were that he not be asked why he was granting an interview, nothing on the nature of his reclusiveness and that all the questions remain literary in topic.

It had been over 40 years since Gravity’s Rainbow, his magnum opus. What does one do for forty years knowing their best work and days are behind them? She considered questioning him more upon this line but felt it would be disrespectful. Knew it would be disrespectful. Tom would come out a victim of this question. That was another thing she was doing nowadays. Thinking of him as Tom. It’s how Melanie always referred to him. Rochelle always wrote back referencing him as “Mr. Pynchon” but fully conscious of it, and feeling that one day she would boldly replace it with “Tom.”

There were so many ambiguities in the world. She could not read people’s sincerity. Everybody acted as though this were a big project, something ambitious that she had chosen to work on. She was all the more ashamed that she had no grand ambitions. She rode the subway every morning hoping to make it through the day with enough energy to ride back in the evening and maybe fall asleep amidst the noise and clamor and rude bumping. Now when she rode back into Brooklyn, she felt a needle in brain’s stem, pressing hard, keeping her awake, trying to re-engage with the active and creative side that would compose what several literary outlets were calling “the Millenials’ finest hour.” Written of course by Millenials themselves, proving no one loves torturing a generation as much as one of its disbelieving members. Not that a belief had anything to do with when you were born, but then what was a generation in the twenty-first century if not a pseudo-cult exclusive to birthdates?

As Flavorwire put it, “Autry and Pynchon are ostensibly two voices of a generation clashing: Tom with his tome-atic ecstasy of printed word, while Rochelle, in contrast, is a mere mendicant producing idle, uncollected thoughts in 140 characters.” n+1 made a vigorous extended metaphor about orphanage and absent fathers in regards to Pynchon’s noted silence and the constant prattling, neuroticism and triple-coated irony that came from Rochelle (or really a conflation of the entire ‘Blogging Generation’) and her perceived lifestyle.

Within a week of receiving the email, word got out, shocked, settled and was forgotten. Rochelle was getting invites to book launches, requests from magazines both large and ignored to write reviews, agents offering their services for her own book writing ventures. She was invited to a launch party for Jonathan Lethem’s latest book. Her boyfriend, Havik Tanner, an editorial assistant for the independent press, Albino Alligator, worked the room, handing out his business card while she hovered over the punch bowl, sipped complimentary champagne and followed the hashtag #LethemLaunch on Twitter and Instagram trying to identify people in the room by their various posts and deciding which ones she despised the most.

Coming home she received an email from a man who identified himself as Richard and as a former friend of Thomas Pynchon.

Dear Rochelle

My name is Richard. Forgive me if this is too forward. The news of your upcoming interview with Mr. Pynchon has made quite a stir in our tiny literary community. If you are interested I would like to speak to you about your subject as I have some information that is very pertinent.

Kind Regards,
-R

She emailed him back with some reserve—that reserve that any young person holds in her head when she feels she is being peddled a scam. Her place in the literary world was one of phantom power, receiving lots of correspondence and requests to meet the man, while she herself was only to have electronic correspondence. Her iPhone dinged at 1:01 AM with a reply:

Rochelle,

What I’m about to say will seems an absolute fabrication, and you’ll likely regard me as the crazy hippy I am. Tom was not very close with many people and even less so with writers, but since we were friends before his genius was ever pronounced to the world, I was lucky to be in that close circle and I kept his silence along with him for many years. It’s very apparent to me, though, that something quite nefarious is going on and I believe that it would be Tom’s wish to communicate to you what I know.

The real Thomas Pynchon died, like the prophets of old, on his birthday, 8 May 2007. He was 70. I was at his funeral. Against the Day was his swan song, and a beautiful one at that. He died of congestive heart failure. Since then his literary trust has remained more secret than most government agencies. Tom was always very fascinated with technology and the modern world in his literature as well as his personal life, and in his last years he developed an early AI program that could compose its own literature. It was based upon the same kind outputs you’ll get from SPAM emails, often the ones that send out those fake prince from Nigeria schemes (sidenote: those programs are actually compelled to riddle their emails with typos and bad grammar to target people who are less intelligent, but think themselves smart that they realize it’s a person speaking in a second language). His family made a discovery of this and has since developed two books: Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge.

Sounds improbable, I know, but if you’ve read these books you’ll notice that they’re very similar to each other. Both involve private investigators, both rely on typical rehashed Pynchon tricks of the search for ambiguous entities (The Golden Fang and hashslingrz) and many critics have gone on to refer to these books (along with a book he wrote in his 20s) as “Pynchon-Lite.” The construction of the books is quite simple. It’s actually a basic 1000 monkey at 1000 typewriters type of scenario. Much of what The Typing Monkey produces is gibberish, but it creates a lot of gibberish. Volumes. Reams. Something like ten full length books a day. The Hermitage actually employs nearly a dozen readers simply to rifle through these manuscripts and select coherent passages, plots, characters etc. I’m giving you just the superficial tie-ins. I can give you more information, but my security in this matter is extremely delicate. I will provide further and substantial proof, but you must not tell anyone about me.

Again, I know I’m crazy, but this is not what Tom would have wanted: his life being exploited for this. It was contrary to everything he was. He was dirt poor for many of the years I knew him, living in squalor and just happy to write. Now everything that Tom created in his life is undermined with the publication of these two novels. At this point only the grave can keep me silent, and I’ve let that day crawl these eight years closer and closer, hoping and praying (to many manner of gods I didn’t believe in, perhaps they are all real, perhaps only some) that someone else would come forward. But I’ve heard nary a word. Perhaps they’ve tried and been silenced. Please contact me. Please take this seriously. Please believe me. I will provide everything you need to prove this. I promise.

Regards,
Richard

PS. If you still need convincing look at this:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/03/08/opinion/sunday/algorithm-human-quiz.html?_r=0

Rochelle’s first instinct was to be afraid. She was caught up in something she didn’t want to even be aware of. The link provided an eight question quiz to see if humans could decipher between human and computer produced writing. She got a 4 of 8. If there was such uncertainty between these simple sentences then of course there was an argument to be made that AI could already write books. Just a few years ago a man named Phillip M. Parker had revealed his own patented system for algorithmically compiling raw data into book form. Because of it, Amazon now had nearly 1,000,000 books for sale from his company. It was ridiculous to believe, but also ridiculous to not at least consider it.

She emailed him back in the dead of that night, hoping that he would still exist outside of it. He replied that it would take a little while to establish more secure communication and that he would write to her soon.

There were other considerations. In the 70s many people judged William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon to be the same person. Gaddis wrote The Recognitions in 1955 and promptly disappeared from the literary scene for twenty years, also never giving interviews. A man identified as William Gaddis would eventually consent to some interviews in the 80s, most notably with The Paris Review and Malcolm Bradbury. Up until Ted Kaczynski was arrested, the popular theory was that Pynchon was the Unabomber. There were those that believed he used the name Wanda Tinasky to write a series of letters to Mendocino Commentary and Anderson Valley Advertiser. He was Bob Dylan’s best man. He met Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City in 1963 over a meal of shredded chicken gorditas. He had crippling agoraphobia.

She was firing off all these theories one night to her boyfriend in bed. She rattled through them all off during sex and found herself unable to judge whether the sex was good or bad, only that it had happened. Havik held her quietly listening to the prattle and stroking her thin chestnut hair.

“And then there’s the Richard Farina theory,” he said passively inspecting the hair as though looking for a magisterial, almost angelic quality.

“The what?”

“Richard Fariña. Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me?”

“Never read it.”

“Oh, well he was friend of Pynchon’s. Some say they’re the same person.”

“Friend? Wait that…what was his name?”

“Richard Fariña.”

By the last syllable of his last name she was already digging through her gmail. She confirmed what she believed to be true. “He emailed me! Holy Christ, Havik, he emailed me. I mean I’m not supposed to tell but frankly I didn’t believe it to be true and he told me not to tell anyone and promise you won’t tell anyone but he was telling me all this stuff that sounded insane but he wrote a book you’re saying?”

“Woah, calm down. Who emailed you?”

“Richard. Richard Fariña, look at this email address. RFarinaphobe at gmail, I was wondering what the hell a Farinaphobe was but—”

“Rochelle, Jesus. That can’t be Richard Fariña.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Richard Fariña died in 1966.”

Her blood ran not just cold, but felt like microscopic beetles composed of frozen nitrogen; disappointment, madness, claustrophobia. “What are you—?”

“They went to Cornell together, yeah. Pynchon wrote the Introduction—”

“But that can’t. He emailed…”

“Probably just someone being smart with you.” Her shoulders dragged down to her hips. “I didn’t mean to disappoint you. I’m sorry.”

She wept and buried her face in his bony neck. “What is going on with me? Who the hell…but he can’t…”

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Don’t say that you asshole.”

“What?”

“Of course you should have said something. You shouldn’t have had to say anything. I’m just an idiot. I know nothing about what I’m wrapped up in.”

“You’re not an idiot.”

“For all I know someone did this just to show how clueless I was. God, Jesus, I’m so embarrassed. I’m so fucking stupid…”

Havik had a copy of the book, but she swatted it away, it being a scepter of her stupidity. He held her and told her he loved her as she struggled against him.

The five questions she sent to Melanie were composed in a flurry the next morning. She just wanted the thing behind her, to be completed. She abided by the stipulations and came up with: 

1. What, in your opinion, is the greatest piece of American fiction of the past twenty-five years?

2. What is your writing schedule like?

3. Your name is brought up constantly as a Nobel hopeful, particularly in light of the fact that it has been more than twenty years since an American won it. How do you respond to this?

4. Some of your more recent books Bleeding Edge and Inherent Vice have been relegated, by some critics, as being genre or cross-genre fiction. How do you view genre fiction in the world and as it relates to your own work?

5. What did you think of P.T. Anderson’s adaptation of Inherent Vice?

A day later Melanie responded.

Ms. Autry,

Please forgive me but I’m afraid I’m going to have to reject these questions. I realize how frustrating this must be! Mr. Pynchon is very peculiar in what he wants…or rather what he doesn’t want to answer. What am I saying? Perhaps that he knows it when he sees it. There’s no rush to this sort of thing. He told me to relay to you that it may take several attempts and to not be discouraged. He would never want to discourage you. In addition he gave some reasoning he thought might be helpful for why these questions seem inadequate:

1. This seems the type of insular question that I ought to avoid. There are a great dozen or two dozen books I could list but I don’t want to come across as a promotional advert. There are many authors I like, some books I’m rather fond of, and even a few I’ve felt necessary to blurb, all of which you can find with a cursory google search. But I don’t wish to single anyone out.

2. The only reason one might answer this question is because some people think I have access to an El Dorado of Writing. I assure you this is not the case. The best answer I could give, which I do not feel is an answer, is that I write enough to produce eight novels in fifty years.

3. Commenting on the Nobel seems to be a dangerous sort of thing. I’d rather the Nobel committee pretend I don’t exist and vice versa.

4 Nope. Sorry, try again.

5. Let Paul’s work have a chance to stand and resonate before I come in with some overbearing and completely unnecessary critique.

He requests you do not make this reasoning public.

Best,
-M

She would have been insulted had another email from the Richard Fariña address not appeared just two minutes before. It simply stated to check her mailbox downstairs. With eyebrow twitching in her kitchen, Havik came strutting in, blinded by the morning glare.

“Morning.”

“Can you see if the mail’s come yet?”

“Babe it’s just past 8:00 I don’t think…”

“Just check please,” she snapped. Havik stood there waiting for her to come to her senses, but she just stared with pupils the size of her iPhone. He walked silently pretending to be angry and not hurt. He came back with a single envelope, her name written in calligraphic grace, and no postage stamp.

“Friend of yours?”

She opened.

It’s me. I told you this would be arriving. For my safety it’s best I don’t deal in specifics. Meet me at the place you and your boyfriend had dinner last Thursday. Tonight. 8 PM. Make sure you aren’t followed.

-R.

She was now thoroughly insulted and realized it was a massive prank. She and Havik had eaten in last Thursday and the letter was clearly a furthering of some perverse internet prank. She flicked it once toward the trash, brought it back, admired the calligraphy—she had always admired calligraphy and was even jealous of it despite its source—and flicked it again into the trash.

Havik was working late that night. In his text he termed it “babysitting an author.” She invited friend and coworker, Connie Quetzalcoatl, to her place for the evening for dinner, which ended up being white wine, pita chips and a tom-sized drum of hummus.

“I want to die,” Connie said opening a second box of pita chips and cramming one in her mouth on the final word.

“Mistakes were made,” Rochelle countered.

“Starting with my parents having sex.”

“We’re better than this.”

“To think I was one hump away from never existing.”

“If only one of us had learned self-control. It might have been enough.”

“I’m not of the mind that quantum physics leads to a multiple Universe theory.”

“But how else do you learn self-control without self-control?”

“It’s just this one. And most of the things, most of the people that could have existed. Just didn’t. And I was the one that existed. Man.”

“I mean if you’ve had no experience with it, how will you ever be able to withstand it?”

“Mistakes were made.”

“I’m out of wine.”

Connie said she ought to be going. They buoyed up off the vinyl couch like pregnant mothers and shuffled to the door. Connie ordered an Uber. At the apartment door they bid each other goodbye. Turning around, Rochelle saw a man in a tan trenchcoat, grey fedora, wayfarer sunglasses and hair so jet black it looked dyed with car grease.

“Rochelle,” he nodded.

She stood stunned. “I’m sorry?”

“It’s Richard. Can we talk?”

She looked about her. For what she couldn’t name. Cameras? Exits? Police? None of the Above? She ascended in a dreamlike manner, taking everything at face value. Sitting back on the vinyl couch the man sat down, looked nervously and began speaking without taking off his coat or hat and without Rochelle offering. He spoke the past to her: how until Tom had married Melanie he had considered himself retired from writing. She was the one who convinced him to release Slow Learner. Vineland actually started as an inside joke between he and Tom. Mason & Dixon had sputtered sometime around ’79 and its publication owed credit to at least three other ghost writers. This was why Tom had invented the Monkey Typewriter. To get out of writing once and for all. The goal was to publish a perfect mimicry of his writing mind…

“You’re supposed to be dead!” Rochelle said.

Richard stopped, straightened himself and said in a calm demeanor. “Yes. I am. It was a…dangerous time for me then. It was necessary to die and as far as the world is concerned I am Robert Feddlestein. I didn’t think I’d live this long.”

“But you’re supposed to be dead!”

“Shh. Be quiet, Jesus.”

“Out. I don’t know how you found out where I live but you need to leave.”

“No Rochelle, please. For my friend.”

“What proof do you have? How can I know you are who you say you are”

“You can’t.” He said coldly. “If I hadn’t destroyed any identifying evidence about myself you’d just assume it was a fake. If I showed you an old letter from Tom in the 60s, you’d assume I wrote it last night. Everything that is,” here he gestured to the apartment, the floors, the kitchen, “is taken on faith.”

Rochelle was on the border of hysterics. “Get out. Just get out I’m calling the police.”

“What you want. What I want is at the Hermitage on the 14th floor facing the street, third window from the right.”

“I don’t want anything! Nobody ever asked what I wanted!” She was shoving him toward the door, slapping his chest which was thin and frail, and it took little strength at all to move his elderly body.

“Shh. Quiet. Mother of Christ, I just need your help on one thing.” He brought her hands together as though in prayer.

“What? What could I possibly give you? Because I don’t have access to him. That’s why it’s an email inter…”

“Just tell Melanie that you’re having a little difficulty and that you’d like to meet her in person. That’s all I need. Her out of her office for a few hours.”

Rochelle stood mute, wounded, angry.

“That’s all I ask.”

“If you don’t leave right now I’m calling the cops.”

He turned, flinging the coat like a cape and whisking the door all but one inch to the jamb. “On the day you do it. Please. Just leave a note in your mailbox. It will get to me.” He closed the door and Rochelle went to cry on her couch.

In researching for her questions she found the sheer fanaticism of Pynchon fans even more frightening and lurid. There were vigils held every May 8th at his old Manhattan Beach house. Fans staked him out for days snapping pictures of old men fitting Pynchon’s description and comparing them on internet forums. Periodically “Missing” posters with his old Navy portrait appeared on the streets of Manhattan. It was obvious that Pynchon feared his fans. In 1989 an 1800 word autobiographical sketch for an application to the Ford Foundation was released to a few scholars. He quickly had them rescind this action, but not before Steven Weisenburger from the University of Kentucky published the article: “Thomas Pynchon at Twenty-Two: A Recovered Autobiographical Sketch” by Duke University Press. There was tale that in 1997 a drunken group at a Pynchon lookalike competition ran down a fellow doppelganger they suspected to be the author, only to trip him and flee when it was found not to be him. He bled on the sidewalk for the next two hours before a New Yorker finally offered to call him an ambulance.

And Rochelle rationalized that perhaps what she was up against was nothing more than a method actor, probably fanatical in his own right. Never mind how he got her address, the Internet existed. These things happened daily, even to those who take intense precaution. She took the criticism from the first email and wrote five new and fresh questions and sent them off to Melanie:

Mr. Pynchon,

1. Paranoia is persistent in your work. For those of us coming of age in an increasingly Orwellian society where the government can ostensibly track us in real-time, how best do you think we can handle this?

2. For you, personally, is fiction an inherently moral art? What is the best way of going about creating art that is moral? And what does it mean?

3. What was your writing education at Cornell like?

4. Does the fact that your characters rarely, if ever, find meaning for the things they most seek indicate a reflection of your own beliefs?

5. Do you still keep in touch with Irwin Corey?

Melanie wrote back exuberantly that Tom had answered one of the questions and encouraged Rochelle not to despair that four others were rejected; that it was “great progress.” The notes sent to the questions:

1. You’re asking about something a little outside my work. I’d prefer if we could stick to that.

2. Nice try, but there are three questions here. Not that I would answer any of these, but I won’t accept multiple question marks in a “Question.”

4. See #1. I’d rather not talk about what I believe. I’m probably wrong as it is.

5. I’m sorry I’m afraid I don’t know who you’re talking about

3. It’s not so much the where I was educated, but when. 1958, to be sure, was another planet. You have to appreciate the extent of sexual repression on that campus at the time. Sure we wrote letters, rallied, demonstrated, marched, rocked, smoke bombed, egged, yet there was no sense of sanctuary there, or eternal youth. Maybe it was the times, maybe it was the brutal winter winds, but death always felt close to us in those days.

She took momentary solace in the one success she had. Perhaps progress existed. She worked her days at the coffee shop, giving old men an extra look, wondering if Pynchon was a coffee drinker himself, wondering if she might as well ask him this since nothing else worked. Havik remained increasingly busy. Their time together was blurry. They fell together at night sometimes for sex, more often in exhaustion.

They had a date night. Dinner at Isabella’s, short walk to Dive 75 where they met some friends and then plodded south to the Wine and Roses Bar. It was 11 PM and she was walking west on 72nd street toward the park babbling to Havik incoherently who was near sleepwalking himself when they passed the Hermitage, ominous and stretching beyond comprehension so that halfway across she was exhausted and they sat down. Here she could think up more questions while the moon burned a hole in the sky and The Ruggles himself lapsed into failed memory of old age. What she hoped was failed memory. Afraid it was more sinister. He toying with her precisely because she was a nobody, picking her at random, coming up with dubious responses to her questions to…to what? To prove a point? To produce an echo of bone-rattling paranoia from inside that mausoleum? To speak death to her as apparently his whole life had to him? To feed some inane desire for performance art? It was all a joke. Everything was a joke to him. He had hired Irwin Corey to accept the National Book Award on his behalf, never having met the man, seen the man, known the man, heard the man, discussed with the man what he ought to portray. And she was like that befuddled audience laughing only to show they were hip to the joke, but not getting the joke, terrified of not laughing, of a world full of silence and nervous coughs. Silence is the essence of meaninglessness. What was the point of asking questions? Of course he didn’t want to talk about the Nobel. Likely he just wanted to win so he could make a mockery of it too and not even show up. Respond, perhaps, by donating the money to a Waco Davidian cult that no longer existed. To answer the question would forewarn the Swedish Academy and permanently blacklist him from the nominations. And then he would no longer be practical joker Pynchon, but angry and bitter Pynchon. The Pynchon that excoriated his former love Lilian Landgraben in his first novel. The Pynchon who rescinded that 1800 word autobiographical sketch. The Pynchon who was so exasperated by the reading public that he escaped to Mexico, an entire country and language barrier separating him from his identity.

