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Sandra Niemi, author of Glamour Ghoul

THE INTERVIEW

I’m a longtime fan of Maila Nurmi’s, the woman who created and played the legendary Vampira on TV and in movies. Although I don’t remember, my mom once told me that she took me to see Vampira in person when I was a little kid. I guess Maila did public appearances—in costume? Maila Nurmi was the host of The Vampira Show on ABC-TV back in 1954 in Los Angeles. Countless imitators followed her, borrowing and stealing from her unique look and style.

After reading the excellent book, Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira, Maila Nurmi, that examines the extraordinary life of Maila Nurmi (1922-2008), the legendary TV host, actress and artist, I was curious to know more about the author. Sandra Niemi is Maila’s niece. When Maila Nurmi passed away in 2008, Sandra took control of Maila Nurmi’s writings and possessions. Ten years later, she penned a loving tribute to her famous fabulous Finnish aunt.

I was able to contact Sandra recently and she agreed to be interviewed for The Writing Disorder.

Tell us about yourself. Where are you living now?

Where the weather is mostly gray and cloudy. November is my least favorite month of the year. It’s dark and rainy and cold and the days are short. I live in Salem, Oregon, which is the capital. It’s a fairly good-sized town. I don’t know the population, but it’s a lot bigger than my hometown of Astoria that I lived in for sixty years. I sure do miss it, but the rain keeps me away.

How far is it from Salem?

Astoria is about two and a half hours north. I was up there recently for a Vampira celebration. It was a big success. They screened Plan 9 from Outer Space and they’re celebrating Maila because she graduated from Astoria high school in 1940. So the town is claiming her as an Astorian.

You grew up in Astoria, as well as your father, who was Maila’s brother?

Yes, my dad was Maila’s brother. He was 17 months older.

Did you know Maila growing up?

Not really. I met her when I was too young to remember. But I remember this, I must have been five or six at the time. My family went down to Los Angeles, and I saw her for the first time—and I was sure she was my own private Cinderella, because she was so beautiful. I had never seen such a beautiful human being in my life. It was in the daytime, I can still see her, she had blonde hair and she had blue eye shadow from her lashes to her brows, and bright red lipstick, a gold lame dress, and transparent shoes—which reminded me of Cinderella’s glass slippers. Then I didn’t see her again until her mother, my grandma, died when I was ten. And we went down to L.A. where they lived. Maila lived with her mother on Carlton Way. We were there for the funeral and Maila scared me. She reenacted how she found her mother dead in the chair that I was sitting in. But I didn’t know that, and she gave out this blood curdling scream that she was known for as Vampira and scared me to death. I ran out of the house. So, I thought that this was kind of a weird place to be, you know, it wasn’t like my little house in Astoria. And the strange thing is how Maila wore a black shift dress and dirty white slacks for two days. And then on the day of the funeral, or the day before the funeral, she asked my mother what she was going to wear to the funeral and my mother told her. And she thought, oh good, Maila’s going to change her clothes. But she didn’t, she just wore the same clothes again, and an old raggedy men’s navy-blue cardigan sweater inside out. Very odd.

She was a very independent and unique person—in her taste, her style, and with everything she did.

She was never afraid to display her different outlook on life, or to talk about it. She was very brave. And she just went about her life as she chose.

I read your book and it’s a really great story. It’s very well written. I kept asking myself, who wrote this book? I wanted to know more about you because I assumed you had written many other books, because it’s so good.

When I was younger in my 20s, I went to and graduated from Oregon State University, in 1969 when I was 22, and I majored in English. I always kind of fantasized about writing because I really enjoyed it. I received a lot of compliments from my professors, and good grades. And then life got in the way, and I worked my entire life as a minimum wage waitress, cannery worker, bartender, or house cleaner. I started out at 99 cents an hour and I think I ended at 8 or 10 dollars an hour. Oh, I worked 18 years at this job, the best job I ever had at the end. I worked 18 years as a medical lab courier. I went to clinics and hospitals and picked up specimens and delivered them to the laboratory. I never did anything with my love of writing until I got Maila’s writings. She didn’t have a typewriter, and this was before computers. She was a prolific writer, and it was all done in long hand. She wrote and wrote, and I gathered all of her papers together. And I thought, well, here is Maila’s story. I’m the only one who can write it. Maila and I had talked about it, when we were writing back and forth for three or four years, before we lost contact again. She said that she and I should do a coffee table book. Since she had been a house cleaner and I had been a house cleaner, she said, we’ll talk about the famous toilets that I cleaned, and you can talk about the rich timber barons and fishermen that you worked for. We never got around to it, but wherever she is, she is not mad at me.

It’s a great book. I would read it again because I enjoyed it so much.

It always shocks me, because we always put our own work down, you know, and have great doubts. Thank you.

Did she ever plan to write an autobiography?

Three times that I know of. I picked up in her apartment, after she passed, an old reel to reel tape and my friend got a player so we could hear what she said. She had spoken the words as a biography, and she had a friend there who was taping it. That was in 1966, so she was planning it then. And then she was planning it with another author, his name is Warren Beath, and he wrote a book about James Dean. He thought he was in contact with Maila, and then as Maila would sometimes do, she would erase the person from her life forever. She would not trust them, and she thought he was trying to steal her story and write her story himself. And then at the end I met this man, Stuart Timmons, he was the man who was with Maila day in and day out during the Elvira trial. He did everything for her, Maila never drove, of course, so Stuart drove her around wherever she needed to be, and he did a lot of the legal work that she needed done, because anything, like the clerical stuff, she had to do and he was also an author. She was telling him stories about what had happened in her life and he was taking notes and typing them up. And then she got to where she didn’t trust him, so she erased him from her life.

Now Stuart and I got together right after Maila passed away. We had lunch together, and we also were together every day. He helped me clean out Maila’s apartment. And, in fact, I found a box that Maila had written: To Stuart Timmons. And I said, Stewart, here is a box just for you. And he said, oh my gosh, and he got teary eyed. Inside was some jewelry that she had made for him. He was so thrilled to get it. And then we went to Maila’s storage unit with Dana Gould, another friend of Maila’s. Dana is the one who paid for her storage unit. And it was a big storage unit — it was packed to the rafters. You couldn’t put a hair pin in there it was perfectly packed to the door, to the ceiling, to the wall. And Dana said, oh my God, this is going to be a chore to go through, and I said, yes. He had a key and I had a key, and because I had to go back to Astoria to work, I gave my key to Stuart, because I totally trusted him. He was a wonderful man. In fact, I called him Uncle Stuart, because he told me he was my aunt Maila’s last gay husband. So, I called him Uncle Stuart.

Dana gave his key to a woman named Gabrielle Geiselman, who at the time had a boyfriend who was a bass player for Rob Zombie’s rock band. And he is still famous, he’s Matt Montgomery or Piggy D, is his professional name. Anyway, they broke up and Gabrielle moved to New Orleans. Stewart called me one day, and I have documentation of this. Stuart called me on the 26th of January 2008. I was in Astoria. And he told me, I think I found THE dress, Maila’s, and I found some hip pads and a waist cincher, and he says I’ll put them aside for you. I thought, oh, that’s wonderful because I’m coming back to L.A. for Maila’s memorial in February. So as luck would have it, five days later, Stewart suffered a massive stroke. He couldn’t speak. They didn’t expect him to live. He was hospitalized for over two years before he was able to come out. He has since passed away, but his brain was fine, but he could no longer walk. He had to be in a wheelchair, and you couldn’t understand what he said. But he was still writing books when he passed away. But when I went back to the storage unit in February, it had been ransacked and everything was gone all the way to one stack of boxes at the very back. So, I called Dana right away and said what happened to the storage unit? He said, Gabriel was there but you know she saved everything for you. There’s a box there for you and I rented another storage unit there that you put all the garbage in that you didn’t want. I said, Stuart, there’s one box here with a hat in it and that’s all. I was furious. And I couldn’t make Dana understand. I blame Dana for ransacking it, and there was a rift with Dana and me. And we didn’t speak for 10-12 years. We’ve made-up now. We’re friendly now, but now he realizes that Gabrielle was a thief. She took all Maila’s stuff, oh gosh—her bat sunglasses, her waist cincher, the dress, black wigs, her makeup, and all kinds of writings. Her marriage proposal from Marlon Brando — all the pictures, and she sold them to Jonny coffin. Jonny Coffin now owns them and the trademark. I get no money; the family gets no money from anything that Maila sells. Not a penny.

You know anything with Maila Nurmi on it that sells, Jonny Coffin gets it all because he owns the trademark. But he went and got it behind my back while I was still grieving my aunt and so yeah, he’s the owner of the trademark. Maila’s family gets nothing. In fact, he tried to stop the publishing of my book. He sent his lawyer to me. His lawyer threatened me and so I turned it into my publisher’s lawyer, and they got rid of him. But then Johnny turns around and says that he helped me write the book. Oh no, which is obviously a big lie. He contributed nothing except a letter from his lawyer saying that they were going to stop the publishing of Glamour Ghoul and that you owe him $30,000. For what, I don’t know.

His real name is John Edwards, and he’s married to a woman named Linda Kay who is an actress and singer. Jonny is a big goth fan, and he hosts parties where he wears a Cape and a weird top hat. He has hair down to his waist and he has some kind of shop where he sells coffin-shaped guitar cases. He has girls dressed in bikinis and things advertising his guitar cases. And he sells a bunch of other stuff — plus all the Vampira stuff, of course, he sells now, and he makes pretty good money.

I think I saw him on YouTube. He was talking at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

That’s where Maila is buried. Maila had her 100th birthday celebration last December in L.A. And I was there, and Jonny coffin, of course, wasn’t. He was terrified of me, so he didn’t even make an appearance.

I’m so sorry that all this happened to you.

We were very close for a while, Jonny, and me. He would call me a couple times a week, always professing to be my friend and asking me advice—what color should I put in this advertisement, and what do you think about this? I guess he was just trying to get information from me. I don’t know. And then when I told him one day, after many years we had talked, in fact. I’ve met Jonny several times. I’ve had lunch with him and his wife in L.A. And we were friendly, but one night he called me in Salem, and I said to him, you know Jonny I have in my possession from when Maila was alive, a cease and desist letter from her attorney to you, because you were proposing to introduce a new Vampira doll and Maila wasn’t going to have anything to do with that. And she told him in the letter, she said she never wanted Jonny coffin to have anything to do with Vampira, and he hung up on me. He never talked to me again because he knew the jig was up. Maila hated him in life.

I think that book The Vampire Diaries was put out by him.

Yes. It’s mostly newspaper clippings, I think. When I went back to his shop in 2009, he showed me a three-ring binder with all these newspaper clippings of Maila’s career that he had bought from a man named Chad, and he had paid $300 for it. A lot of those articles were in that book. I haven’t bought the book, but a friend of mine in California did buy the book, and I leafed through it. I wasn’t going to read it. I don’t know how many of Maila’s writings were in there, but they were all stolen property that Gabrielle stole. If Maila knew this was going she’d be so mad. I know she’d be on my side. So, I don’t know where it’s all going to end but that’s where it is now. And Jonny has no family. He has his wife, but his mother, father and sister have all passed away. And he and his wife have no children, whereas I have a daughter and two grandchildren that I have to live for. And then I have also met Maila’s son, David Putter.

Yes! Are you still you still in touch with him?

Oh, yes! I just called him. He left me a text message last week. He’s learning how to message. He’s going to be 80 in March, and I’m 76. I’m going to be 77 in May, and he’ll be 80 in March. So, we’re all Oldtimers. Yes, I’ve met him, and he’s got his mother’s eyes, exactly the same color and everything—that brilliant blue. We got along really well. He was an esteemed attorney for 50 years. It was celebrated with a lifetime achievement at the ACLU. He was at one time the assistant attorney general of Vermont. He has some things that he changed in the courtroom that are still law today in Vermont. He’s a very esteemed attorney. Maila would be very, very proud to know that.

Has he ever tried to reach out to the other side of the family?

Well, he’s looking to see who his dad is. He asked Orson Welles’ daughter for DNA, but he hasn’t heard back yet. But he’s trying to find out for sure. We don’t know for sure. We just know what Maila said. We weren’t there so we don’t know for sure. But I put it in the book because that’s what Maila said. Everything she said was put in italics in the book. You know she was a brilliant writer herself.

I remember her writings in your book. I liked the way she always used an ampersand.

Yes. I was really impressed by how she expressed herself, and I thought this is too good to paraphrase, I need to put her words down word for word so she can tell her story right. So that’s how it all happened.

You spent a lot of time researching this book.

Oh, I forgot to tell you that in 1989 I spent a week with her in Los Angeles and that’s the last time I saw her. We had a great time, we got along together. We dined out every single day and we got drunk together.

Those were the good old days — 1989 in Los Angeles.

It was August, the last week of August of 1989.

She was living in East Hollywood.

She was living at a place on Hudson Ave. and it’s no longer there. They raised the house and the garage that she lived in. There’s an apartment house there now. She was evicted but she got $5,000 to move, so that helped her.

And she had a store on Melrose Ave.?

Yes, she had a store. She went to garage sales and bought things and brought them back to her store and resold them. And also when she was on Melrose—she was a great seamstress—she made clothes for rock stars, during the hippie age, when they liked pantaloons and feathers and sequins and things like that. She would make costumes and people bought them. And she made jewelry. I still have many pieces of her jewelry, many pins that are signed Vampira on the back.

She also did some painting and artwork?

Yes, she did, and they were stolen—every single one. I know for a fact that when I looked at the storage unit before it had been ransacked, there were many paintings and they were covered with paper and they were propped on either side of the door. And when I came back, they were all gone. A year later I picked up a copy of Spin magazine. I don’t think it’s in print anymore, and there was a two-page color layout of Rob Zombie displaying his favorite things, and two of them were Maila’s, two of her paintings. He said he bought them from Maila’s estate. And I thought, no, you bought them from Gabrielle Geiselman, who’s the girlfriend of your guitarist Matt Montgomery aka Piggy D. So, she sold at least two paintings that I know of to Rob, and he has money, so she probably sold them for $1,000 each. They’re probably worth more now.

I’m assuming they’re worth a lot more.

I own one of her paintings that’s small. I got it is from a friend of Maila’s. They were very good friend towards the end of her life. His named is Greg and he connected with me, and I connected with him, and we talked. He sent me one of his paintings of Maila’s for free. It’s on my wall. It’s very nice. I love it. I had it professionally framed.

Beyond her personal diaries and her own writings, what other research did you do?

I interviewed Hilda, she was the woman who found Maila when she passed away. And I, of course, interviewed Dana, and the man who wrote Vampira and Me, R.H. Greene. And also, her second husband. His name was Farbrizio Mioni, he lived in Calabasas. When I was in Los Angeles, I just dropped in on him on a Sunday morning. He came to the door in a bathrobe, and he graciously invited me in the house. So, I got to visit with him. His last name was Mioni, and he and Maila were married in 1961 and divorced in 1964. He was 79 years old at the time and he has since passed away. I got the impression that it was just a marriage of convenience. He was gay. Maila wanted so much money a month to stay married to him and he could afford it and so it worked out. They stayed married for three years. And there were other people that knew her. I can’t think of anyone now right off the top of my head, but people that knew her. I would contact them about Maila and take notes. That’s after I had decided to write the book. I didn’t think that at the beginning, you know, and then I thought I have to, I have to. I can’t let Maila be a sad footnote in horror history, right? She deserved so much more.

How long did it take you to write the book?

12 years. I was plagued by self-doubt. Who am I? You know I’m 70 years old and trying to write a book, my first one, and then I would write a couple more chapters and put it away for six months and think, well I’ve come this far. And I’d write a little more, and it just went like that. In fact, I didn’t write the entire book, I was on the last chapter, when I came home from the grocery store and my daughter said to me, who lives with me. She said, I know who Maila’s son is. I know his name. I know where he lives. and I know his phone number. And I said, you do not—come on, that’s not even funny. She said, it’s true, here it is here. His name is David Putter, he lives in Vermont. What happened was, a couple years before for a Christmas present, I had sent my daughter, you know that ancestry.com? I sent her that and she had sent it in, and so had David. And they matched them as first cousins once removed. Oh my God, give me his phone number right this minute, I said. And I called right then and there. I didn’t even have my coat off and David answered the phone. I never dared to dream I could find my cousin; Let alone talk to him. Because I have a very, very small family, and every family member is extremely precious to me. David has no children, and he was adopted, so he has a very, very small family too. So, the first question he asked me is, do you do I know who my mother is? And I said, do I know who your mother is? I’m writing her biography right now, and I’m on the last chapter. You couldn’t be talking to anybody else on earth who knows her better than I do. It’s Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira. And he goes, Oh my God! I waited 75 years to find out who my mother is, and she’s a vampire? He didn’t know who she was, so he immediately went on the internet and looked her up. I said, you can see your mother, you can go on YouTube, and you hear her talk. You can find out everything you want to know just by going on Google. And he was excited about that. He said, I never dreamed of this. And you know those Vampira statues that Maila had commissioned back in the 1980s? They are very, very rare now. I had one for me and I had an extra one. And I said to myself, all these years that I have been packing it around original in the box, never opened, I always said to myself, someday I’m going to find the perfect person to give this to. And I’ll be darned if I didn’t. I sent it to David, and he has it proudly displayed in his living room. Whoever comes over to visit him, he always says that’s my mom out there, and they go, no? and he goes oh yes, that’s my mother! I saw her statue when I was at his house. I went there a year ago in August and I saw Aunt Maila there in David’s living room. He says he feels her around him all the time. And I say well if Maila could be anywhere, it would be with David. And then I said, I thought I was almost done with this book, and I had one more chapter because I had just met David. So that was the final chapter of the book.

Yes. He is the last chapter in the book.

I mean, I was there, I had just gotten to the end. Well now it’s over, just a few more paragraphs. And then I met David. And so, it was just my Maila. I keep saying, you know 12 years it took me to write this book, and I’m saying well Maila said you’re not going to finish this book until you meet my friend. And the minute, the minute I met him, the book was finished. It’s just bizarre, isn’t it, how things work out?

How did you find a publisher? Did you have one from the beginning or did you find one at the end?

When I first started writing the book, I learned that Feral House published the book on Ed Wood, A Nightmare of Ecstasy, that the movie was based on. So, I thought, well Maila was in Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Ed Wood—she knew him. I wondered if they’d be interested. So, in 2009 I called up Feral House and I talked to a man Adam Parfrey, he was the owner. And I simply asked him, I told him I was Maila’s niece, she had passed away, and I was going to write a book. Would he be interested in a biography of Vampira? And he said, oh absolutely. I said, okay, thank you. And so fast forward 10-11 years. I called him up again and Adam had passed away, but his sister Jessica was running the business, so I talked to her. And she said, yes, send me the manuscript. So that’s where it went, that’s how that worked out. They took it right away.

Were you involved with the cover design and or any other aspect of the book?

No. I’m not thrilled with the cover, it was not my choice. That was all the publishers. The Passion and Pain of Vampira or whatever the cover says, that was the publisher too. I just wanted to say Glamour Ghoul. So, I didn’t have much input on any of that. No input, I should say. And now these Finnish filmmakers, ICS Nordic, that are in Finland, they’re just in love with the whole concept. They’ve had a contract for going on two years now. They’ve been working on a six-part documentary of the book, and they’re looking for money. They’ve been looking for money for a while, and apparently, they don’t have the money yet, but that’s where that is.

Did they get the rights to your book?

They have a contract. The first time it was for 18 months and that expired. Now they have another six-month contract and Jessica Parfrey has been through this situation with her books many times. She said this is normal for the course, when people try to find money. She’s giving them a lot of leeway.

They’re a company from Finland?

Yes. They’re from there, and because Maila’s from Finland—we’re 100% Finnish all of us. Her parents spoke Finnish at home, and my mother’s parents spoke Finnish at home, so we’re Finnish. I think there are a lot of blondes in Finland, but there are brunettes too. You can usually tell by their faces. They have small eyes and round faces and blonde hair. But Maila and I are similar, we don’t have a round face. We have the cheekbones. I can usually tell Finnish people by looking at their faces. Yeah, they’re Finnish.

Do you have any family in Finland?

I have lots of family in Finland, but I’ve never met them on my mother’s side. My mother was in contact with them briefly. And they sent pictures of our cousins and lots and lots of cemetery pictures. Fins are big on cemeteries. They visit the graves 12 months out of the year—they’re decorated. I laughed when I got the photos, I said, oh there’s the cemetery, grandma said, yes, we’re big on cemeteries. My grandmother on my mother’s side was the oldest of nine children. She came to America on one ship after the Titanic. She missed the boat. She had a ticket for the Titanic, but she was late, and missed the boat. So she had to take the next boat over in 1912. My grandfather was already here from Finland. They got married and my grandmother never got to go back home. On the other side, on Maila’s side, her father was born here but she had one sibling who was 20 years older, and he was born in Finland. When he was a child his parents moved to America. And Sofie was born here in Boston. She was born in Boston. She was a Fin with a Boston accent. She talked like the Kennedys. My grandfather came over here when he was 21. Maila’s dad.

Who were some of your favorite writers?

To tell the truth, in college I had to read so many books as an English major. I even took French. I had to read books written in French, which I couldn’t do now to save my soul. But when I got out of college, I said I never wanted to see another book as long as I live. Never. And I did not read a book for many years. I was sick of reading, and now I can’t live without having a book to read. I like biographies. So, I read a lot of biographies, but I also like true crime like John Grisham, John Sandford, and Lee Child. I’m reading Grisham now. I’m reading something about an island in Florida.

When you were a kid or a teenager, who were some of your favorite writers?

When I was a kid, I read all the Nancy Drew books. Carolyn Keene, I think she’s the one who wrote those books. I can remember sitting in the car when my mom and dad were working during the summer, and just avidly reading those books one after another. I had a collection of Nancy Drew books. All of them were a dollar a piece in those days. And I went to the library quite often and just randomly picked out books to read. I was always a good reader, you know, right from the get-go. I could read very well. I didn’t read much in high school because I had schoolwork to do, and I had to read schoolbooks. The only thing that comes to mind now is Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys (Franklin Dixon) books. I might have read some of The Bobbsey Twins. I read a lot when I was a kid.

What about television — what did you watch when you were growing up?

We lived way out in the sticks, so we had to get an antenna. We didn’t get a television until 1958. But I can remember watching a Miss America pageant, and Bourbon Street Beat. I remember watching Bourbon Street Beat and the writer was Dean Riesner. And I said, oh mom look—we called him Dink—Dink wrote this episode of Bourbon Street Beep. (He was Maila’s husband at the time.) And my mom just said, Oh well, good. But I remember Chet Huntley and David Brinkley news, and I remember the original Mickey Mouse Club.

Dan Riesner was her husband?

Yes, we all called him Dink. I met him when I was a little kid. I remember sitting on his lap. I remember men in those days would flick the ashes from their cigarettes into the cuff of their pants. At the time that I met Dink he had on tan pants and a pink shirt. I remember he took us to a movie set where they were filming. We sat in the back, and they were filming a western. I think it was Amanda Blake or someone like that. There was a girl in a saloon. Then a production guy came around, I was standing by my mother, and the guy said, come on you’re on next, to me, and he grabbed my hand and took off. And my mother said, no, no, wrong kid, wrong kid. I told my mother years later that she had ruined my chance to be a star. We all went and played miniature golf after that, and I got to wear my Aunt Maila’s Cinderella shoes.

Dean was a successful TV writer?

A very, very successful writer. He wrote Play Misty for Me for Clint Eastwood. He wrote the movie for him and he was very involved with Clint Eastwood’s, The Enforcer. Remember all those movies he made in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. He even wrote the words, “Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do you? Why don’t you make my day?” That’s Dean Riesner. He was very well known, and he was a script doctor. If somebody didn’t like a script, they called him to come in and fix it. Rich Man, Poor Man, the mini-series, he wrote that. He was very famous. He had no children, and he married a woman named Marie, and she passed away before he did. He didn’t have a family either.

How long was he married to Maila?

It was a common law marriage. They were together from 1949 until the first part of 1955. Dean was a hopeless alcoholic when Maila met him. And his career was down the drain, but Maila got him to quit—and his career took off again.

How many times was Maila married?

Twice. I never put the third husband in because I was never sure that they were actually married. She was married sort of married to Dean, I mean common law. And then she was married to Mioni. That’s the name that she went by legally. That’s how she got her Social Security checks, Maila Mioni. Supposedly she was married to John somebody. And I’ve heard there was a marriage license somewhere. But I never saw it, so I didn’t include it in the book. I think Maila and this John guy were just very good friends. So I didn’t include him. I think she was only married twice. And I’ve never been married, so I always say Maila was never really married, and neither was I. And we both have one child. I see a lot of parallels with my life and Maila’s.

Does your daughter or grandchildren have any resemblance to Maila?

No. My daughter is half Hispanic. As she found out with her genealogy. She always says, I’m 61% Finnish. I’m more Finnish than Hispanic. And it came back that her father was 10% Finnish. We never would have guessed. So, she’s 55% Finnish today, and her half-brother is 5% Finnish from his dad, from their mutual father. She’s 47 years old now. And I have two grandchildrenboth living in the Hawaii on differentislands. My granddaughter, she kind of resembles Maila. She would make a perfect new Vampira. She’s five feet, six inches, long dark hair, light colored eyes—very pretty girl. She would make a beautiful Vampira. She’s a bartender in Maui. She’s 27, my grandson is 24, and he works on the Big Island, Hawaii. I don’t ever get to see them because I can’t afford a ticket to get to Hawaii. That makes me sad. If I had the trademark for Vampira, I could afford to go see them. But I don’t.

So, you can’t use the name Vampira for anything because he got the trademark?

I guess I’m not supposed to. It’s okay to write a story about her because you know biographies happen all the time without trademarks. But I can’t sell any anything. I can’t go and have coffee mugs made with Vampira’s name or picture on it, something like that. I can’t do any manufacturing. I can sell things that I found in her house, because that’s like a gift you know. I can sell those, but I can’t manufacture anything and sell it like T-shirts. I can’t even do that.

That’s not right.

No, it isn’t. There’s nothing I can do about it, it would cost lots of money for an attorney, which I do not have the money for. Jonny was counting on that, I’m sure.

Maybe the publisher or someone like that could help.

We’ve had talks. Maybe in the future. I told them, well, you better hurry, because I’m 76, and you know I’d like to see it in my lifetime. But there isn’t anything yet. They have an attorney. The one who wrote the letter in the first place, when they threatened to not get the book published. I’ve met him, he’s very nice. I met him in Astoria this last weekend. He’s a very nice man. So, you don’t know. He kept telling me how important it was for me to attend the Maila celebration in Astoria. He said it was important and I don’t know why. I signed books. There was a Q&A. I have participated in that. I also participated in the signing of books and a Q&A in Los Angeles for Maila’s 100th birthday. So, I’ve done this twice.

When was that?

It was December 11th last year in Los Angeles (2022). I can’t remember the name of theater. It was at a perfect theater. It was supposed to rain like crazy that day, but it was beautiful sunshine on her day. It was in Hollywood. The American Cinematheque—that’s where it was, in Hollywood. It’s the old Egyptian Theater. That’s where we were.

I wish I would’ve known. I would have attended.

They declared it Vampira Day. It was officially named Vampira Day in Los Angeles. And now my biggest wish, my biggest wish, is for Maila to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

I can’t believe she doesn’t have one.

I know. I want to start a crowdfunding effort to raise the money. It’s around $55,000 to have a star. And then they have to vote on who gets to have a star that year, because not everyone does. But I think, for Maila, because it was officially called Vampira Day, that it really boosts her chances.

That would be great!

I keep saying that Maila walked the streets of Hollywood for 60 years, because she never drove a car. And for 38 years of those she walked with a cane because she had pernicious anemia. She had walked with a cane. And she walked a lot.

Later in her career, Maila was still appearing in movies.

Yes, she was doing movies, but was still being billed as Vampira. She was never billed as Maila Nurmi. Even though she wasn’t in a Vampira costume, she was still Vampira. As she got older, Maila liked being remembered as Vampira. For a while she tried to get rid of that image, you know like, I’m Maila Nurmi. And then she sort of became like a hermit, a recluse, and moved to the very, very east part of Melrose Ave. She moved from the west part, clear over to the east part. And she never told anyone that she was Vampira. In fact, in the book it says that Hilda knew her as Helen Heaven. And even when I was having lunch with Hilda, she always referred to Maila as Helen. And she knows that her name was Maila, but she always referred to her as Helen. That’s who Maila introduced herself as, Helen.

She lived on Melrose when it was like becoming trendy and popular with punks and new wave music in the 1970s?

She was there when the hippies came out. That’s when she lived there. I’ve gone past the house that she lived in. It’s still there. It looks like a two-story duplex. It might be four apartment units. That’s where she had her shop, in her living room. She didn’t rent a separate place. It had a big window in front. And it was her living room, so she just had that part as her shop. I just saw it in December again. I had some friends from Sacramento that drove down, so they were my wheels while I was there. And they’re interested in Maila too. They have a goth rock band called Ashes Fallen, and they have a song called Vampira that has over 10,000 hits. They’re big Vampira fans. They wanted to go to all the places where Maila lived, and we took pictures. It’s still there, and the little crappy apartment she lived in on east Melrose is also there. When we were there, it was a beauty shop. And, of course, the one where my grandma died, where Maila and grandma lived, It’s still there. It looks almost the exactly the same one. There’s a little fence built around it. A short little fence, and the apartment house next door has been torn down and a new apartment house has been built. And the fence that separated the properties is gone. That’s the same. I recognize that street so well. And then she lived on Gateway. I went up there and looked at that place. And then she died on Serrano and of course, they’ve completely torn down that and rebuilt it so it’s nice and new now. I remember Gabrielle had the key to Maila’s last house, and she did not want me to go back in there. And I couldn’t find her. I called her on the phone she wouldn’t answer. So, I called the managers, and they knew who I was by then. And I said I don’t have a key to Maila’s apartment, and I want to go in, and they said go ahead and break in. And I said really? They said how they were going to tear the place down anyway, so it’s okay—just break in the door. And I said, okay. Kind of funny. So, I was at the front door, and I was shouldering the door, and shouldering the door, and the guy next door opened his window and said, hey, do you need a hammer? Yes. I said, what kind of neighborhood is this where I’m breaking in and they’re offering me help? But Gabrielle had been there, and she had set aside a bunch of stuff on the floor that she wanted to take from Maila’s apartment. And I know she was there because she had left a satchel, an umbrella, and a hat of hers there, which I took. And the couch that Mila had died on, she had ripped open the back of it looking for money. That’s how she thought of Maila. It’s just sickening. And I have pictures of that.

Since you’ve written the book, have you learned anything more about Maila that wasn’t in the book? Are there any stories about her that didn’t get in the book?

There’s probably a couple. When I finished the book, the publisher wanted me to remove about 5,000 words. They wanted it to be shorter. So, I had to take some material out. And somebody said, now you have enough to write a second book. I don’t think I have enough for a second book. I have enough for a fiction book, but it wouldn’t be Maila. It would be some other name. I’ve messed around with the thought of me and Maila being in a book, but fictionalized. It would have Jonny and Elvira. I’ve pictured it. They would be the enemies of the book. Jonny would be running around Los Angeles, but instead of that costume that he wears now, he would be wearing one of those bird heads that doctors wore back in the day, when it looked like a crows head, when they had the plague, and they had to take care of people with the plague. They were those things that looked like a bird heads. That’s what Jonny would wear around Los Angeles, you know, and we get them in the end. I don’t know if it would sell. That’s the whole thing it’s just kind of a comedy, and not really, but I could put my personality in it.

It sounds like it would be make a good graphic novel. You’re not into the Goth scene, are you?

No, I’m not Goth. But I have friends who are Goth. They never wear anything but black. And my friend is the best Gothic baker you ever saw. She can bake anything. She can make a cake look like anything. I like the Goth scene. A lot of the people who came out for the Astoria Maila Nurmi show and the Los Angeles Vampira show were Goths. Very, very interesting outfits that they wear. And I like it. Maila is the original Goth creator—the mother of Goth. When she got older, she would say I’m the grandmama of Goth. She was the pioneer. And I had no idea when Maila passed away that she had so many fans. They’re all over the place. And I had no clue because to me whenever I saw Vampira, I would just say, oh there’s Aunt Maila in a black dress with a wig on. It was just my Aunt Maila in costume. I couldn’t separate them. It was all just one person. When I was with her in 1989, I didn’t ask her one question about Vampira. I just wanted to know her as a person. What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite food? What do you like to do? What do you do with your days? How do you take care of your dog? What are you interested? Do you like to read? What’s your favorite TV show—things like that. Who is this person, my aunt? I didn’t ask about James Dean. I was here to find out who Aunt Maila was.

What was her favorite food?

Her favorite food was banana cream pie. Her favorite color was jewel tones. I assume she liked Ruby, sapphire, emerald—that kind of thing.

Who are her favorite performers?

I know that she hated Madonna and loved Cher. And I said, there we agree. I can’t stand Madonna, and I love Cher. And she hated in those days, at the newsstands, The Inquirer and The Star. She said all the photographs were terrible. They all had shiny faces. I remember that. She liked the TV shows, Three’s Company and Remington Steele. And if she could get an old movie on her TV, she’d like to watch that. She had a tiny little TV up on top of an armoire. That was her entertainment. I had sent her a little boom box that was my daughter’s. It was light blue, and I sent her some tapes. My father had been dead for 12 years, and I had a tape recording of his voice taken at a Christmas celebration. I sent her that and she really enjoyed that she got to hear her brother’s voice again. He sang the Finnish national anthem. He whistled and he talked, so I know Maila enjoyed that. And I still had a couple of letters that her dad had sent to my dad. They were written in Finnish and Maila could understand it. She could read it. So, I sent her copies of those letters. And I sent her a case of salmon, tuna and sturgeon, and a can opener. And a bottle of wine and a bottle opener one year for Christmas. So, I hope she liked that. I know she couldn’t cook. I think she had a heating plate to make coffee on. So, I sent her something that didn’t have to be cooked, and I know she liked fish. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience visiting with her. If I could live my life over again, I wouldn’t have come back in a week. I would’ve stayed and asked a lot more questions. Anyway, that was my time with Maila.

The photographs in the book, those were your photographs — or the did the publisher have to secure the rights to them?

I don’t know much about that. Some of them were my pictures, but I didn’t have much input on that aspect of the book either. I have a friend in Tennessee, who is a young man. He’s a huge Vampira fan that I befriended. In 2009, when I was in Los Angeles and met Jonny coffin at his place, Clint, and his mother, from Tennessee, flew out. So, I got to spend some time with them too. And Clint is a huge collector of Vampira memorabilia. He has lots of pictures. So he gave the pictures he had to the publisher. That worked out really well. I’m not that organized, and I have some pictures, but I don’t know where they are. The one that makes me the maddest of all, the one that I can’t find, is an 8×10 photo of Marlon Brando and Maila. It’s just the two of them. Maila is all decked out like she’s going to a party, in black dress, and Marlon is dressed like the movie, Desiree. He was a sea captain, or a military guy, and he’s dressed in costume and they’re together. I had looked for that picture for years, but I can’t find it. I think it still might be in the garage, and I’m hoping so. But I’m afraid to look anymore for fear I won’t find it. And so, there’s a lot of pictures in there—my most important pictures, and the letter from my grandmother is in there, too. The last letter she ever wrote before she died that I wrote about in the book. It’s in a three-ring black binder with a lot of Maila’s writings. I have not been able to find it. In fact, all the letters that she wrote to me, I had them when I wrote the book because I quoted from them, right, but I can’t find them now. Like I said, I’m not organized, I see something, and I just put it aside. And I’m not going to change at this age.

Who were the photographers who photographed Maila Nurmi?

Well, we know some of the photographers who took pictures of Maila in the 1950s. But we have no way of knowing who all the photographers were. I have no clue. There are family pictures of Maila, and her mom and dad, that I don’t have—and Jonny’s hanging on to it. That makes me mad. That’s my grandma and grandpa and my aunt. He has nothing to do with them.

Perhaps you could use some help organizing.

That’s why I have that friend in Sacramento. She is the most organized person I’ve ever met. She is really my archivist. I gave her all the stuff I had. She came up to Salem and I gave her everything I had. And she has cataloged and filed and put everything together and filed everything on the computer. She said this is all important Hollywood history, we have to preserve this. And she has. I’m really happy about that. Now everything is organized. Before everything was just in boxes. Everything works out. Maila found me, the archivist, and Maila made sure that I met her son. Maila is still working her Vampira magic. We don’t know for sure, but it seems that way.

She still has a presence in your life.

Yes. I still feel her around me. Once in a great while, not a lot, but once in a while, it feels like Maila is here with me. I think she spends a lot of time in Vermont now with her son. But she’s still working weird things. I mean, when my friend was here in Salem, and we were going through part of the garage looking for Maila’s stuff. It was September, I think. The garage door was open, and we were talking about Maila, and all sudden there was a huge cacophony of crows across the way. You couldn’t hear yourself talk. There had to be fifty of them in one tree. I’ve lived here for eight years, and it’s never happened before. And we both stopped talking, like what?! And we looked out and there’s all these crows. And my friend said, that’s a murder of crows. And I said yes. And then her husband showed up and we told him about the murder of crows. About a week later, I told you they have a Goth band. So a week later they were called up and asked to perform in New York City at a festival called Murder of Crows. See stuff like that is happening all the time. They went and performed this year in September, and now they have lots of new fans. They were number two on the Goth music list for their new album. They’re called Ashes Fallen. Michelle, my friend, plays keyboards, and her husband, James, is lead singer. The other guy in the band is named Jason. James and Jason have been friends for 30 years. They’ve played in the same band.

Thank you very much for your time. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. I wish you good health and happiness—and the rights to Vampira someday. I hope you get the rights back.

Thank you. It was nice meeting you too.

GLAMOUR GHOUL BOOK IS AVAILABLE HERE:








The Death of Rhetta Brown

by Norman Belanger

i

Workshopped to Death

It was not her week to read. She knew full well it was not her week. Rhetta rose up from her seat at the front of the room, the sheafs of her manuscript fluttering as she wrapped a floral scarf around her neck. A current shivered the air, almost audible over the wheezing AC as Rhetta Brown stood defiant, oblivious to the ripple of ill will percolating around her. A clear breach of established protocol was happening, a coup. The people in their seats took turns giving Rhetta the fisheye and making faces at Peter Kaye to do something. It was Caroline’s week. They were all aware of that. It was the one rule of workshop at the Center: everyone gets a turn. And this was Caroline’s. Five pairs of eyes implored Peter to say something, anything, just stop Rhetta.

He did say something. That is, he tried. He would never understand why he let himself be intimidated by her, but he did speak up. “As a courtesy to the community, we try to ensure that everyone has equal time,” he said something to the effect of the rules and the respect extended to fellow writers, how everyone earned their chance, but he felt himself losing steam and by the end he was moving his lips but no sound came out because the woman had fixed him with such a look of impatience to be done with his little speech.

When he finished, Rhetta waved the air as if to erase what he had said. To her, it was noise. Static. She smoothed the pages of her opus, opened her mouth, and began to read.

“It’s really most humiliating,” Peter confided to Shaw later over their usual nightcap at the Eliot. “I never know what to do with her. The class is rightly irritated because I have lost control of the room. I’m supposed to be the instructor. Everyone expects to read. She runs roughshod over everybody, me included.” Rhetta had insisted on reading for the past three weeks in a row. And it was Peter’s fault for not stopping her. He sipped his drink, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“It’s not like you at all. You love telling people what to do.” Shaw hoped to tease Peter out of this rare funk, he’d never seen him so undone over a student.

“That’s the ridiculous part. I agree. I love telling people what to do. More than that, I love telling people to stop doing things I find annoying. But this person. She steps all over me.”

“Is she any good?”

Peter looked around, as if the lady in question was looming over his shoulder. “She thinks she’s a genius.”

“That bad?”

“The worst.” Peter wished he’d never met Rhetta Brown. There was a version of her in almost every workshop, but she had taken the role to master class level. Pushy. Rude. Dismissive of feedback other students gave earnestly, as if they could have no way of judging the magic of her words. And such words. There was not an overblown adjective she didn’t love, no adverb left unturned. And so many words. She consistently churned out 30-40 pages a week, an amazing feat for any student writer. But no problem for Rhetta, who once informed the class in all seriousness that she had been seized by an invisible power when she sat down to write, that her fingers were guided by an unnamed power as she banged out words like an amanuensis of the gods. So many words. Peter wondered if she used a laptop or a Ouija board.

Shaw, well into his cocktail, was practically busting with questions. Who must this Rhetta Brown be that she could subdue Peter Kaye, the formidable. Peter Kaye, cowed by a mere genius?  “What does she look like? I want to picture her.”

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you? You love seeing me stymied.”

“Oh yeah.” Shaw motioned to Thomas for another rye.

“Fine.” Peter put his glass down on its damp napkin. “She’s odd. Dresses in bizarre combinations of scarves and expensive shawls. Gaudy jewelry. Cambridge Artsy.”

“Sounds like a colorful character.”

“Not so much in real life.”

“What else?”

“She walks with a stick.”

“Like a cane?”

“Think more forest witch. Burled wood. Ornate. It’s all part of the act.” He finished his drink, disappointed. He’d hoped that venting to Shaw, having a nightcap in the usually soothing environs of their bar might help him shake off this feeling of weakness in spirit, this heavy shame that he’d let his students down by allowing one dilettante in cashmere to usurp his leadership of the class.

* * *

He’d been instructing Writing Murder is Murder at the Adult Ed for something like 12 years. Standing at the front of that room every Thursday afternoon was his happiness, the little rectangle of space where he strutted before a half dozen people who hung on his every word his stage. Here, he was beloved. The writers did not think him too short too fat too queeny too much; his students saw him as someone who loved talking with other writers about how they wrote, why they wrote, what they wanted to say. A handful of ladies, and one gay man, returned often, signing up for the class term after term, making the class a kind of family, a circle of friends. He kept the class size small to create that intimate environment, more like a salon, and this made signing up for the course something of a competition to break into. Cutthroat. There was a wait list.

On the first day of the term, he had read the class roster, noting that one familiar name, Martha Andrews, had a grim black line through it, and another handwritten in its place. Rhetta Brown. Had this been a movie, an ominous ripple of cello strings would have signaled a warning, but instead he read the name with no awareness of the cascade of trouble to come.

She came in full sail, swathed in yards of fabric and jangling beads, that witch stick ticking down eternity, the sound of impending doom. But he might as well have been deaf to it. Blind as well—he had seen how the regulars responded as the lady made her entrance into the room, tapping out her steps. Tap. Tap. Tap. Glacially. Slowly. Erect. You had to watch her, an unstoppable tug trudging into harbor.

Caroline, who had a fatal tell whenever she didn’t like something, crossed her arms over her chest and sat back in her chair.

Joseph, the lone male in a sea of doctor-prescribed estrogen, clicked and unclicked his pen.

The class elder June zipped up her fleece as if she felt an unwelcomed chill.

Peter Kaye saw all this. He’d even felt his scrotum retract deep within him at the sight of her, his reptilian brain sensed the predator when his ego did not. He had been an idiot. As soon as she finally dropped anchor and groaned into her seat, she opened a capacious bag out of which she produced what he would in time come to understand was her manifesto. So many pages.  She was here to annihilate them all, one word at a time. One week at a time.

* * *

Shaw, saddened by the dejected look on poor Peter’s face, decided to relent his prodding. The situation had somehow humbled his friend in a way he’d never seen happen before. “I’m sorry, old man,” he said. “The term won’t last forever. It’ll end. Hopefully you’ll never be troubled by Mrs. Brown ever again.”

Peter shrugged. Maybe he’d met his Waterloo. Maybe it was time for him to hang it up, give up teaching. If one person could cause this much trouble, he’d lost his ability to run the class the way it always had. He could not bear to think about the looks on the faces of the others while he sat and did nothing. This occupied his thoughts as he said goodbye to Shaw on the corner, mechanically kissing his friend’s cheek, and it followed him on his short walk all the way home.

* * *

He was not surprised the next day when he was invited to meet up with Caroline and Joseph in the park for “an important discussion.” They were standing under a spreading elm next to a bench he assumed was intended for himself. He sat, like a witness in the box, and waited to be grilled. He did not need to wait long.

Without preamble or the usual niceties of greetings, Caroline went right into it. “You’ve got to do something about Rhetta Brown.” Caroline’s speech was like her prose: clean, efficient, nothing extra, nothing that did not advance the plot. “If you don’t take care of her, we will.” That did sound ominous.