And she too began to scowl. There were now watchblogs commenting and updating on her daily internet activity: her Twitter updates, her Instagram photos, her Goodreads progress, all questioning why she hadn’t questioned. As though asking questions were easy work. A Facebook fan page of her popped up and people discussed in the open forum all the salacious rumors that surrounded her. Rumors that, of course, had no origin, came out of nothing, as did the whole Universe. She scaled back, deactivating her Facebook, taking down her Instagram, not posting to social media any longer, but only watching. She wanted to deprive the web of gossip—its oxygen.

Her silence was well noted. Her silences. People began wondering if she was in fact a Pynchonian hoax. One of the watchblogs aggregated data of increased sales of Pynchon’s books and pointed to it as nothing but a clever marketing scheme. But why would he need money? Again, fans feared the worst for the ex-sailor.

1. What is your next book about?

2. Is that really your voice in the Inherent Vice book trailer?

3. Did you ever end up writing those opera librettos proposed in your application to the Ford Foundation?

4. Do you think there will be a time when there are no humans to write books and that you are of the last generation to compose literature?

5. What do you think of the eventual heat-death of the Universe?

More non-answers. More “refer to note so-and-so in email so-and-so.” More and more and more and yet always less.

She finally got around to reading Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. Or rather she read the Introduction and was heartbroken. The one answer she had received, the lone scrap of authenticity she held of Thomas Pynchon was actually a few extant sentences cobbled together from Tom’s most rare of autobiographical acknowledgements. She curled up on the vinyl couch crying, surprised she was still capable. 

Thomas Pynchon was identity in full entropy. An equilibrium across all people where one never knew if their dinner date that night was actually Thomas Pynchon. In a manner, Rochelle could consider herself to be Thomas Pynchon.

She relented to Richard Fariña’s request and asked Melanie if she could possibly take her out to lunch and get a better idea of what he wanted to answer. To her surprise Melanie assented, even encouraged the visit. It was a Tuesday, and Rochelle and Connie worked the morning shift beginning at 4:00 AM working straight through until 11:00 AM. In the Uber on the way over Rochelle commented to Connie that she hadn’t seen Havik in three days and asked if she should be worried. Connie responded by asking if she had been sleeping regularly. Rochelle looked vacantly at the back of the driver’s balding head hoping it would speak for her instead.

They arrived early and informed the lady at the desk of their appointment. They stood in the lobby waiting.

“Y’know I was googling her today.”

“Who?”

“Melanie Jackson. The lady you’re here to—”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I just didn’t—”

“There aren’t any pictures of her either.”

“Of Melanie?”

“Yeah. That’s a bit weird don’t you think?”

“Considering who she’s married to, not really.” Rochelle ran fingers through her hair and stared at the elevator, the elevator’s lips, waiting for truth to emerge.

“But both of them. I mean, it’s like he’s got his whole family now in this sort of secret cult of privacy.”

“Is privacy a cult now?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No but,” she said directing eyes now at Connie, worried look on her face. “Is it?”

But there was no answer. At that moment a screaming came from the ceiling, childlike and full of terror. The whole building began to wobble and the two dashed to the exit and looked up. A plume of dust and orange claws leapt from a window near the top, hail of glass and a resonant pounding from the heart of the building resolute and final. People were running in no discernable direction: toward the building, away, some walking as though deaf or else too bothered to be afraid. A cascade of flimsy paper, some of it burning, eschewed from the floor and there were little children nearby trying to catch it on their tongues like snowflakes.

They went back to Rochelle’s place and lay on the couch emptying their eyes into the TV. MSNBC to CNN to FOX NEWS to ABC to MSNBC…Havik appeared only a few minutes later, kissing her and picking glass from her cheeks asking questions that got no answers. They sat like that for hours. When it was dark, Rochelle noticed there were bandages on her cheeks she did not remember being put on. Connie had left. She asked Havik if there was any mail and he said he would go check. She opened her laptop and typed the only thing she felt possible.

What happened at the Hermitage today at approximately 11:53 AM?

Do you have any reason to suspect that Richard Fariña is still alive?

Why me, Mr. Pynchon?

Are you there, Tom?

Are you alive?

Havik returned. “There’s no mail today.”

Richardson-Orange 2015-2017


BIO

Nathaniel Heely is a graduate of the University of Arkansas and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University. He has published over two dozen stories, appearing in in Burrow Press Review, decomP, Identity Theory, the Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles, and many others. He is currently working on his first novel. For more visit nathanielheely.com

The Campaign

by Michele Alice

Please

     give us another chance

           to do it to you

again.


Anthropology

Put a couple

         of yeast cells together

and look what happens.


Untitled

Through the veil of snow,

                        signs of spring:

buds upon the trees,

crocuses in bloom,

and the cardinal in muted plumage,

singing.


BIO

Michele Alice is: Detroit born, Tucson (U of A) philosophy-major, resides in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

Word May Set You Free

By Marco Etheridge



Sweeney thought the kidnappings would be the difficult part, but they proved to be the easiest. What he discovered is that people are disconnected from their surroundings. Each of the abductions went down more or less the same way. One of the agents would be walking down a city sidewalk; strolling from the office or the subway station. Their faces were invariably glued to their smart phones, oblivious to the world around them.

Buck Mulligan and Sweeney worked as a team. They slipped up from behind while the agent was busy reading texts or yakking into the phone. Sweeney zapped their target with a stun-gun. Buck grabbed the sagging body under the armpits before their victim turned into a rag doll. While Buck held them upright, Sweeney popped a sack over their lolling heads. The van pulled up, side door already open, Stephen’s strong torso leaning out. The wobble-legged agent was thrown to the yawning door of the van and Stephen Dedalus snatched the hooded body into the shadows. After scooping up whatever belongings the victim had dropped, Buck and Sweeney followed. The van door slid shut and Molly Bloom drove them away. It was as simple as pie. No one seemed to notice or care. Maybe that was because it was New York City, or maybe because even in NYC, nobody likes a literary agent.

No, the hard part wasn’t snatching them off the street. The hard part was the long van ride from the City back to the warehouse in middle-of-nowhere New Jersey. That first drive, after they snatched Jeff Lyons, that was the longest. The guy whined and babbled like a little girl: What do you want from me, I don’t want to die, please, please. It went on forever, over and over, until Sweeney wanted to club him like a baby seal, which would have spoiled the plan.

After that first interminable ride, Banshee said she was damn sure going to show them another use for duct tape. She did just that. The second drive was quieter; mostly just inarticulate moaning and nose breathing. Leave it to the mystery writer to have a practical solution.

It was blind luck that they got two of the bastards in one day, or, more correctly, a bastard and a bitch. In retrospect, Sweeney realized they shouldn’t have been all that surprised. The literary agencies in Manhattan are grouped in clusters, like infected buboes in the armpits of the island. Set off a big enough bomb on West 21st Street, and you were liable to take out four or five agencies. Not that Sweeney would consider that as an option. Bombs were far to random, far too anonymous. It was a much more specific revenge that he craved.

When Allie Stark ducked into the alley behind Greenburg-Golden, she practically stepped into the van. The crew had just snatched the Reuben guy, so why not?  Bad luck for the stylish Ms. Stark, and one less trip into the City for them. At least the Stark chick was quiet, unlike Mr. BJ Reuben. He blubbered and made eyes at the Stark woman like he knew her. She ignored the crybaby, keeping her eyes focused on her abductors. All that long drive to Jersey, she didn’t make a sound.

*  *  *

Molly leaned through the heavy steel door, her voice coming thick and dull from under the latex mask.

“Are you ready for the opening monologue? I want to lock these parasites in their boxes. Everybody is sick of listening to their shit.”

Sweeney rose from a battered steel table, five manila folders in his left hand.

“Yes, Ms. Bloom, I am ready.”

“It’s Mrs. Bloom, as you know all too well. Don’t forget your mask.”

“Right, the mask.”

Sweeney dropped the folders onto the chipped tabletop and reached for a crumpled pile of latex. It was the distorted face of a nightmare leprechaun; a corpse face without an Irish skull. He stretched the thing over his head, letting it snap into place around his neck. The latex pulled against the stubble on his cheeks.

“How do I look?”

“No more of a fool than the rest of us.”

Molly Bloom raised a hand to either side of her distorted head, miming alarm. A fake orange beard wobbled below an exaggerated nose as she rolled her costumed head in a show of alarm.

“Oh, the humans, they be after me pot of gold! C’mon, Sweeney, let’s get this show on the road.”

Molly disappeared through the doorframe.

Sweeney watched her go, this woman he loved, the woman who would always be his best friend and never more.  He stood alone in the room, his breath was hot under the latex of the mask.

Sweeney’s mind wandered back to the conversation that had changed everything, before she was Molly or he was Sweeney. They were celebrating the completion of her latest work, some of the most poignant and beautiful memoir he had ever read. Over drinks in the corner of a favorite bar, their talk was of the usual frustrations, and the struggle to get published. Then the words were coming out of his mouth: It’s time to teach these bastards a lesson, change the rules of the game.

More than a year of planning followed, with endless discussions over endless pints of beer. Sara was brought into the scheme and became Banshee, then Joe became Buck Mulligan. What began as a formless fantasy of revenge took on sharp edges. By the time Stephen Dedalus joined the group, the thing had become real. Sweeney shook himself out of his memories and looked through the open doorway. And now it all comes down to this. Are you ready?

He grabbed the five file folders from the table and stepped past the rusted steel door.

*  *  *

Evening light leaked into the warehouse through jagged holes in the painted-over windows. Layers of surplus industrial paint peeled from the concrete wall; huge patches of pea green sloughing away from baby-slime yellow. Water dripped into puddles at the windowless back wall. Time had not been kind to this abandoned hulk, and it had been abandoned a long time. A collection of five small shipping containers stood in a rough row; ten-foot long steel boxes in faded colors of blue and red and green. The doors of the containers were standing open; eight-foot-wide by eight-feet-tall.

In front of the containers sat a row of five aging steel chairs. In the chairs sat two women and three men, all looking decidedly worse for the wear. Each of them were manacled; one ankle hand-cuffed to a heavy chair leg.

Sweeney crossed the chipped concrete floor, taking his place beside four masked figures standing in front of the seated line. He slapped the file folders against his thigh. Five sets of eyes looked up at him, eyes that were angry, or confused, or frightened. Sweeney ran his own eyes across the faces, looking for the cracks.

The Collin woman looked scared; just plain, ordinary scared. The first one they’d snatched, Jeff Lyons, he looked ready to burst into tears. The BJ guy was a bluster of anger and indignation. It was the last two that mattered. The older guy, Peter Schear, his eyes were taking everything in, looking for a way out. But the Stark woman, her eyes never moved. They were staring straight into Sweeney’s. He smiled at her, just to see what would happen. What he got in return was the slightest raise of an eyebrow, nothing more.

“Right. Let’s get started, shall we? Some of you have been with us for a few days. Others have just arrived. Now that we are all here, we can begin by laying out the rules. I…”

The BJ Reuben character interrupted him, his voice loud and angry.

“What the hell are you talking about? What rules? Are you some kind of crazy terrorists, or what?”

Banshee started forward, a Taser gripped in her left hand. She aimed her outstretched hand at the crotch of Mr. Reuben’s expensive slacks. He became suddenly very quiet, wide eyes staring at the thing Banshee held.

“Well, then, let’s move straight into introductions. BJ Reuben, I’d like you to meet Banshee. She will be your handler. I would advise against any more outbursts. I don’t think she likes you very much. Ms. Banshee, here is Mr. Reuben’s file. And would you pass the rest of these down, please?”

Banshee reached for the files. Through the holes of her grotesque mask, Sweeney caught the bright gleam in her eyes. Someone is enjoying this far too much. He had no doubt that Banshee would turn this whole escape into a cutting edge mystery novel. Sweeney turned his attention back to the seated captives.

“Moving right along then, let’s get to the rules. I am sure most of you are aware that you are in the same business. In fact, I am reasonably sure that some of you know each other quite well.”

He watched for any furtive glances and was not disappointed.

“Think of these rules as submission guidelines. If you don’t follow the rules, exactly as they are laid out, your stay here will be a long one, and more uncomfortable than it needs to be. Each of you will be paired with a handler. You will speak only to your handler, understood?”

“Ms. Collin, you’ll be working with Stephen. I think you’ll find Mr. Dedalus to be quite a gentleman. Peter, you’ll be with Buck Mulligan. He’s a bit hard at the edges, but I’m sure you two will hit it off.”

“Jeff Lyons, you’ll be working with Molly Bloom, you lucky devil you. That takes care of everyone but Ms. Stark, who will be working with me. My name is Sweeney. Ah, yes, Mr. Schear, thank you for the raised hand.”

“Mr. Sweeney, I’m guessing that we’ve been abducted for some reason, but I’m struggling to figure out what that reason is. I mean, we’re just literary agents; not exactly high ransom targets if I understand the situation correctly.”

The man’s voice was calm and smooth, probing for an advantage.

“If we could just hold off on the questions, I think this will go faster.”

Peter Schear shrugged, his hands in his lap.

“You are here for one reason, and that is to write. The way you are going to get out of here is to write your way out. Your choice of project is up to you. It can be a novel, a collection of short stories, even a play if you like. Buck, what would you think about the choice to write a stage-play?”

The answer came rough and hard.

“Delusional.”

“There you have it folks; and from a source that should know. Buck writes some of the best dramatic dialogue out there, but I’m sure none of you have ever heard it. His work is performed so far off Broadway it might as well be Uzbekistan. As you can see, Buck is a large man, and I can assure you he has no love for agents. I would not cross him if I were you.”

Sweeney paused to let his remark sink in.

“Now, back to why you are here. Whatever project you choose, it will be submitted to a jury of your peers, namely other agents. We will, of course, have to submit your work under assumed names. If an agent, any agent, asks to read a full manuscript, or further chapters, or expresses the slightest interest in representing your work, you will be free to go. One simple, positive response is your magic key.”

“Wait, you want us to write something, submit it to an agent, and wait for a response?”

“Another country heard from. Yes, Mr. Lyons, that is exactly correct. You will write, your handler will transcribe the manuscript into a computer file, and then we will send it off with as perfect a query letter as we can conjure.”

 Sweeney watched the change in the man’s face; the look of a little boy about to cry replaced by the look of a little boy struggling with his maths. Jeff Lyons swung his eyes up as the difficulty of the problem dawned on him.

“But, but, that could take months!”

“Yes, it could, Mr. Lyons; all the more reason for you to write well and quickly.”

“Ah, Mr. Reuben, you wish to comment?”

“Is this some crazy stunt to get published? Some elaborate piece of performance art?”

“An astute and hopeful question, Mr. Reuben, but no, this is not a stunt. Besides, each of us have published work, though perhaps not to your standards. After all, you are the gatekeepers, are you not? You judge who is worthy to walk the hallowed ground and who will remain out in the cold, dark night. No, we are well past stunts or trickery. This is about something much simpler; it is about getting even. I admit that there is some thought of making it better for the writers coming after us, but mostly this is just revenge. Banshee, do you have Mr. Reuben’s wish list?”

Banshee swung the folder open with a flick of her right hand, the Taser still held in her left.

“Got it right here, Sweeney. BJ Reuben, always willing to take a chance on a debut author. Looking for something that makes him miss his stop on the subway. Likes literary fiction that is quirky; surprise him. The usual rot.”

Sweeney raised a hand to cut off any more comment. I should just let Banshee Tase this bastard in front of the others. That would move things along. Just a nod and she would be so happy to oblige. She’s angry and ready. Sweeney knew he could count on Banshee to do her part.

“We are wasting time here. Forgive me, perhaps I have not been clear. If you wish to leave, you will write. Behind you are your accommodations. Think of them as monastic cells. Each has been furnished with a cot, a desk, and writing materials. Chairs you already have. Meals and other essentials will be provided for you so long as you write. If you want to eat, you write. If you want to shower, you write. It’s quite simple, really. Three thousand words per day, seven days a week; in four weeks you will have a novel of eighty-four thousand words. That is, I believe, your optimum length for a debut novel, yes?”

“And what if we refuse?”

Lauren Collin has found her voice. Sweeney looked into her brown eyes; attractive eyes. She may be scared, but at least she is thinking.

“That is a very good question, Ms. Collin. There must be penalties, of course, else how would the system function? If you refuse to write, you will not eat. You will not shower. You will not be allowed out of your comfortable cell. There are some other penalties as well, which I should make clear. You may write whatever you wish. Your work can be tailored to your own wish list, or the wish list of an agent that you know. But do not try to plagiarize someone else’s work. If you do, we will know it. The penalty for plagiarism is death, and I do not mean that in a metaphorical sense. You will be shot, and your body will be dumped in a place where no one will ever find it. Likewise, for any attempt at escape or mutiny. Do I make myself sufficiently clear?”

The words seemed to sink in. There was a silence from the line of chairs, then one raised hand.

“Yes, Ms. Stark, you have a question?”

“I just want to clarify. I write a novel. You send that novel out to other literary agents. If one of those agents requests additional material, or expresses any interest other than a rejection, then I go free?”

Sweeney smiled to himself, making note of the careful choice of pronouns. There is no ‘we’ with this woman.

“That is exactly correct, Ms. Stark. I couldn’t have put it more succinctly.”

There was that same barely raised eyebrow, the slightest nod as if she were confirming something she already knew; then nothing. I like this one, even if she is an agent. Careful, Boyo, this is not the time or place.

“Very well, if there are no further questions, we need to get you back into your cells. We must start the dinner preparations. There are some good cooks amongst us, as some of you already know. You will not suffer unduly. Tomorrow is our first work day, so you will want to get your rest.”

Sweeney turned to his companions.

“If you will, please; one at a time of course. Escort our guests back into their cells.”

*  *  *

Buck Mulligan bounced his ass down the bench between the concrete wall and the long table. He pushed a plate of breakfast down the worn surface. Once the big man was settled, he smiled across at the others.

“G’morning Banshee, morning Ka… sorry, Sweeney.”

“Morning, Buck. What, two weeks of practice and you’re forgetting your lines? You’re the stage professional.”

“Yeah, sorry, a momentary lapse. Your two shining faces put me off my guard. Banshee is smiling like a cat in a canary factory.”

“Understood, of course, but no mistakes in front of the guests, please.”

The bigger man grunted, stabbing a fork into a mound of scrambled eggs and roasted peppers. He chewed and nodded before he spoke again.

“Mmm… that’s some fine tucker. I don’t know if the original Dedalus could cook, but our modern version is a wizard. What is the line? God made food, the devil the cooks, or something like that.”

Banshee smiled at Buck from across the table. She was curled around her coffee; a soft smile gleaming through a tent of dark hair and bare forearms.

“You have it exactly, Mr. Mulligan.”

Buck looked between the two of them, Banshee’s dreamy smile and Sweeney’s smirk. His suspicion grew in spite of the known facts. He pointed his fork at them as he spoke.

“Okay, what’s the deal? Have you two been laying pipe?”

The first response was laughter, then more smirking.

“You have a suspicious mind, Buck Mulligan. Banshee and I have done no more than sit here and enjoy each other’s company.”

Sweeney leaned into Banshee’s shoulder.

“Not that I wouldn’t jump at the chance, my dear, if proclivities weren’t what they were.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll send you a memo if something changes. As for you, Mr. Mulligan; laying pipe, really? This is how a man of the theater speaks?”

Buck waved them off with his free hand, reaching for his coffee with the other.

“Theater is the art of the people, don’t you know, written in the language of the common man. Unlike the fancy prose of your highbrow novelists like Sweeney here. So what’s with all this bliss and happiness then?”

Banshee pushed herself upright, raising her coffee mug between thin, spidery fingers.

“I can honestly say that I haven’t felt this good in years. Almost three weeks of dealing with that whiny shit Reuben, and yet I feel fantastic.”

“Is he actually writing anything?”

“Just enough to eat, and what he’s scribbling down is crap. Worse than you would expect. Bitching, moaning, and scribbling shit; that’s pretty much his daily agenda. It’s a good thing we aren’t actually submitting this garbage to anyone.”