Joseph, the diplomat, whose natural gracious manners won him the affection of most people he met, spoke in his usual soft voice: “Mr. Kaye, with all respect, please, we beg you. We are a community, and more than that, friends. She is not interested in being either.”

“It was my turn this week,” Caroline fumed, “I worked hard on my revisions, psyched myself up all week to read. I could’ve whacked her over the head with that stupid cane of hers.”

Joseph attempted to smooth the situation with a smile, “Back home, the old aunties would call this kind of person a ‘pig stuffer’. It loses in translation, but you understand.”

Peter didn’t know if he should laugh or submit to the sob that harbored deep in his chest. He was certain they were speaking on behalf of the rest of the writers, that the group of them all had huddled together to discuss what to do about Rhetta Brown, perhaps they even said amongst themselves that Peter Kaye had lost his ability to facilitate a class.

Joseph put a consoling hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Mr. Kaye. Please understand. We say this out of love.”

This was the cruelest blow of all. Peter bowed his head. He could accept their enmity, even their scorn he might understand, but that they should pity him, this he could not, would not allow. He stood up with such uncharacteristic rapidity of movement that Caroline and Joseph both took a step back in surprise

Peter said at last: “I am sorry. Sorry that I’ve let you down by my inaction. No, don’t say anything, Joseph, I know you want to make things more comfortable, but I deserve to feel the weight of what you have said to me. Believe me, I have been berating myself as well. I will find a way to make this right.”

He walked away, leaving the two of them wondering what he might do.

* * *

He got her number from the registrar. If Shaw were not sitting next to him, he would not have made the call. Even still, he sat with his hand on the phone for some time, unable to make himself go through with it.

“Maybe wait, until you feel up to it,” Shaw said.

Even his best friend acted like he was some feeble coot who had dulled his edge. This would not be borne.

He punched her number into his phone, listened to the line ring and then a horrifying click as Rhetta Brown picked up the landline. “Who is it?” she said, not by way of a greeting but more like a warning. When he could not respond immediately, despite Shaw’s nudging his arm, she demanded: “WHO IS THIS?”

In a hesitant croaking voice he did not recognize as his own, he began, “Rhetta? This is Peter. Peter Kaye from the Center?”

“Is that a question, or a statement of fact?” she said.

He tried again. “Mrs. Brown. This is Peter Kaye. I’m calling to talk to you about your recent conduct in the classroom.”

“What of it?”

He swallowed. Shaw nodded, encouraging him to keep going, a thumbs up for the promising start. “A number of students have brought it to my attention that they feel—”

“Oh I know where this is going. It happens. They’re jealous, naturally. Intimidated by the caliber of my output,” and here she allowed herself a chuckle, “it happens in every class I attend. I pay no attention to it, I advise you to ignore it as well.”

“But—”

“I know, it’s that Caroline person. She’s always looking at me. And that French fellow. Him too.”

“Joseph is from Martinique,” he interjected, pointlessly, as if she might care.

“They’re  jealous. It’s so transparent.”

“Mrs. Brown. I need to speak to you about how we can bring a spirit of fairness to the class. Each writer wants the chance to read their work.”

“If you call the pap they produce ‘work,’ I think we’ll have a difference of opinion, Mr. Gay.”

“It’s Kaye.”

“Beg pardon?”

“My name. Peter Kaye.”

“Fine. Mr. Kaye,” she said as though his name was a negotiable point she was willing to concede. “I really can’t continue talking on the telephone much longer, I’m right in the middle of an important denoument scene to which I must return. When the muse strikes, you know—”

“How about we meet in person? Talk this out? I’d be happy to meet you at the Eliot, for a drink, it’s quiet there and we can have a conversation.”

“I’m not accustomed to meeting men in barrooms, Mr. Kaye. Even if I were, I can see no reason to discuss the matter any further.”

Peter felt his face get hot. Everything she said just made him angrier. She was condescending, a snob, a bully, and worse—a hack writer who thought she was the next Agatha Christie. “I’m afraid we are not finished, Mrs. Brown. We need to come to some kind of understanding before the next class meets. I insist it is of great importance that we do.”

Silence. She was not used to being challenged, and he could practically hear her thinking her next move. With an impatient sigh she relented, “My husband will be at a board meeting this evening. Why don’t you come to my home sometime after dinner. Say 7 0’clock?”

She was smart. Having him come to her place gave her the home advantage, but he didn’t care. At this point, he just wanted to get this over with. “I’d be delighted,” he lied. He wrote down her address on a scrap of paper, and before he had a chance to thank her, she had hung up.

Shaw glanced at the address, gave a low whistle. “Swanky,” he said.

* * *

Rhetta Brown sat down to her work much later than was her routine that Friday, which ordinarily would exasperate her, but today as she dropped down into her rattan chair on her patio before her old lap top a definite smirk played around the corners of her mouth.

It’s not like she hadn’t reasons to be irritated.

For starters, Jefferey. It was so like him to let her down when she needed him. She had asked him to march right over to the Lindens’ place next door and get to the bottom of why they had been pointedly not invited to their annual garden party, the crown jewel in the neighborhood calendar.

Last year, she had successfully lobbied for an invite from the skinflint Eunice Linden through a series of persistent notes and the occasional banana bread she sent next door through her emissary husband. It worked. Savoring her victory, on the day she eschewed protocol of being paraded from the front door and through the tedious receiving line like all the others, instead she swept through the gate separating their properties, the privilege of being so near neighbors, and let it drop here and there that she lived just over the fence, she was of the inner circle, here to consume canapes with certain local notables. With Jefferey in tow. After that success, it was imperative that they should go again this year. But the invitation was not renewed.

The Browns lived in the ugliest house on the prettiest street in the tony historic end of town. Theirs was a squat Cape type house, considered a usurper and an eyesore among the sedate Colonials when it was built in the heady post war boom; now Number 217 had the patina of age that gave an aura of respectability suitable to its zip code, but still Rhetta felt the sting of being seen as an outsider. The neighbors never let her forget she’d only been there a few years, whereas they were generations in the same family houses stretching back to before the Revolution.  Such snobbery goaded her, spurred her. She’d show them.

Last year at the august garden party, she had the ear of none other than Ellery Wendall, the Editor in Chief of Rex Press, for 15 minutes she had him cornered between the  prize winning rose garden and the ice sculpture of some sort of bird in flight, she regaled him about her murders, and her wily detective Sir Archibald Leech, she was on the brink of asking him to read the manuscript she happened to have handy in her bag—well then she could have clobbered Jefferey who chose that exact moment to lope along and see if she needed anything, and of course he should have seen her empty champagne flute and brought over a fresh one, but as she was making this point to him, she somehow lost Mr. Wendall, whom she watched wistfully as he sped away, he must have needed to use the water closet because he moved so fast. No matter.  She had marked her prey. She would bag him. In time.

She gave herself an indulgent smile, a blush of hubris that sometimes befalls a genius. An alchemist might understand what’s it’s like to create magic out of nothing. Her manuscript was gaining heft, she’d made substantial revisions since last year—Sir Archibald lived in Monk Stone Priory now, which sounded so much better, and his sidekick with the limp had clearly been damaged in the first war—she knew that her work now at last deserved, no, was destined to be published, read, seen, and most importantly, admired. Wouldn’t that turn a few smug heads. All she needed was just a few minutes more with the editor to make it happen. Those damned Lindens.

Now, as she sat on the patio, her fingers practically ached with the need to produce, the energy inside her was restless, crackling. But still the pesky thought buzzed around: why hadn’t they been invited back? She supposed, in full light of day, that it was probably Jefferey and his blandness that failed to spark. Who wore those skinny ties anymore? Really. She had laid out for him perfectly suitable linen shirt and nice trousers in a soft palette that would complement her outfit which she had chosen with equal care: the dress with the cabbage roses and the silk fringed shawl, stacks of bracelets. She now came to realize that his refusal to wear the approved wardrobe for the Lindens had been the start of disobedient episodes of acting out. Only last month he had declined to speak to the gardener for starting at his work too early, when she needed her rest, and so she had to do it herself, and the man up and quit, so they had no gardener and Jefferey was of course useless in that department. And, just this morning, he told her he was not going to knock on the Lindens’ door and ask them why there was no invitation to this year’s party when everyone had been boasting for weeks about getting theirs. Then, in a kind of showdown, a rare display of assertion which just made him look silly, Jefferey told her he wouldn’t be home for dinner, he had a board meeting, the burden of such a feckless lie made him hang his head like a dog as he hauled his pathetic carcass out the door. She saw right through his nonsense. He’d be singing another tune soon enough, when he learned anew who was in charge.

Then she got that phone call from that odious little man. Peter Kaye. Galling. It was not her fault the other students in class were not at her level. She’d straighten him out too.  She thought with a quick glance at her watch she had hours to get something on the page before he showed up. It was the burden of every great artist to forge ahead, to not allow the unseeing critics to get in the way.

Despite all that she had to manage, all the insufferable distractions that kept her from her work, she was pleased with herself. A pitcher of iced tea sat where she’d left it when she went in to answer that call on the house phone from Mr. Kaye, and she felt like she had earned a respite. She poured herself a tall glass, smiling to herself as she thought about her secret. She’d never tell anybody about what she’d done this morning. after Jeffery had left. There might be evidence, if anyone ever thought to look for it. And what would they find, really? A bucket in the tool shed. A few empty bleach bottles. Just the thing to kill prize winning rose bushes. The thought came to her as if heaven sent. Slip in and out the back gate, quick and quiet like a cat. It had been little labor, but oh the rewards.  If she was not going to be invited to the garden party, there would be no garden.

The yard only got sun briefly in the late afternoons, the surrounding trees and houses yielded a narrow patch of blue sky that just now blazed bright and hot. She turned her face toward the warmth and sipped her cold tea.

* * *

At the appointed hour, Peter Kaye and Shaw arrived at number 217.

“Jeez,” Shaw said. “Kind of a letdown.” They regarded the unimpressive little white house on a bit of shaggy grass, dwarfed by its grander neighbors. Even though another half hour of sunlight was left of the momentous day the place cowered in permanent shade.

“It’s perfect,” insisted Peter, recalibrating his expectations of Madame Brown. Perhaps she was not as grand as she seemed.

“You sure you’ll be ok?” Shaw said.

Peter resented the patronizing tone. He assured his friend he’d be just fine.

Shaw watched him walk down the gravel drive. He would wait here for moral support, what he wouldn’t give to be there when the skirmish began. Shaw leaned against a fencepost badly in need of paint and tried to make himself comfortable, but he was antsy. Silver leaves overhead tittered, tickled by the unfolding scene.

* * *

A dog started barking. He turned to see an elderly woman and an equally elderly collie making their way towards him.

“Who are you?” the lady demanded. “Why are you lurking about?”

The dog gave another wary bark.

Shaw didn’t think he was lurking exactly. He explained that he was waiting for his friend, who was visiting Mrs. Brown.

The lady’s dry lips scowled. She clearly had no love for the mistress of 217. Was it possible the dog scowled too?

“I understand she’s not very popular.”

The lady gave a dry laugh that brought on a cough. “My sister Martha was the only one in the neighborhood who could stomach Rhetta Brown, but she was always too nice, too unsuspecting.”

“Unsuspecting?” it seemed an odd word to use.

“I don’t trust the woman, it’s as plain as that. Conniving.  Makes a fool of herself wherever she goes.” Shaw could sense she was enjoying the chance to trash her neighbor.

“I’ve never even met her. My friend Peter Kaye, he teaches at the Center. Mrs. Brown is one of his students.”

A flash of recognition lit up the woman’s face. “Him I know. My sister Martha. She was a writer. She was forever going on about wonderful Mr. Kaye.” He felt himself rising in her estimation. She even smiled at him. “Rhetta fancies herself a writer too. I see her from my room when she’s out here banging on her keyboard, what a show. Egads. She’d foist her stuff onto poor Martha to read.”

“What does Mrs. Brown write?”

“Drivel. Utter nonsense about English lords killing vicars, or the other way around. Rhetta would drop off one of her famous inedible banana loafs and a pound of paper every so often. Neither was digestible. But Martha, being Martha, she ate the loaf and read the pages, too nice a person to tell Rhetta to shove off.” The woman, suddenly aware that she had been running on with someone she didn’t even know, a stranger, she remembered her manners.

“I’m Patti Andrews,” she said, “I’ll talk anyone’s ear off. My apologies. I forget sometimes how lonely I am these days.”

“Your sister, Martha? She has passed? I’m sorry for your loss.”

“She had a good run,” Patti was not the sentimental type, apparently. “She was 80. Had a bout of a nasty virus that finally did her in. Just a few weeks ago. Such a shame. She was so excited to be in Mr. Kaye’s workshop again, didn’t make it. I do miss her, Rags does too,” she gave the dog a gentle pat on the head.

When Shaw would try to replay the events that happened next, he had trouble making sense of the kaleidoscope of images that refused to form a recognizable pattern. What he remembered as they were talking: the light fading, flowers dropping petals in the sleepy garden, a bird calling to its mate, but the quiet evening ended with a scream ripping the air like a crack of thunder sending the birds scurrying from the trees. Peter screaming Shaw’s name, over and over, echoing in Arthur’s ears, he could see himself moving in slow motion though he must have been running, the crunch of gravel beneath his feet, the dog barking, Patti several paces behind him, the door left ajar as if waiting, the darkness of the house, vague shapes of furniture as he moved toward Peter through a creaking back door to the patio, he flicked on the outdoor light, flooding the scene with a merciless white glare—Rhetta Brown, sprawled out on the gray flagstones in a pool of inky blood. Peter Kaye, trembling, holding in a his hand a heavy stick. A wind shaking the trees a shadow running over tall grass that grew darker and darkeruntil everything went black for Arthur Shaw.

ii

A Murder in Tory Row

The news of the murder rippled through the community as if carried on electric current. By morning, everyone had heard: Rhetta Brown had been brutally clubbed to death, killed by an instructor at the Center. Peter Kaye was in custody.

* * *

Caroline paced Joseph’s studio apartment. He watched her, noting she had barely run a comb through her hair. Her hands were restless, tugging at her long sleeves, fidgety.

“Please. Sit down. Have some coffee. There’s some toast if you would like.”

“How can you think about eating? My stomach is a bag of broken glass.”

“You’ll feel better. Sit.”

She kept walking, up and down the length of the room. The smell of fresh coffee made her insides turn. She swallowed down the sour taste at the back of her throat. “Did it occur to you that we goaded him into it? Did you see his face when he left us in the park? We pushed him.”

Joseph smiled. “I am sure that there has been some misunderstanding. I cannot believe for a minute that Mr. Kaye, our Mr. Kaye, could do such a thing. Have some toast.”

“How can you be so sure? His friend caught him in the act. A neighbor lady too. What further proof do you want?”

“I am sure there is more to the story. We can rationally discuss likely scenarios.”

“Such as?”

“Such as. There may be other people who wished Mrs. Brown dead.”

For a moment she stopped. He had a point. Rhetta was detestable. But there were witnesses. He could not easily explain that away.

“You yourself said you wanted to hit her over the head with her stick,” he sipped his coffee.

She laughed. “So I went over there and clobbered her before Mr. Kaye showed up? She was already dead?” Maybe Caroline fantasized about it, maybe the thought of smacking that woman senseless had crossed her mind once, or a hundred times. She still felt hot when she remembered how unpleasant the dead lady could be, how dismissive she’d  been with her critiques in workshop; Caroline was working on a thriller about a heroin dealer who was frantically trying to find whoever was putting fentanyl in his product, killing off some of his best customers, and it was really coming along— Rhetta had been so condescending, calling her antihero “unlikeable.” Duh. That was the entire point. The guy’s a peddler in class A substances. He wasn’t meant to be likeable. But you couldn’t have a conversation with Mrs. Brown. She called the whole thing “unsavory,” and something “no decent person would ever want to read.” Pretty brutal. It would be completely different if Rhetta herself was this amazing writer, but she wasn’t. Who the hell wants to read about English folks politely killing each other, bloodless murders with no visceral juice, no passion. No life. She had thought about it. Clocking the insufferable she beast with that stupid stick. “Do you think I could have done something like that?” she asked her friend.

“I am saying that someone could have. As you say, she may have been dead before Mr. Kaye even got there. No one actually saw Mr. Kaye strike the woman. You told me yourself that he was standing over the body with the stick in his hand, but does that necessarily mean he killed her? There may be other details we are not yet privy to.”

She hugged herself.

“The coffee is still hot. Sit.”

“What are we gonna do?”

“We are writers. Mystery writers. Maybe we find out who really did it?”

“Like Nancy Drew? Skulking around for clues in old clocks?”

“We can be more methodical, perhaps.”

Caroline was intrigued. “You think we can?”

He lifted his shoulders. “It cannot hurt to try. It may even be fun.”

“I’m calling June,” she said, pulling her phone from her back pocket, “she’ll want to be in on this.”

* * *

Arthur Shaw had not slept. His head still ached. In the bathroom mirror he touched the  still tender line of stitches on his forehead, replaying the ambulance ride to the Emergency Room, the kind paramedic who told him he was lucky. He had passed out, fell to the ground, taking with him a small table and sending a glass pitcher shattering on the flagstones. One of the shards just missed his left eye. He was lucky.

As he was being taken away to go to the hospital, flat on his back on a stretcher, he saw the moonless night, the black sky. Blue lights flashing. Red lights flashing. Neighbors gawking on their lawns.

But it always came back to the same image, burnt into his brain.

Peter standing over the dead woman’s body.

Arthur heaved over the sink, nothing but green bile from his empty stomach hurled into the white basin, the clockwise swirl of the taps and vomit spiraling around the drain made him hold on to the edge of the vanity for dear life.

* * *

Jeffery Brown instinctively put the key in his own front door with the stealth of a thief, quietly, holding the knob steady in his hand while the lock opened, then nudging the door with his shoulder, listening, his ears attuned, attentive. The furniture regarded him with stoic silence. Early American couches. Shaker chairs, ladder backed, spindly legs that would give way if anyone dared sit on one, but no one ever had. The entire house felt inert. Hollow. Dead. And then he remembered. There was no need to sneak into his home for fear of making noise, afraid of ruining a nap or a writing spree. There was no exasperated sigh when he did make himself known by tossing his keys into the painted bowl on the hall table, just the bright clinking of metal on porcelain. He could yell at the top of his lungs if he felt like it. But he didn’t. Funny. Twenty plus years of tiptoeing so as not to disturb the Chippendale dining chairs that stood as mute guardians around the oval table with its centerpiece of wax fruit. The wallpaper, sly sheperdesses leading willing shepherds away from their flocks in an endless repetition always made him dizzy, and he automatically went straight for the kitchen.

Rhetta had shown an indifferent talent for cooking. She made a big show of burning cookies and loaves heavy as bricks, she could do a roast drier than death or incinerate a chicken with equal poise, but she excelled at leaving behind a mess. The counter still had a shriveled half lemon sliced on the cutting board. Granules of sugar all over the place inviting a parade of ants he brushed into the sink full of plates and glasses smeared with orange lipstick.

The back gate unlatched.

Then the familiar sound of heels clicking on the flagstones.

When the footsteps stopped abruptly, breaking the characteristic confident stride, for a beat there was just stillness, not even a hint of a breeze came through the open window where he stood watching her. She shouldn’t have come. Not now.

Eunice Linden stood still, her peep toed shoes inches away from the black sticky stain of dried blood, broken glass, the table on its side where Rhetta had been lying just twelve hours ago. He saw the effort it took her, to suppress a scream, compose her face, but underneath he was sure she was now afraid. Afraid of him.

She gingerly stepped around the stain, the glass, the table. “I saw your car. Are you Ok? Jeff, I couldn’t sleep thinking. What did the police say?”

“Come in,” he said. “Might as well make me a cup of coffee while you’re here,” he held open the screen door, the creak of the old wood frame reminded her of Thursday afternoons. Despite herself, she smiled, remembering, but the moment she heard the door bang shut behind her she knew it was wrong to come, today, but she had to see how he was. She had to know.  He supposed she had a right to know.

Eunice busied herself in the kitchen. Measured out coffee, filled the carafe from the tap, remembering to let it run until it was cold. The whole time his eyes were on her.

“I told them I had an alibi.”

She pulled two mugs off their little hooks. “What did you say?”

“Same as I told her. Board meeting.”

“But they’ll figure it out soon enough. Jeff—” she turned to face him, “why did you lie? Can’t you get in trouble?”

“I thought I was being chivalrous,” he touched her forearm, noted the split second when she wanted to flinch but didn’t. Her eyes looked everywhere but at him. “It’ll get out. There’s no avoiding it now. I bought us a little time” he said.

“I guess so,” she was tearing up, scared, a little girl with a manicure and hair that smelled like money. “What a mess.”

“Wipe your nose.”

“Jeff. You know I’m only going to ask you this once. I swear I’ll never mention it again. Whatever you say.” She tapped two big spoons of sugar into his mug. A Splenda in hers.  “Did you have anything to do with it? You didn’t do anything because of–”

“Did you?”

She winced as if he had slapped her. “How could you even ask me such a thing?”

“How could you ask me?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been a wreck. Crazy things are going through my mind.”

“We’re going to have to decide. If this thing is going to be between us, or if—”

“Or if—”

“Or if, regardless of what comes out,” he held her by the wrist, “we’re in it together.”

“How? Can we trust each other?” There was a deeper question she did not dare ask.

“The coffee. It’ll go a lot faster if you tap that little button. There.”

* * *

June had to knock a few times before Shaw got up to answer. He had finally drifted off to a kind of sleep, peppered with terrible dreams.

“You look awful,” June said.

“Thank you,” Shaw’s glasses were nowhere to be found. He squinted at his unexpected visitor. “I’m sorry. You are—”

“June. You know me. I’ve met you lots of times,” she seemed to know what she was talking about as she stood there with her hands clasped in front of her, reminding him of a reading teacher he had at Park Glen Elementary. She did look familiar. Fireplug build. Sturdy. Eyes that looked right at you. “I met you at Mr. Kaye’s parties for the Center. You have to remember.”

“Of course,” he lied. “I’m so bad with names though—”

“June. June Jablonski.”

“Hello June.”