Buck nodded, savoring the tang of the peppers against the smooth taste of the eggs. He looked between the two faces sitting across the table, his fork poised midair.

“So what do we do with him?”

Sweeney turned to the smiling Banshee.

“He’s your guy. What do you think?”

She smiled even more, wrinkling her forehead as if it were a stupid question.

“Look, I signed on for the long-haul here, just like the rest of us. But I don’t have two years to waste on this little bitch. He doesn’t have a bad novel in him, much less a decent one. I have my own projects to write, and lovely maidens to chase. So I think it’s obvious: We kill him.”

The two men nodded their heads. Buck shoveled another forkful of eggs into his mouth. Sweeney spoke first.

“Sounds reasonable to me. When do you want to do it?”

“After breakfast tomorrow. I’m feeling too relaxed right now.”

“Who do you want to help you?”

“I don’t need any help to shoot him, but Stephen can help me dump the heavy lump of shit. I’ll have more free time after that, so I can play in the kitchen. I’ll bake you some biscuits, Buck.”

“I like biscuits.”

Buck pushed the empty plate aside, reached for his coffee.

“Listen, I’m worried about this Peter Schear cat. He’s the exact opposite of Banshee’s BJ. Pardon the pun.”

“In your dreams, Buck Mulligan.”

“I only dream about flying monkeys. Anyway, my guy is following the rules like a hall monitor. I swear, it’s like he’s analyzed the entire program, trying to figure out how to unlock it.”

Sweeney sipped at his cooling coffee.

“What about the stuff he’s writing?”

“Well, that would be worse news. It’s pap, pure and simple. Setting that elitist judgment aside, it’s the kind of pap that would sell in very respectable numbers. A dog, a pretty girl, a mildly shocking conflict; every element is lifted from somebody. But we can’t shoot him for plagiarism. He’s not lifting from one person; he’s lifting from everyone.”

“Well, I suppose it was bound to happen. It’s not unreasonable that one out of the five would turn out to be a writer. Maybe we just handed him an opportunity. At least he’s not trying to bust your balls.”

“No, but he’s a calculating bastard, I can tell you that. I wouldn’t want to be on the other side of a negotiation with him. A fella would come out short on that deal.”

“Think about what we should do with him, Buck. Banshee will have a bit more time after eliminating the annoying Mr. Reuben. When she’s not baking biscuits, perhaps she could give Peter Schear’s cage a bit of a rattle?”

Banshee shook back her hair, grinning a wicked grin.

“I’d be delighted.”

*  *  *

It was after breakfast when they came for him. The captives were all in their cells, but she could hear every word. The steel boxes did not hide sounds as much as magnify them. Every noise, every groan or fart, was broadcast across the open concrete room. Allie Stark heard the outside door open, the footsteps heavy across the floor. This wasn’t part of the routine. The handlers usually stayed away in the morning. No one had shouted for a bathroom privilege. Allie sat absolutely still, the tip of her pen hovering above a yellow legal pad. The footsteps passed in front of her box, the sound of two people moving further up the line. She heard the wrenching creak of a steel handle, then the groan of a heavy door opening.

“Okay, Reuben, on your feet.”

It was the woman, Banshee, with that voice like soft gravel. The other one was silent; maybe one of the men.

“What do you want? What’s this about?”

Allie shook her head at the tone of BJ’s voice. You poor idiot, three weeks and you still haven’t figured these people out. As if you were still in charge of everything. You never were much for learning things. Banshee’s voice cut across her thoughts, harsh and metallic.

“Shut up. I am sick to death of listening to you. Turn around and put your hands behind your back. We’re going for a little walk.”

“But I…”

“I said shut up. I won’t say it again. Turn around, hands behind your back, or I stun you right now. Dragging you will be more work, but if that’s the way you want it, fine.”

There was the creak of a chair, the muffled sound of movement, the faintest click of steel on steel. Then the sound of shuffling feet, footsteps being retraced. Allie Stark sat quite still, listening to the quiet that followed. She knew the others were listening as well.

The first gunshot cut through the silence, rolling like thunder against the concrete walls. Two more shots followed, the echoes mixing and dying. The thunder fell away, replaced by the sound of weeping from the next cell.

*  *  *

“Dammit, Stephen, couldn’t you two keep your hands off each other for a few more weeks? I thought you were the writer who wanted to reinvent the modern love story. Instead, you get involved in some pulp romance.”

Molly Bloom stood in front of Stephen, her hands on her hips. Dedalus raised his hands from the arms of the chair, shook his head, dropped the hands to his lap. Molly blew out a huge sigh, turned to the others.

“Does someone want to help me out here? Anyone?”

Sweeney was slumped over the long table, silent. Banshee leaned against the wall casting dangerous looks. Buck Mulligan sighed and scratched at the stubble on his jaw, thinking of where to start.

“I think it’s safe to say that this changes things a bit. Stephen, can you give us the quick version? But please, without any graphic bits, because I am really not in the mood for that.”

Banshee laughed out loud.

“Yeah, I’m dying to hear this. At least someone is getting laid. Please tell me that you took that stupid leprechaun mask off.”

“Look, I’m sorry; really I am. It was after you took that Reuben prick out. Lauren was scared; I mean really freaked out. We were just talking, you know. We had to whisper, so we were leaned in close. Then it just happened.”

Sweeney raised his head from the table.

“Yes, it just happened. The Stockholm Syndrome kicked in, or the earth moved beneath the two of you. It doesn’t matter at this point. This pretty much tears it. Ms. Collin has to go, and so do you, Stephen. Then you two can live happily ever after, or she can hand you over to the Feds.”

“I don’t think Lauren would do that.”

“Sure, of course. Buck, would you care to script this one out for us?”

“No, Sweeney, I most certainly would not. But I agree that they have to go, and they have to go quickly, which means we have to close up shop. The question is, how long is it going to take to clean everything up?”

Sweeney’s laugh was sour.

“When we were planning this thing, we weighed out a lot of contingencies, but I swear, I never thought of this one. But at least we have an evacuation plan. I need to go over the checklist, but I originally figured two days at the outside. We can probably get it done in one. After we serve our guests their dinners, we can start packing up the gear. Stephen, you’re going to have to wait a day or two before we can spring you two lovebirds. Can you live with that?”

“Sure, of course we can. Look, I’m sorry. I’ll never breathe a word of this to anyone. And you guys can keep my share of the profits.”

“No, Mr. Dedalus, a deal is a deal. We spent an entire year planning this thing. One of the rules was that if there were ever any royalties, we split them evenly. You did your part, just like everyone else, so the deal still stands as far as I’m concerned. Besides, you may need some money when you finally get out of the slammer. As far as talking goes, never is a long time. But we can’t kill you; we all go back too many years. Is everyone okay with that?”

There were nods around the room. Sweeney shook his head.

“Right. There’s not a lot more we can do tonight besides packing up the miscellaneous stuff. Tomorrow we move everyone out. Buck can drive Stephen and Ms. Collin to the Denville Station. That’s in the opposite direction of where we dumped Reuben. They can get to the city from there, or wherever they choose to go. Stephen, you need to do whatever you can to keep a lid on your new girlfriend until we can get clear of here.”

 Stephen Dedalus nodded his head, still slumped in his chair. Sweeney rose from the table.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do, so we better get to it.”

*  *  *

Hers was the last dinner to serve. Sweeney rapped twice, his knuckles ringing on the steel door. Heavy cams groaned as he rotated the thick handles. Before he fully opened it, Sweeney peeped through the gap in the door. There was no need. Ms. Allie Stark was not poised to attack, sharpened pencil raised to stab. She was sitting at her makeshift desk, as always, her eyes calm and waiting. Vaguely disappointed, he retrieved a tray of food and pulled open the door, edging into the steel box.

“Good evening Ms. Stark; here is your dinner.”

“Good evening, Mr. Sweeney. Mmm… it smells like curry. It must be Stephen Dedalus’ turn in the kitchen. He is a very good cook, Mr. Dedalus. I may actually miss his curries.”

Sweeney set the tray on the desk and took one step back.

“Are you leaving us, Ms. Stark?”

“Everything must come to an end, Mr. Sweeney, even this little vacation.”

“Yes, well, I will leave you to your meal.”

Her voice stopped him before he could move.

“Would you mind very much staying for a bit? I am sick of eating alone, truth be told.”

Sweeney shrugged, seated himself on the narrow cot.

“A bit of time is all I have, I’m afraid. Lots to do, dishes to wash; you understand.”

“Yes, and love affairs to see to, I would imagine.”

She caught his harsh look and gave him back a half smile.

“Relax, it’s no business of mine. The walls are quite thin, that’s all. But it would make a very good party story, don’t you think? A wonderful response to that awkward ‘how-did-you-two-meet’ question. Speaking of questions, do you mind if I ask you one?”

“I believe you just did.”

“Alrighty, let’s make it two.”

Sweeney raised his hands palm up.

“Your name; how did you choose it? I mean, I understand the others, the Joyce characters: very clever. And Banshee, that requires no explanation. She has the sexiest voice on the planet, all gravel and threat. It is a treat to listen to her.”

“She would be pleased to hear it.”

“Yes, I’m sure she would. But back to your name. Which version of the Frenzy of Sweeney are you? Were you cursed for insulting a holy man, or broken in the shock of battle.”

“I am impressed, Ms. Stark. You are well-versed in your Irish literature.”

“Allie, please; I think we are long past the formalities. And yes, I have a little something to show for all of that money my parents handed over into the coffers of the Ivy League.”

“Brown University, if I remember correctly.”

“Yes, six years of it; and you?”

“I spent a bit of time in academia, but nothing so prestigious.”

The woman ignored her food, her eyes fixed on his.

“Tell me, Sweeney, what do you think of my story?”

You asked for this, Boyo, engaging in a serious conversation with this woman. All you had to do was drop off the food and go on about your business, but no.

“To be honest, I like what you’re writing. It’s good, edgy, but it will never sell.”

“I wasn’t thinking about it selling. You never had any intention of submitting our manuscripts, so what does it matter? I may as well write what I want. Isn’t that the way to create something real?”

Sweeney rose to his feet in one motion.

“Damn you, Allie Stark. Damn you to hell.”

*  *  *

Buck Mulligan stepped into the room. His crumpled leprechaun mask dangled limply in one hand. The other three looked up from the cramped table. Molly was the first to speak.

“Did everything go okay, Buck?”

“Sure, by the numbers, just like we planned. I dropped the two lovebirds off at the Denville Station and came straight back here. But the clock is ticking. We need to wrap this up if we want to stay out of prison.”

Sweeney looked up from a pad of paper.

“Buck’s right, of course. We need to get the others out of here and clear out ourselves. Let’s run through it one more time. Banshee, is the pistol taken care of?”

“It’s handled, Sweeney. I ran the tap thing down through the barrel. There were metal shavings everywhere. No one is getting ballistics from that pistol. I swept up the shavings and mixed them in with some other piles of junk.”

“And you dug the three slugs out of the hay bale?”

“You know I did. We can’t be leaving any bullets for the cops to find. They went down the toilet.”

“Good work, thank you. We can toss the gun when we leave. One more pistol in a New Jersey ditch; no one is going to notice or care. I can smell the chlorine, so the bleaching must have gotten done, right?”

“Yes, we made Stephen do it. It seemed only fair. He doused the toilets and the kitchen like a madman. I don’t think there is going to be a lot of DNA left. Better if no one ever finds this place at all, but we did our best.”

“Okay, Mrs. Bloom, that’s checked off the list as well. Everything went to the storage unit this morning. I paid three months rent on that thing, so no one will be opening it anytime soon. I don’t think anyone will ever connect a bunch of pots and pans with a kidnapping, but if they do, we will have a long head start.”

“Do we tell them anything about the cel phones, Sweeney?”

“Sure, tell them the truth. We’re not thieves, but we couldn’t have the cops tracking us. Their phones are in a package buried in the mail room of the Reuben Park Group. It’s disguised as an unsolicited manuscript. If they look hard, they may find it in a week or two.”

There was grim laughter around the table. Sweeney pushed the legal pad away and looked at the others.

“You know they’ll never stop looking for us, right? Kidnapping, a Federal offense and all of that; we need to get this last part over with.”

Everyone nodded. Buck Mulligan’s voice cut across the group.

“We need to be careful about the finger prints. Everything has been doused with WD-40. All the doors will be open, so there should be no need for anyone to touch anything, but make sure you keep the latex gloves on until we are in the van and driving.”

Sweeney nodded his head.

“You all know what to do. You three take the van. You dump Lyons and Schear near the train station. Their hoods don’t come off until you push them out of the van. I do the last wipe down, then I take Ms. Stark in the car. Once we’re all clear, we head for Philadelphia. Remember to watch the speed limits and all of that. Any questions?”

It was Molly Bloom who spoke.

“The wild card is that prick Reuben. Banshee, you dumped him in Patterson, right? He’s had a few days to do whatever he’s going to do. What do you think?”

“We gave him the spiel, about how we know where he lives, where his family lives. I think he’s scared enough to keep his mouth shut, at least for a little while. I told him that if he talks, someone will find him and kill him for real; slowly and painfully. Stephen said there is a lot about this that Reuben wouldn’t want made public, but who knows.”

“I suppose we will find out soon enough. We give the same talk to the others, of course. Let Banshee put the fear of all the gods into them. Buck said it best; the clock is ticking. You guys get a move on. As soon as you’re clear of here, I’ll do the last walk through and follow. See you in Philadelphia.”

Without a word, the crew rose and set to work.

*  *  *

Sweeney crossed the concrete floor, a canvas bag in his hand. The warehouse was in shadows. Steel doors gaped open on four of the shipping containers; empty mouths on empty cells. The nearest, the fifth, was shut tight. Sweeney rapped twice, then pulled at the heavy handles. The door wrenched open, the handles clanged. A feeble light trickled in from a small overhead vent. The generator was gone and the lights had gone with it. 

Allie Stark was seated on her narrow cot, hands in her lap, as if she were waiting on a bus. She held a hand to her forehead to fend off the sudden light, weak as it was.

“Good afternoon, Sweeney, or evening; whichever it is.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting Ms. Stark. Late afternoon would be accurate, I suppose.”

“If you call me Ms. Stark one more time, I’m going to scream. And I can scream really loudly, so fair warning. Not that it matters, since everyone is already gone. They are gone, aren’t they?”

“Yes, Allie, everyone else has left, as I’m sure you heard. “

“Then I should be terrified: Trapped alone with a legendary Irish madman.”

Sweeney did not think she looked at all terrified.

“What is it you’ve got there?”

Stepping into the gloom, he held out the canvas bag.

“I brought you your things; your purse, wallet. You’ll have to do without your cell phone.”

Allie Stark took the bag with one hand, motioned to the cot with the other.

“Have a seat while I pack.”

Sweeney shrugged and sat, leaning against the steel wall at the far end of the cot.

Allie rose, took three steps to the desk, reached for a stack of legal pads. She fit the pads into the canvas shopping bag and returned to her place on the cot. It creaked under her slight weight as she sat.

“I’m packed.”

Her smile flashed in the dim light. Sweeney reached into a side pocket of the work coat he was wearing.

“You should add this to your packing. It’s your manuscript; as best as I can transcribe it.”

“Oh, a thumb-drive, how sweet. Now I will have something to remember you by.”

“Right, a keepsake. I didn’t want you to lose all of your hard work, that’s all.”

“One of the lessons I have learned in the last four weeks is that I rather like working with paper and ink. I had forgotten that lovely scratching sound the pen makes as it slides across the paper. Speaking of lessons, did you learn yours?”

“And what lessons would those be?”

Allie Stark turned away from the bag in her lap, giving Sweeney a frank stare.

“You know exactly what I am talking about. This elaborate abduction; weeks of watching and listening. There must have been some surprises, lessons you weren’t counting on.”

Sweeney looked away from her probing eyes.

“I’m going to need to get back to you on that. I wish I had something profound to say, but I’m still trying to sort it out in my head.”

“I suppose that’s fair. Did you at least get what you wanted out of this whole thing?”

“No, not so much, or rather yes and no. I think there was more of the unexpected than the expected. Let’s just say that things didn’t stick to the outline.”

“Maybe not as much as our friend Banshee? Direct anger, driver revenge; she is very good at it.”

“Yes, I think you’re right. Banshee got exactly what she was looking for, exactly what she was needing.”

“Are any of the others really dead?  Mr. BJ Reuben in particular?”

“Dead?”

“Yes, you know, shuffled loose the mortal coil: Dead.”

“No, no one is dead.”

“Good, I’m glad for that.”

“You’re glad for them?”

“No, I’m glad for you, Sweeney.”

She raised a hand, pointing to his face.

“Since it’s just the two of us, would you be willing to take off that stupid mask? It’s most unflattering, you know.”

“No, Allie, I would not be willing to take off this stupid mask.”

Her eyes were on him again; grey, serious eyes.

“Then I am stuck with the image of a horribly disfigured man; saber scar across the left cheek, a crooked, broken nose.”

“That is remarkably accurate. We should be going now.”

“All right, Sweeney, but just one more thing before we go. When you send me the query letter for this novel, make sure you put in a line, a code word, something I can recognize. I know, use this sentence: And your words may set you free. I’ll make sure my assistant is looking for that.”

“What makes you think I’m going to write a novel about this?”

“You’d be a fool not to.”


BIO

Marco Etheridge lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His fiction has appeared in Literally Stories, Dime Show Review, Five on the Fifth, Storgy, Inlandia Journal, Manzano Mountain Review, Every Day Fiction, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Literary Yard, Mobius: A Journal for Social Change, Czykmate, Cleaning Up the Glitter, and Fleas on the Dog. His non-fiction work has been featured at Route 7 and Bluntly Magazine. Marco’s third novel, “Breaking the Bundles,” is available at fine online booksellers.

Reflections

by Regan Kilkenny



It was always empty at this time of night. Everyone else had gone home to start their weekends – see their kids that they had visitation rights to see – although had no custody over. The addiction had made it that way.

I dragged the chairs out of the little circle we had set up and back into their proper formation. A chill had set in. The heating turned off at nine each evening and the old, poorly insulated walls did little to nothing in order to help keep it warm. The cold wind managed to trickle in through the cracks in the single-paned windows and, at the same time, created a high pitched howl that echoed around the room. The artificial light that had been shining down on me for the last few hours was beginning to give me a headache. The muscles behind my eyes had been working too hard and had started to become strained, forcing the unpleasant soreness that wrapped it’s way around my head to intensify.

I dreaded the drive home. Navigating the winding country roads that remained unlit at this time of night, the darkness that set in would always crowd her, the blanket of black creeping its way in, suffocating me. I hated it.

The isolated town hall, that was far too elegant to just be a town hall, was situated outside of town which unfortunately meant a grueling drive for me every other Friday. It had once been home to an eccentric, elderly man who had supposedly donated it once he had died. Whispered rumours informed us all that he had gone mad in his old age and when he died there had been no next of kin and so the council deemed it the new town hall.

Most of his belongings were still here since no one had bothered to clear it out. The antique furniture that had a permanent layer of dust settled on its surface, the unpolished marble floor. The grandfather clock that stood proud at the top of the carpeted staircase and yet always chimed at the wrong time. A forgotten plate was still placed on the dining room table. I passed it as I walked to the coat room to grab my gloves, coat and bag, glad to be done for the day.

I whipped my head round when I heard a noise from another room. A high-pitched squeak, like worn shoes dragging across a too-shiny floor.

“Hello,” I called out, my voice confident despite my shaking hands. I told myself it was just the cold.

Expecting the noise to be from some kids that had snuck in as a joke, I walked in the direction that it came from – behind a pair of large double doors that stretched all the way up to the high ceiling. The wood that the doorway was made of had cracked and discoloured in places. The corners had even rotted slightly. The gold handle had been well worn, rust settling into the delicately sculpted design. Grabbing the handle, the cool metal sent shivers up my arm. I turned and pushed. 

The floor was made of mirrors. As I walked across the room, a deep pit eroded away my stomach. A weird tingly feeling spread over my arms and legs. Like fireworks, except I felt nauseous. My fingers were numb.

Looking down at the floor beneath me, the mirrors began to move. Ripples spread out from under my feet, the mirrors sliding over each other like a reflective pool of water. Yet I seemed to still be standing on solid ground.

I jumped back when a pair of hands reached towards me, through the pool of mirrors. More ripples spread over the surface. The skin on the hand was grey, almost translucent and rough; patches of dry flaky skin chafing against my own smooth skin. Long black talons pierced into my wrist along with a burning sensation – a handprint burning into my flesh. I screamed as the hand began to pull me down.

I was pulled through the river of mirrors, an icy chill settling over my skin as the unusual liquid splashed around my body. An indistinguishable pressure encompassed me – as if being squeezed through a tube that only just allowed enough space for me.

The claw was still wrapped tightly around my wrist, tugging me along; branding itself deeper and deeper into the flesh on my arm.

I struggled against it, pulled with the weight of my body. But with nothing else to pull myself towards, my efforts were futile. The hand pulling my body along as though i was a limp ragdoll.

The pressure around me began to grow tighter. Tightening around my chest, my ribs, my lungs. It became harder to breathe. The effort it took in order to get air into my lungs was unbearable and when I opened my mouth to attempt to breathe, a foul taste of iron entered my mouth and coated my taste buds.

I was drowning in metal. And then I wasn’t.

All of a sudden, the tightness around my chest released and my feet had found purchase. I was no longer falling through the river of mirrors. Instead I was in a room of mirrors, with multiple versions of myself staring back at me. My hair was now a wild nest on top on my head; completely windswept. My jumper had ripped, the stitches up my left side that held together the purple polyester had come apart completely.

In the dim light, the figure behind me was barely visible. It was all but a shadow that towered above me. It lifted a clawed finger and point towards one of the walls that was coated in mirrors. Though these mirrors had gone dark and cloudy. A dark inky mass spreading across the once crystal-clear wall and with it, the last of the light that lingered in the small room. It pulled all the light away and me along with it, I couldn’t seem to look away. When I dared to try and look at the creature behind me, I just couldn’t. My vision was fixed. I felt a cold hand rest on my shoulder.

In a rapid movement that lasted all of a second, the inkiness cleared and a brief spark of yellowing light flashed across the wall; a scene from a film, playing in front of me.

A younger version of myself stumbling down an alleyway, visibly intoxicated. It was nighttime; a full moon stood proudly in the pitch-black sky. No stars were out that night.

A man was following me, the glint of a knife reflected off what little light the moon provided. He walked with purpose, towards her, me, as I continued to stumble down the alley, wanting to be home. The me on the screen pulled out her phone. I remembered that I had tried to call a taxi, but the screen of my phone danced around, my eyes wouldn’t focus. The man had reached me now, grabbing my arm and roughly pulling me around to face him. I almost fell over with the force that he enacted onto me.

“Give me your money,” he said. My own mouth, the one in the room made of mirrors, mimed along to his words, like it was me saying them. The cold hand clutched my shoulder even tighter.

“I don’t have any,” My words were slurred as I tripped over my own feet. I pulled him with me as I fell. His body landing on top of me with a grunt. I struggled under him, trying to move his heavy body off me. I remember feeling as though he was suffocating me. I remember passing out. I remember the feeling of his dried blood clinging to my jeans that made it even more impossible to move. I remember his body crushing me.

I had still been drunk when I left him there. With a knife sticking out of his chest. It had somehow managed to lodge itself inside him when he had fallen on me. I was left limping away covered in a stranger’s blood.

The wall went black, like a television turning off. My cheeks were sticky with tears, but when the lights came on, I was back in the town hall, with nothing around me except the howling wind. And a burning handprint scarred into my wrist.


BIO

From the U.K., Regan Kilkenny is a young aspiring author currently studying for a Bachelors Degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from Staffordshire University.

Smoke: A Memoir in Ten Puffs

by Dennis Vannatta


            Don’t believe it when they tell you that, as you get older, your short-term memory goes but your long-term memory grows sharper, the distant past set before you bright as a reality series on a plasma TV.  Trust me, nothing gets sharper as you age.  That’s why, nearing my three-score years and ten, I’m always pleased when something I’d thought lost in the past does come back to me, for then I’m given my life back, at least a small part of it, at least for a little while before it begins to fade again.  It happened again recently, and I’m grateful for the gift, even if it was mostly smoke.

Puff One

            My wife and I were staying in what was billed as a “rustic cabin” in a state park an hour’s drive from our home in Little Rock.  That night I built a fire in the fireplace, and sat back in a wooden rocker with a glass of wine, prepared to enjoy the atmosphere.  Strangely enough, though, for a moment it wasn’t the burning oak faggots I smelled but a different odor:  pipe smoke.  And then I was gone, a little boy again standing beside my father on a cold gray winter’s day in a depot agent’s office in Appleton City, Missouri.  A pot-bellied iron stove was in one corner of the room, burning coal, no doubt, although I don’t remember that, or even the pipe itself, only the musty, pungent odor of pipe smoke emanating from the agent’s wool slacks and sweater.  I think I was holding my father’s hand.  I’m not positive about that, but I think I was because when I was little I’d walk with him, my tiny hand in his huge, gentle one.

            It’s a good memory.  My wife and I had treated ourselves to a couple of nights in the rustic cabin on Valentine’s Day weekend, and I’d like to think that that moment retrieved from my childhood was a gift from Aphrodite’s pal, Mnemosyne, Goddess of Memory.  Strange that it would involve smoking, though, because I’ve never been a smoker.  Wait, though.  Now that I think about it . . .

Puff Two

            When I was a boy, many men smoked pipes.  In my family, however, although there were a few cigarette smokers, only my grandfather, John Vannatta, smoked a pipe.

            I was a late child, my father in his forties when I was born, and even as a young boy I thought of my grandfather as an old man.  He was shorter than his sons and slightly stooped, but he had broad shoulders and even as an old man incredibly strong hands.  I vividly recall my cousin Johnny—seven years my senior, star athlete—hand-wrestling with the old guy (each grasping the other’s right hand and squeezing), his eyes growing wide in amazement and then face crumpling in pain as his hand was crushed in the hard-callused, farmer’s hand of our grandfather.

            Grandpa was rumored to have been quite the lad in his younger days, hell on the ladies (I’ll tell no tales) and a sometime drinker—hard for me to imagine in that strict Baptist family. 

            Smoking was also frowned upon by Baptists.  Grandpa smoked pipes, against which wickedness the puny efforts of his local preacher were of no avail.  The tent revivalists who came through periodically were another story.  Those guys were real pros.  They could entertain and put the fear of God in you at the same time.  They’d put the fear of God in Grandpa, too, who’d return from a revival meeting, grab his pipe, run out of the house, and hurl the pipe as far as he could into the pasture.  As soon as the revival folded its tents, though, he’d have his sons out there in the pasture with him looking for it.  “Find that son of a bitch!”

            That was from a time before my time.  In my earliest memories, he was already retired from farming and living in a little house in Windsor, Missouri.  He’d given up trying to give up the pipe.  I remember the smell of pipe smoke on him, those flat rectangular Prince Albert tins, remember vividly his drawing on the pipe and then pushing his index finger into the bowl, tamping the tobacco down, I suppose.  I couldn’t understand how he could do it without burning his fingertip, but his hands were still hard-callused even though he no longer farmed.

            He had several pipes and kept them in his bedroom in a wooden rack which, decades later, I had one much like.  I was fascinated by the various pipes lined up in the rack, and every visit I’d go into the cold dark bedroom to look at them.

            Grandma would be in there, too.  She’d had a stroke and sat in a wheelchair.  She couldn’t talk although she’d try and would make a grunting, whining sound I couldn’t understand.  When we came for a visit, she’d be sitting in her wheelchair in the living room.  We grandchildren would dutifully file by the wheelchair and give her a kiss, and she’d make that sound.  Then Grandpa would wheel her into the back bedroom and close the door on her.  We’d have dinner, and afterwards the adults would visit or play cards while we children played outside or whatever.  At some point before we left, I’d go into the bedroom and look at the rack of pipes.  I’d try not to look at Grandma.

            Like I said, he had hard hands.

Puff Three

            Grandpa was the only pipe smoker in the Vannatta side of the family that I recall.  Uncle Dud (Durward) smoke cigarettes despite the Dud Vannatta branch of the family being especially religious.  From this half-century distance, I’m not sure whether I actually witnessed or only heard about cousin Johnny getting down on his knees and begging his father to stop smoking.  Whether Uncle Dud’s smoking affected the condition of his soul is between him and his God, but I don’t think it affected his health much.  He had stomach trouble as did my father, probably from the same cause:  stress.  (Both were school-district superintendents.)  Smoking didn’t have anything to do with his death:  he and Aunt Anna were killed in a car wreck when I was in basic training in the Army, spending a part of each day policing up cigarette butts.

            My father wasn’t a defiant smoker like Uncle Dud but a sneak smoker.  If you want to talk about strict Baptists, you’re just playing games until you get to my mother.  No drinking, no smoking, no cussin’.  I’m not certain how she managed to conceive three children.  Add to the religious prohibition the fact that my father had his first of three heart attacks when I was six, and you can see why smoking for him was forbidden.

            My mother watched him for signs of smoking like Hera watched Zeus for signs of philandering, and she enlisted me as one of her spies.  It was a game for me, trying to find his latest hiding place for a pack of Camels, but it was serious business for those two, locked in perpetual marital combat, smoking just one among many battlegrounds.  I didn’t realize how serious it was for him until one day I found a pack of cigarettes hidden somewhere in the house and gleefully flashed it to him as I was about to run with it to my mother.  “If you take those to your mother, I won’t play catch with you anymore,” he said.  I think I must have been about eight at the time.

            Let’s move on.  And quickly.

Puff Four

            My experience of smoking was not entirely vicarious, even at a young age.

            I suppose that all children . . . . No, wait.  I was about to say something silly.  What I think of “all children” doing probably vanished about the same time that people in small towns stopped letting their children roam all over in search of relatively innocuous adventures and started locking their doors night and day.  (My family would not lock the doors even when we went on vacations.)

            One of those things I was going to suggest all children indulged in was smoking reeds, dry hollow stems of some weed or flower (I don’t recall exactly) about the diameter of a pencil, broken off in cigarette lengths.  Light up, puff puff puff.  Well, two puffs at most.  They wouldn’t stay lit like a cigarette, and you wouldn’t want them to anyway because they tasted awful, and you certainly didn’t want to take a big puff and draw fire into your tender young imbecilic mouth.  Still, this allowed you to pretend you were smoking the real thing, which is what we thought adults were supposed to do.  We were assailed by commercials and ads for cigarettes on radio, television, billboards, signs on screen doors of cafés announcing, “It’s Kool inside.”  The women in these ads were beautiful and the men handsome, confident, and tough, qualities we did not possess.  If we had to choose just one, though, it would definitely be tough.  We watched Alan Ladd, John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden in the movies; they were all tough, and they all smoked.

            It’s not easy for a young boy to be tough, but you could attempt to look the part by dangling a cigarette out of the corner of your mouth.  The effect, alas, was diminished somewhat by dangling a smoldering hollow reed out of the corner of your mouth, so my friend Jerry and I graduated to cigarettes.  Once in awhile we’d steal a cigarette out of our fathers’ packs, but it was dangerous to do that too often.  It’s tough to look tough when your dad is blistering your bottom.  Mostly we picked up butts off the street.  Sanitary?  Ha.  To even raise the issue shows that you’re not tough, Nancy boy.

Puff Five

            Instead of progressing from smoking butts picked up off the street to buying packs, I gave up smoking before I reached junior high. 

            My high school friends and I would have described ourselves as scholars and athletes; others would probably have described us as nerds.  Whatever, only one of my half-dozen closest friends smoked then or thereafter.

            I speak of cigarettes.  I never developed a habit for cigarettes for the most basic of reasons:  I didn’t enjoy smoking them.  Cigarette smoke seemed like sucking in hot air to me, vapid, virtually tasteless.  Pipes and cigars were another story, and while I avoided the temptation in high school, there was a time in my undergrad college years that I smoked a fair amount.

            Cigars were my favorite.  No smoke beats a good cigar.  I use “good cigar” primarily in a theoretical sense, having almost nothing to do with them myself.  Back in my undergrad days, even Dutch Masters and El Producto were too rich for my blood.  White Owls, Roi-Tans—those were more my speed.  Swisher Sweets and Mississippi River Crooks (wavy-shaped cigars with a sweetened end, pack of five two bits).  I liked those Crooks.  I smoked a thing called Erics, I believe it was, cigarette-sized cigars with a filter tip. Ghastly.  I looked good with one hanging out of the corner of my mouth, though—or thought I did.

            That, in fact, was the problem with the full-sized cigars, the best smokes:  they didn’t look cool.  A nineteen-year-old college student with a cigar in his puss looks less like Warren Beatty than a Chicago ward-boss trainee.  What chick would go for that?  It was the chicks I was really interested in, of course.

            If not cigars, what about pipes?  A college man with a pipe is a chick magnet.  Not.  At least not me.  While they didn’t help me with the ladies, though, I liked everything about smoking pipes:  the pipes themselves and all the wonderful sizes, shapes, and colors they came in; my really neat wooden rack with the built-in humidor; sampling different tobaccos; tamping the tobacco into the pipe; the process of lighting the pipe (drawing the flame down into the bowl, then shooting it back up with that distinctive little pop); smelling the smoke (nothing beats Cherry Blend, my friend, especially when you’re poor); even cleaning the damn things.

            I’ve never understood why pipes smell so wonderful and cigars so atrocious and yet pipes can’t come close to cigars for taste.  Not that they don’t beat the hell out of cigarettes.  It helps to buy a better quality tobacco, for which I did not have the wherewithal.  Still, I would have kept on smoking pipes but for one drawback:  they gave me a sore throat.  I’ve always battled allergies and spend most of the spring and fall with a raspy voice as it is.  After smoking pipes for awhile, my throat would be raw, and I, never more than a step away from full-blown hypochondria at any time, would imagine an army of cancer cells marshalling the troops.  That pipe rack with the humidor and six cheap but still pretty cool pipes went into the top of my closet, and never came down again.

Puff Six

            This is not to say that my experience of smoking ended in my undergrad years.  One could not serve in the United States army, in my day at least (1969-1971), and escape all experience of smoking.  Indeed, the Army encouraged us to smoke.  A little packet of two cigarettes came in every carton of C-rations.  Cigarettes could be purchased dirt-cheap in the PX.  Virtually every formation—unless the sergeant in charge had a case of the ass at us for something—would include a break where we were invited to “smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.”  Most had ‘em and smoked ‘em, and those of us who didn’t could look forward to the pleasure of policing up the butts.  In basic training and MP school, one of our daily rituals was to line up and slowly traverse some area looking for butts.  “Hey, you missed one back here!” some horse’s ass sergeant would inevitably call out without indicating exactly where the “here” was, and back we’d go across the grounds looking for that renegade butt.  I enjoyed that a lot.

            We didn’t do much policing after our training was over with, but the smoking continued, blue clouds of the stuff in the barracks, EM clubs—wherever there were GI’s.  Some of it was even tobacco smoke.

            When I was stationed in Germany, there was a guy who would drive his VW van with the hidden compartment under the floorboard down to Spain and once even to North Africa and come back with slabs of hashish big as a dictionary.  My company was divided between the hash-smokers and the juicers.  I was a juicer but not from any moral or legal scruples.  I tried hash a couple of times, but all it did for me was put me to sleep and leave me with the same sore throat as pipe tobacco. 

            Almost all my friends there were hash-heads, though.  They were a mellow bunch.  I never saw a hash-head get in a fight or get violent in any way.  I can’t say the same for my fellow juicers.  (There was a lot of drug-taking:  LSD, mescaline, and toward the end of my tour a new group of guys who were into heroin.  The most disturbing thing I saw involving any sort of mind-altering agent was a sergeant whose wife and small son lived off-post with him.  He was a juicer to beat all juicers, kept two hollow plastic pistols filled with vodka in holsters on his belt.  To entertain us, he’d hand one of the pistols to his son, I’d guess around eight; the boy knew what to do with it.  He’d take out the stopper, put the barrel in his mouth, and drink.  Most of the guys laughed, thought ol’ sarge was a great guy.  Me, not so much.)

Puff Seven

            I got out of the Army in 1971 and enrolled in graduate school.  The hash smokers were now pot smokers.  I knew a lot of them and would take a hit now and then, but weed didn’t do any more for me than hashish, so I don’t have much to say about it (except you could buy a lid for ten dollars if you knew the right guy; eat your hearts out, twenty-first-century tokers).

            One more thing from grad school, 1971.  I met a tall blond girl from Queens, New York, who smoked cigarettes.  I didn’t like the smell of it on her clothes or the taste when we kissed, but I put up with it because, well, tall, blond, kiss.  Eventually, she gave up smoking for me, along with her parents’ dream of her returning to New York to marry the kind of doctor who actually made money, not some doctoral candidate in English.  Today our children are astounded at the idea of their health-conscious mother ever smoking, but I think back on those tobacco-tasting kisses as magic time, violins floating in the honey-sweet air, angels eatin’ pie.

Puff Eight

            In the nearly four decades since I got my PhD, my experience of smoking has waned almost to the nonexistent.  Of course, it’s a different world today.  Not so long ago one dined in restaurants surrounded by smokers.  We watched movies in theaters thick with smoke and flew in airliners where non-smokers were banished to the last four rows, next to the toilets; but even there the stuff would reach us, clog our noses, foul our hair, impregnate our clothes.  The halls of every public building were lined with sand-topped canisters for cigarette ash and butts—although simply dropping a butt on the floor and giving it a quick stomp was common practice.  (I think we do have an ashtray, tacky faux-gilded aluminum thing, in a drawer somewhere even now.  We’ve lived in our present house since 1985; to the best of my recollection, no one has ever smoked a cigarette in it.)

            In the almost two-score years since grad school, I have smoked a few times, pipes and cigars, never cigarettes.  When our children were little, to save money on our trips from Arkansas to New York to visit my wife’s family, we’d drive straight through, twenty-four hours, and I’d try anything to keep myself awake behind the wheel at night, including smoking a pipe.  Fiddling with the damn thing with one hand on the wheel, trying to fill it, light it, keep it lit helped me stay alert—or so the theory went.  It was the only time I ever smoked around the kids with my wife’s consent, a little second-hand pipe smoke being preferable to my missing a curve in the Tennessee mountains.

            I was never one of those pipe-smoking college professors, even if I did still have my pipes from my undergrad days, plus the de rigueur corduroy jacket with elbow patches.  Many of my colleagues smoked pipes, and I did think pipes lent one an air of intellectual gravity.  (No, one never becomes oblivious to image.)  Problem was I still had that sensitive throat.  My God, risk having to miss a day or two of school because of a throat too sore for lecturing?  Leave my students bereft of my astounding command of the best that’s been thought and said?  Mais non!

            I do fondly recall two episodes of cigar-smoking from my professor days.  The first was thirty years ago probably.  My wife and I along with several other couples had dinner at my friend and colleague Ralph’s house, and afterward the men repaired to the front porch.  It was a soft spring evening.  Ralph opened a box of cigars, and we smoked and passed around a bottle of bourbon.  A pleasant night to look back on, especially poignant for me because all those friends, save one, are now scattered across the country, all alive and well, I hope, although in truth for me they live only in memory, wreathed in pipe smoke.

            The only one of those friends still here is Dave.  A number of years ago, another warm evening, our wives off somewhere, we old buddies sat on lawn chairs on the back deck of my house, smoking cigars and sipping cognac from tiny snifters that had come with a Courvoisier gift set.  We enjoyed ourselves so much I smoked a second cigar and was suddenly so dizzy that when I got up and went into the house I walked straight into a wall.  Wretched as I felt at the time, by now, twenty years later, it, too, is a good memory.  If I’m not mistaken, it was the last time I ever smoked anything.

Puff Nine

            Not all smoking memories are pleasant ones.  Smoking does kill.

            My father was superintendent of a small rural school district, and when I was a boy his janitor was a fellow by the name of Harvey, a smoker.  My father was quite fond of him.  It was winter, a cold starless night in my memory, and we were sitting in the car somewhere, perhaps ready to drive home after a basketball game, when my father turned to my mother and said that Harvey had lung cancer.  I wasn’t old enough to know precisely what that meant; nevertheless, the darkness, the cold, the dampness, not the sound but the weight of my father’s voice pressing down on me, told me that Harvey was done for.  He didn’t last long.  My father would visit him at the hospital and come back looking like something had grabbed him by the throat.  Like he couldn’t breathe.