“I know this is a bad day. We’re all worried sick about Mr. Kaye. We know of course he didn’t have anything to do with it. Imagine. Impossible!” she looked at his stitches, “Oh dear you got your share of it too, I’m so sorry. You must be devastated. About Mr. Kaye I mean.”

“I don’t know what to think yet. I don’t. I can’t—”

“I understand. We all feel the same way.”

“We all?”

“Mr. Kaye’s workshop. At the Center. That’s us.”

Things started clicking into place. Yes. June Jablonski. “Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming by—”

“Mr. Shaw,” said June, “you misunderstand me. I didn’t look you up just to offer our support, which you have, obviously. We’ve been talking and we think we can dig around and maybe find out somethings about the whole business with Rhetta. If Mr. Kaye didn’t do it, and he didn’t, then we need to find out who did.”

He and Peter had enough murders. He was tired. This wasn’t a game or some episode of Midsomer. There were real consequences. “I don’t think that’s wise,” he said.

“I’m disappointed in you, Mr. Arthur Shaw.” Now she really did look like Mrs. Pennell from Park Glen. She was frequently disappointed too.

* * *

Caroline and Joseph had a fruitless morning. She was frustrated, but he was as steady as ever.

Of course, they tried the police station first thing, but some desk guy told them no way were they getting in to talk to, much less see, Mr. Kaye, and he’d give no information on an ongoing investigation.

“May we leave a note?” asked Joseph, and honestly it seemed perfectly reasonable, but the guy was not having it.

“Maybe tell him we said hi, even?” She had asked, knowing it was a doomed effort, but she had to try.

They were out on the pavement beating it back to the car within 8 minutes.

“Now what?” she said as she buckled into the driver’s seat. She hoped her voice didn’t have the irritation she felt. So far, he seemed undaunted by her cynicism, a carryover from an embarrassingly long Emo phase, when she was one of a million standard issue bar rats with a burgeoning eating disorder centered around vodka and clove cigarettes, a fuck everyone attitude, and a knack for finding the worst, the absolute worst guy in any given situation. She was getting incrementally better now, trying, but that pessimism lingered, a smudge of black eyeliner on a hangover morning with your shoes still on from the night before. Caroline admired Joseph, his sense of inner quiet that she could only wish she felt for maybe fifteen consecutive minutes in a month. He remained placid and smiling all the time. And it wasn’t an act. You can tell. He was also her best friend in workshop. She gave him a smile, hoping to soften her tone.

Of course, he smiled back. “We made a valid first attempt,” he said.

Which is a nice way of saying they struck out.

* * *

Patti Andrews didn’t answer the door bell when June and Shaw rang.

“Why exactly are we here?” asked Shaw. He had been led around by this tank of a lady, succumbing to her natural role to lead, and his to follow. In the absence of Peter, he was feeling the loss of someone telling him what to do, maybe that’s why he allowed June Jablonski to push him through this sleepwalking day. None of it felt real. Only the stinging itch over his eye told him different. He had no idea why they should be standing under the portico of the Andrews’ house.

“I explained on the way over” June’s voice again had that irritated edge of someone who doesn’t like having to repeat themselves more than once. “You and Patti were there last night. You saw what you saw. If we get the two of to talking, maybe some interesting details will emerge.”

“I told you all I remember,” he said, exasperated with himself.

“Listen, this might jostle the old memory, kick it into gear. Patti might have seen something, heard something that you didn’t. Visa versa. Something we can piece together. Can’t hurt. Give it the old Harvard try.”

“Did you go to Harvard?”

“Radcliffe, dear. That’s where I met Martha. And hence Patti. We’re all friends going way back.”

“Martha? The sister who died?’

“She was a wonderful gal. I was so pleased she said she was going to be in this year’s workshop, with Mr. Kaye. Terrific writer. She died just a week before the first class met. Poor Patti. All alone in this big old house. So you see, I owe her a visit anyway, check in on her, see how she’s doing. Martha was the lovingest, kindest person you’d ever want for a friend—”

Shaw remembered how Patti had described her sister: “Unsuspecting.” It seemed to be an unusual word at the time, and it still stuck out.

Just then Patti Andrews turned the corner, a shovel in her hand, ratty jeans caked with dirt. “Heard you ringing,” she said, “persistent, aren’t you?”

June laughed. “Patti. Forgive the intrusion. I felt I was long overdue in paying you a condolence call.”

“I got your card, that was very thoughtful.” Patti attempted a smile, “We didn’t do anything. Why give that kind of money to the funeral parlor? She didn’t believe in all that. Just wanted to be cremated and that’s it.” And then she recognized Shaw. “You I remember,” she said. “Nasty gash you got there. Hope you’re OK.”

OK was as much as Shaw could be. He nodded. Mumbled thanks.

“Patti, dear, we were hoping that you might be willing to talk a little bit. About last night.”

“All talked out. Those cops are something. I thought you were them when I heard you out here,” she held the shovel as if it might have been brandished, in the event she needed to shoo off a detective or two from her doorstep. “Besides. It was that fat fella. He was standing right there, holding the damned stick in his hand like a club. Doesn’t take a Miss Marple to put that together.”

Shaw winced. He too had been asked, over and over, even in the Emergency Room while they were stitching him up. He was exhausted. There was no way to unsee what he had seen. He didn’t want to talk about it, either.

June tried a different tach. “Martha was quite fond of Mr. Kaye.”

Patti nodded. That she was. Loved him. She was looking forward to being at the Center again.

“You might as well know that we don’t believe that Mr. Kaye could have had anything to do with something like this. There’s got to be another way to look at this. We need your help. Please, just let’s walk through it. Once more?”

Patti knew full well that June was not going to give up, she was a squirrel with a nut. “Fine.” To Shaw she said, “I didn’t intend any offense. Of your friend I mean.”

She led them to the garage that had once been a stable, its barn like doors open, she invited them to sit on a couple beat up plastic lawn chairs while she finished doing the things she needed to do. “Got to keep my hands busy. Since Martha. I’m just talking to myself and trying to stay occupied. You won’t mind?”

They didn’t.

She put the shovel up on the wal. Everything in its place.

An ancient car took up the middle of the interior, a hunk of curvy metal, wide white wall tires, a steering wheel you could crack a tooth on, solid. It was bathed in a light worthy of an operating room that made the hood ornament, a winged woman in flight, gleam in blinding glory. Patti picked up a chamois rag to rub the chrome bumper and grille with all the attention of a loving parent.

“That’s a 1955 Nash Rambler Cross Country wagon,” June said to Shaw, knowingly. “Six-cylinder.”

“Ugly. Isn’t she?” Patti continued buffing. The metal shone mirror bright. “She really did go cross country. Twice. Might be able to do it again. I wouldn’t be surprised.” She patted the car like it was a horse, or a dog, an old friend that has served well. “Of course, for every day, I putter around in the Civic,” she gave the other car a look that said it was no comparison.

The shelves were organized. Shaw read the names of the metal cans and jugs, names that remined him of his dad: Motorola. Valvoline. Carnauba Wax. Penzoil. He half listened as Patti went through the events of last night, answering June’s questions, the same things he’d gone over and over so often he could recite them like a litany, ending with the two of them there on the patio, but something, something he had almost forgotten. “Ms. Andrews, do you remember? Last night? Did you hear anything like footsteps? Like someone running across the lawn? There was a shadow or something?”

She paused and considered, rag still in hand. “Hmmm. Now that you bring it to mind. I think that’s right. I think so.”

June clapped her hands. “There. Now we’re getting somewhere. Someone could have been there. Someone else! It’s at least a possibility.”

“It was confusing,” Shaw said. “I thought I imagined it, there was so much to take in, and the dog barking—”

“Dog barking? Where is old Rags, anyway?” asked June, wary, she did not like dogs as a rule, they were always sniffing where they shouldn’t.

No answer.

“She’s usually glued to your hip.”

“That she was.”

“Patti, dear? Are you OK?”

Patti leaned against the hood of the wagon and for a moment it looked like she was about to cry, something so strange on that stoic granite face. Shaw and June exchanged a concerned glance, and then at the shovel hanging on the wall still coated with dirt.

“Stupid thing,” she rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, “must’ve gotten into something last night in the middle of everything else. You know how dogs are.”

Shaw had never been so happy to see the Rose Hill Apartment Building, every cell in his body felt fried, in need of sleep. He waved as June zipped off in her sturdy Subaru, but he didn’t know if he had the energy to walk the dozen or so steps from the curb. Only the promise of bed prodded his body forward.  He couldn’t think, didn’t want to think. The whole thing with Patti was—he couldn’t come up with the word—it didn’t matter, except that maybe she’d heard it too, that someone else was there in Rhetta’s backyard last night, maybe it wasn’t Peter. He desperately needed to believe that.

At the door his nose wrinkled with the distinct yellow tang of cigarette smoke. Unmistakable. Now he was having sensory hallucinations, Shaw worried, his years in nursing told him this was the first sign of cognitive slippage, it was happening, dementia was creeping over him, this was the beginning of the long gray twilight. Dotage. Old Timer’s, his mom had called it, before she wandered away further and further, and suddenly forever gone. His odds of it were just that much higher, this much was simple science and genetics, and it scared him to death to think about. The more rational part of his brain interjected that he was just as likely suffering from sleep deprivation, and the incredible stress of current events. Sleep. That’s what he needed.

Something else though.

The apartment wasn’t empty.

Someone was inside.

Someone was here.

This was no blip in mentation, he was positive. He didn’t think a burglar would take a smoke break in the middle of a heist, but what did he know about burglars? Next to nothing. He grabbed an umbrella from its stand, he needed something, anything, he might use to defend himself. From the narrow hall he barreled into the living room, brandishing his weapon in front of him.

“Is it raining indoors?” Peter Kaye said from the usual armchair he assumed whenever he visited. Peter Kaye sat there with that infuriating smirk, smoke curling around his round face. Peter Kaye was sitting and smoking and smirking. 

“You know I hate it when you smoke,” was the first thing Shaw said. And then he collapsed on his couch. “Am I dreaming? Did I finally snap? What—”

“I used my key. I hope you don’t mind. I wanted to call you, but then I thought a surprise might be more fun.”

* * *

Caroline and Joseph came up craps, again.

Back to the car.

Caroline needed a fucking drink.

Her passenger didn’t say a word when she pulled in front of the Abbey. “Let me buy you an Aperol Spritz.” She said. He liked the sweet stuff. Her drink these days was something hard and brown that burned and did the job quick. “I’m beat. Chasing a murderer is thirsty work. What do you say?”

“We are not quitting,” he said.

“No. Just a teeny tiny little break.

“Just one?” he asked.

“Sure. Yeah. Let’s go.

He gave her the stern eye.

“I promise,” she said. “One.”

They were deep into their second round. Joseph was starting to droop, but Caroline was bright as a field of daisies. The frustration of the day evaporated, and in its place a warmth flowed through her, made her giggle.

“What is so funny?” Joseph looked up from his notebook, he was starting a list of suspects. He felt their investigation up until now had lacked vision. He wanted to recap.

“You. You and your lists. You and your spreadsheets.”

There are two kinds of writers, it is said: “plotters” who outline and work out the mechanics of their stories; and “pansters,” so called because they fly by the seat of their pants, guided by inspiration and intuitive processes only understood by themselves. Joseph, no surprise, was the former. His notebooks were full of meticulous, detailed narrative elements. Character biographies, backstories, motivations, plot points all written out in his neat block writing. She knew him to be a Virgo, so there you go. Fastidious. Always kempt. Tidy. Shirts ironed and buttoned up. Caroline had her own kind of system involving random post it notes, crumpled napkins with scribbles she’d find in her pockets, her phone rife with cryptic notations. As to dress, she drew from a pile of cleanish laundry that lived and died on her bedroom floor.

“Having a method is not a bad thing,” he said, his breath thick with Aperol. “Especially now, if we are hoping to solve this. Will you help me, or not?”

She drained her bourbon and signaled the bartender for another round, ignoring Joseph’s well-groomed raised eyebrow. “Fine.”

“Mr. Kaye is the first suspect, but we agree he could not have done it.”

“Check.”

“Sylvia, Debra, also have very strong alibis which eliminates them.”

They had hiked down to Sylvia’s who predictably had nothing to say. Sylvia Berry was the one person in workshop who never offered a word of useful critique other than she liked something, or she didn’t like it. The worst. Pretty meek as a writer, wouldn’t venture out of safe tropes and cozy mysteries neatly pieced together. She didn’t kill Rhetta. She was in Providence overnight seeing her sister recovering after hip surgery, just got back on the Acela which might make an interesting place for a killing, she told them. Murder on the Boston Express. Very original.

It wasn’t Sylvia.

Ditto Debra. They went to see her, or they tried to, but she was down after testing positive yesterday and it was clear she hadn’t moved from her bed in the last 24 hours.

“Check and check,” Caroline confirmed.

“Then there is ourselves.”

“It just got interesting,” she laughed.

“Be serious, for one time” but he was laughing too. “Let us do this properly.”

“So, where were you last night?” she poked him in the chest. She sometimes got a little handsy when she drank. She watched as he added his own name to the list, each letter exactly of the same proportion, so neat and orderly, which might be a red flag. Who knows what sociopathy this signaled?

JOSEPH

He put down his pen, parallel to the pad, and smiled. “I was entertaining a guest,” he said, the closest he’d ever gotten to saying anything regarding what he always termed his “personal life.” He would sit through any of her stories about the parade of sad sacks who lumbered in and out of her “personal life,” but was as a rule absolutely mum about himself.

She had begun to think he was a prude, or some kind of monk, and now she looked at him with renewed appreciation. “You dirty bird,” she said. “Tell me every detail.”

He shook his head. “Suffice it to say I can produce receipts, if necessary.”

“No fair. I tell you everything.”

“Yes. You do.”

“Well!” she gasped like a daytime TV diva, making them both hoot.

“Now, what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Where were you last night?” He wrote her name on the list.

CAROLINE

She took a healthy swig of her fresh drink, felt it warming her gullet. There was no answer to his question.

“No. Again?” he asked.

Her hand gripped the heavy glass.

“Again?”

“The sun went out,” she said, “I don’t remember after that. But I’m sure I didn’t have the wherewithal to kill anybody.

“Besides perhaps yourself.”

She sucked down her drink.

“Merde.”

“You can cross me off your little roster. I was blissfully comatose.”

“Why, though? You were doing better–“

“Not having this conversation,” she said, “stick to your list.”

He gave her that look she was dreading. He really did have beautiful eyes, but they could be uncomfortably steady when they looked at you in that way. She knew he wouldn’t think any less of her than she felt herself. If only he wouldn’t look at her with such intensity. It was too much.

She said: “I’m sorry.” The two words were puny, insignificant. Meaningless. But not to him. To him, to Joseph, she meant it. Every time.

Eventually, he nodded, and ran his hand over the page, smoothing it down, laying it flat. He picked up his pen, added a name to the list.

MR. BROWN

“The husband,” he said.

“Why him?” she breathed again, relief crawled its way back into her belly to have his attention move on from herself.

“It may be cliché,” he said, “but it is often the husband who does the killing.”

“Imagine being married to Rhetta Brown,” she said, and they both laughed again, but it was just a little less bright. A little less happy. And they did not look each other in the eye.

Eunice Linden regarded her hands which still held onto the steering wheel even though she had been parked in the lot of the police station for ten minutes. She had rather good hands. She took care of them, of course. Lots of creams. And those well-tipped girls at the nail salon. No age spots. No spreading of the joints other women her age had, those athletic Smith gals who were always playing tennis and golf. She’d never had to have her rings re-sized, like Helen Forest had to do.

Her rings.

The five carat marquise cut engagement rock, its matching platinum band of diamonds.

A significant sapphire sparkled on her right ring finger, an anniversary gift from Chip. That one she slipped on just before she left the house. She needed a talisman, something to remind her if she should again waver from her express purpose:

There was just no way she was going to leave her life and all it bought, to be with someone who couldn’t afford her.

If she were to appraise the worth of herself, right this minute, the bracelets, the earrings, the bespoke bag and shoes and soft knit jersey silk wrap dress, the hours spent on hair and makeup and training sessions, if she added up all that it cost to be her, she’d have to admit that she was an expensive lady, and that sum would be something quite northward of what Jeff Brown could ever hope to have. She did not feel the least bit mercenary. One has to look at things rationally, with cold logic and reason.

Maybe her joie de vivre had gotten in the way briefly, but it was foolhardy to be guided by a passing flame. Jeffery remained the front runner among suspects in Rhetta’s death by virtue of being a husband in love with someone else. Poor Jeff. He had been so susceptible, letting his ardor reach the inconvenient sticky stage. She had cared for him, in her way, but the itch was scratched. This current situation might be an expedient full stop to their dalliance, as fun as it was.

There was plenty of evidence she could give. He had told her how much he hated Rhetta, how much he wanted to be free of her, how she kept him like a pet dog; Eunice Linden could say any number of things. With one last look at herself in the rearview she checked her lipstick and ran one of those lovely hands through her hair. She practiced looking sincere. Eyes clear. Gaze steady. Time to tell her story.

* * *

“Did you escape?” Shaw could not imagine his friend overpowering a precinct of police, but he had never imagined that he might be capable of killing anyone either.

Peter laughed with his whole body, from his belly. “Oh I do love you, Arthur Shaw. I needed that,” he was still laughing, “it been quite an unusual day.”

Shaw nodded. It certainly had been. “You didn’t—-?”

“Of course I didn’t,” Peter stubbed out his cigarette on a tea saucer he was using as a makeshift ashtray. “Frankly, I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. A point we can re-visit another time over a cocktail. You’ve known me longer than anyone. Did you really wonder?” Peter was clearly enjoying the situation, his friend’s confusion, the very idea that he might have—

“Then what did happen? How are you here?”

“It became apparent to the police that I wasn’t their man. At least they don’t jump to conclusions without evidence.”

“What evidence?”

“Well, the good lady did not die from being bludgeoned. There was no indication of that kind of blunt force trauma at all. She was dead hours before we even got there. The medical examiner on the scene said something about her esophagus being burned. They don’t know yet what poison it was, but it did the trick effectively.”

“But all that blood, the stick—”

“Think about it: she ingests poison, at some point when she feels the effects she jumps up,” and here Peter clutched at his throat in dramatic replay of the way he saw it happen, “She teeters, she falls or trips. Hits her head bang on the hard stones. You know how head injuries bleed like hell.”

Shaw nodded. That was true.

“I have to say, I feel sorry for her. Such a terrible way to die. Brutal. Someone had to have really hated her. It’s sad to contemplate.”

“I had this image of you in my head. It was. I—”

“From the very beginning that stupid stick was just a prop. Picking it up, well that was sheer stupidity on my part. I don’t know what I was thinking. I must have looked like a villain when you came on the scene,” he laughed again but when he saw the look of anguish on his friend’s face, he got more serious. “I’m sorry Arthur. That you had to go through that. Look at you. I’ve never seen you so hangdog before. I will admit that scar you’ll have will be very butch, but that too is another conversation for another day.  You’re exhausted. It’s OK now, I’m here. It’s going to be fine.”

All Shaw could do was nod. Verbal ability was flown away as the irresistible desire to close his eyes came over him.

“I’m happy to see you, Arthur. But it’s time you went to bed. We’ve all had a long day. There’s plenty of time to compare notes.”

Shaw’s outstretched body had already gone slack, his mouth open wide.

Peter, all tenderness and care, covered Arthur with a throw.

“You’re not going away again?” Shaw mumbled, emerging for a moment from the soft fog.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Peter soothed, “I’ll be sitting right here with a book while you rest.”

Shaw smiled. “I want–” but he forgot what he wanted as he slipped mercifully, finally, into the depths of sleep.

iii

A Death in the Afternoon

“Poison?!” June Jablonski said. “Poison? This changes everything!” She was sitting with Peter Kaye and a refreshed looking Arthur Shaw on a bench in the Commons. A nearby playground full of children gave the scene a more sinister feel, as though a conversation about a deed so dark amid such innocent noisy happiness was subversive, and she had made a conscious note to lower her voice, but still, she couldn’t hold back her utter surprise at the turn of events. The most important thing, obviously, was that Peter Kaye was free, safe from harm. She knew all along he wasn’t guilty of murder. She kept touching his arm to make sure he was real, and this was all really happening. He was, and it was. The new facts of the case were that Rhetta had been killed by poisoning, and the state of the body indicated she had been dead at least two hours before she was discovered on the patio. “This opens up a whole new set of possibilities,” she said.

Peter Kaye nodded. He felt the sun warm on his skin, the breeze, he heard the kids laughing at play, and allowed himself a smile of simple gratitude to be back in the little park again. “It certainly clarifies the timeline of the crime,” he said.

“You were on the phone with Rhetta at one o’clock, and we showed up there at 7 sharp,” said Shaw, “it happened sometime between one and five pm, if the coroner’s time of death is accurate.”

“So, what was the poison? How did it get into her?” June’s mind spun scenarios, but nothing clicked yet.

“It’ll be some weeks before the medical examiner will confirm, but from the preliminary observation it was caustic enough to burn her esophagus, that may narrow the field,” said Peter.

“Maybe ethylene glycol,” guessed Shaw, who had seen his share of poisonings in his years when he worked the emergency room. Gruesome. Inventive solutions for offing friends and loved ones. Mundane things used for murder.

“Ethylene glycol?” June asked, again trying to keep her voice down.

“It’s the chief ingredient in antifreeze,” Shaw said.

“Antifreeze. Anybody can get a hold of that. But how could they get her to drink it?” June felt that Rhetta was too smart to fall for a cheap trick.

“It reportedly has a very sweet taste,” said Shaw, “you might not notice it, It would depend on the dose, how much was ingested, before you felt its effects”

Peter shuddered. “How awful. The poor woman.”

They all sat quietly with the image of Rhetta’s last painful moments. No one deserved that.

Shaw broke the silence with a sudden memory of the shattered glass, reflexively he touched the area above his eye, “There was a pitcher,” he said, “the table. I knocked them over. The pitcher had something in it, something she was probably drinking. Someone could have put antifreeze in that.”

“That makes sense,” acknowledged Peter, “but I’m curious as to when. Assuming she was sitting on the patio, drinking something—”

“It was a warm day,” June interrupted, “maybe it was lemonade. Or iced tea.”

Peter gave her the briefest look that suggested the beverage itself was immaterial save as a conveyance for whatever agent that killed Rhetta. “I was going to interject the question: when might someone have slipped in poison without her knowing?”