            My wife grew up close, geographically and emotionally, to her Uncle Bob, Aunt Pat, and their children, almost another set of parents and siblings to her.  Uncle Bob had been a career man in the Navy before going into the insurance business, and in photographs in his uniform he looked like a more robust Ray Milland.  But he’d been a heavy smoker, and by the time I knew him he was yellow and haggard, coughed continually and sounded like he was drawing through a water pipe when he tried to breathe.  Emphysema.  He was a proficient amateur photographer, and at my brother-in-law’s wedding, he was to take photos of the ceremony and reception.  On the morning of the wedding, he took me off to the side and said, “Dennis, I’m not sure I can hold the camera steady enough.  Will you take over for me?”  Of course I did although my expertise with cameras ended with putting a new flash cube on the Instamatic.  All those dials and meters on his fancy camera flummoxed me, and the results were disastrous.  Uncle Bob died not long afterward, and a few years later his wife, Aunt Pat, until then a vigorous, healthy non-smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer.  I don’t know what part years of breathing second-hand smoke played, but it couldn’t have helped.  I remember her final Christmas, more than a dozen of us sitting in my in-laws’ big living room, dazzling Christmas tree in the corner, presents being passed out, glasses of wine and beer in hand, hors d’ouerves consumed, laughter, good times.  In the midst of it Aunt Pat, once the life of any party, sat in her chair looking down, communing silently with something inside her.  Something not good.

            My older sister, Delores, died of congestive heart failure on top of years of suffering from emphysema.  She smoked up until the very end.  Before deteriorating health forced her to quit, she worked in a deli, where she wasn’t allowed to smoke.  One day she slipped behind the counter, fell and broke her ankle.  The deli owner called an ambulance.  Delores, in terrible pain, beseeched him, “Oh please, won’t you let me smoke just one cigarette?  You know they’ll never let me smoke in the ambulance.”

Puff Ten

            My daughter was a smoker.  I’m not sure when she started, but she smoked a lot and for enough years that my wife and I worried about her health.  Our nagging no doubt only exacerbated the problem.  She finally kicked the habit a few years ago.  I think it was when she broke up with a boyfriend, who was a smoker.  Bad breakups can turn out well in some respects, evidently.

            My son never smoked cigarettes or, as far as I know, cigars or pipes.  At least with any regularity.  Like all young men, no doubt he tried this or that a time or two.  The only time I know for sure he smoked something was in high school, an all-boys Catholic school run by a notoriously strict monsignor who, if he caught a boy smoking, would sit him in a chair before the entire student body assembled in the gymnasium and make him smoke cigars until he vomited.  On their very last day of school, though, the monsignor would let the seniors light up a cigar.  Matthew bought a big one, and if he smoked the whole thing, he was probably sick as a dog.

            He gave me the last cigar, the last smoke of any kind, I’ve had.  It was the occasion of his first son’s birth, my first grandchild.  (I was the one who reminded him that he had to pass out cigars to commemorate the occasion.  I didn’t want him to ignore the tradition and deprive me of my first stogie since Dave and I smoked ourselves dizzy many years before.)

            Matthew is a true Dutchman, throws nickels around like manhole covers, and I’d been expecting something cheap but got a real shock:  the cigars were Bubble Gum!  I admit I felt a little cheated, but at least this way I have a souvenir, the gum cigar still in its IT’S A BOY! wrapper in my chest of drawers.  I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation of a real cigar.  Too, the literature professor in me appreciates the symmetry provided by that cigar, for my first experience of smoking wasn’t those butts Jerry and I picked up off the streets of Sedalia, or even the dry-reed “cigarettes” we lads smoked, but the cartons of candy cigarettes I’d get occasionally instead of a Baby Ruth or Butterfinger.  So in a sense you could say my smoking life has come full circle—candy to, well, something close to candy.

            Isn’t it pretty to think so, anyway?  The sobering truth is that life doesn’t come full or any other kind of circle.  The years roll by, not back.  Nothing returns.  All we have of the past is what we remember of it.  The marvelous thing is that, when you reach a certain age, all memories are good, even the bad ones.  Think not?  Just wait.  It’s forgetting that’s death; remembering is resurrection.

            Proust told us that long ago, of course, his rebirth through a tea-soaked Madeleine.  For me, a whiff of pipe tobacco will do.  Make mine Cherry Blend.


BIO

Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with stories and essays published in many magazines and anthologies, including River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review.  His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was recently published by Et Alia Press.


My First Dance

by Juanita Rey


This is what it looks like
to be dressed in
what a family can’t afford:
a chiffon dress,
blue as a lily flower,
wide lace,
vertical pleats,
new nylons,
creamy white shoes,
tight enough to hurt.

My mother remembers
when she first went dancing.
Her parents went without for her
on that occasion too.
It’s romance.
She figured we all
owe a debt to it anyhow.
Otherwise, there’d be none of us.
So why not owe more.

My father can remember
hanging out with his amigos,
all done out in hand-me-downs,
watching the cluster of la chicas.
on the opposite side of the hall.

He was brave enough
to ask my mother for a dance.
So she reckons the expense
will be worth it
if I meet someone half as fine
as the man she married.

Of course, mostly they argue these days.
But always in clothes they can afford.


My Street


Families, loners, occupy the tenements,
play in the park,
shop at the grocery store.
I’m sure there’s a story to why
all these people live where they do.
I’m learning it bit by bit.
Some have been here all their lives.
Others are just passing through.

Lots of folks sit out on their stoops.
If you want to know why they can’t get a job
then stop a while and listen.
Economy’s bad,
they tell me.

This city’s a crazy grid
of streets just like this one.
Except elsewhere
there’s different houses, different people.
So it’s not alike.

Some of the streets are better kept up.
Some look like battlegrounds.
Some boast fancier parks and grocery stores.
With others,
the playground’s littered with glass and needles
and, if they have a store at all,
it’s most likely boarded up.

I’ve seen people
sitting on their stoops
on block after inner city block.
But I only get the news
from the ones on my street.


The Whistle from Above


Are you pleased with yourselves…
I think the word is “voyeurs.”
Or is it “lechers.”
This is what comes of all these
English as a Second Language classes.
I have rid myself of el lascivo, el libertino
but then some would-be stud takes their place.

Okay, I get it.
I’m a piece of meat
with hair where it should be
and brown skin where it’s not.
And I have the shape
that corresponds with
someone’s momentary libido.
Now there’s a word that’s the same
in English and in Spanish.
So there’s no getting away from it.

But, to be honest,
a catcall, high up on a construction site.
has nothing to do with me.
From that distance,
my possibilities are endless.
Up close, I can only be so much.


BIO

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in this country five years. She has worked many jobs while studying to improve her English. She has been writing for a number of years but has only recently begun to take it seriously. She enjoys reading. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison are particular favorites. Her work has been accepted by 2 River View, Harbinger Asylum, Pennsylvania English, Petrichor Machine and Madcap Poets.

The Walker

By Martin Keaveney



            I stop walking on the hard shoulder. There is a light flashing in the distance. It’s different from the yellow glow of the streetlights. A silver torch beam from the bog, over the sparkles of tarmac, through the hue of the blue moon. Now it lights up the canvas of a small tent. There is someone inside. It’s a female. I know by the shape of the shoulders. I better be careful.

            I always leave the city when the buses stop running. The clubs are starting, there’s queues of youngsters lined up, perfumed, heels tapping, phones blinking, excitement of the night to come. I hit for the ring road, past the 24-hour service station. Around the big roundabout and onto the east route. I walk fast. I go if it’s dry, if it rains, if it snows. I take what comes. I go no matter what. I probably shouldn’t walk on the dual carriageway. But I live with risk.

            There isn’t much notice taken out here after dark. The night has its own laws. I could go by the old road. There’s a lot of hills that way. But I’d get over them. Or I could go cross-country. I have done. Squelching across the bog, trawling through streams, climbing over fences. The world slows you down. It’s never in a hurry. Nature is always on time.

            But my old boots are leaking this last while. You can get no wear out of anything these days. I only have them a few years. I can feel the damp coming in already. Even though the shape of this road rolls down from the centre, there is still a film of dampness across it. I sense it coming in my woollen socks. Around the toes. The reeds and marsh are out for now. I’m afraid I’ll have to get new boots for the winter. Then I might take on the cross-country. But the motorway is the most direct. As-the-crow-flies.

            They knew what they were doing when they set it out. I know all about road-making. I did an exam on it. I studied the production of road coverings, bridge-building, urban and rural planning, infrastructural strategies and policies, waterways, dams. The route was well planned. On certain parts of the road, you can see the track of it for miles by the lights each side. You can see things better in the darkness of the night.

            It’s hard to get silence in the world these days. I’ve tried lots of places. The church. The last morning, I found a couple of parishioners by the devotion candles. Chatting as I knelt and prayed. Down the library. A row broke out one day over an unpaid fine while I was looking for a history book. You can’t even walk along the canal in the daytime, without whooping children rattling crisp bags, beeping mobile phones. People racing everywhere. Round in circles.

            I’d only be about during the night if I could. Sounds that were hidden all day come alive at night. The rustling on leaves, doors banging, bins emptying, dogs barking. You couldn’t hear them things during the day. Not with all that goes on. But I wouldn’t be the first to throw light on that.

            No cars have passed for a while. Awful waste of a good road really. Lying dormant here for hours. It’s funny to be walking slow on a surface designed for great speed. The road tries to hurry you. But I’ll not be hurried.

           It’s like you are in slow motion. The big white and yellow lines, the flat bitumen skin, the crash barrier of two aluminium channels running all the way. The massive green and blue signs. The smaller yellow ones with bars showing how many hundred metres before the next turn-off. Billboards at the slip roads. Designed for people zooming by. You get a glimpse of a woman using a shiny lawnmower or a man filling a sleek washing-machine. Happy people that have something the drivers of the cars should buy. You see it. You want to buy it. But I’m looking at these pictures for a long time as I walk. When you come up close to the giant board, you see them better. You see it as a flat sheet of colours and shapes. If you look really close, you can see it’s just lines of coloured full stops.

           The hostel lobby clock put temperatures at between 4 and 5 Celsius tonight. The autumn is dying. The leaves won’t be rustling for much longer. Except in the Copper Beeches. And the evergreens. I’m an evergreen. I don’t lose my leaves in the winter. I don’t hibernate. I keep going all year round.

            I’ve decided I’ll move out of the hostel as soon as I can. I’m in one of six bunk beds in a room. The people change every night. But even so, they’re the same. Rattling plastic bags. Fiddling with zips. Blowing hairdryers. Flashing phones. I get cold with those noises. Scratching at you. Great silence out here. I was always fond of the night.

            I didn’t want to go to bed at all when I was a boy. The old man would tell me it was time. I’d spell ‘N-O’. He would spell ‘Y-E-S’. But I couldn’t spell ‘Just another half-hour?’ The old man was good at spelling.

            There’s always hassle in the hostel. One night in there I thought I heard the cuckoo. I never heard one, even though I lived in the country until I grew up. I was awful excited. To hear the cuckoo for the first time, and in the city. I jumped down off the bunk, the man sleeping below groaned, rattling the wooden bead necklace he wore. I ran to the window. It was like waking up Christmas morning, running to the bottom of the tree to see what the man in red had brought.

            I looked across the roofs. There were owls hooting by this time as well. Another first. I couldn’t believe it. But I couldn’t see any birds. I thought they must have all their nests under the eaves. Then I saw a square blue light reflected in the glass. The man with the wooden necklace was sitting up in the bed. He had his phone out. He turned off his alarm. The owls and cuckoos stopped.

            I don’t need to find anywhere else when I leave. I’ll firm up for the winter. It’s surprising what the body can attune itself to. Surprising what the skeletal structure, the muscular tissue, the organs can withstand. It’s a durable design. Almost limitless. You’d be minted if you owned the patent.

           I’ve tested it well already. I was able to hop sixteen foot when I was sixteen years. The long jump at the village sports day. The sports field was green grassed. White fence posts and blue ropes marked out the running track. Crease suit lines ran in huge decreasing circles for the laps and relays. Wooden swing boats rose high into the blue sky. Children laughed. A man in a suit walked around speaking into an orange spongy microphone with a short piece of wire that wasn’t connected to anything. His voice came out of two blue loudspeakers attached to the top of a telegraph pole. I always wanted a go on that microphone. You could hear him speak all over the village, giving the results of the under-10s three-legged race. But I didn’t mind the noise then. I always loved the night though.

            The schoolmaster in the village shook my hand and gave me the winner’s trophy. It had a small golden statue of a man in sports gear. The master’s name was Joe. But he wasn’t my teacher anymore by then. When he gave me the trophy, I could have said ‘Thanks, Joe’, if I wanted. But I didn’t. I said ‘Thanks, sir.’ The master told me I should take sport more seriously. I had a real talent, he said. I could jump very high as well. And I could run fast. I looked at the trophy as he talked, my fingers on the marble base, the little golden plate glued on, inscribed with the year and the word: ‘Winner’. The man in the suit said my name into the orange microphone. It came out the two blue loudspeakers on the telegraph pole for everyone in the village to hear. They took my photograph. Everyone clapped for a long time.

            But I didn’t take sport more seriously. I went learning about the roads instead. The old man told me it was more secure. One of the arms broke off the trophy figure a while later. I never did any sport again. That was fifty years ago.

            I’m still fit enough. I walk most of the day as well. It’s surprising what the body can train itself to do. Imagine all the miles I could walk over another twenty years if I keep in good shape. No one should ever be in any hurry. Nature is always on time.

            I moved out of the flat in the city a month ago. The crowd I was living with were fairly lively. ‘Sticky People’ the landlord called them. He didn’t mean me. If they were all like me, he’d be elected, he said. But they’re not all like me. That was the problem. He was getting rid of the lot of them.

            The buck from down the country that called a kettle a ‘kittle’. The foreigner that was trying to learn English from him. The father of three whose family lived in a different continent. There were a few women there too. I didn’t know much about any of them. They’re all sticky people, the landlord said. He wanted to clean the place up and get in a family. Every landlord wants a family.

            I didn’t mind. I was glad to be getting out of there. I took a top bunk in the hostel. But I’ll be getting away from there soon enough too. Sticky people in it and all. Out here on the road, there’s none of that. It’s all left to you. Freedom.

            I looked at a few places last week. But I didn’t like the terrain. I’ll firm up for the winter instead. I’ll wear two trousers and two shirts if temperatures go below zero. My woollen cap. Thick socks and gloves. I’m fit for anything. I’ll sleep behind the crash barrier on the motorway. It’s surprising what the body can attune itself to if the mind is right. The mind is a powerful tool. The old man told me that once.

            I’m getting very close to the torch beam in the bog. I can see the tent better now. It definitely wasn’t there last night. Someone sleeping by the motorway. Moved in under cover of the day. Someone with my idea. I can see the woman inside. I can make out the jawline. The shape of the hair. It would be funny if I hopped the barrier and called in to her. Tell her I pass this way every night. Maybe she could do with something brought from the city 24-hour next time I’m passing. A carton of milk. Or a pound of sausages. Or a bottle of 7up. But I don’t talk much to women. Never did. It’s hard to know what to say to them. They’re not straightforward. The old man told me that once. They can be sticky. The night is not sticky. The night is straightforward.

            But it would be funny if I told her I was going to be her neighbour. That I’d the same idea. Except without a tent. She’d probably call the law. Say I was some weirdo. There’d be a court visit. A cell at the finish. That’d be the end of the freedom. I value my liberty. I pass by her tent and keep going. Good luck to her. She’ll have to do her own shopping.

            I turn onto the slip road after the last yellow sign. I walk up a little hill to the bridge overhead. I walk across, looking over and back at the carriageway, streetlights stretching out into the dark. I can see the tent in the bog. A small triangle of canvas-shaded light. I go by a little roundabout. Then I come into the suburbs. Streetlights shine torch beam silver here instead of the motorway yellow. Security alarms flash in industrial estates. Lines of trucks parked up all night. Awful waste really. The night is a neglected space.

            Near the town centre, I cross an old bridge. I stop in the middle, go to the wall, look into the canal. The water never stops flowing here, from dusk to dawn. I hear it splashing against the bank. On the stone cut cap someone has written a small message in white paint: ‘Don’t Jump’.

            I get to the main street. I pass the traffic lights, a post office, a supermarket, a clothes shop, a bank. I walk into the town square, cars parked around it.

            I get to the statue in the centre. I stand by the square concrete base. There is a gold plate at the front inscribed with the words: ‘J.M. Barrie 1757-1845 – “The Walker”’. I look up at the bronze sculpture. I can see the outline of the boots, the jacket, the big bag on the back, the hat on top. The arms are outstretched. The wall lights of the town hall behind shine against the statue and the head is a black shape as I look up. But I always imagine The Walker is smiling.

            I pull my bag off my back. I sit on the concrete base. I look down the street. I have the freedom of the town. There’s always sticky people around the city. But not out here at night.

            I’ve walked ten miles on the dual carriageway. But I feel like I could walk forever. I stand. Better not to sit for too long. Hard to get going again. I bend each leg. I rub the backs of my thighs and calves. I’ll have to get new boots for the winter.

           I walk down the main street to the traffic lights. They change every thirty seconds, even though there’s no drivers to come and go. Changing colours all night to an empty street. Awful waste of electricity really. I go up close to them.   The lights are just circles of coloured full stops. I stare at the amber when it comes. It means prepare to stop. It reminds me of the torch beam yellow. I walk back up the street and sit under The Walker.

            I pull off my shoes and socks. I wiggle my toes and stretch them out. I take off my high-viz jacket. The jumper with ‘Champion’ written across the front. The check shirt. The vest.  I sit in my skin. It’s good and cold. I look around. Not a sinner, not a sound. I scratch an armpit. I walk out to the middle of the main street. The road is wet on my feet. I stand on the white line in the centre. I flex my biceps. After a minute, I let off a roar. The silence falls again in the town. I let off another roar, louder. I’m coughing after this one. Heart thumps. A light comes on somewhere.

            I go back to the statue. I put on the vest, the check shirt, the ‘Champion’ jumper, the high-viz jacket, the socks and the old leaking boots. I put my bag on my back.

            I walk by the bank, the clothes shop, the supermarket, the post office. I stop at the traffic lights. I look to the town square. I can see The Walker, the arms outstretched. Smiling down at me. I smile back.

            The walk is always easier on the way back to the city. A car whizzes by outside the suburbs. Boxy lads squeezed inside, music beating, a purple light shining from the underbelly. They circle the little roundabout a few times. Then they zoom back by me toward the town. They beep as they pass. Sticky people. I shouldn’t be walking out here at night. But I live with risk.

            As I walk across the motorway bridge, I see her leaning against the crash barrier. She is looking up at me. The only trouble with the motorway is there is no cover. But usually there is no need to hide.

            There is nowhere to turn off on the slip road. I have to keep going toward her. I don’t let on to see her at all. I keep my eyes down on the sparkling tarmac. But as soon as I set foot on the hard shoulder, I hear her say ‘Excuse me?’ I say nothing. I keep walking. She has the torch in her hand. It shines on the road. But she could flash it in my face, if she wanted.

            ‘Excuse me?’ she says again.  I’m close by now. She says it so loud I couldn’t miss it. Unless I was deaf. But that could be dodgy to pull off. I stop. ‘Yes?’

            ‘Did you pass by here a while ago?’

            ‘Pass by? Where? Here?’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘No. No, I wasn’t this way before. Not for a long time.’

            ‘I thought I saw you pass by earlier. From my camp.’ She nods back to the bog, ‘I thought it was you.’

            ‘No. That wasn’t me.’

            ‘You don’t normally pass this way?’

            ‘No.’ I look back toward the little town. ‘My car broke down. Back there. In the town. But there’s no one about. I’m going to the city. To get help.’

            ‘That’s awful, can it be fixed?’

            ‘What’s that?’

            ‘Your car, can it be fixed?’

            ‘I don’t know. I don’t know much about cars.’

            ‘Can you ring anyone?’

            ‘I don’t have a phone. I don’t use them.’

            ‘I’d give you mine, but the battery is flat.’

            ‘That was it.’

            ‘What?’

            ‘The battery. In the car. It’s flat.’

            ‘You poor thing. There wasn’t a phone box in the town?’

            ‘Vandalised. I must be on my way.’ But I’ve hardly gone two steps and she calls me again.

            ‘Excuse me! Really sorry to bother you when you have enough trouble, but I’m very stuck, and I wonder, do you, by any chance, have such a thing as a tin-opener? Maybe in your bag there?’

            ‘A tin-opener?’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘You need to open a tin?’

            ‘Yes, do you have one?’

            ‘I do.’

            ‘Great! Could I borrow it? Just for a couple of minutes?’

            She has a funny accent. She’s not local. Her voice is like the current under the bridge, where they tell you not to jump, she gets higher pitched, same as the water splashing against the sides of the bank, as she reaches the end of each sentence.

            She must have grown up in a place hundreds of miles away from here. She picked up that twang in the schoolyard.  Pushing, pulling, shouting, screaming. Bouncing balls, stones grazing your arms, a busted nose. I hated them places.

           I pull off my bag from my back. Everything I need is within. Three pairs of trousers, three shirts, three changes of underwear, three pairs of socks, my wellingtons and a belt. Three cooking pots of different sizes, a frying pan, one knife, one fork and one spoon. A mug. A razor, a comb and a toothbrush. A shirt, tie, suit jacket and black shoes. A football jersey. My woolly hat. A bar of soap. A penknife with a tin-opener. Carrying all this around probably makes the walk harder. But I never leave anything in the hostel with the sticky people and their sticky fingers. ‘You have a tin and no tin-opener?’

            ‘Well, yes.’ She could be smiling, but her face is a black shape in the streetlight.

            ‘If you get the tin, I’ll open it for you,’ I say, taking out the penknife. ‘There’s a knack to this.’ A penknife is a valuable item when you live in the bog. She might not want to give it back.

            ‘Thank you so much!’ She sounds young, but she could be old. She climbs over the crash barrier. I hear the boots squelching over the bog. I know they are boots by the stamp. I wonder where she bought them. I will ask her that before I go. The torch flashes out the opening, lighting up a part of the night. The tent looks to be of decent quality. I wonder where she bought it. But I’m not getting a tent.

            When I move out of the hostel, I’ll lie directly onto the bog. There’ll be nothing separating me from the elements. It can get as cold as it wants. I hope it does. It’s welcome to. It’s surprising what the body can attune itself to. Strange machine really. If you ever built something as durable, you’d be minted.

            But no one has yet. It’s a long way off. I’ll take full advantage of the skeletal and muscular structure I was born with in the meantime. Firm up the body. Away from all those racing sticky people. Nature is in no hurry. It’s always on time.

            If I fit with nature, I’ll be alright. That’s what they mean by staying fit. Fitting in with nature. Everything makes sense at night. You couldn’t ever get your head straight during the noise of the day.

            She’s coming back now with a pile of tins in a plastic box. She must have strong arms. ‘I may get a few opened while you’re here. Do you mind?’

            ‘No. I don’t mind at all.’ She takes out the tins and lines them up along the top of the crash barrier. I take the first one and clip the tin-opener onto the top. It bites into the rim. I wiggle the handle until it grips the little wheel. As I twist, it clicks around the circle.

            ‘This is so great,’ she says. An articulated lorry whizzes past. The gust lifts her hair high into the moonlight. There’s a smell of oil and burning rubber.

            The moon goes behind clouds. She shines the torch on the tin-opener. I look over to her. ‘If you turn off your torch, I’ll see better in the dark.’

            ‘Really?’

            ‘Once the eyes become accustomed.’

            ‘Ah-hah.’ She turns off the torch. I stop twisting the handle and the lid comes off. I can smell sweet fruit juice.

            ‘Good man,’ she says. She takes the opened tin from me and pours it into the plastic box. I start on the next one. ‘Do you like peaches?’

            ‘Peaches? Is that what these are?’ I fiddle with the handle. The wheel catches and the teeth chew the rim. I guess she nods, her hair moves around her shape.

            ‘They’re not fresh fruit, but still they’re good,’ she says.

            I get them all opened. I hand her the last one. She’s happy. ‘Thank you so much.’

            ‘You’re welcome.’ I push the tin-opener back into the bottom of my bag.

            ‘Would you like a bowl?’

            ‘What?’

            ‘Would you like a bowl of peaches?’

            ‘No, thank you. I’d best be on my way. My car, you see.’

            ‘Of course. Do you not like peaches?’

            ‘What?’

            ‘Do you not like peaches?’

            ‘I do. I do like peaches.’

            ‘Don’t you want a bowl?’

            ‘I’m not sure I’m that hungry.’ I’m beginning to wonder if maybe she is a bit sticky after all. ‘But where are the bowls?’

            ‘Actually, I use mugs. They’re back there. In my camp.’ She points to the bog.

            ‘I’d better not.’

            ‘Come on! You’re safe enough.’ I guess she is smiling now by the rise of her voice. ‘What’s your name?’

            ‘What?’

            ‘Your name?’

            ‘My name is Jeremiah.’

            ‘Of course it is. Come, I’ll get you a mug of peaches for all your hard work.’ She climbs over the crash barrier. She carries the box of peaches to the tent. She is fit enough. You have to be to live in the bog. Her boots squelch. She stops at the tent and turns. ‘Come.’

            I climb over the crash barrier. My old boots sink. The ground is soft. It wasn’t the best spot to pitch up. With no tin-opener and no bowls. People get very confused. But that’s because of the day.

            She has gone inside the tent. I stop at the entrance. ‘Welcome to my camp!’ she says. Her voice sounds different in there. She’s kneeling on a sleeping bag. There are lengths of beads hanging everywhere, all different colours. Some are wooden but most are plastic.

            She has the torch set up in the corner. She has two mugs on a small wooden table. They are three-quarter full with peaches in fruit juice. The plastic box with the rest is now covered with a lid, beside a pile of folded clothes. ‘Are you coming in, Jeremiah?’

            ‘No. I’m fine here.’ I kneel at the edge of the floor cover.

            ‘Fair enough.’ She hands me the mug. It’s a fisherman’s tin. They use them mainly for worms as far as I know. Good for little else. Burn the lips off you if it were hot. But it’s not. It’s ice cold. Pieces of peach float around in the juice. I sip it. It’s sweet. I suck up one of the peach segments, making a slurping sound, breaking the silence of the night. ‘Sweet, aren’t they?’

            ‘They’re good. Not like fresh fruit. But not bad.’

            ‘Not many peach trees around here, Jeremiah.’

            ‘Not many.’

            She sips the juice. ‘I don’t suppose you have anything to smoke?’

            ‘No.’

            ‘Pity.’

            ‘Are you going to be here long?’ I say. I’ll have to change my route by the looks of this. Get new boots for the winter and get off the motorway. Take the old road.

            ‘It depends. I don’t make plans anymore.’

            ‘That’s about the best plan,’ I say. She slugs the mug. I look around the tent. There’s a pillow with blue strawberries on the case and a photo sellotaped to cardboard on top. There are two children in the photo. Beside the pillow, there’s an alarm clock with two silver bells on the ears. The woman keeps track of time.

            I finish the mug. ‘Thanks.’

            ‘Thank you so much for the use of your tin-opener.’

            ‘You’re welcome to it. I better be going. My car.’

            ‘Of course.’

            I hand her the empty mug. ‘Hope to see you this way again, Jeremiah,’ she says and shakes my hand. She doesn’t let go. I don’t know what to do. Her hand is warm. I couldn’t say what age she is. She’s not that young. She’s not that old. Hard to say with women. They’re not straightforward. Then she takes her hand away.

            My old boots squelch on the bog as I walk back to the dual carriageway. The water seeps into my socks when I hit deep puddles.

            I’ll take the old road tomorrow night. The buck from down the country told me it had been upgraded. New surface, yellow lines for the hard shoulder. Cat’s eyes. Nearly as quick probably. There’s no crash barrier on the old road. But I live with risk.


BIO

Martin Keaveney’s debut collection of stories, The Rainy Day, was published  by Penniless Press in 2018. Short fiction has been published in  many literary journals in Ireland, UK and US. He has also written for the screen and his writing has been produced and exhibited at many international  film festivals and on broadcast television. His  scholarship was recently published in the peer-reviewed  New Hibernia Review, Journal of Franco-Irish Studies, and Estudios Irlandeses. He has a B.A. in English and Italian, an M.A in English (Writing) and a Ph.D. at NUIG (Creative Writing and Textual Studies).   He was awarded the Sparanacht Ui Eithir for his research in 2016 and the NUIG Write-Up Bursary in 2018. See more at www.martinkeaveney.com    

The New Girl in Our Office

by Deepti Nalavade Mahule



The New Girl in Our Office arrives for the first time one rainy morning with glistening raindrops splattered like stars on the lenses of her glasses. She is without an umbrella or raincoat. This indicates that she is clumsy, but it could also mean that she’s very excited to start her first day at work. 

Her manager introduces her to all of us. She shakes all of our hands in turn and furrows her brow in concentration as we tell her our names. 

Although not exactly a beauty, she has the rosiness of youth and a face that many might label “moderately cute”. She smells of lemon and lavender, a mix of two commonplace fragrances, which suits her personality just fine.

The New Girl sets up her desk on her first day. Among her personal items, there’s a picture frame of her green-eyed tabby cat and two palm-sized red dice with white dots on them. 

The New Girl asks many questions about her job responsibilities but during lunchtime banter, she is mostly silent and only answers when asked a question. Because she keeps her mouth shut for so long, it emanates a slightly unpleasant odor when she opens it to talk.

She’s fresh out of college and has touched down onto this bustling city as if she were a fledgling landing after its first flight from its nest. However, even after weeks in office have passed, with her sitting among different groups of people during lunch hours, she doesn’t seem to be part of any particular flock. When we talk to her, we cannot help but look away from the loneliness in her eyes staring back at us unabashedly.

On most evenings, when we’re leaving for the day, the New Girl is still at her desk. She barely looks up from her computer as she murmurs a “good night”. Sometimes, she’s not there with us at lunch. We find her later, devouring an apple in the break room while she scrolls through work emails on her phone. She does not interrupt others in meetings, but after everyone else has gone silent, she offers creative solutions to most problems. The New Girl’s earnestness in applying herself to her given tasks grates on our nerves and makes us question our own efforts.

At a team dinner one night, which she’s forced to attend, as the alcohol flows freely and tongues loosen, someone pesters her during a game of Truth or Dare to share the purpose of the dice on her desk. She finally discloses that they are containers to hold her antidepressant medication.

Months pass and the New Girl is fading into Just Another Go-Getter Girl at our office when hushed whispers are heard at the end of one workweek. Words like “New Girl”, “New Girl’s boss’s boss”, “sexual misconduct” are thrown around, followed by “brushed under the carpet”, “consensual”, “too ambitious” and “The Girl of Questionable Character”.

On Monday, the New Girl calls in sick and does not show up for work. She is absent for the rest of the week and at the end of Friday, we learn that she was last seen at dusk the previous evening by her landlord. She was standing on the bridge overlooking the rushing waters of the river that runs through our city. She’d already given her notice of resignation at the office and had probably stopped by at our workplace in the early hours of the previous morning to gather her things from her desk. Having cleared out her belongings from her rented apartment as well, she was presumably planning to be on her way back to her hometown.

The Monday of the next workweek comes and goes, and it is confirmed that The New Girl will no longer be with us. Gone from her desk are her dice. One of our colleagues who has a cousin in the police force tells us what he’s heard. He says that two red dice — one of them with four dots and the other one with two dots on the sides facing up —  were found when they plummeted from the top of the bridge and landed in the bushes near the river bank instead of on the rocks jutting out in the middle of the surging downward current of the river. It’s surprising how much detailed information the colleague has about the position and location of the dice and yet he doesn’t know if they were thrown down first by the girl or came down with her.

We rack our brains about the four and two on the dice and talk excitedly among ourselves theorizing about the meanings that they might have tried to convey. In the end, we give up and look away from the blank space that they’ve left on her desk and talk about her cat instead. In our minds, we convince ourselves that the New Girl in Our Office has gone on to a higher paying job at an ideal workplace and that her dice-like containers are sitting on her new desk with nothing but breath mints inside them.  

      

BIO

One of Deepti Nalavade Mahule’s short stories was highly commended in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition in 1999 and others have appeared in Daily Flash Fiction Magazine, 101 words, Kitaab, Aphelion webzine, Women’s Web and elsewhere. 

Originally from India, Deepti currently lives in California, where she spends time developing software, reading aloud to her five-year-old daughter, submitting short fiction and fretting about what to put in her author’s bio. 

Her website is: https://deeptiwriting.wordpress.com/

Smitten to Spitten

by Madeline McEwen



If only we’d had a prenup, none of this would have happened, but we didn’t and it had.

The first hint of something amiss was when I couldn’t pay the hackney cab driver with my credit card. The second hint, after I paid with cash, was when my latch key wouldn’t fit in the lock. It took a few seconds for the light to dawn.

I stuck my finger on the bell and hammered on my front door. Nothing. No response. Was anybody home?

Bending down, I lifted the flap on the letterbox and peered into the empty hall.

“Kevin! Are you in there? Open the bloody door, I’m freezing out here.”

Turning, I checked the street. Where was his precious car, a prestigious, gold colored Infiniti? Our two-story, Edwardian terraced house had no garage, and only a tiny garden the size of a picnic blanket currently full of Kevin’s dismembered motorcycle—a Royal Enfield Bullet, which lay buried beneath a season’s worth of soggy leaves. The man had a million projects, none of them ever finished. Although, changing the locks might signify the start of task completion and the end of our stagnant relationship.

I grabbed my phone, dangerously low on power, called Kevin, and put my ear to the letterbox. If he was hiding, I’d hear him since he never switched his phone to vibrate. Like a surgeon on call, his inflated ego demanded 24-7 availability. CyberTex, his fledgling business enterprise, swallowed his attention and energy.

Listening to the silence, I sighed in defeat. Where was he? Then I remembered the app—TrackMyPhone—which Kevin installed even though they’re illegal in the UK unless the trackee consents. The red battery icon flashed and died, the screen turning black.

Typical. Now I was stranded, powerless, homeless, and carless—my battered jeep was in the local repair shop–on the coldest February evening I could remember.

How had this happened? Where had I gone wrong? What should I to do next?

That’s when I heard a snuffling sound from inside the house. Oscar must be waking from his late afternoon nap. I’d come home early, thirty minutes earlier than my schedule permitted. Usually, Oscar was awake and ready to play for a few minutes before I prepared dinner and tackled the other chores I had to conquer. But now I couldn’t get in, entry barred, and banished from the house I’d learned to call home over the last eighteen months.

What would happen to our little family? Divorce was inevitable, but Oscar was the innocent party. He didn’t deserve to suffer. Somehow, I must maintain his routine and stability. Obviously, that goal was best achieved if Oscar lived with me, his primary caregiver, in a new home, somewhere far away. No chance of accidental meetings causing endless grief and unnecessary heartache.

Hearing the clunk of a car door, I glanced behind me.

“Kevin! Where have you been?” He stared at me, his expression unreadable. “No matter. Don’t tell me, I don’t care.”

“You’re home early.”

“Shut up. I’m not here for a debate. Just give me Oscar and you’ll never have to see me again.”

“You’re spitting in the wind if you think I’ll give up Oscar without a fight.”

“I’ll take you to court, sue you for custody.”

Kevin leaned against the front door and swallowed hard. He spat a wad of phlegm onto the concrete.

“That’s all you’ll get from me.”

#

I fled without further pointless protestations. His words were lies, but I didn’t want to make a scene for my neighbors’ entertainment. Instead, I opted for a safe harbor, walking distance from home until I could collect my jeep.

I charged along the road and into the next street where the old terraces had been torn down and replaced with luxury, single-dwelling homes with double-garages and generous gardens. Lydia, my friend since childhood, lived in a mock-Tudor monstrosity with her numerous, obnoxious children.

What can I say our friendship?

Things were great until the twins were born, but after that I couldn’t compete for her attention, the woman caught baby-fever. At least this meant she was almost always home.

On the doorstep, I listened to a peel of bells announcing my arrival.

Lydia threw the door open and gaped at me open-mouthed.

“Clare! What have we done to deserve the honor of your presence.”

Sarcastic as always, Lydia’s face broke into a hospitable smile. I missed her company and her witty mind, but I’d given up on our friendship when her brain was over-taken by child development milestones and a never-ending pile of baby related trivia. No longer a corporate lawyer, she’d betrayed her sex and settled for domestic suburbia. But as ever, Lydia was a sucker for a sob story. I dabbed my eye with a crumpled tissue.

“What’s wrong, Clare? What’s happened? Come in.”

I picked my way over the carpet strewn with discarded toys, sippy cups, and assorted primary-colored clothing while Lydia cooed words of soothing solace to me. She swept the sofa clear of detritus, and I sank into its soft, supple warmth.

“It’s Kevin,” I explained. “We’re finished.”

“Oh dear. How ghastly. Are you sure? I always thought he was the one.” A frown fluttered across her face. “Let him cool off for a couple of days and maybe you can patch things up. I’ve always liked Kevin, he’s so good for you, so stable, so calming.”

“Calming?”

“You know what I mean. Your personality traits are complemented by his. Together you make the perfect couple. Yin and yang.”

“Don’t give me that romantic claptrap. We’re like chalk and cheese, incompatible, and now we’ve have an irretrievable breakdown. But I need your advice, legal advice, on what to do about Oscar. What are my rights? Will you represent me in court?”

“In court? I don’t practice any more, and even if I did, that’s not my field of expertise.”

Damn. I’d spat it out too quickly. I should have played the pity card first.

“But,” I said, using the gentle tone of a sympathetic plaintiff, “I remember you saying that everything in law boiled down to contracts, didn’t you?”

Lydia’s deep wrinkle of concentration distracted me, which was when I noticed the palpable silence.

“Why is it so quiet, Lydia? Where are,” I trawled my memory for the kids’ names, came up blank, and whitewashed my question, “all the children?”

“On Wednesdays after school, kindergarten, and day care, they spend the evening with their paternal granny. Why do you ask?”

“I’m interested. Being a mother is such a huge part of who you are and because of that, I’m hoping you can understand my desperation about Oscar.”

Lydia’s eyebrows jumped. She pursed her lips.

“It’s hardly the same thing.”

“It stems from the same desire to nurture.”

“I don’t wish to be unkind,” Lydia said, “but you can’t equate giving birth to six children with buying–”

“I thought you of all people would be aware of the politically correct terminology. I didn’t buy Oscar. I adopted him.”

Lydia raised her hands in a gesture of exasperation.

“Whatever,” Lydia said. “The point is, no matter how smitten you are and how cuddly he is, Oscar is still a dog.”

#

I spent the rest of the evening in Lydia’s luxurious guest bedroom ostensibly weeping in private while watching Netflix on my phone. Fortunately, Lydia lent me a posh, silk nightgown—price tag still attached–and a charging cable. She’d also called the repair shop and paid the bill for my jeep’s repairs—ready for collection tomorrow.

After a fitful night’s sleep during which I had formulated a plan of action based on Lydia’s advice, I crept out of the house before dawn with a sheaf of paper from their copier machine. If I used my flexi-time hours at work by starting at six, then I could clock off at two leaving the afternoon free and clear. With luck and a handful of intimidating copied receipts, Oscar, once again, would be mine exclusively.

#

At the park, I left my jeep at a discrete distance and lay in wait for my victim, Hamish, a self-employed dog-walker, as wiry as a whippet.

Before too long, Hamish appeared, or rather eight dogs barreled into the park like a pack of working huskies dragging Hamish behind them.

Oscar, my favorite, ninety-five-pound, Old English Sheepdog puppy was flanked by three other large dogs, none of whom I had seen before. Judging by Hamish’s struggle to control them, they, or rather their owners, were new clients.

I stepped into their pathway. The dogs surrounded me, a single sheep in an overgrown litter of barking, bouncing, salivating dogs frantic in their excitement.