“Perhaps she had to use the bathroom, or got up to make a snack?” June said, undaunted by askant looks from such an old dear as Mr. Kaye.

“Or she was called away,” said Shaw.

“I called her,” Peter said. “I called her at one o’clock, like you said Arthur, she went inside to answer the phone—”

“And someone with a jug of antifreeze came along?” June laughed, it seemed a little far-fetched someone would have been practically lying in wait, watching, waiting for a window of opportunity. Why? And more importantly, who?

* * *

Jeffery Brown nursed his coffee while he did the dishes in the sink, set the kitchen back to rights. He stepped out onto the patio where he swept up glass, returned the wicker table to its corner. The police had collected all they needed, and now there was nothing left to do but what he had always done, clean up a mess. 

For 10 minutes he blasted the hose on the flat stones, sending a black cloud of flies swarming off to hover nearby in wait only to swoop back in for another taste, constantly dodging the spray of water. It was no use. The blood had seeped into the porous surface. He shut off the spigot, took his time coiling the hose into a neat arrangement, took his time while he waited for the police to show up. Any minute, he expected to hear a knock at the door. His head ached. His stomach burned with acid and bitter coffee on an empty stomach.

He had watched Eunice walking away this morning through the back gate like she couldn’t get out of there fast enough. He didn’t call her back. Probably because he knew it was no use. When he saw her backing her E-350 out of her driveway and speeding off, he knew she was running to the cops to tell all about their affair, his lies, his motives for killing Rhetta.

Ironically, it was Rhetta’s doing that started the whole thing. She kept sending him next door to the Lindens with little notes and block-like banana breads begging for invitations to this and that, and after a while Eunice began to think Jeffery was a man who needed a little bringing out. Like one of her prize roses, he might do with a bit of pruning and coaxing into full flower. He just wanted a little attention. Eunice Linden was a very good gardener. Under Eunice’s husbandry he did bloom. For one brief Spring he had reached toward sunlight, felt something as close to love as he’d ever expected to find. He blossomed.

Rhetta couldn’t keep a cactus alive.

He had lived as her husband for two decades, slept in bed next to her for 7,300 nights, give or take. And now, in her absence, now that she was gone, just gone, like that, he honestly didn’t know how to feel besides an unexpected sense of relief. He was of that generation of men whose emotional interior had been stripped bare since boyhood, who found themselves at some points in their lives troubled by an emptiness that had no shape and no description. What saddened him now was that he didn’t feel sad, hadn’t cried, hadn’t wanted to think too deeply about any of it and so kept himself busy, yet there was this pesky vague idea that he should feel something, and he puzzled this out as he walked back into the darkened house.

As a young man, he considered going into the seminary, not because he had any deep faith in anything, but because he was searching for an answer to that well of hollowness he felt. When he met Rhetta, her overbrimming confidence and unquestioning sense of forward directed movement intrigued him. If he lacked a sense of purpose, Rhetta blazed ahead, and he found himself swept up in her orbit like a mote of dust in the tail of a comet. He came crashing back to earth soon enough. And now she was gone.

Eunice too. He allowed himself to think that maybe what they had would be for keeps, but it ended with the snick of the back gate latch when she left an hour ago. He saw his own folly. Too late.

In one day, he had lost two women.

It seemed unfair.

A leaden exhaustion came over him. He needed to wake up. Needed some clarity. Needed this pounding headache to go away. Jeffery noticed the little red light on the coffee maker still on. Despite nausea bubbling his insides, he poured the last of it into his mug, sweetened it up, sat back down at the kitchen table to think.

The house was quiet.

And cold.

The minutes ticked away on the wall clock. He swallowed down coffee, watched the minute hand sweeping around and around which made him dizzy and sick.

Coldness gripped his insides, colder and colder as he stumbled upstairs with heavy feet, a hand on the banister. His head throbbed with the racket the birds were making in the trees just outside the window. Sheer curtains muted the sunlight but still he flinched at the blazing whiteness of the bedsheets looming a few steps ahead. He didn’t take off his shoes. Rhetta would be furious with him he thought, as he crashed flat on his face.

Birds kept roaring, screaming in the treetops. But he didn’t hear a thing.  

* * *

Caroline watched Joseph make his way to his building’s entrance after she dropped him off, it’s the thing you do, you wait to make sure a person is safely delivered. He, as usual, turned and waved with his keys in his hands, he smiled, and went in. He acted no differently than he had on a hundred other afternoons, was just as serene and kind and thoughtful as always, and this for some reason felt even worse. If he yelled. Screamed. If he could, just once, show he was really angry. She understood anger. But this, this unyielding kindness made her feel more like a shit heel than any throw down combat ever could. She could defend herself against anger. She learned how. The difference here was that Joseph cared, really cared, about her, about what happened to her, whether she lived or died, and she could not just toss her life away like it didn’t matter anymore, couldn’t piss it away with drinking and pill popping and a lineup of loser guys without feeling like she was somehow hurting him.

When her phone rang it startled her, she wiped at her eyes with the long sleeve of her shirt and took a deep breath.

June.

“Caroline. I’m sitting here with Mr. Kaye. He didn’t do it. You were right. He’s free. He’s sitting right here, can you believe it?”

Now she let the tears come. “What happened? Is he OK?”

“He’s fine, he’ll tell you all about it himself tonight, we’re all invited to his place for dinner tonight, and he’ll tell us everything. I just wanted you and Joseph to know, so you can keep looking for the real killer,” June laughed, as if it was some game like a scavenger hunt. “But get this—Rhetta was poisoned. We think someone slipped antifreeze into her iced tea. Isn’t that horrible?”

“Antifreeze? In her tea? Who?”

“That’s just it, dear. Who, indeed?”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Certainly, dear—” and then June Jablonski disconnected the call, probably by hitting the wrong stupid button.

God damn.

Caroline went to hit redial when something Joseph had said occurred to her. The husband. Cliché or not, he did have the easiest access to Rhetta of anyone to poison her.

 Caroline had devoured true crime podcasts, watched Netflix plenty enough to support the theory of murderous marriages. An idea buzzed in her brain, persistent through the fog until it started to be clear that she could break this thing, she could go right over there and knock on the door and get Mr. Brown to confess. She could go right now and talk to the guy.

She rummaged in the glove box, pulled out nips of Fire Ball she kept for just such an occasion when she needed a jolt of confidence, had already downed one in the time it took to punch an address into a GPS and was working on its sibling when she did a U-turn on Mass Ave to head back in the opposite direction. 

* * *

Shaw and June were filling in Peter Kaye about the events of their morning.

“Patti Andrews confirmed she also heard someone out there in the backyard. I knew it had to be someone else, obviously, but when she said that it was the first full breath I took all day.”

Shaw nodded, but then thought about it,” That doesn’t really make sense though. I mean, now that we know Rhetta was likely dead by 5 p.m. or so, why would the killer have just hung around the back yard for two hours?”

“I don’t pretend to understand the mind of a psychopath, Mr. Shaw,” for clearly whoever had done the act had to have been crazy. That seemed obvious.

Peter Kaye wondered, too: “I don’t know if I agree our killer is someone deranged at all. It would have taken someone of great patience to wait out the right moment of opportunity, assuming that her drink had been poisoned, that speaks to a certain amount of pre-thought, premeditation, someone who had thought about it and seized the moment when it presented itself.”

“Don’t you have to be a little off the nut to kill someone? Doesn’t that stand to simple reason?” June didn’t like the idea a cold-blooded killer. She wanted there to be a certain amount of passion. When they’d all thought Rhetta had been clubbed to death, that made sense, it was an act of the moment, rage, fury, that appealed to her in a killer, someone pushed to the brink of insanity to do such a terrible thing. 

“What if they felt they were justified in the murder of Rhetta Brown? What if they felt she somehow deserved it?” Shaw asked.

“That would still be crazy,” insisted June, “what on earth could justify murder? Even of someone as universally unlikeable as that woman?” She had to wonder what Rhetta could possibly have done to get herself killed. There had to be a why.

Peter was willing to concede that under the ordinary definition of “crazy” someone had acted in an abhorrent manner, that was clear, but whatever motive they’d had, whatever rationale they had formed to do the thing itself, it seemed logical and reasonable to them, and he went down this esoteric path, pedantically explaining the underpinnings of subjective morality, to which June replied:

“Nuts.”

* * *

Patti Andrews heard the mail truck pull away. Probably just the bills, she figured as she wiped her hands on a clean cloth and looked in the mailbox. Writers’ magazines still came for Martha, and she just let them pile up, couldn’t haul them out with the recycling, not out of any sentimentality but from the habit of many years living with someone. Every few weeks another one came, and Patti added it to the pile by Martha’s reading chair, same as always. No bills today. No magazines. A store flyer with this week’s specials and coupons. A postcard advertising a local window cleaner and sons. And a large white envelope stamped by the office of the City Coroner and Medical Examiner.

After all these weeks of waiting.

She needed to steady her hand so she could open it, she wasn’t going to wait until she got inside or sat down, she tore it open right there at the end of her driveway and read it:

TOXICOLOGY REPORT OF MARTHA ANDREWS

Her eyes ran over the two-page report.

And then she read it through again.

Martha had the constitution of an ox. When she had started complaining about stomach pains and cramps, they thought nothing of it. Then she lost her appetite. Martha was one of those women who could tuck away food like no one’s business, ate like a Marine. Martha got sicker. Nauseous all the time. Terrible headaches. The doctors were less than useless. Patti watched her slip away a little more each day.

A suspicion tiptoed into Patti’s thoughts, becoming increasingly intrusive. It started when she read through Martha’s papers, her sister had been re-visioning fairy tales in modern times, and the story she left unfinished was about a witch who was killing her neighbors with sweets and treats she brought by. It was not a big leap to cast Rhetta Brown as the witch. She had visited, all concerned, all neighborly, every couple of days at the back door. A glowing hatred took hold of Patti, illuminating everything: Rhetta cozying up to Martha once they discovered they were both writers, mystery writers, and how they got to sharing their scribblings with each other, how Martha encouraged her, told her about workshops and classes, but Patti knew full well that the pest next door’s work was pure tripe, and that Martha had a genuine gift, always had. It stood to reason that Rhetta nursed a resentment toward the better writer. Maybe it wasn’t much to be a motive for murder, but not completely out of the question, either. She knew writers to be a touchy bunch. That Brown character was unbalanced, anyone could see that.

As the weeks passed, Patti had been able to convince herself she was right, over and over she ruminated on it until it seemed clear as anything—Rheta Brown had killed Martha.

When the coroner had asked about an autopsy and a toxicology report, of course she said yes because from the very beginning she smelled something off. This would dispute any doubt. This would be incontrovertible fact. In the meantime, Patti would watch. And wait.

And now she held in her hands the coroner’s report. There was nothing. Nothing in Martha’s system. No poison.

Nothing.

The cause of death remained “Natural Causes.”

She was wrong.

Had been wrong. The whole time. She had leapt to conclusions, believed in a complete fabrication of her own mind. Patti felt all the air escape her lungs. A bell clanged in her head as the full reality of the truth rang through her. She had convicted Rhetta Brown of the crime in her heart and hated the woman with every cell of her body.

The two pages, the torn envelop, the store circular and the postcard, fell from her hands and fluttered down to the ground silently. She headed toward the stable, her old boots shuffled on the dusty driveway as she dragged shut the heavy doors behind her. Alone in the darkness, she went up to the wagon, touched it with the tips of her fingers lovingly, a caress that remembered long days on endless stretches of road, windows open, radio blaring. Happy times. Inside, she pulled the door, heard the solid thunk as it closed. She sat behind the wheel, turned the key in the ignition. With a satisfied sigh she leaned into the leather upholstery, the engine tuned over with a soft rumble and a roar. The chrome exhaust pipe rattled as smoke plumed out, thick smoke that hung like a haze in the air.

* * *

Caroline flew through the red light, cutting off two bicyclists and a kid on an electric scooter who told her to get bent. She told him to get bent right back. But it wasn’t fun and games; if she got stopped by the cops she’d be screwed. Three strikes, you’re done. So she gunned out of there. The Square was poorly designed to accommodate traffic now that they added the bike lane to the already narrow network of roads, but she was emboldened.

She had just made the turn into the residential neighborhood, gave a little outlaw whoop, when she heard sirens behind her.

Fuck.

She scrambled through the detritus around her for gum, a mint, something, willing herself to be sober enough to charm her way out of trouble and knowing it was probably a lost cause. Blue lights flashed in her rearview. The sirens got louder. She dutifully pulled over in the shade of an ancient tree, rolled down her window the rest of the way. She breathed into her hand to gauge just how bad her breath was. Fuck.

Caroline was not a praying woman, but in moments of dire consequences of her ill-fated choices, which were many, she did have a mantra which she repeated now, her eyes closed tight and her voice barely a whisper: Holy shit Please Please PLEASE holy shit holy shit I’m fucked please please I promise oh please

The speeding cruiser with its lights flashing passed her. And kept going. Then another whooshed by. When she opened her eyes, she saw an ambulance fast approaching, and further away, the shriek of a fire truck could be heard over the pounding of her heart in her chest.

For the second time in less than 24 hours, neighbors came to their doors and windows to watch something unfolding in their midst as the house at 217 was buzzing with activity. Caroline peered through the pollen coated windshield. A team of paramedics carried a stretcher. A body hastily covered in a white sheet. A man’s shoe, careworn and scuffed, poked out as the crew jostled into the back of the idling ambulance.

* * *

Jeffery Brown was dead.

iv

Who Killed Rhetta Brown?

The car hugs the curving road as it snakes its way down from the beach. A snow fell during the long night, but the morning is silent, everything blazes white and still. Even the gulls seem frozen in flight overhead. The road dips for a stretch, a thin ribbon to skate along under arching tree limbs heavy with snow.

“Be careful,” Martha says, laughing.

Martha. Has she been here this whole time?

“Of course,” her sister says, “Don’t ask silly questions. Just watch the road.”

Patti feels like she just woke up from a dream, or maybe this is the dream, but no. She feels the steering wheel, the cold seeping through her old gloves, she can feel the tires gripping for purchase on the slick downslope. Along the sides of the road, she can see clearly ice forming on the tips of beach grasses glistening with the brightness of tears.

Where are we going? she wonders.

“There’s one road. Just stay put” Martha reaches over and flicks on the radio, she rolls down her window to let in a blast that blows her hair around, air that smells of the ocean.

She sings the words of the song, screams them into the wind. “Don’t you remember? It used to be your favorite.”

Oh my god. Yes. This song. Patti sings with her, the two of them laughing and singing, she remembers every word. The cold stings her face, pierces her lungs when she takes a deep breath to belt out the refrain, so loud a blue heron standing in the black reeds in the brackish moors flaps off and away over the horizon, but still their voices rise up and up.

When the song is over, a stillness comes over them. On the right, the low dunes stretch away, on and on to the sea, sand dunes shaped by the constant sighing wind. They hurtle forward, the hood of the car vibrates, the chrome lady flies through the crystalline morning.

“Slow down,” Martha says, “you don’t want to miss the best part.”

Ahead, out on Land’s End, the old lighthouse comes into view like a mirage floating on the sand, and Patti realizes she needs to tell her sister now, before they go any further, before they get to the end. She must explain everything to Martha.

Martha puts a finger in front of her lips. “No need,” she says. “I know.”

Caroline collapsed with exhaustion onto the driveway as the paramedics took over getting Patti Andrews to put on an oxygen mask. The old woman batted them away.

“Leave me be!” Patti pulled the apparatus off her face. “Let me alone!”

For someone who was practically blue with death a few minutes ago, the woman had come back from the maw of oblivion with a vengeance. She was pissed.

Caroline had seen smoke coming from under the garage doors. The house she immediately recognized, she had driven Martha home from workshop many nights over the years, she jumped out of her car before she even had the chance to think about it. “Hey!” she yelled to the crew next door, who had just put Jefferey Brown’s lifeless body into the back of a waiting ambulance. “Hey! Somebody help!” She was miserably out of shape, she realized it the moment she tried running the few feet from the car and was panting when she dragged the heavy door open to have heavy smoke pouring out that burned the back of her throat, making her cough and her eyes tear up. She was able to make out the shape of the car, see the body slumped in the driver’s seat. She half carried, half dragged the unconscious woman out of the garage just as two uniforms rushed up the driveway.

She rolled over onto her side, still coughing, her heart banging against her rib cage. She heard one of the cops who had come with the medics squawk into his radio that another house on the street needed assist, in addition to the body found at number 217, there was another next door, a victim of possible suicide attempt, an elderly female who was being revived on the scene and may need a psych eval.

Patti had tried to kill herself. Jefferey Brown was dead. What was going on?

The cop muttered to his partner when he signed off his radio call that the neighbors were really getting an eyeful, it’s not every day there’s this much activity on a street like this. Caroline saw folks gawking from their lawns, sitting at windows with curtains discreetly held open, everyone abuzz over the turn of events in the neighborhood that was so Conservative, some of the older houses still had British flags displayed. Nothing was supposed to disturb the peace here, and it is almost certain that in some of these dark parlors behind damask draperies more than a few suggested in quiet voices that this is what happens when you let people like the Browns, people like Rhetta, elbow their way in. There was one old bag pretending to be watering  rhododendrons, who couldn’t keep eyes off the scene at the Andrews’ place, and it gave Caroline an inordinate amount of satisfaction to see the prune face crumple when she gave the lady the classic double bird. “Viva la Revolution!” Caroline laughed which hurt her lungs a little, but part of her knew she was no better than all the other voyeurs who get a giddy high around murder, who find an odd sense of comfort in the terrible things that happen to other people. She lived on True Crime and murder. it was too much to think about right now though.

Meanwhile, Patti Andrews was still kicking up a fuss. They had to hold her hands down to keep her from swatting the guys trying to help her breathe, until one of them finally said, “If she can yell at us, she can breathe. Let the cops and the doctors figure it out. We’ll be on standby if they need us,” and they hung back and let the old gal do her thing, which was cussing them all out, including Caroline, who had no business interfering, Patti was an American citizen, she paid her taxes and then some, she voted regularly and was on time with her bills, who had a better right to decide whether or not their life had played out its usefulness? She was alone in the world and she had every right to assert control over her own body as she was hurting no one, a point of philosophy not currently embraced in the law and so the cops were having none of it, the one who seemed to be the lead officer said to her bluntly: “Listen, this young lady saved your life,” he pointed over at Caroline’s slack body, “not everybody takes the time, not everybody cares about other people to do what she did for you. You should be kissing her ass. She’s a hero.”

Caroline didn’t know about that, but something in her chest rose up she had never felt before, and she tried to figure it out as she lied there still laughing like an idiot.

* * *

When Peter Kaye heard about this all, he confided to Shaw what he had secretly kept in his heart: if he were allowed to have a favorite, which of course he wasn’t saying anything like that, but if he were, he’d have to confess that Caroline was it. “She has real substance.” Of course, he kept his voice low enough that June in the next room wouldn’t overhear. June had aways assumed that she was his favorite, and sometimes it’s best to let things go.

June had been on the phone ever since she got the first call from Debra, who had a police scanner she was addicted to, and since she’d been laid up with COVID all weekend she had no other entertainment but to listen to the comings and goings of law enforcement, and she was the first to break the story about Rhetta’s husband being found dead, and Patti Andrews found nearly dead, and who should have been on the scene but their own Caroline. June allowed herself a pang of envy that it was not herself who had the fortuitous luck to be where the action was, when she had just been there only hours before. She even chastised herself for not sensing Patti’s apparent distress, but how can you know what someone is thinking? How can you know when someone is at that brink? It was a sobering thought to have as she jotted down the main points she gleaned from her various phone calls. She talked loudly on the phone, the other two could easily hear her through the wall.

It was Shaw who finally asked, “So am I the only one who feels worse confused now than ever?”

There were more questions than answers:

How did Jeffery die? And why? Did he kill himself out of guilt because he had killed Rhetta? Did someone else kill him? And if so, were they also the one who killed Rhetta?

Why had Patti tried to kill herself? Did she have something to do with Rhetta’s death?

Peter waved away the interrogative, he had no solid idea and this upset him.

The two men were in Peter’s snug dining room setting the table for the evening’s dinner party which was intended to bring the workshop writers together, to synthesize their theories about the murder of Rhetta Brown. When it was planned earlier this afternoon there was a hint of hubris which by now with evening fast approaching had completely evaporated as the new information didn’t make any sense. The fact of murder had taken on weight. It was no longer a parlor game to be played over wine and nibbles. What are you supposed to serve after two and a half deaths? But still they set the table.

Peter sighed.

Shaw could tell his friend was distracted because he did not re-set every article of cutlery Shaw had laid down, he didn’t straighten the knives or smooth down the napkins, or make those clucking sounds every couple of seconds. He was listening to June in the next room, his brow creased with thought.

Shaw was glad at least he wasn’t the only one at sea. 

When June stood in the doorway with her mouth still open both men stopped what they were doing and looked up.

“You aren’t going to believe this,” she said, pocketing her phone for the moment. “I just got finished with Joseph.”

“Joseph? Is he OK?” Peter was starting to fear everyone he knew was somehow vulnerable.

“He’s fine,” June waved her hand as if to dispel anything more unpleasant on this day of unpleasantness, “I had to let him know about Caroline, and of course he called her a hero too, like everybody, but then he told me the most interesting thing.”

“Now would be an excellent time to tell us,” Peter sniffed.

She ignored his snark, she always did. “For starters, we were completely wrong about the poison, and how it got in the mix.” June was enjoying her moment. “It wasn’t antifreeze,” she said. “It was something else, another common everyday thing, right there in plain sight.”

“And how does Joseph come by this information?” Peter asked.

“Joseph’s got himself a new fellow, it’s about time if you ask me.”

Peter nodded, they agreed Joseph was a lovely man who deserved the best.

“Mazel tov,” he said.

“Guess what?  The beau is an officer right here in our precinct, and he’s has been on the scene all day pretty much. He even got a statement which blew up the whole thing.”

“Something that was in plain sight?” Shaw was intrigued about the poison. He had been teasing the how in his mind, wondering how poison got into Rhetta.

“I’m getting to that,” June nodded, still savoring having a starring role in the drama, “like is said Joseph’s young man got a statement himself, someone walked into the department. It wasn’t antifreeze at all.”

“No?” Peter asked.

“It was weed killer.”