“Clare! You shouldn’t be here. Kevin warned me.”

“Warned you?”

Hamish was flushed, sweating, and breathless from exertion. He was both outclassed and outnumbered as I had hoped.

“He said you might try to dog-nap Oscar.”

I unrolled my sheaf of papers and flapped them in front of his face.

“These,” I said, “prove Oscar belongs to me.”

“No, no, no.” Hamish wrestled with the tangled leashes. “I can’t get involved in another custody dispute.”

“There is no custody issue.” I unhooked Oscar’s leash, and he leaped free. I hurried away, Oscar following my outstretched hand dangling a bag of his favorite treats. I called over my shoulder, “I’ll let you know my new address”—if I ever found a dog-friendly landlord.

#

My jeep chirped and unlocked, which was when Kevin’s tires screeched into the curb. He stomped toward us, fists clenched, jaw locked.

I had a spare leash in the jeep. Without it, I had no chance of reining in my powerful puppy. Instead, I dodged around Kevin, dashed toward my car, and yanked the rear door open.

 “Enough,” Kevin shouted, spittle bubbling at the corner of his mouth.

He blocked the dog’s path as Oscar ran toward the jeep. Kevin grabbed him by the collar and lugged him toward the Infiniti.

“You can’t take him,” I said, stuffing the treat bag in my pocket.

I was yelling too. A man wearing a bike helmet leaned against his motorcycle, arms folded across his burly chest, enjoying the show. A group of mothers and children in the play area stood gawping at us too. Kevin bundled Oscar into his car and gripped his key like a lethal weapon.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said.

“No, UK law treats pets as property. Money changed hands. I’ve paid for his food,” I counted them off on my fingers, “his vet bills, the microchip, and all his other paraphernalia.” I saw Mr. Motorbike striding toward us. “In contract law, he’s mine, and I have the proof in this paperwork.”

“Hey, you!” Mr. Motorbike stood too close, spitting distance from Kevin. “Is that her dog?”

“No,” Kevin said, “get the hell away.”

“Wait a minute, Mate.” Mr. Motorbike opened the Infiniti’s door.

“Take your hands off my car.”

With his shoulder, Kevin shoved Mr. Motorbike, but the guy barely flinched, an immovable buffer.

“Call your dog,” Mr. Motorbike said. “We’ll see who’s his owner.”

I slipped my hand into my pocket–a secret, visual cue to Oscar. “Here, boy!”

Oscar bounded toward me. I flung the treat bag inside the jeep, and Oscar followed. Sometimes I too acted like an animal, thoughtless and instinctive, occasionally unkind when I was with Kevin, but Oscar brought out the best in me and made me a better human.

With Oscar’s tail safely inside, I slammed the door, jumped in the driver’s seat, and reversed. I sped off in triumph with my love-smitten pup drooling on the backseat, showering gravel in our wake, and Kevin, no doubt, spitting nails in defeat.

BIO

Madeline McEwen is the author of three stand-alone novelettes, numerous short stories published both traditionally and online, and is a contributor to several anthologies. Currently, she is focused on two cozy mystery series, one set in the UK and the other in San Jose, USA both featuring a significant character with a disability, and a senior female amateur sleuth. She is an ex-pat from the UK, now settled in San Jose, California in the heart of Silicon Valley. Bi-focaled and technically challenged, she and her Significant Other manage their four offspring, one major and three minors, two autistic, two neurotypical, plus a time-share with Alzheimer’s. In her free time, she walks the canines and chases the felines with her nose in a book and her fingers on a keyboard.

Fasting

by Cliff Morton


My mother is Muslim and my father is a seldom practicing Catholic. As a kid, I viewed my parents as people who followed religion but they weren’t going to go out of their way to practice it. It was kinda like any sitcom that was wedged between Friends and Seinfeld on Thursday nights. You wouldn’t change the channel, but now, twenty-something years later, you’re not endlessly searching Netflix for old episodes of Suddenly Susan. My parents were the same way; they’d put up a Christmas tree, we’d visit my grandmother’s house for Eid, we’d go out to brunch on Easter morning, and we’d fast and abstain from all Haram food during Ramadan.

Ramadan always felt like the playoffs for a Muslim. You waited your whole season for this moment to shine and waver between feeling habitually hungry and then overfed. Starting at point guard, number 11, Muhammed, at shooting guard, number 2, Mohammed, at small forward, number 25, Abdul, at power forward, number 33, Muhammad. Lots of variations of Muhammed growing up. And me, Cliff, the whitest looking Muslim in the Ramadan starting lineup.

Whereas other people prepared mentally for the many days of fasting ahead, I prepared physically. I knew that in the thirty days, I would crave nothing more than what I was not allowed to eat. That meant Jamaican patties, hamburgers, burritos, pretty much anything meat related that was ethnically different from the Indian and Middle Eastern cuisine that would make up my menu over the next month. I ate all of it. I shoved all of that Haram deliciousness into my mouth, savoring every last bit of sinful goodness.

When it came time to actually fast, I felt doomed from the start. My days of gorging on carbohydrate and fat laden foods did not prepare me for the Ramadan playoffs. If I didn’t take it seriously, I was going to be bounced within the first week. I first started fasting when I was eight years old. In the previous two years, I would fast for half the day, eventually progressing to full days on the weekends, but when I was allowed to do a full day fast, the first of thirty days in a row of eating and drinking only before sunrise and after sundown, I felt like I was being called up to the big leagues. My grandmother fasted, my mother fasted, my aunts and uncles fasted, my older cousins fasted, and now I was on their level.

Within the first five minutes of sitting at the lunch table on the first day of Ramadan, I begged to be demoted. My friends were all eating, because, of course I was the only Muslim kid growing up in a town in Connecticut. The usual suspects were tantalizing; hot lunch, which happened to be spaghetti and meatballs, sat across from me at the table, my friend, Sean, shoveling it in, bite after bite, barely allowing the steam to escape from the top of the tray before he moved onto the garlic bread. Sure, its consistency could have been cardboard, but the smell of buttery garlic was overpowering. I turned my gaze towards my friend Pete’s lunch. He brought lunch, and based on his history, I was expecting peanut butter and jelly or a sad looking bologna sandwich with Kraft singles American cheese on white bread. Even at my weakest and most vulnerable stage of hunger, I could resist those temptations.

Instead, he reached into his bag and pulled out something wrapped in tinfoil. What the hell was in that thing? He opened it up and there was half a hoagie roll, with tomato sauce pouring out of the side, with some kind of indistinguishable filling. Two ravioli looking things rested against the side of the bread. Are you fucking kidding me? I knew Pete since I moved into Trumbull, I went over to his house a bunch of times, and the one thing that was certain was that no one in his family cooked. They were a Stouffer’s or take out kind of family. Snacks at his house consisted of Fruit Roll Ups or bags of chips, that’s it.

“What is that?” I asked, conscious of holding the drool back from my mouth.

“Oh, it’s called Golabki and pierogi!” he said excitedly, “We went over to my gammy’s house for dinner last night. It’s so good. Do you want to try it?”

Damn you Pete! Damn you and your hospitable nature!

“No, I’m good,” I said sheepishly, my arms crossing my chest to muffle the sounds that echoed from the walls of my empty stomach.

“You sure? Did you forget your lunch?” he asked, genuinely concerned. Pete was a good friend, but I would have much preferred a tact similar to Sean’s Lord of the Flies, survive at all costs, at the moment.

I hadn’t completely thought out the whole Muslim thing yet. I was nervous about telling people that I was fasting because I didn’t want to come across as weird. I was already the only brown kid in the school, and I didn’t need any other non-cool distinguishing features to make me stand out. “No, my stomach was feeling kinda sick this morning, so I didn’t bring lunch today.”

“Got it,” he said, as I breathed a sigh of relief. He took a bite out of the sandwich and its juiciness poured out onto the tinfoil below. “The… only bad thing… it’s kinda messy… in a sandwich,” he said in between bites. He swallowed the entirety of his bite before adding, “Normally you just eat it with a fork without the bread, but my gammy makes it into sandwiches for us for lunch.”

Alright, alright, with the Polish food lesson and stories about your gammy, Pete. I’m starving to death over here and I’ve still got a few more hours to go until sundown. I looked at the clock, 12:05. I did the math in my head. It wasn’t dark until around six o’clock each night. I had six more hours to go of this torture! Noooooo!

* * *

Eventually, I got over lusting after other people’s food, but when I had my first basketball game during the day, I nearly lost my shit over the fact that I couldn’t drink water.

“Remember, you can’t drink any water during the game, so load up now,” my mom advised me as we ate together in the wee hours of the morning. The worst part about eating so early in the morning was that I wasn’t truly hungry because I should’ve been sleeping, but I also knew that I had a full day ahead of me without food, so I better find a way to shovel in the food.

I took a bite of my egg and cheese sandwich on an English muffin, a meal that I thoroughly enjoyed during normal daytime breakfast, but found to be an arduous task at four thirty in the morning. My brain started to turn itself on and I began to process what my mom had just said, “Wait, what?” I asked, confused.

“You can’t eat or drink anything while you’re fasting. You know that,” she said, a little too chipper for my liking.

“Umm…” I began to say, trying to temper my annoyance, “But I have a game today.”

“And?” she asked.

“I’m gonna be thirsty! How am I supposed to play a game without drinking water?” my voice raised with each word, but the glare of my mother began to tamp down my volume by the time I reached my second question.

“You know, Hakeem Olajuwon is Muslim. He fasts during games,” my dad said, emerging from out of nowhere. Where did he even come from? I didn’t even think he was awake.

“What?” I asked, confused less about my dad’s information and more about his sudden appearance in the kitchen.

“Yup. Houston Rockets. He fasts during the games. There was an article about it in Sports Illustrated,” he said.

Nice. Real nice, dad. Use sports and one of my favorite magazines against me. My mom nodded towards me, encouragingly, “See?”

I quickly finished my breakfast and began guzzling water in preparation for the day ahead. As I walked out of the room, I said, “You know, I’m gonna play like crap now.”

“Watch your mouth!” my parents yelled in unison.

* * *

Years later, at a family barbecue, I was playing basketball with my cousins. A seldom seen relative who was visiting from Toronto chimed in from afar, “You know that Hakeem Olajuwon is Muslim, right? He even fasts during Ramadan! During the games!”

Olajuwon’s Houston Rockets had defeated my beloved Knicks in the NBA Finals a few years prior, “I hate that fasting sonofabitch,” I muttered underneath my breath.

* * *

By the time I entered college, I was already on the fence about fasting. I couldn’t imagine trying to work around my class schedule, my work study job, and absolutely necessary extracurricular activities, such as pickup basketball games and hanging out with the girls from the other end of our dorm.

The year prior, I learned about the newest downfall to fasting that was previously unbeknownst to me; no sexual relations during the daytime hours. No kissing… nothing. I tried explaining the concept to my girlfriend at the time and she gave me an odd look as if to say, “We can’t make out in this empty house because you’re fasting?” The devilish character on my shoulder was dressed ironically in an all white suit like he was in a Jagged Edge music video, while my moral compass was standing around in khakis and a polo shirt. It certainly seemed like the Jagged Edge version had better plans for the afternoon.

Fast forward a year, and I was about a month and a half away from Ramadan, with my mind still undecided about whether or not I would fast during the month. My friends wanted to go to a pizza place on Charles Street, a place for higher end fare that would be out of the price range of most college students, but we had a friend who waitressed there and she said that she could hook us up with a deal.

We ordered a couple of pizzas to share for the table. They all looked delicious, but there was one in particular that caught my eye. It had a thin crust, with pink strips crisscrossing the top of the oblong pie with a layer of thick, brown sauce underneath. It looked unlike any pizza that I’d ever had, especially considering that the full gamut of pizza flavors that my parents ordered ranged from cheese to, well, cheese.

I took a bite and there was an explosion of flavor in my mouth. I hate rats, but the scene in Ratatouille, where Remy describes the combination of flavors, with fireworks shooting through the air, intertwined with food, explained my feelings completely. The saltiness from the unknown pink substance combined with the sweet sauce, mixed with the bitterness from the arugula, and the creamy but sharp cheese made for the most delightful bite of food that I had ever eaten.

“What is this?” I asked, turning to one of my friends.

“Prusciutto fig pie,” he answered as he savored a bite as well, “It’s so good, right?”

“It’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” I said, but I was still perplexed, “But what’s that?”

“Prusciutto? Oh, it’s like Italian bacon, but better,” he answered.

Bacon? My mind raced. I’d never eaten pork, and now that I had, I pretty much traded in my Muslim card. I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to ask, just in case, “So it’s pork?”

“Yup,” he said, nonchalantly.

I stared down at the pizza and pondered my choices, but in reality, there was no turning back. I took another bite and basked in the bliss of delicious swine.


BIO

Cliff Morton is a small business owner who lives in Connecticut with his wife and three children. His poetry has been featured in Alexandria Quarterly. When he’s not chasing after two dachshunds and seven ducks, he is known to dabble in woodworking, baking, and sneaking away to the quiet confines of his home to write.

A New Method of Wellness

By Charles J. March III




Maybe I begot the Y2K bacterium…
I mean, it’s conceivable—since I was a reckoning, millenarian millennial—who withdrew from the world while waiting for the coming of God; notwithstanding the certainty that I wasn’t yet counting down the days until my odometer was ready to roll over and cross the great divide, as I progressively gazed forth to my calendar being filled with astronomical events, leading me to consider giving the 12 modes of Gregorian chanting a chance, which, I knew—in all likelihood—would have reflected my new light potential like a Gregorian telescope. So I started to deliberate about the day when I would get up-to-date with myself, be the arbiter of my arbitrary actions, and advance on a date with Destiny.

But many twelvemonths would make their way before the good government of my being would come to be. Momentarily after the millennium, I ran my eyes over different discourses of methods, which fomented my overthinking—therefore—winding me up in an extremely existential existence. I became cynical, and skeptical of the whole shebang, as I started smoking more peace pipes than Method Man, and yenned for my red skinned counterparts. I progressed to the edge of unemployment, and ambitioned about cutting myself in the line, but my avant-garde alter ego guarded me. I even thought of utilizing a TEC-9 technique, by shooting my star-crossed nut, but instead of destroying my third eye and waking up to a pearly gated ghetto—some of my pearly whites were serendipitously purloined by a slug, and I ended up in an ebony neighborhood.

I tried to plead temporary insanity—by saying that the state of my art was underdeveloped, and that all of my original ideas about original gangsters who experimented with experimental drugs would one day be certified fresh on old-fashioned tomatoes—but nobody bought them. Providentially, I wasn’t prosecuted, and was able to persecute different pursuits. The only doohickey I got out of the new deal was a set of newfangled fangs, which left my debt in mint condition. Perchance the second-hand smoke and hackneyed horse would have executed me toothless regardless. The solitary structure I had at that juncture was puncturing the organization of my largest organ, which was semi-erotic, but wasn’t likely the best logic. I was kindred to a method actor in a dreamlike requiem I once had, which turned out to be the nest of a nightmare gone bad.

People were starting to co-sign my slow death by design, and not even Dakota Fanning could stop the subconscious planning of my inner world’s wars. So I tried methadone, but got sick from its scientific methods, and knew that I needed something more, in spite of the fact that my spiritual practice was out of practice, and that the ecclesiastical tactics were rather taciturn—the bells would shortly toll for me, and my éclat would soon emulate the complex algorithms of Method ringing that were set/sent by The Holy Spirit. The pedantic permutations of my modus operandi began to find a routine, but it all became too routine, and I digressed from the process as my strategy grew into an elegy. I knew I needed a new order, because all my sun declines were like blue Mondays.

So I set out to get away from all my Hellenistic mistresses, who were like Nike—in that they were mindless, damaged goddesses who wanted to just do it, but which I suppose were sublimely beautiful witches nonetheless. And when I look back, it’s putative that they were all victories in discernment. Posterior to the pronouncement of this purpose, I ended up erecting passage to pristine pastures in an area where flora and fauna flourish, where the Beats found their rhythm, and where customers who are accustomed to alternative lifestyles have consumption. I also decided to take another shot at/as the unknown soldier, and the days that shadowed were extremely strange. Even familiar faces seemed unfamiliar. But I put my trust in The Man with the plan, and one day, my fiendish friend—who goes by the moniker of Monk (sobriquet, due to the resemblance to Tony Shalhoub and his OCD, but I suspect that he does, indubitably, have a certain, ostensible cenobitism to him) introduced me to a consortium called New Method Wellness, and after many kismets, came across the possessors, who launched me into a whole new way of life. The trying of untried herbs was inaugurated (which enabled me to be reborn by means of Mother Nature), and I also engaged in various, vigorous exercises (which were reinvigorating, and refreshing to my physique).

This all went well for a time, but the day where I became diffidently indifferent to “something different” soon betided. They then suggested that I get the lead out of my head, so I made progress to become an inky octopus, in search of the 8 areas of wellness. But then the rabble began to call my babble dense, and in a sense—it may be verifiable—but at least I rarely lose in scrabble. And I never scrawl before any man when it comes to the spouting melody of my fountain pen’s composition. Having said that, I only sign things when I see sigils to do so. I log my Logos, list my trysts, and scribble as I see fit (which usually ends in the ripping up of my scripts), but in the end—it all has a hand in creating the calligraphy of my calling card.

Anyway, many moons have waxed and waned from the time that the tides brought me upon these beauteous beaches—and I’ve since become involved in many New Thought Movements—where I preserve to attain alternatives to my old-self-medicated alternative medicine. Under no circumstances will I peter out in the persistence of being a wellness tourist, and peradventure—my passport will unabatingly be stamped—even as I pass onto/into the thereafter-life.



BIO

Charles J. March III is an impoverished, asexual, INFJ, neurodivergent Navy hospital corpsman veteran from the South Side of Chicago, who is currently trying to live an eclectic life with an interesting array of recovering creatures in Orange County, CA. His avant-garde poetry & prose has appeared in Literary Orphans, Stinkwaves, Fleas on the Dog, Harbinger Asylum, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, et al., and is forthcoming from Angry Old Man, 3:AM, and Free State Review.


Separated by Glass

by Kailyn Kausen

 

He’s a slice of a red hot velvet cake. She’s a creamy chocolate cheesecake with many layers and curly hair made of chocolate shavings. They are each surrounded by others like them, but they don’t want the others. They want each other, the one on the other side of the glass, the plate standing vertical, separating the cakes from the cheesecakes.

It started out like this. They were formulated one after the other by the same hands. First it was him, the red velvet, mixed together with his brethren in an old silver pot. Those were the velvet’s youthful years. He was poured into a pan along with his brothers and warmed from a gross gooey boy to a firm, but sensitive man. While he was cooked to perfection, she was mixed, settled into layers, refrigerated, and transformed into a woman.

After maturing, they were carefully separated from their brothers and sisters, individually wrapped, and placed into specific rows – he with the other red velvets, and her with the other chocolate cheesecakes. They ended up in the back of their rows and learned each other’s expressions as they moved forward in line, unable to speak or touch, but learning more about each other than a cake and a cheesecake ever cared to.

His brothers made fun of him.

“You won’t ever get her. Look at that glass! Might as well give up now and accept your fate.”

“Why would you want a cheesecake, other than her being rich, of course?”

“She’s not one of us.”

Her sisters had a similar reaction.

“He’s dry, honey.”

“He’s only got two layers. And buttercream!  He’s a simpleton, sweet heart.”

So they learned to ignore the others. They grew worried as they approached the front of the line, nearing their inevitable deaths, but also grew more in love. They stopped hearing the buzzing sounds of the others making fun of them. Nothing mattered except the other.

The worst times were when they weren’t next to each other, when too many of her sisters or too many of his brothers were purchased for the pleasure of the moving giants. They grew nervous the other would be taken away for good long before they could devise a plan to be together, to touch each other just once. The rows always evened out eventually, so they approached the end together.

She reached the end first. She hung onto the edge of the slanted shelf, nothing but the lip holding her in place, covered in the sweet remnants of others trying to save themselves, the lip that said, “Chocolate Cheesecake,” like that was all she was. Everything that had settled to the bottom while she matured threatened to explode out of her. She couldn’t look away from the vast chasm before her even though she knew if she looked back at the velvet, he’d give her that reassuring look. She thought she should look back. If she did, she would see his face. That’d be the last thing she’d see, whether she dropped over the edge of the cliff because she wasn’t good enough anymore, or if she was picked up by a customer. His face would be a happier sight than either of those, buts, she couldn’t look away from the scrawny boy with the crumpled five-dollar bill waving in his hand.