“Weed killer?” Shaw hadn’t heard of that one before.

“Yup,” June could barely contain herself. “It was in the sugar bowl.”

* * *

Eunice Linden did not like being kept waiting. She had been sitting here for quite some time, the chair was uncomfortable and the cramped interview room was kept far too cold. She’d had a lovely chat with a handsome young officer, a green sapling of a lad, who was not the least receptive to her charms. She’d smiled at him, gave him the head tilt, she talked in that hesitant voice she had cultivated in her long career dealing with men. This one was all business. Professional. But still. He just took down her statement, asked a few perfunctory questions, and excused himself to leave to go talk to his chief.  She reached in her purse for a the little compact and checked herself in the mirror. Perfect. For a moment she felt that unwelcome chilling worry that she wasn’t getting any younger, maybe she was losing her edge. But clearly that wasn’t the case. She shut the compact with a definitive snap and tossed it back into the Birkin. A glance at her wrist told her Handsome had been gone now for 23 minutes. Unacceptable. She was sure she’d be speaking to someone about this, the chief or whoever runs things in this roach trap.

 What could the guy be doing, anyway? She could recall everything she had told him, she’d rehearsed it enough times in the car:

Jefferey had been acting very strange lately, he was worried about money, he was always worried about money, and Rhetta was worse than a thorn in his side. She told the officer all about their affair, mindful of looking up through her wispy bangs to give him an understanding of her vulnerability. Eunice was sure to emphasize how it was largely her pity for poor Jeffery that lead her to offer him comfort and solace, she was one of those people who was such an empath others were naturally drawn to her seeking compassion.

The officer took a lot of notes at that part.

Then she let her voice waver, just a little, she did this by constricting her throat ever so slightly when she told all about how Jefferey had killed Rhetta, how he’d been plotting it for weeks, months, how she wished she could have talked him out of it, she had tried, she really had tried, and then for a little while he seemed to drop it so she thought the whole crazy mania had passed, but last night when she heard that Rhetta had been killed, well she knew he must have done it, and of course it was her duty to tell the police.

She smiled at the young man.

She told the officer about the sugar bowl full of poison, and how it was just sitting there waiting for Rhetta to come along, it was something Jeff talked about doing. Why not put weed killer in with the sugar, and let nature take its course, Jefferey had said it just like that, she made sure the officer took the quote down.

How awful. Poor Rhetta. Eunice didn’t have a tissue handy which wasn’t a problem since no actual tears came, still she accepted with a gentle thank you the one Handsome handed her and she did the delicate dabbing of her dry eyes.

She regained herself enough to go on, after a tiny sip of water from the bottle he’d kindly given her earlier. Had she thanked him for it? She had, the young man assured her. She confided that she was worried that Jefferey might do something, something out of desperation, he might harm himself out of guilt or shame.  Hadn’t she gone over to check on him, like any caring, compassionate neighbor might do? He was a prickly, on edge. Everything he did just confirmed her suspicions, but she was cool, she was very cool she could attest, and she acted as though nothing had changed. She even made him coffee. Served it to him with her own hands.

And here the officer asked her one of his pointless questions: how did Mr Brown take his coffee? She told him that Jeffery had a terrible sweet tooth, but she was always on a diet, she said, shrugging off the vigorous sacrifices she was willing to make.

And then another question: what do you do, Mrs. Linden?

That made her laugh. Where was he coming up with these unnecessary digressions?  Whatever. She didn’t mind a chance to talk about herself so, what the hell. She reminded him that she was so very empathic, evidenced by her numerous charities and support of the arts, her board memberships, the money she’s raised for this and that, and she belonged to a dozen clubs, perhaps he knew her work with the Cambridge Gardner’s Club, and how her Juliet roses had won prizes? He hadn’t, but he did seem interested in gardening, and asked her about how she took care of roses, and she made a point to let him know that even though she could, she never trusted a gardener with her beauties, did everything herself. She was proud, she wasn’t ashamed to acknowledge. Her life had always been devoted to bringing more beauty into the world, and wasn’t that really the most worthy calling?

And that’s when he left. Took his notepad and his stubby pencil and his gorgeous self out of the interview room.

27 minutes ago.

When she finally heard someone at the door, she set her shoulders to best convey her displeasure about being kept here like this for no reason. Her face was arranged to say she was annoyed. But willing to be placated.

It didn’t matter, for as soon as the door opened all expression drained from underneath her flawlessly applied make up. Handsome stood there, but he wasn’t alone. There were three uniformed police officers behind him. One held a pair of handcuffs.

Eunice bolted up out of her chair. “What’s this?” she demanded.

“I’m very sorry Mrs. Linden, but I’m placing you in custody,” he said.

“This must be some mistake,” she was genuinely confused—hadn’t she laid out the case against Jeffery? Hadn’t she spent the last hour assuring the young man how her ex-lover had felt about his wife, hadn’t she let him know she was almost certain Jefferey could even now be harming himself out of a terrible sense of guilt? She ran through in her mind her statement, she had been letter perfect, exactly as planned, not a misspoken word, not a wasted gesture.

He was unmoved by her distress. “I am placing you in custody under the suspicion of the deaths of Rhetta Brown, and Jefferey Brown.”

Jeffery was dead then.

It was done.

Instead of the relief she expected, a deep pit of horror opened up. Jeff was really gone. It was hard to breathe. She had done it. She had been on the verge of getting away with it. But something didn’t feel right. It came to her. She had made a mistake. A fatal misstep. She slipped when she told Handsome about the sugar bowl full of poison, how she had put it in Jeff’s coffee. She had basically confessed, and he heard it. She knew about the weed killer because she had put it there.

I killed him.

I wanted him dead, and now he is.

She could almost feel herself falling into that pit, giving in to the gravity, the tenacious pull downward into the maw of her fears.

No. She willed herself to visualize side stepping the mess, she knew there had to be a way not to fall.

There were mitigating facts, as she saw it.

Jefferey would have blown up her life. She could have lost it all because of him, if he went to Chip to tell him everything like he promised he’d do, if everyone were to find out about her and Jeff Brown. She was, in effect, protecting herself, protecting her family, protecting the community and the greater public from heartache and scandal. If Jefferey were suddenly to just be gone, the thorny problem was solved.

Stupid Rhetta.  So apt that she should barge her way into poison intended for weeds. Her death was a silly accident, collateral damage, and morally Eunice did not feel responsible for that one. She had never intended to kill the wife. Only Jeff.  They couldn’t pin Rhetta on her, she was almost sure. If Rhetta was unlucky enough to stumble into the sugar bowl, that was fate, and this glimmer of rationalization gave Eunice just enough air to breath again.

She was Eunice Linden.

That still meant something.

“You have the right to an attorney…” Handsome was saying.

The best attorney, Eunice thought. She could pay for the best attorney on the planet. She could walk away from all of this. Her life could go on.

As the man recited her rights, she heard in his voice a deference, and she smiled up at him. He was beautiful. She watched him with eyes softly glowing, she watched his lips like he was a lover reading a Marlowe sonnet, and they stood not in a gray windowless cold box, but in a garden full of flowers in pink bloom.

* * *

The dinner went off as planned. Peter ordered from the Armenian market, so there were fragrant plates and bowls covering the round table where his guests were assembled. There sat Shaw, of course, who even put on a new sweater, and combed his hair.  Next, June Jablonski, who was fielding phone calls the whole time. Then Joseph with his beaming smile and crisp white shirt. And Caroline.

“So, Peter said, pushing himself away from the table and resting his hands on his Buddha belly, “now that we’ve eaten a little and settled in, I was wondering if you all would indulge me. As writers, we know all about narrative, and character, but as mystery writers, a particular and perverse subspecies, we also know the mantra: motive, opportunity, and means.”

June interjected, “Obviously.”

To which Peter gave a raised eyebrow that said now really would be a good time to put down the phone, which she did, after one last longing look at a message that had just popped up.

“I was on the verge of saying,” Peter went on, “I would be very interested to hear from you all who you had thought killed Rhetta?”

An expectant titter went around the table. Everyone sat a little more upright in their seats.

“I’ll start,” the host said, which surprised no one. “Who else thought that the husband did it?”

Joseph raised his hand.

“Why?” asked Peter. “Think: motive, opportunity, means. Also, consider. Motive itself can be parsed into convenient categories: Lust, Revenge, Greed. That’s the holy trinity in our religion.”

“Well,” Joseph began, “as to motive, I suppose in a marriage there may be jealousy, or money problems, maybe another lover.  I confess I did not know very much about Rhetta’s married life. I think I have a bias that the spouse is so often the one to do the harm. Occam’s Razor. The simplest answer is often the correct one.”

Peter nodded. “I share that bias, which is sadly borne out in fact. I thank you for your honesty. Now, what about opportunity? Means?”

“Who has more opportunity than the person living in the same house?” asked Joseph. “As to means. Once we learned it was poison, and not a clubbing, that does simplify the whole story. Any home has poison under the kitchen sink, in the medicine cabinet, any cupboard—”

“That’s right!” Shaw said, “That’s the thing that’s been on my mind. It scares the shit out of me. I mean, who do you trust?”

Everyone took a darting look at each other, followed by a nervous giggle.

June said, “Well, I would trust my life with any of you,” she said, nodding her head, “I mean it. You people are top notch in my book. I didn’t think it was the husband, though. To be truthful, which we are, obviously, I had an uneasy feeling about Patti. I don’t know why. Just a feeling. It was terrible, she is a friend I’ve known for a very long time. But I could have convinced myself Patti poisoned poor Rhetta.”

Shaw agreed. “Me too. I mean, I saw all kinds of hazardous materials in her garage. Maybe that’s what got me thinking about antifreeze. And that whole weirdness with her dog. I thought maybe the dog got into the poison she gave Rhetta. It made a kind of sense. She lived right next door. It wouldn’t be difficult to create an opportunity.”

“And she did try to kill herself,” added June, “we don’t know what motivated that. When I first heard it, I suspected she couldn’t bear the guilt of murdering Rhetta. But the Patti I knew, it just didn’t sit right. It makes me sad, obviously. It’s sad to think of anyone feeling that lonely, that alone. It must be terrible to be so bereft.”

Caroline nodded. She hadn’t said much all evening.

“Ah yes,” Peter said. “This brings me to my next thought.” He got up on his feet, always a laborious process with accompanying groans, holding his glass up, he looked directly at Caroline across the table.

 She tugged at her sleeves. Her face said she’d rather dive under the table than have everyone looking at her.

“Today, my dear girl, you showed such incredible sense of character, such strength.”

“I didn’t do anything that anyone else here wouldn’t have.”

 “You underestimate yourself. It’s not at all a given that everyone would have behaved as quickly or as selflessly. Do not diminish the fact. You saved someone’s life.”

Caroline shrugged. “I think you should ask Patti if that was a good thing, or not. She was kicking and screaming the whole time.”

“In any event, I am so very proud of you, I want to make the last toast of the evening in your honor.”

“Caroline, dear,” said June, “you haven’t had any wine tonight, would you like me to fill your glass for the toast?”

Caroline covered her clean glass with a napkin. “I’m actually good,” she smiled, and raised her water tumbler.

Joseph smiled, reached over to touch her arm. “I am so very proud of you, too,” he said.

“To Caroline!” said Peter, and they all clinked glasses and hugged each other.

Caroline, close to tears, said a quiet thank you.

Peter sat down again, with other noises and groans before he got comfortable again in his chair. “I have been thinking lately,” he said. “I’m getting older,” he waited for a burst of denials from the others, which never came. “I’m getting older,” he repeated, and I’ve been an instructor at the Center for a very long time.”

“And we love you,” said June, “don’t we?”

Everyone did.

“Lately, I’ve been considering that it’s too much for me on my own, I’ve been maybe phoning it in these last few years. What I mean to say is that I think the Center could use a fresh perspective and a new voice. I think the course could use a shot in the arm.”

June worried he might be talking about retiring for good. Thursday afternoons would not be the same, not without him at the front of the class where he belonged.

Joseph agreed.

Peter nodded his thanks, but went on. “Caroline,” he said, “I would very much encourage you to consider a simple proposition. For some time, I’ve thought how effective you would be, if you might agree to my plan. I mean to say, I would love if you would co-teach with me next term.”

“Caroline?!” June couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealously. Wasn’t she after all the most senior member of the group?

Caroline herself looked dubious.

Peter Kaye opened his hands, held out his palms, “If it’s something you’d like to do, if you like it, it’s yours. If you want it, it’s yours. I could pass the torch gladly if you were to take the class over. But be sure, this is my baby I’m handing you, my creation and my one true love, I would entrust it to no one else.”

The table erupted with applause. Except maybe June, who clapped but her heart wasn’t feeling it.

Caroline was wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “You fuckers. I hate you all.”

* * *

During dessert, a contented silence fell over the room, the circle of friends sat savoring the simple pleasures of being alive, full stomachs, being together, candlelight softening their faces with a warm glow.

Shaw had been thinking. “Do you think maybe we should be done with murders? Maybe just go back to normal life?”

“What do you mean?” said June, ready to argue.

“I propose that we never delve into the crimes of humanity again. No more murders!” and he held up his wine.

To which everyone playfully agreed, tinkling glasses together.

But not a single person sitting around the table meant it.



BIO

Norman Belanger is of that generation who survived Reagan, AIDS, and enough Cher comebacks to have earned the badges of a queer curmudgeon. His latest series of long short stories features two old queens who are dear friends that find themselves at the age of sixty wondering what the next chapter of life holds for them. Fate steps in and throws a few murders in their path. Norman has previously published short works from a series entitled Clean, about coming out and coming of age in the era of a plague. These works can be found in Hunger Mountain, Bull Magazine, Barren, Sibling Rivalry Press, and POZ.







MY LIFE BY DISNEY

by Dana Roeser

At twilight
when I was gathering 
         newly sprouted arugula
in the backyard garden, a cardinal
sang to me

from the high limb of 
         an ancient elm. It was a sweet
song
that I tried
         to answer. I apologized again
for Alice killing the robin

because the more I think of it
         the more I think she did
do in Laura. 
         A day after the murder
         I pulled up in my dirt-streaked Toyota

sobbing so hard 
         I soaked a box of Kleenex.
         I could hardly get up the steps.

Alice was inconvenienced, always
having to use the back door. Was she inconvenienced
         by my caring about the robin?

*   *  *

I will not, I cannot, 
         look in the nest 
             high up under the eave
         of my house.
The babes in the woods 
                clinging to each other
in the cushiony bed—frozen with their mouths open—
         their rubbery beaks—
         Or were they still perfect eggs—unhatched—
also frozen—
         b/c the mother left
against her will? 

I’ll never look at Alice the same. And truly I 
         don’t know she was the perpetrator.
The one time that I left her out
         when I pulled away. 
            I knew I’d be back in a couple hours.
I knew the weather was sunny 
            and hospitable.
Alice stared at me
from the end of the driveway

because she likes to go in when I’m out.
   But I was embarrassed
            being already seven minutes
late for Sarah, and I didn’t want
to open my car door,
                              disrupt the bird.

Immaturity is my humility—but that’s for another poem—or no poem.
         (Ask the cardinal.)

The bird calls are a relay, a transference. 
         They know each other
and they all have witnessed it. 
         The father, somewhere, witnessed.
That is the only explanation for the disappearance of
the dogged mother. 
         She sat on that nest, breast puffed, eyes bulging
         and inscrutable,
         her tail jutting out like a stick

through cold rain—she was under the eave, I watched her from
            little arched windows at
the top of the front door. It was ridiculous,
         the weather. 
            We had more than one night
at freezing. (I was busy then covering the
                   baby greens with bed clothes.)
The neighbor cats
            were not clued in, had no
territorial vendetta, though they, especially lithe Horace, may
         have been called in as accomplices.

Tonight. I had come from a twelve-step meeting
                   where people were kind.

I went to one at noon too—I said just who did I think I was?
         Mother-goose? A bird-whisperer? Yet,
         Beach, at Clay Knob Stable today, was also kind, 
            soft, grabbing for apple pieces with
                     his velvety, oversized lips—and disappointed,
I’m sure, that we didn’t get to do our after-
ride ritual (Christy turned him out
            for me) because I had to run

to the car before 4 p.m. to do a financial thing 
         on the phone, the stock market
         had supposedly rallied. 
         My ex-husband told me 
         today was a good day.
I have no income to speak of, as I am old.
         I am spending down the funds that came to me
                   in the divorce. I am almost five years 
         older than my former husband.
                   He still has a job. 
         Income from the part-time job I did have this semester,
according to my accountant,
         actually cost
                  me money. 
         Do the math.
         Weep.

How in the hell 
         did I mislay this man 
                   and my family?
Why can’t I visualize
         my Canadian boyfriend
when he is not here?
My dear Canadian boyfriend who actually said on
            Messenger this week: 
            If we break up (or words
         to that effect), if I have to get a girlfriend 
(online/yoga class/
         coffee shop, etc.) 
         because I can’t wait any longer
for us to be together,
         “I will always interact with you.”

Jesus Christ on a bright purple crutch!!!!

And then on my way home from my circuitous
         “self-care” travels today,
I realized our relationship

         was another victim 
         of my “magical thinking.” As durable 
as Sleeping Beauty 
         or Snow White—their chirping, carefully-colored birds
         and chipmunks—
bursting into song . . .

while Laura is 
         carefully extracting worms
from my little as-yet-untilled strip garden 
         between house 
                   and driveway 
under the nest—

the cat’s 
         going to get her
with lightning speed,

with sharp claws.



O HOLY WEEK, O HOLY SATURDAY


Black Saturday Jesus is in the tomb
            germinating and the people
across the street are rocking out
            to some kind of grinding repetitive
hip hop, interspersed with Bollywood.
            We are college students
We are going to be having a loud
            party this afternoon
and we deserve to enjoy college. So Jesus
            hung in his cocoon while
I burned a fire, opened all the windows,
            felt suicidal and went through
mountains of random bills catalogs manuscripts
            and papers and ultimately
raked through cat litter, took it out with garbage,
            recycling, and compost
all to the grinding neighborhood beat. Kept trying
            to figure out what they could
do to it. Not sex. Not work. Maybe shouting
            at each other at a party, clambering over
each other, dominating
            on their huge wooden oversized chair
in the back yard or in the ever-repeating
            hacky sack or foosball game.

                                    What is really the use of trying
            to win at divorce counseling
when you flunked marriage counseling
            and your ex-husband has a personality
disorder? Patti my beautiful, stoic
            Buddhist AA
sponsor tried to say.
            When you already lost
spectacularly.
            What is your expectation, I believe
she said. Also, maybe implicitly, well
            NVM implicitly. Let’s just say
Patti knows me, has known me. I’m surprised
            she speaks to me.

Jesus was still hatching while this evening I rolled
            my cart through Fresh Thyme. Some appearing-
families, endless sturdy children rolling
            in and out of carts;
the stringy-haired
            tender-looking Goth woman in
the soup aisle, the very thin wan blond
            woman with whom I conferred over the
sushi case. Only California Roll
            remained. She put hers back,
and, later,
            I did mine. Bland tonight
even worse tomorrow and what was I doing
            eating all that white rice. Couple other
random people. Somebody by the Medjool organic
            dates, I think. Maybe a couple near the
remains of the broccoli or bok choy. Produce
            waning. We were all convivial.
We were all flunking Easter.
            At every turn, the handle of my cart
was shocking me.

            After the checker saw the absurdly
expensive “natural,” with-the-shiny-foil
            packaging, Sierra-something,
couture cat food I bought
            and I told her how much better
my cats’ coats were, she and I
            went over her mini-labradoodle
stud’s diet and coat
            supplement. Apparently
his coat is bedraggled. He’s still picked
            up by the breeder twice a month
to do his thing, but it appears that
            it’s wearing him out—all
those different women—or that was
            my guess. I told her I wanted
a dog, which made us both
            happy, me b/c it would
get me out of the man thing.
            The loneliness thing.
All this while a line of people
            formed behind me and random
groceries were plowing
            forward on the belt.

                                                     Driving home
I thought about how sad Beach had seemed
            at the barn yesterday, grounded
in his stall with his hurt foot and the dear
            young person, who must be
home-schooled, far too innocent at age
            seventeen to be attending
any public high school even
            in rural Indiana.
Her fresh face in my face
            asking me all sorts of questions about
Beach, about patient, shark-faced Indy whom
            I’d ridden that day instead of Beach,
about posting the trot,
            and so on. And today
at Fresh Thyme
            the other young person maybe
the same age or a bit older
            going on about the mini-labradoodle
set up. They sort of lease the dog, foster
            him, whatever.

            In all seriousness, I think these
dear earnest young people are what
            Jesus is thinking about there
in the dark. They’re inheriting rampant
            porn, a frying earth, a parent-
and grandparent-killing pandemic. Oh,
            and a brutal war and genocide
on television. & that other thing.

            My raspberries at some point must’ve
gotten loose, were rolling all over the grocery
            bag apparently, because several
dropped into my yard when I got home
            and I just popped them all
in my mouth. All that abundance. All that
            freshness on the young
people’s faces.

            Jesus, think hard. Meditate hard.
As previously stated, I don’t know how
            Patti can stand me, and come to
think of it, I’m not sure she can. We talked
            about meditation. A woman she reads
who writes about Zen and the twelve steps.
            Irish formerly-Catholic Patti said “I hate Easter”
and I must say it was something of a relief.
            I’d neglected to say I’d wanted
to write to my hot convert friend
            up in Toledo
 and say Happy Easter,
            that I missed the big bonfire at my former church
in which we threw
            our palms from the week before;
our little candles lit, blown out,
            and re-lit in the dark sanctuary. The Litany of
the Saints, so beautiful, to which I’d sobbed every year—
            including three years ago—not two hours
before, in our living room, exhausted—
            I’d been to a student event
with my husband before the service—
            and the Vigil had lasted three and a half
hours—when my husband told me he was
            leaving me.

                                    The week after that I went back
            to Mass, not knowing where else
to take my outsized pain—it was packed
            and a woman next to me gave me
her handkerchief
            as my sobbing was getting messy—
and I was convinced it was a message
            from my dead father who always gave
me a hankie and whose clean, folded handkerchiefs
            looked just like hers.

I could hardly get out of the church after
            Mass or through the ensuing
days in which my husband vaguely confessed
            about two other women and precisely
set about organizing his move which happened
            ten days later.