The boy was coming for her. She knew it. If only she knew the red velvet’s name, if only he’d be able to hear her say it. The dirty fingernails snaked towards her and she closed her eyes, waiting. But the boy didn’t reach for her, he reached for the red velvet next to her – not her red velvet, but the one preventing them from being side to side.

So, the red velvet and the chocolate cheesecake were side by side again, each waiting for their deaths, each scared on the side of the cliff, each wanting to speak, and each staring at the other from the corner of their eyes, both waiting for the ring of the bell at the door that would signal their end.

When the ring did come, it was much louder than either of them expected it to be because it rang for both instead of one. A young woman and a young man walked into the store, laughing and so involved in  each other they could barely tear their eyes away from the other’s face.

The chef, hearing the bell, came to the front of the store. “When you’re ready,” he said, smiling.

The young man grabbed the red velvet.

The young woman grabbed the chocolate cheesecake and two plastic forks from a cup on the table.

“Will that be it?” asked the chef, placing the two cakes into a white bag.

The cakes shivered in fear and their proximity, now able to touch and speak, but they didn’t want to speak. They were afraid of what to say and too frightened at what would happen to them in the next moments. It was simultaneously the best and worst time of their lives.

The young man handed the chef a bill. “Yes, thank you,” he said. The chef returned his change and the young man dumped the coins into the tip jar.

“Anytime,” said the chef as the young couple exited the store.

The young man stood behind the woman and fumbled with the bag, slipping a ring into the plastic wrapping of her cheesecake. She chose a table and sat down. He sat across from her and pulled the cakes from the bag. She handed him a fork and began unwrapping the plastic. When she uncovered the ring, she stopped unwrapping.

He got down on one knee and looked up at her like he was the earth and she was the moon. “Will you marry me?”

She smiled and tears filled her eyes. “You know I can never say no to cake,” she said, laughing and crying.

He took the ring from her hand, slipped it over her finger, and kissed her knuckles. “That’s why I asked you like this,” he said.

They smiled and talked a while more with excitement before settling in once again on opposite sides of the table to open and eat their separate cakes.

This is the moment the chocolate cheesecake and the red velvet had been dreading from that very first moment they were created. But, at least they would go together.

The fork sliced into the red velvet first, his buttercream filling smearing over the fork and across the lips of the young man. Crumbles of the cake dripped from the man’s mouth like drops of blood.

Next, the young woman pushed the cheesecake onto her side, slowly ripping her apart before the first bite was taken. This bite stripped the cheesecake of her form, reducing her to a pudding-like consistency, which flowed down the woman’s esophagus into an acid bath.

The cakes were forced to watch as the other was eaten by the couple, pieces of red velvet flying across the table and onto the floor, smears of chocolate against the plastic wrap, chocolate shavings rolling away like unwanted ornaments after Christmas. Dismembered and dissected, the cakes hoped each other would leave this world quickly and find peace in the next world as a brown reincarnate.


BIO

Kailyn Kausen commutes between Santa Barbara and the Central Valley of California, and spends her evenings imagining the secret lives of inanimate objects. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of Spectrum literary journal. She has been published in Disturbed Digest and Perspectives on Undergraduate Research and Mentorship.

Assumptions

by James Mulhern


“You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.”
(Song of Solomon 4:7)


Peggy Fleming, according to my grandfather was the “homeliest damn woman” he’d ever seen. Her face was swollen and pasty, with broken capillaries that sloped down the sides of her nostrils, flooding the arid plain of her skin, like some dreary river and its tributaries eking over a delta of nasolabial folds to terminate in the red seas of two droopy cheeks. Spindly, awkward limbs stuck out of a round body, like you might see in a kindergartner’s rendering of a person. She was, unfortunately, toothless and hairless as well, suffering from a mysterious childhood disease that had left her with chronic alopecia. Peggy used to tell us kids that she lost her hair because she refused to eat green beans when she was a child. I always thought it a cruel irony that she had the same name as the graceful and beautiful skater who had won the Olympic Gold Medal in 1968.

I remember hearing my grandparents and Auntie Ag, my grandmother’s older and “much smarter” sister (the one who graduated high school), likening Peggy’s features to those of a bulldog as they puffed away on Lucky Strikes and Parliaments, stopping every now and then to slap down a poker chip or a playing card, or take another sip of whiskey. While they played, I circled the kitchen table and listened, picking up snippets about Peggy’s tragic life.

Her story goes something like this–She was married once to a very handsome man named Jim, who was quite successful in business, something to do with cutting pants–“slacks” my grandmother called them–for a good company. Everyone was surprised that Peg could get such a catch, but like many ugly people, she had a heart of gold, and oh could she sing! The two of them, they met in a nightclub in Boston’s Back Bay, one of those divey joints, nothin’ too swanky, where Peg sang jazz classics for a small crowd on Friday nights. Jim often stopped by the nightclub after work, and you know, eventually they hit it off. One thing led to another, and of course they got married. But by Christ! How in God’s name could Jim stand to look at that puss day in and day out?

And wasn’t it a tragedy, how one evening, after a game at Fenway Park, Jim drove the green Buick that he loved so much into a fruit stand on the side of the road, killing the old Italian guy selling the stuff, and himself, of course. Afterward, Peg was never the same. She wouldn’t go out, still hardly does, and that was years ago. It’s a shame how she’s tried to drown her sorrows by cozying up to that bottle. It’s a good thing she has a neighbor like Helen to check on her, and take her out once in a while.

My grandmother would beam smugly. Aunty Ag would say, “Oh what troubles some people have,” and my grandfather would look down, embarrassed he had said too much.

In the knotty pine basement of Peggy’s home was a beautiful Steinway piano. My most vivid memory of Peg’s singing was when, after my grandmother and she had a few highballs, they led me down the cellar stairs so that she could sing for me. My grandmother had bragged, as most grandparents do, that I was a most talented pianist, and Peg wanted to share her own talent with me, encouraging me that I could “make it” like she had.

They were both very drunk; I was relieved that neither of them fell down the stairs and broke their necks. My grandmother goaded Peg to sing “When Your Old Wedding Ring Was New,” Peg’s favorite.

With one thin arm braced against the polished black surface of the Steinway, she sang with no accompaniment, and even now, years later, I hear the swelling sadness in her voice, remembering too, the indignity and shame that I experienced when my grandmother slyly smirked at me and rolled her eyes. Peg was horrible of course–years of smoking, drinking, and heartache had ravaged her vocal chords–but her pain was so real. I knew that she was dreaming–longing for her husband Jim–and I think it was then that the first throb of death’s glower entered my consciousness.

When I was ten, my father sent my dog to the pound because he barked too much. I cried and phoned my grandmother, who had just come from lunch with Peg. The two of them arrived within the hour, scolded my mother, and cursed my father, who was still at work. A few hours later, we had retrieved Scruffy from the Animal Rescue League of Boston. During the ride back, my grandmother and Peg convinced me that the best thing was to find a new home for the dog.

“To hell with your father,” Peg said, passing me a mint she kept in her pocketbook in case her blood sugar dropped. “We saved Scruffy’s life, sweetheart. And what matters most, Jimmy, is knowing that he’s happy.  Sometimes that’s the way it has to be, my love.”

At my grandmother’s house, Peg took charge, calling the local radio stations and asking would they broadcast that “the sweetest dog Scruffy” needed a home. She and my grandmother drank several whiskey sours during their home-for-the-dog campaign, and I’m certain that the disc jockeys did not take Peg seriously, let alone understand her slurred words.

“You’ll see. Everything will be all right,” she kept telling me.

We had Chinese food delivered, and at the end of our meal, Peg opened a fortune cookie and read, “Do you believe? Endurance and persistence will be rewarded.” For Peggy, this was a mystical sign that we should “get off our arses” and knock on doors all over the neighborhood. “Where there’s a way, there’s a will,” she stammered. “What we need is faith is all, and our coats.” She smiled at me and rubbed my head.

My grandmother said she was too damn tired to go traipsing around the neighborhood, and passed out on the couch. Peggy said, “To hell with you, too, then!” and laughed.

The three of us–Peg, Scruffy, and myself–began canvassing the neighborhood. It was December and cold; the sky was crystal clear. I could see my breath, and just above us, one bright star seemed to be chasing a crescent of moon. What a sight we must have been! Peg zigzagging beside me, me nudging Peg–trying to keep her from falling off the curb, Scruffy following behind, wagging his tail and sniffing spots along the way.

We walked several blocks that night, ringing bells and knocking on doors, stopping a few times to plan what we should say. Peg said that what we needed was a “hook.” She suggested that she could take off her wig and tell the people “just a little white lie” about her dying of cancer. I said that I thought that was probably a mortal sin, and my grandmother wouldn’t like it. She reluctantly agreed, and we decided to state the simple facts. “No blarney. Just the bit about your father sending poor Scruffy to the pound.”

Some people didn’t answer their doors. It must have been after 10 p.m., and I imagined tired strangers peeking out at us, annoyed to be disturbed at this time of the night. Of the people who listened to our tale of woe, most were gracious and polite. Some of the neighbors clearly recognized Peg though, and there were looks of exasperation and disgust on their faces.

“Take the boy and his dog home,” one young mother said. “It’s too late to be out, especially with you in the state you’re in. You should be ashamed of yourself. It’s freezing out there and the boy’s gonna catch a cold.”

“But the dog needs a home!” Peg pleaded.

“The boy needs a home. Now take him home before I call the police and have you arrested for public drunkenness.” She gave me a pitiful look before shutting the door in our faces.

“Show me the way to go home. I’m tired and I wanna go to bed,” Peg sang. “I had a little drink about an hour ago and it went right to my head—

“Have faith,” she told me, “We’ll find a home for him. You know I’d keep him if I could, Jimmy, but I’m all allergies. Makes my face puff up and screws up my breathing.” In addition to alopecia and diabetes, Peg suffered from episodes of acute asthma.

My grandmother was snoring on the couch when we returned. Scruffy jumped onto the wing-tipped chair, and curled himself into a ball. Peg and I serenaded my grandmother with “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You” until she awoke with a start and asked for her “damn” drink.

The rest of the night is a blur. Perhaps I fell asleep on the rug watching TV? Maybe my grandfather carried me to bed when he returned from his night job? What I remember most about the events of that evening is that Peg kept her promise. Later that week, she found a home for Scruffy–with a “rich doctor” at the clinic where she got all her medications. A couple times over the following months, she took me to see Scruffy. I was content–he had a large fenced-in yard, and there were other dogs as well. I was happy to know that he was happy. Peg had been my savior.

A few years later, my grandmother brought my sister, Peg, and me to be “cured” in the waters of Nantasket Beach. Snapping open her compact, she peered into the mirror while she smothered her lips with red, all the while explaining the importance of August 15th to Beth and me. We were seated in her kitchen, sunlight flickering on the orange-and-gold checkered pattern of the wallpaper behind her.

“On August 15th,” my grandmother elaborated, “we celebrate the Feast of the Blessed Mother’s Assumption, when Jesus’s mother, was taken to her heavenly home.”

“Who took her?” Beth asked.

“God, dear.”

“In an airplane?”

“No, sweetheart. Finish up your eggs.”

“Then how’d she get there?”

My grandmother rose and began washing dishes at the sink. Beth and I looked past her head through the window to examine the sky.

“It’s a mystery, Bethie. Just one of those things,” she said.

“Oh.” Beth picked up her fork. “A mystery.”

The dogma of the Assumption, I later learned, was firmly established in 1950 when Pope Pius XII made his decree that the Immaculate Mother of God was “assumed into heavenly glory.” I’ve always wondered why it took so long to decide on the fate of poor Mary, who like a participant in a tableau vivant, remained motionless, one foot on the earth and one foot in the air, for centuries.

On that August day, the idea of a “cure” paled in comparison to the roller coaster ride my sister and I, if well behaved, might enjoy at Paragon Amusement Park across from the beach. Since we weren’t sick and didn’t need a cure, “Mary’s blessing” seemed like a gip.

After breakfast, the three of us–Beth and I wearing bathing suits under our T-shirts, and my grandmother arrayed in a white and gold sundress, a wide-brimmed hat with a spray of lilies, and black Farrah sunglasses–crossed the street to get Peggy, who had been “very ill” lately. I had overhead my grandparents whispering about Peg’s “delirium tremens,” how she was imagining things, and telling crazy stories about monkeys calling her up on the phone. One night a police officer brought her to my grandmother’s house after he found Peg wandering the streets of a nearby square; she was bruised and teary. Peg said she was looking for her husband Jim, trying to bring him home. I remembered our cold walk in December and wondered if Jim had been on her mind even then.

In the bag I carried were six baby-food jars to collect salt water for our family, some clusters of red grapes, as well as apples, raisins, and a few banana loaves that my grandmother had stolen from Solomon’s Bakery, where she worked part time. My grandmother believed it was a mortal sin to waste the day-old baked goods, even though the management had insisted that they be tossed in the rubbish.

Just outside Peg’s door, my grandmother stopped us. “Now you both behave. And Jimmy, remember to call her ‘Lovely Peggy,’ ” she whispered quickly. ‘Lovely Peggy’ was the sobriquet my grandmother had invented one Sunday after a sermon the priest had given on the power of names and the mystery of the Word. If we thought lovely things about Peggy, she explained, Peggy’s life would be happier, and she would feel better. “You kiddos don’t know how much this visit means to a lonely old lady.”

Peg opened the door. I mechanically announced, “Good morning, Lovely Peggy.”

Peggy responded, as she always did, “Isn’t he adorable,” while Beth skirted past her into the kitchen, desperate to get away, and my grandmother, appalled at Peg’s appearance, said, “What’s the matter with you? Did you forget we were going to the beach?” She looked down at Peg’s feet, tsk tsking at what Peg was wearing. “You look foolish in those things.”

Peggy had a confused look on her face, like she was half-asleep. There was pure grief in her expression, as if she felt cheated from a surprise. Her housedress, which had a pattern of tiny roses, shrouded a pair of small black boots; there were red stains at the end of her sleeves from where she had spilled some juice. She had forgotten her wig and the sunlight highlighted a laurel of peach-fuzz hair; a few silver strands, moist from sweat, garlanded the area by her temples and behind her large ears. The blinds were pulled down on the window behind the kitchen table, and the sweet smell of cedar cabinets and wine surrounded us in a cloud.

My grandmother crossed the threshold, flicked on the lamp, and guided Peg to the table. I hadn’t seen Peg in several months. Her usual cheeriness had vanished, and she was distracted and distant. It unnerved me to see how much she had changed. I joined my sister who was seated on the verdant green divan in the living room, strategically positioned in front of the dish of hard candies that we had grown accustomed to raiding on our visits.

We were quiet, enjoying the deliciousness of peppermint candy, swinging our legs together and humming just a little, eavesdropping on the conversation from the kitchen table, which was not far from where we sat.

“Let’s have one for the road, Helen.”

“You’ve had quite enough already, Peg. Aren’t your feet hot in those God-awful boots?”

“Not really.”

“But your feet must stink. You’ve got to take those damn things off! The salt water will be good for your gout and all that puffiness around your ankles. And the water will help the calluses on our soles!”

Peg laughed. “I figured the boots were perfect for the beach.”

“For Christ’s sake, Peg! The point is to get wet. How else are you going to get the cure?”

“Cure for what?”

“Anything! Your aching bones, your mood, your bowels, whatever it is that’s bothering you. God will know what you need. Miracles do happen, ya know.” I pictured my grandmother making the sign of the cross, Peg watching dreamily. I don’t know that Peg was very religious. I’m not even sure if she was a practicing Catholic, but that wouldn’t have stopped my grandmother in her missionary zeal.

“I believe miracles sometimes do happen, Helen,” Peg said at last. “It will only take me a moment to get ready. I have to use the little girls room and put on my fancy wig and makeup so I can look divine for my Jim over there,” she said, looking at me.

“I need to straighten out, get my life together,” Peg said, arching her back.

“You’re fine, Peg.” My grandmother helped her through the narrow doorway and down the hall. Peg hesitated every now and then, pressing her trembling palm against the wall, as if to discern whether it, or she, was still really here.

It was breezy at the shore. Soon we found a comfortable place on the beach. My grandmother rubbed tanning oil into Peg’s bald scalp, forehead, and the nape of her neck; she shone like a miniature Sun. Peg let Beth and I drape a necklace of dried seaweed upon her; we pretended it was a string of jewels. Then the two of us scribbled words into the sand with our fingers and played Yahtzee until we lost one of the die. The salty north winds felt good against our skin, and Peg wrapped our shoulders with her purple towel so we wouldn’t get burned.

Later, as Beth and I waded through the shallow waters at the ocean’s edge, we stopped occasionally to work and wedge our feet into the cool sand, then sloshed our legs through the foam a bit, deliberately making heavy giant steps and dancing to keep pace with the sun. We splashed ourselves as we jumped to avoid dark clumps of seaweed or a jellyfish, and we scanned the hard bottom for a lonely starfish or stone, or the clam with a secreted pearl. For a while, we explored large rocks that edged the beach, unearthing small crabs in the sand between, and startling a mourning dove that sped from its cleft into the bright sky. It made a whistling sound as it rose; then it began to descend over the water where my grandmother and Peg were walking towards the ocean. The waves beyond glimmered like sparks from an unquenchable fire. On a jetty in the distance, a father and his son cast fishing lines into the sea.

Suddenly, we heard my grandmother shout, “Watch yourself!” but it was too late; both she and Peg were surprised by a spirited breaker that razed them in its wake. Of course we ran to help, but delighted, too, in the spectacle–my grandmother and Peggy, seated on their asses, just a few feet from where the waves trickled to their end. In an instant they were kneeling forward, laughing so hard that they cried. As we began to help lift them, my grandmother and Peg, in between guffaws, groaned that the soles of their feet were cramping from shells and stones beneath their feet. My grandmother said that her “permanent is all ruined” while she fussed with her hair. Peggy answered, “At least I don’t have to worry about that,” and they laughed even harder. Then Lovely Peggy reached for me. I was mesmerized by her wet silvery scalp, and resisted the urge to touch the crown of her head before I gave her my hand and she rose from the sea. “Jimmy, you’re my angel,” she said, and kissed me on the forehead.

We filled six jars with water that day, and starving, we made a feast of the bread and fresh fruit by a small tide pool in the shade of a bony cliff. In the late afternoon, Beth and I had our roller coaster ride. With hands shielding their eyes from the sun, my grandmother and Peggy waved to us, transfigured figurines on the earth below, their clothing white as snow. The coaster lifted our chariot further into the crystal sky, while on the horizon, heat lightening flashed behind a lacey curtain of gray.

It has been a long time since that ride, but when I recall that afternoon, I feel the heady anticipation of the rising, and the delightful fright of the quick fall. Only a few days later, early on a Sunday morning, my mother would come to my room and wake me. She sat on the side of my bed where I had propped myself against a pillow. When she told me that Lovely Peggy had died in her sleep, I felt the pang of grief, but a sweet happiness, too, as I remembered our December journey, Peg’s persistence and her songs.

I imagined Peggy “over there,” eyes no longer teary, her countenance reflecting the brightness of a blazing fire. Finally she would be at home with her Jim. Completely awake–laughing, altogether beautiful, and divine–she rises once again to sing her favorite song. And the Sun’s great light shines upon and caresses her warm skin, like the flesh of a Father’s hands as He cradles His child’s head before lifting His crossed arms to kiss her soft cheek. A Father, joyful and tearful at the same time, hallowed by a loveliness that would forever be a part of Him.


BIO

James Mulhern has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in literary journals or anthologies over eighty times. In 2013, he was a Finalist for the Tuscany Prize in Catholic Fiction. In 2015, Mr. Mulhern was awarded a fully paid writing fellowship to Oxford University in the United Kingdom. That same year, a story was longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His writing has earned a Kirkus Star. His most recent novel, Give Them Unquiet Dreams, is a Readers’ Favorite Book Award winner, a Notable Best Indie Book of 2019, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2019.

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