                                    How many times had I stood
in that parking lot before that fire
            with my husband and sometimes one
or the other, or both, of our daughters?
            And then gone
in to stand in the dark sanctuary waiting
            for our little white candles
in the paper cones to be lit hand to
            hand from the priest’s
Pascal candle. Staying standing
            for the long, long reading
of Genesis where
            God divided the light
from the darkness and Exodus, the
            Lord in the pillar of fire
and cloud. Oh how I wish I were there now.

            I heard we are having
yet another hard frost tonight
            —though it is April—
and again I congratulate myself
            for not planting anything yet.
I’m sure it is beautiful there at the garden
            under the dark, pink full moon.
                        Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us.
Saint Michael, pray for us.
            Holy Angels of God . . . .
            The frost drops tonight

like stars.
            Perfect hairy red raspberries tumbling
out of the back door of my car
            and into the yard.



HAPPY DAYS


                        Belle hiding in the narrow brush jump
covered with red faux-brick paper. (Note to both horse and rider:
            the thing will not give.)
                        Her fluffy head
and fat tail coming out of the open top. Frustrated Cohen the
            black pit bull cross
            hanging around her licking her face.

Christy says Let me get a rope for the dog
            so I can rescue the cat
and Roxy can jump the brush jump.

I’m trotting around on Beach. I had to do energy work—
                        my guestimate of Reiki—
            on the horse before I went out there. Seriously.
I didn’t know that that was what I was doing.
            But he lowered his head and let his eyelashes drop
            when I stroked
            the bone behind his right ear.
Also looked at me dreamily
            when I kissed him square on the face.                         

                        Riders don’t always realize that horses
            need reassurance. The day before’s lesson, C. admitted,
“went south.” We were scraping mud
                        off Beach from either side.
 She thought 13-year-old Suzette could handle him,
            but instead he veered right
and broke into a canter down
            the rail—
            maybe she poked him with her heel—

            Suzettte ended up coming off INTO the wall of the indoor
breaking off a tooth—and fracturing her jaw.

                        Still she had the presence of mind,
Christy said, to ask for someone to look for
            her tooth. (Which I did not know
            until today was even
            a “thing.” Those who watch
                        hockey know about it?)
I’m sure the mom was not pleased, but
                        the liability waiver
—which refers to the “inherent risks of equine activities”
            and “death”—is in huge block letters on
            the tack room door.

And everybody signs a copy.

            My job today was to calm Beach down
enough to get him to go over the small jumps
                        without running out. (Or, God forbid,
into one of the hayfields stretching in
            every direction.)
Lily, another beginner, had helped him to realize
            that running out might be an attractive option.

                        The cat hiding in the brush jump, with the dog sniffing her face
            reminded me of how John, about age 12, used to hold
Douglas, age 10, down on the floor and I would slap him.

Then when Mother appeared, John and I would lie.

I am getting ready to confront my ex-husband
            in divorce counseling, to let him know
how much he hurt me. Is that not the most laughable
                        thing you ever heard? Like a person who
                                    pursued two
people while holding my hand
                        in “marriage therapy,” as he called it,
                        would suddenly
be capable of compassion?

Ha ha ha.

The cat’s head rotating around above the box reminded
            me of the woman’s head in Happy Days
the Beckett play my boyfriend lent me.
            Honestly, the grief over our uncertain future
                        is tormenting each of us
            in different ways. He can’t get across the Canadian/U.S. border
and I am a basket case about going up there.

My love bleeds and I go very blank. If I’m going to
            have excision surgery I need to prepare for it.

I need energy work. On myself. Courage to                
            get dipped in acid
            again.
I DO NOT visualize myself as Winnie in                                           
            Happy Days, the tiny circuit of toothbrush,
toothpaste, and comb—
buried to her waist in an earthen mound
            beneath a “trompe-l’oeil backcloth” of
                        “unbroken plain and sky.” A black bag and
parasol beside her. When will “Willie,”
lying asleep
somewhere behind her, speak?
                        Brush and comb
            the hair if it has not
been done or trim the nails

if they are in need of trimming. . . .
            This is going to be another happy day!



REVOLVING DOOR OF SPRING: CHECK ON ME


Trina T. has gone back out.
           It was all over WLFI.

Two OWIs in twenty-four hours.
           First she got hung up on 

a snow drift, drunk, then motored off
           from the officer

who tried to help her. Then she
           had an accident. “You should

have seen her mug shot,” Emily said,
           “and people were

saying things like ‘Lafayette’s finest’
           in the comment

section. Brandi and I had to
           defend her.”
                                 March 11th, apparently,

is the day my father will be released from
           the hospital. On his 93rd

birthday, his blood pressure was 69
           over 40.
                      “I always think

March 11th is the day we start
           to ride outside,” Christy says.

“We could probably ride in the outdoor
           today but we wouldn’t

be able to get there. All the snow is
           melting—the ground

is soaked.” March 11th is three days from
           today. No one knows if Trina has

been bailed out.
           Her husband had just gotten

out of prison which “could
           have been a factor.”
                                               That train accident

was by my rather obvious
           deduction a suicide. The train

was coming from the west
           and Rachel just rolled

her truck slowly onto the track.
           Three-column obituary. An engineer

who traveled the world, rode
           and showed a horse

named Orion, loved guinea pigs, pottery
           (which she made), sunflowers.

In other words, who lived eighty
           lives to my one. Christy

and Josie knew her. I heard about it
           at the barn when I was

having my lesson. Walking and trotting,
           always getting yelled at,

always waiting for the chance
           to jump (when I was young, it was “hunt”).

A hanger-on at the barn—with ten-year-old
           cohorts, college girl

stable helpers. “She, the witness, observed
           and heard the train

coming from the west
           and saw the pickup truck

slowly edge up onto the tracks,” said the
           Chief Deputy.
                                    When Doug heard

about Dad, via my voice mail, yesterday,
           it took eight hours for

him to get back to me. He was
           talking really slow. I wondered

how much he’d been
           drinking. I could tell

he didn’t feel up to calling Thea and sorting
           out the visiting rotation.
                                                  When they

told me Tammy died, I had
           to look up her obituary picture

to remember who she was.  Emily,
           recently relapsed and on the run

from CPS (having been caught driving drunk
           with her child), was the one

who found her. When you endanger
           children as much as she has, Child

Protection Services becomes CPS. Emily had tried
           to call Tammy to check on her

but she didn’t pick up. When
           Emily went over to check on her, she

found her naked on the
           bed, fresh—or not—from the

shower. Emily flashed back to her mother’s
           suicide by alcohol overdose,

replete with note, on her ninth birthday,
           and then tried to kill herself two and

a half weeks later. It was Tammy’s sister
           who called to check

and upon hearing Emily’s garbled voice
           called 911. She had been very, very

thorough in her overdose, though I can’t
           remember right now what

combination of drugs and alcohol she told
           me she used.
                                Arlene at the nursing home

was perfectly cheerful about
           my father last night, said she

only wished they’d caught it sooner
           so he could have avoided going

to the hospital.
                              He sounds
           like he is trying

to speak from a deep
           well. Thea said on the phone

that when she arrived she found
           him “unresponsive,” deploying

a medical default/buzz word. I knew
           it would be okay, though, because

the night nurse “Jackie” last night
           on the phone said she was right

outside his door, had just checked on him, and
           that he was “adorable.”                           
                                                             A man in the my

home meeting about
           whom I’ve been nursing

some kind of an obsession asked me
            for my phone number and I nearly

died. I kept thinking, Is this a date? I gave
           him my number and my last

name and he gave me his. I know what it was
           really for. I know we had

more important things to do
            in that room than

have a Valentine’s dance. I think about him,
           how raw and in pain he seemed a

month or two ago, how I was worried
           he’d go back out

(but he didn’t and that was all
           that mattered).
                                       When Andy refused

to watch Lola, and Mia was paranoid,
           I told her to ask

the reason. She ended up
           sobbing to him on the phone. Then

someone she knew from Lola’s school
           saw Mia in Target in the hour

before the meeting and offered to take her so Mia
           could have some peace.

Andy said it was just work that
           was bothering him. Mia’s friend

texted a photo of Lola at Tractor Supply—
           or was it Rural King?

I didn’t ask the man why he wanted
           my number. I did not want

to end up sobbing.
                             Doug,
           it’s Daylight Savings

Time, drag yourself up out of that
           hole you’re in. Dad is not dead.

Let’s work on his obituary while there’s
           still time. I’ll tell you

when it’s otherwise. Slim, in your
           gold shoes, carry on,

keep deploying your charm. Mia,
           tell the truth to Andy. Emily, one day

at a time, keep coming back. I’ll call you,
           Doug, and tell you when to

enter the hole for good. Meanwhile, pick up
           your phone once every

thousand years. Let me check on you.



BIO

Dana Roeser’s fourth book, All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts, won the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press and was published in September 2019. Her previous books won the Juniper Prize and the Samuel French Morse Prize (twice). She was a recipient of the GLCA New Writers Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and several other awards and residencies. Recent work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Poem-a-Day, The Glacier, North American Review, DIAGRAM, Pleiades, Guesthouse, Barrow Street, Laurel Review, and others. For more information, please see www.danaroeser.com.

Sometimes it Takes Fifty Years to Repair a Friendship

by Kelsey Berryman


            I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, Babcia, growing up. We would swim in her pool, she’d make delicious food, and I’d dress up in her old clothing- she even let me wear her high heels. But what I loved most was when she told me stories.

            Sometimes she would tell me about being a little girl in Poland. Usually, she would gloss over her teenaged years. Sometimes she would talk about her time in Chicago as a single woman in the fifties. But then other times she would talk about the time that she was happiest; as a married woman and later young mother in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she lived in a little apartment building with a bunch of other parents with young kids.

            My grandparents had only dated for a few months before they got married and left Chicago for Cincinnati and then Erie. Babcia hated Ohio. It was too dirty for her. But she loved Pennsylvania.

            She told me about the one neighbor with the bum husband and told me about the one with too many kids, but her favorite neighbor was her best friend Cathy and her husband Fred. They had two kids: Cathie Lu and Mary. Cathie Lu had arthritis. Everyday Mary would knock of her door saying that it was Halloween and ask for some candy.

            When Babcia went into labor with my mother, Cathy and Fred took her to the  hospital. It was a different hospital than my grandparents had planned on going to and my grandfather, Grandpere, didn’t know where to find Babcia until he talked to Fred. It turned out that Cathy and Fred had taken Babcia to the Catholic hospital.

            When my mother was born Cathy told my grandparents to name her Deirdre. My grandparents liked that it was a name that you could yell. But they wanted to change it slightly and named her Daedre.

            Cathy wanted to be godmother to my mother and sent over to my grandparents a Catholic priest to facilitate matters. Though both my grandparents were raised Catholic, they had become disillusioned with the church. Grandpere was called the son of the devil and expelled from Catholic school because he kept asking “how do we know” when ever religion was brought up. Babcia lost her faith during childhood her family was poor and the priest kept telling them to give more to the Church. They didn’t even marry in the Catholic church because the priest demanded that they promise to have as many children as they could. Anyway, a new Catholic priest came over to the apartment to discuss a baptism and when he found out that my grandparents were married in the Episcopal church, he screamed that they were living in sin and had to get remarried. My grandmother sent him packing.

            Babcia said Cathy was a large woman with dark, Italian skin. Once when my infant mother wouldn’t stop crying and Cathy put her on her breasts and rocked her. She knew how to help with a baby because she had so many kids. She would buy her kids clothes rather than wash the dirty ones. But as soon as her husband came home she made him watch the kids and she’d go out to see the same movie twice just to be away from them.

            Eventually, my grandparents moved to California because my grandmother wanted to grow oranges. Since Babcia was a girl in Poland she had hated the cold climate and dreamed of living somewhere warm. Florida had too much mildew so they chose California.

            Cathy and her husband moved to Texas. But both couples all still kept in touch. My grandparents even drove to see them in Houston when my mother was in elementary school. My grandparents saw that Cathy and Fred had a big house with a swimming pool and had had three more kids: Deirdre, Ralph, and Florence.

            Cathy decided to come to California and visit my grandparents. They took her all around Los Angeles, especially Beverly Hills. Cathy wanted to be discovered. She was mad about Rock Hudson and thought that if he would just see her he’d fall in love with her. My grandmother bought her some diet cookies. As soon as Cathy heard that they were diet she ate the whole box.

            My mom said that she had been waiting to meet “Auntie” Cathy. She had heard so many good things about her but didn’t end up liking her. Everything that Cathy said was a patronizing, “Honey” this or “Sweetie” that.

            Cathy talked about to my grandparent about moving out to California. Babcia told her that it was so expensive. Cathy could have a much nicer house in Texas.

            Finally, one night Cathy told my grandparents the real reason she came. She was going to divorce Fred and needed their help. She wanted to punish her husband and wanted my grandparents to hide their children from him. My grandfather immediately said no. Fred loved those kids. It was also illegal to take them over state line.s Cathy was insulted and kept saying that if they were divorcing she would hide my mother for one of them.

            Babcia and Grandpere didn’t hear from her again.  I always wondered what it would have been like if my grandparents had taken her five kids.

            To me Cathy was just a character from my childhood. She was as safe and real as Peter Rabbit. Part of me never thought of her as a real person but a figure of stories that I was told.

            During spring break of my junior year of college, I went to visit Babcia. She was sitting in her maroon recliner and sipping coffee. Babcia had already grilled me about school (“Are you getting A’s?”, “I hope that you will go to grad school” and “Kelsey, education is something that no one can ever take away from you.”) I had given my pat answers. Then we got to an interesting part of the conversation. I lying about my friendships (“Oh, I have really great friends, we hang out all the time.”)

            When Babcia said, “It’s so important to have friends. You know like I had Cathy Xxxyz….” She took a sip of her coffee before adding, “I wonder what she is doing now.”

            Back in college and lonely, I decided to find out what happened to Cathy. I knew that she had lived in Texas and googled her daughter’s name and found a workplace that advocated for the disabled. Given that Cathie Lu had had arthritis that seemed to make sense that she would in a capacity for the disabled.

From: Kelsey Berryman
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 9:08 PM
To: Cathie Lu
Subject: old friendship

Hello,

I know that this might seem kind of random but I might as well ask. My grandmother is named Anna Cottrell and she used to live in Erie, Pennsylvania, and was great friends with Cathy Xxxyz and her husband, Fred. She was wondering what ever happened to them and I told her that I that would look on the internet for them. I assume that you are their daughter Cathie Lu. I hope that this is not too much of an intrusion but if you are so inclined please email me back. My grandmother would be really happy to know what happened to her old friends.

Thanks so much,
Kelsey Berryman

Ten days later I got

From: Cathie Lu
Subject: RE: old friendship
Date: March 26, 2012 12:34:40 PM EDT
To: Kelsey Berryman

Hello Kelsey,

Yes, I am the oldest daughter of Fred and Cathie Lu and we did live for a short time in Erie, PA when I was a child. My mother lives in a Dallas suburb and my dad and his second wife live in Houston. If your grandmother is interested, we can exchange phone numbers so she can call and speak with my mom and dad.

Cathy  A. XXXYZ

            We exchanged a few more emails and on my normal Sunday call I said, “Babcia, I’ve found Cathy XXXYZ for you.”

            “What?”

            “In Texas, I’ve got her phone number for you.”

            “Why on earth would you do that? What if she is still angry at me for not taking her kids.”

            I rolled my eyes because that was so typical Babcia.

            A few weeks later, when I called Babcia she said, “Cathy called me.” She found out that Christine had two kids and Florence worked in design and that Deirdre had a dog that was like her kid and that Cathie Lu had never gotten married. She had forgotten to ask about Ralph. She also talked about Mom. Cathy wasn’t still angry.

From: Cathie Lu
Subject: Sad News
Date: June 20, 2012 8:40:04 PM EDT
To: Kelsey Berryman

Good Evening Kelsey,

I wanted to let you and your grandmother know that my mom died unexpectedly on May 26. My brother will be spreading her ashes in New York City (her hometown) next month.

Cathie Lu XXXXYZ 

Your Mom, my grandmother and my Mom in front of their house in Pacific Palisades before Mom’s ballet recital.






BIO

Kelsey Berryman grew up in California and has been writing since she was twelve years old. She attended the University of Iowa to study writing. She currently works as a teacher and is working on her latest book.




“dates”

by Uzomah Ugwu


1.

Dark shots
Passed out moons
Arise for the night

2.

Moonshine Sundays
Bulls on charge
Meet with red, bullseye

3.

Met with gloom
Decided against the wall
Dreams arranging dates with nightmares

4.

Ice cream cones licked
By adults that
Can’t relive their childhood



“saying goodbye”


Was this a different love song
The kind you only heard in your head

Unmade beds, removed pillows spread across the room
Far to the left I find you in spirits I thought
you were tired of being accustomed to

You locked on tight like a crab on the shore
to an idea that did not include a saga
Where I was a character foreshadowing
great things that in the end you wanted

But was something you couldn’t go after
A new chapter for you to outline a new mattress
For us to spring off of

Which did not matter
what part we couldn’t get pass in our past
couldn’t be hidden
Our love did not spring after winter in
season long after to hear the birds sing outside

Our disturbed windows with the type of crust
similar to ones found in the pockets of your eyes
That I looked into a hundred times wanting

to believe you, believe this believe us
We were just blind and needed to see pass
what it was really worth and giving something more than

Another try because this was a different love song
the one where you forget to cry because you can’t
Accept saying hello or most importantly
knowing when to say goodbye



“trail of blood”


Outside her belly is the distant north
That outweigh risks. She clutches her tummy
Like a check-up to see if it’s there watching above


Life caught in the air
She breathes two breathes
Two come out. One inhale
They make it
Hard to stand
Can’t keep the pace
No one is alerted
They walk on too painful to make a plea to stop


A trail of blood lies behind her
Paired with the outline of her shoes
She can’t find a heartbeat
For her or her baby
She grabs her belly once more
She walks to freedom alone
With a problem with her god
Soiled in the loss of life
Now hollow, she sees the border
As not a place to live life but to lose one





BIO

Uzomah Ugwu is a poet/writer, curator, editor, and multi-disciplined artist. Her poetry, writing, and art have been featured internationally in various publications, galleries, art spaces, and museums. She is a political, social, and cultural activist. Her core focus is on human rights, mental health, animal rights, and the rights of LGBTQIA persons. She is also the managing editor and founder of Arte Realizzata.







CHARLOTTE, DAMNED BY WATERS

by Jacob Strunk


            She feels their eyes on her, and she hears the accusation in their silence as she drops down from the cab of her truck. She drops the tailgate, pulls out two black trash bags bulky with waste. She stickers them and walks them across the transfer station lot. The half dozen or so folks already there stop jawing, watch her with stony stoicism as she hoists the bags into the compactor.

            “Morning, Charlotte.” It’s Zeke, tipping his hat back with a folded knuckle and nodding at her. He’s leaning on the compactor, his arms crossed, heavy work gloves on his hands. She smells alcohol on his breath.

            “Zeke,” she says. It’s not much, but this weekly exchange is about the only pleasantry she’s granted these days on her rare trips into town. She goes back to her truck, pulls out a box of recyclables, walks it across the lot. She makes eye contact with each of them: Fran, the retired school teacher cum town secretary; Peter, who runs heating oil to most of the houses on the mountain; Juliet, who welcomed Charlotte and Alex to town with a basket of blackberry tarts. Juliet looks away as Charlotte passes. It stings. Still. Always.

            She makes a big show of climbing up into the cab of her truck, then theatrically waves out the window to the town dump social club, the lot of them. Only Zeke waves back, spitting brown tobacco juice onto the gravel as he does.

            It’s three miles up the mountain, but it might as well be another world. She turns off the blacktop onto Paradise Road, the truck’s tires crunching satisfactorily on the gravel. Then it’s over the new culvert and left onto Old Cut Road, barely more than two wheel ruts climbing up and away from the horse pastures and seasonal cottages surrounding the village. Up and up, as the trees crowd ever closer, scraping sometimes along the doors, whacking against the mirrors. The canopy chokes out the sun. The windows down, Charlotte feels the temperature drop five degrees. Then ten. She leans close to the open window, breathes it in.

            Then she rounds the final corner and the forest gives way to meadow, her meadow, and every time it feels like being born anew. There are two deer down by the pond. She waves at them, too, but this time she means it. They looks up briefly, then return to chewing the long grass that grows at the pond’s shore. Alex’s grandfather, she knew, had been meticulous about keeping the grass knocked down, pulling most of the weeds and lily pads; he left enough to nurture the frogs and the fish, and every morning he’d sit in the screened gazebo with his newspaper and his coffee. The screen is torn now, the gazebo host to spiders and mouldering lawn furniture. Mice have built burrows in the chairs. The small wooden table, purpose built by hand to hold a cup of coffee and the Sunday Times, sits crooked, its legs chewed by generations of varmints.

            Charlotte parks the truck outside the garage. She stands for a moment, looking out across the meadow, at the green forest stretching endlessly below her, at the peak of Mount Agnes fifteen miles away. The sky to the west looks ominously dark, and Charlotte heard on Vermont Public this morning that a storm system was heading their way. She goes around the house to the back door, kicks off her shoes in the mudroom. The house is silent. She thinks again of getting another dog. It’s so quiet up here. Then again, isn’t that the point?

            Alex was the one with family in Carversville, but it was her idea to move. By June of 2020, New York City felt like a prison. Their apartment was spacious and even had a view of the park if you craned your head enough. But as the realization settled that this pandemic was just getting started, Charlotte began to feel a claustrophobia that was alien to her. Suddenly the city where she’d lived her entire adult life felt like a nemesis, a danger, thick with contagion. She floated the idea to Alex over dinner one night, and by October their apartment was cleared out and on the market, and she was following the U-Haul up I-91 through New Haven and Hartford in their Audi, their mild-mannered rescue mutt Birdie riding shotgun, then onto state highways and through towns you’d miss if you so much looked down to change the radio station.

            Alex’s cousins were relieved to unload the property and wash their hands of the old house. The upkeep was getting to be too much, the repairs too expensive. The price was fair, below market; it was a project house, and they both dove headfirst into the opportunity. After twenty years in the city, Charlotte awoke each morning no less enchanted by the sweet, earthy smell reaching for her through the open bedroom window, beckoning her to step outside, to hold her arms wide and give herself over to the Green Mountains. They painted and sanded and stained. They weathered their first winter by the hearth, bought new L.L. Bean boots. They traded the Audi for the Ford, four wheel drive and a long bed. Alex restored the wood stove in the barn and used the drafty old building as his studio, uncovering the antique furniture and working on a new book with a vigor Charlotte hadn’t seen in him since they were young. They were happy days. Good days. And until Alex died, hanged from the barn rafters by a length of nylon rope, she let herself believe they could stay that way forever.

            The storm arrives in the early afternoon, the sky blackening like spilled ink, an eerie calm settling over the mountain. From here on top, Charlotte can see nearly to Ludlow, and she stands on the porch feeling the pressure drop and watching a wall of rain inch across the valley. Then the winds come. And the downpour. She lights a fire in the fireplace and settles in with a book. She has candles ready for the inevitable loss of power, plenty of fresh water from the artesian well, ice packs already placed in the refrigerator. Truth be told, she feels comfort in the storms. They remind her, in some small way, of life in the city, all chaos and fury.

            The power stays on, and Charlotte bakes a chicken breast and sautés some asparagus listening to weather reports on the radio. Montpelier has issued an alert for possible flooding, and a voluntary evacuation of downtown has already started. The river is already up three feet in Ludlow, which lies almost entirely on the floodplain. But Charlotte’s not on a floodplain. Charlotte is, in fact, on top of a mountain. She’s glad to hear no one’s been hurt; she knows she’d feel guilty for how much she’s enjoying the storm.

            She eats on the screened in porch. She has the lights on, though sunset isn’t for another two and a half hours; the dark sky stretches across to the horizon, high altitude clouds dumping waves of rain. Thunder rolls back and forth through the valleys, and more than one lightning strike lands close enough that she can smell the ozone, hear the crackle of the electrified air. Maybe she should stay inside, but she finds herself always thrilled with the passion of the storms. And hadn’t Alex told her of his grandmother’s warning to stay away from the faucets in a lightning storm? The spring house was hit at least once a summer? Of course, the artesian well went in 30 years ago and the spring house is no more than a brick foundation overgrown by wildflowers. But it sounds like a safer bet out here on the porch, where the air is thick with nitrogen, the cool copper smell of a summer storm.

            Another lightning strike. Charlotte runs a forkful of chicken through the last of her mashed potatoes. She’s heard lightning is attracted to granite, too, and thus drawn to the mountain. But that’s apocryphal, and she’s enjoying the rush of the wind and the tuning orchestra of rain and thunder too much to care.

            She stokes the fire and returns to her book. The power flickers for a beat around 10:30, the lights momentarily dimming. She hears the beep of the battery backup still in Alex’s study sounding its warning alarm. In the kitchen, the fridge clunks as its compressor kicks back on. The fire burns down to embers, and she can finish the book in the morning. She takes her pills, drinks a second tall glass of water, and trudges upstairs. She’s more tired than she realized.

            In the dream, Alex is hanging in the barn, still alive, his fingers frantically fighting the rope, even as it burns into his skin, bites deep into the flesh of his neck. Charlotte is there. On the stairs. Watching. She rubs her hands together. Alex’s eyes remain fixed on hers, even as they bulge out from his skull, as their blood vessels burst and begin to trace red rivers across the whites. Alex’s legs kick, knocking over an antique pitcher, breaking an oil lamp, tapping fecklessly on the back of the chaise. Squeezing her hands into fists, she sees Alex has wet himself, and his grey slacks go dark. Blood runs from his nose, down his chin, and he’s opening and closing his mouth as if trying to speak. He reaches out for her with one hand, his body swaying, his bare feet tapping on the load-bearing beam beside him. She’s at the bottom of the stairs now, looking up at him. His fingers shake as he stretches his arm toward her, then claw at her her shoulders as she steps close to him. She smells urine as she wraps her arms around his waist tightly.

            She wakes sucking in a lungful of cool air. She’s had the dream before, but for some reason this feels more real, Alex more present. She almost feels the heft of his body, the damp of his pants against her chest, a ghost she’s dragged with her into the waking world. But as all dreams do, it begins to fade away, sink back into the inky black of her subconscious, and she finds herself once again present, alone in her king size bed. She blinks in the gloom, looks to her right for the comforting green glow of her digital alarm clock. But it’s gone. At least it seems to be.

            She sits up and barely makes out the shapes of her bedroom windows, open to the night. She fell asleep to the rain, the windows open to carry its iron scent across her as she slipped off. But now it’s quiet, the rain has stopped, the night outside the windows is black as sackcloth, and the power is definitely out. She swings her legs out of bed and stands carefully, takes a few tentative steps. She bangs her knee on the nightstand just as she knew she would, curses, and then reaches for the doorway and turns into the hall, feeling her way to the top of the stairs and then down to the landing.

            She finds one of the candles she had ready on the kitchen counter. She completely spaced on setting one beside her bed, but here she finds a new tapered candle vertical in a holder, a book of matches beside it. Well, she didn’t completely bungle things, she thinks, striking a match. In the dim orange glow of the candle, the kitchen encased in amber, she retrieves a glass and pushes it against the refrigerator’s water dispenser. Nothing. Of course. Come on, Charlotte. Time to wake up. She sighs and fills the glass from the tap, drinking greedily.

            She pads into the living room on bare feet, holding the candle in front of her like a Dickens character. She chuckles to herself. A few dying embers in the hearth give off the barest weak glow, dark red like burned skin, refusing to give up the ghost. Charlotte squints out the window, leaning closer until her forehead is pressed against the cool glass. There’s no moon. No stars. No light. The cloud cover must be thick overhead, she thinks, like a mat pulled over the mountain.

            It smells great, she thinks, and then she turns and takes a few steps back toward the kitchen. But. She stops. Listens. She can swear she heard something. She listens, frozen, the candle’s flame splashing flickering nightmares across the wall, stretching shadows into grotesques. There. She hears it again. Something in the woods, maybe. Or down the hill? She goes back to the window, crouches beside it and leans in close to the screen, turning her ear toward the night.

            A cry wafts up at her from somewhere out in the dark. Her hand goes to her throat instinctively, her mouth slack and open. She leans in closer, pusher her ear against the screen. Again the plaintive wail comes to her from afar, pulled apart by distance, an echo of itself. It’s a sheep, she thinks. One of Mary Stein’s sheep got out in the storm, and it’s wandering around in the woods. It’s lost and scared and –

            Closer now. Almost human. But it can’t be. The sheep have gotten out before. She’s found them in her flowers, mowing the perennials down to the ground, chased them off with a broom. Yes, of course that’s what it is. She straightens. Sound does weird things up here. She knows that. It carries. It distorts. By the time it’s run its way through the trees and creek beds, across the meadows, it could be anything. She shakes her head and chuckles. The stillness outside gives way to the slow build of a north wind, and she hears the trees creak and pop, the water blown from their leaves like a fresh shower in itself.

            She pauses at the bottom of the stairs, hearing the sheep’s call again. With the wind picking up, she imagines a new overtone, something frantic. She hears it again and thinks, yes, there’s panic in that. Fear. Then the wind gusts up, and before the rush and roar of the trees drowns it out entirely, Charlotte thinks – just for a moment – it almost sounds like a shriek. It almost sounds like high laughter, shrill and mad. Then she reminds herself just how silly that thought is, stupid, and through the open windows now is only the rustle of leaves, the low howl of the wind through the forest and up the mountain. Charlotte grabs the matches from the kitchen counter, gently holds the matchbook between her teeth, and cups her hand around the candle’s flame as she heads back upstairs. When she wakes three hours later, shortly after dawn, it’s raining again.

            Alex found out about the affair the same way everyone else did. Melissa Eli – shortly before screaming out of town in her Subaru Legacy, leaving broken windows and myriad household debris piled in the yard where it landed – spray painted in black on the side of her  own house, shared until that very moment with her husband of 26 years: “CHARLOTTE FROST IS A HOMERECKOR!!!!!” (sic) in letters two feet tall and slanting slightly downward from left to right. Alex passed by the next morning around 8:00, just as a few neighbors stood at the property line with steaming mugs of coffee watching Roger Eli spill white paint all over his lawn, tripping and fumbling, trying with broad strokes to cover the slanderous graffiti. But as Alex passed, Roger looked over, and their eyes locked, and Alex knew it wasn’t slanderous at all. In that look, in the way Roger’s shoulders slumped and he cast his eyes down, Alex knew it was truth.

            He did not so much as feather the brake. Instead, he turned his head forward again and continued through town, then out past the horse pastures south of the Methodist church, eventually turning left on Highway 155. He returned home at 2:00 pm as planned, carrying the books and notebooks he’d used in his lecture.

            Charlotte waited, silent, in the bedroom as he went into his study, replaced the books on the shelves. She heard him open the top left drawer on his desk, shut it after placing his notebooks neatly inside. She listened as he went to the kitchen, filled a glass with cold water from the refrigerator, stood and drank it, probably gazing out the window to the east, as he often did, across the valley. Then she heard his footsteps slowly climb the stairs, traverse the hallway, approach the door. Her head hung – silent, swaddled in shame – she saw his shoes enter, pause in front of her, then cross again toward the closet. Saying nothing, she watched him pull down a suitcase.

            He set the suitcase on the bed next to where she sat and said, “I think I’ll stay in the barn for awhile.”

            Charlotte’s kicking herself. She pulls open drawer after drawer in the kitchen, but has so far only found two AAA batteries, both crusted with green acid. She dumps them in the trash and puts her hands on her hips. She spaced on this, too, batteries. When was the last time she even thought about buying batteries? The whole world is rechargeable.

            Sure, she has the big backup in Alex’s study, and she can use that to charge her laptop a few times, not that it does any good with the modem and router dark and silent, plugged into outlets with no juice. And she has the travel bricks she bought to charge their phones when they went to Rome in 2019. Even her emergency flashlight is rechargeable – and she topped it off before the storm.

            But now she’s standing in the middle of her kitchen holding a 35-year-old portable radio, its shiny aluminum antenna extended like a child’s hand to god, and she can’t even remember the last time she held a fucking AA, let alone two, let alone new. She goes to the living room, checks the remotes for the television (AAAs, and beginning to crust; she tells herself to make a note to replace them before they burst) and the Apple TV (rechargeable via the same lightning port as her phone, of course). Even her vibrator uses rechargeable lithium ion. Then something strikes her, and she crosses through the dining room.

            She pauses just for one second, then turns the knob, pushes open the door to Alex’s study. It’s on the desk right where she knew it would be, right where it always was and where he left it the last time pushed one of his yellow number twos into it. Charlotte picks up the Sharper Image pencil sharpener, turns it over, says a little prayer to whatever deity happens to be listening, and pops the battery compartment.

            “Gotcha, fuckers,” she says with relish, and plucks the shiny AAs from their nest.

            She tunes in 89.5. The governor has released a statement. Charlotte leans in close. The flooding is bad. Worse even than they expected. Some areas received up to nine inches. The Black River, swollen like a gangrenous limb, has flooded downtown Ludlow with two feet of water. Consumed it. Montpelier’s downtown is under five feet of toxic sludge. The state capitol. On the gas range, her kettle begins to whistle. It’s a scream by the time she kills the heat and pours water into her French press.

            The rain is still coming, maybe even another inch or two before the front moves east. A railroad trestle in Wallingford washed away, leaving the tracks dangling thirty feet up like telephone wires. The Weston Playhouse, mere feet from the river, was inundated. And at Proctorsville, a mudslide has made the highway impassable, possibly for days. Charlotte pours coffee, looks out the window. Still coming down and it’s almost 9:00am. She wonders what will even be left by tomorrow.

            On the radio, we’ve returned to our regularly schedule program, and someone from Pasadena is concerned about wildfires. Charlotte takes her coffee into the living room and pokes at last night’s embers. Cold. She probably should have built it up before bed, but she hadn’t expected the temperature to continue to drop through the night. It’s down to 50 this morning, from the mid-70s yesterday, and with most of the windows open all night, it’s not much warmer inside. She kneels, carefully arranging fresh kindling, pushing aside last night’s ash, while shaking her head at herself. She hadn’t expected this. She hadn’t expected a lot of things.

            By 11:00, the radio has gone softer and softer until finally, as the anchor’s last words distort into a terror of diminishing static, it goes silent. Charlotte’s checked and checked again, and those were the last AAs in the house. Her phone’s fully charged, of course, but there’s no signal. Not even the “SOS” in place of bars that usually comes with dropping off the national network and onto some ancient 2G capable only of emergency calls. Nada. The rain falls steadily; the sky a grey void, formless and infinite.

            At around 2:30 that afternoon, Charlotte wakes from an unintended nap on the couch to a bright fist of sunlight square in the face. She straightens, cracks her back, and then stands and moves to the window. The rain has stopped, and the clouds are beginning to break up, move apart, winnow themselves east like oil in water, leaving behind a brilliant azure sky to the north and directly overhead, so blue it’s almost black, so blue it almost hurts. Charlotte steps into her boots, not bothering to lace them, and pushes through the door into the yard.

            It’s colder still now, but Charlotte turns her face to the sun, squeezing her eyes shut, spreading her arms wide and pushing her chest out toward the mountains like a greeting. Her ears swell with birdsong, her nose fills with the swollen sex of the mountain, musty and ancient. From somewhere far away, she thinks she hears someone calling, shouting. Could be the Yosts down on Paradise Road, she thinks. They’re not 15 yards from the lake, and if it jumped the dam…

            Charlotte tosses two more logs onto the fire and closes the glass door. She slides her phone into her pocket; maybe there will be a signal down the road. She digs through the closet for a coat, and pulls a stocking hat down over her ears for good measure. She certainly hadn’t expected that the second weekend in July. She grabs keys to the truck, laces her boots this time, and heads out the back door. She doesn’t get halfway to the garage before she sees the futility.

            Below the garage, where the driveway begins to curve downhill and to the south, a washout has carved a deep channel. She pushes the truck keys into her back pocket, sighs, and walks down the driveway to survey the damage. It’s only four feet wide, but it’s deep. At least that again, maybe deeper. Four wheel drive isn’t getting anyone over that, not anytime soon. Charlotte looks back at the garage, back up at the house, and then figures since she’s already out here, what the hell.

            A few feet into the trees uphill, before the swollen ditch and the failed culvert she imagines she’ll find washed somewhere downstream in the woods when things dry out enough to look, she’s able to hop across the washout to the other side. Her knees chide her for attempting such a stunt, and she nearly slips in the mud and sends herself backwards into the abyss. Just what she needs right now, cracking her head open on a fieldstone and bleeding out within sight out of the house.

            The last of the clouds has moved on, and the sky is crystalline in its cobalt glory. As she walks down Old Cut road, mostly intact but with a few deep ravines carved by the storm, she realizes she can’t hear a single engine – not a plane or a truck or even one of the backhoes the county surely already has out to work on the major thoroughfares. Other than the crunch of her boots on the wet gravel, she hears no noise made by man. The sounds of nature are almost deafening. Birdcalls, wind-tickled leaves, and all around her the shoosh of running water, the entire mountain’s watershed pouring into larger and larger brooks, streams, creeks, tributaries. The water follows ancient paths; it moves without forethought, without doubt, without guilt. The water is unstoppable, she knows, despite the best laid plans of mice and men. It will find its way home.

            Then from somewhere far off, she thinks she hears voices again. She stops. Listens. Waits. Her ears are overwhelmed with birdsong, with the rush of waters and breath of wind. There it is again. A high call, powerful, cutting through the symphony of the forest. It’s no voice, she knows that. Not human, anyway. It comes again, mangled by the wind, and Charlotte thinks it’s gotten closer. So close she believes she should see something. But there is nothing in the trees, just dappled sunlight, mist rising from the forest litter like spirits. A rooster, she thinks. A storm like that puts everything on edge, shakes up reality. It’s a rooster who doesn’t have any reason to know it’s going on 3:00 in the afternoon. She shakes her head again and walks on.

            Charlotte’s sister came to stay with her in the week before the funeral. Emily drove Charlotte to the funeral home, held her hand and helped answer the awful questions. She cooked for them both, let Birdie out into the yard and fed her morning and evening meals. The phone never rang. No visitors came with casseroles or pies. No meatloaf was delivered, nor condolence cards. Emily knew better than to mention it, to ask, to pry for details. She knew her sister, and just like she always had, she stepped in to take care of her.

            Charlotte spoke little that week, a polite thank you when Emily set a plate before her, another when it was taken away untouched. Grief is an animal, and it hungers. It can be observed, understood, even – in time – tamed. But it has a mind of its own, and it follows an instinct alien to us; it follows ancient paths we’ve never had opportunity to trace. The grief fell over Charlotte like a cloak, heavy, its insidious musk overcoming all other senses. And with it came the guilt, gnawing at her, working at her like floodwaters eroding a riverbank. Poor Alex, a kind, quiet man who had helped a young woman pick up the pieces of her abusive childhood, her wild college years. Sweet Alex who had been patient with her, had sat with her as she cried, gagging on the past, retching up memory. Alex, who had only ever been fair. And kind. And made her feel safe. And she had, what, gotten bored?

            Twin snakes, grief and guilt, coiled around her, pulled themselves tight, cutting off her air, choking out the light. Only Alex’s cousins attended the funeral, a small graveside service at the cemetery south of the village. He was buried beside his parents and a brother who died as a boy. Emily, exhausted, forgot herself on the drive home and took them past Roger Eli’s newly painted house. He sat on the porch, drinking a beer. He lowered as his eyes as they passed.

            “Take Birdie back with you to Chicago,” Charlotte insisted. “She’ll be happier there with kids. A fenced yard.” Emily protested, but Charlotte was firm. “It’s not safe here.”

            She doesn’t even make it to the bottom of the hill. A hundred yards before the final turn that would carry her onto Paradise Road and, eventually, the tarmac that led to civilization, Old Cut simply disappears. Through the meadow on her right, a wall of water seems to have swiped the ground away. She steps to the edge of this new ravine and peers down. It’s at least an eight foot drop, and she can hear the trickle of water in the dark below her.

            How is this even possible, she wonders. It must have been some ancient creek bed plowed over a hundred years ago. But the water remembered. It came home. And now she’s stuck on a mountain for god knows how long. She pulls out her phone and thumbs the screen on. Still no signal. She tries opening Safari, pulling up the Times. Nothing. She scrolls to Emily’s contact card, taps “Call”. Silence, not even the judgmental beep of a failed attempt.

            She pushes the phone back into her pocket, puts her hands on her hips, stares across the yawning six feet between her and – what? Another road? Who even knew if Paradise Road was intact. Hell, the highways were impassable this morning, said the radio, and the backroads of Carversville must be pretty far down the county road crew’s list of priorities. And if they were, so what? Was she going to go knock on doors and make sure everyone was all right? She’d probably get rocks thrown at her from second floor bedrooms. Tomatoes. She almost chuckles. The live music on the village green is probably cancelled this week. Ain’t that a shame for the good folks of Carversville. Now she does chuckle, thinking of the Neil Young covers no one gets to hear. She turns back to the one mile uphill climb she has ahead of her to the house. At least, she thinks, it stopped raining.

            At 5:00 the sky goes yellow, then purple, then black. Then the rain returns.

            Charlotte hadn’t thought to download any music, so she’s on her knees listening for the third time to the one U2 record on her phone, using the fireplace tongs to turn the foil-wrapped potato she’s pushed into a womb of embers, when a window upstairs explodes. At least that’s what it sounds like. She’s startled so badly she drops the tongs, which rattle and clang on the brick of the outer hearth. She hears the fierce howl of wind and runs upstairs.

            It’s in the guest room, where the two twin beds are now covered in broken glass. Both panes of the swinging windows have burst inward. Shards of glass, splinters of wood cover the room, the furniture, the floor. The curtain flails wildly, and sheets of rain reach greedily through the fanged black mouth of the broken window. Flashes of lightning throw horrors of trees into momentarily relief against the night. Charlotte pulls the door closed; there’s not much she can do about that window now. It must have been a pressure wave, the wind must have –

            Behind her, another window blows in, this time in the bathroom. She goes to pull shut the door, seeing in a flash of lightning the bathtub filled with broken glass. But there’s something else. She walks carefully, feeling her way in the dark, her boots crunching glass on the floor, and puts her hands against the window frame. Rain spatters her face, icy needles, but she waits. And in another flash she sees – but it’s impossible – she thinks she sees water, out past the garage, not just coursing but – it can’t be – standing. Standing water. But that driveway, and then Old Cut Road, that’s all downhill for a mile, then another mile down and around the wide base of the mountain to the village and the lake.

            Should have kept the kayaks, she thinks and tries to laugh. It doesn’t work.

            She pulls the door to the bathroom closed, then the other doors upstairs to her bedroom and the sewing room. The storm front must have brought with it a low pressure system, and these old windows – but they’d blown in. Not out. The windows had blown in. She’s at the bottom of the stairs, reaching for the burning candle she left on the kitchen island when the glass over the sink splinters into shards and blows across the kitchen like a shotgun blast. A few shards whip past her hand, leave deep grooves in her flesh, embed in her palm. She pulls her hand back as the candle is blown out and away, and in another flash of lightning she sees canyons carved into her hand as if it, like the candle, is made of wax. She wraps the bottom of her coat around it and turns to drop the three stairs into the living room, but in another flash she sees a gallery of faces at the broken kitchen window, their mouths drawn long, gaping black, toothless and hungry. Their eyes sunken hollows, lifeless cavities rimmed with sickly, split flesh.

            She screams, she can’t help it, and trips on the last stair into the living room, sending herself sprawling in the dark onto the floor. She hits an end table and something smashes to the floor beside her. Their faces, god, their faces. But that’s impossible, too, isn’t it? Of course it is. She crawls to the fire, whipped into a vortex by the wind, twisting up past the flue, roaring like a caged animal. She unwraps her hand, holds it close to the light of the fire. The deep grooves darken and then fill with blood, and she hurriedly wraps it again. She feels her way back into the kitchen, hunched against the howling wind, and pulls a hand towel from its hook by the sink. She keeps her head down as she moves back toward the living room, toward the relative safety of the fire, but still she hears their voices.

            Whore, they hiss as Charlotte falls upon the couch, wrapping the towel around around her hand; in the flickering light of the fire, her blood blooms black through the towel. Slut, they seethe through the fire’s roar as Charlotte pulls blankets off the back of the couch down onto her, pulls her knees up to her chest, buries her face. Killer, they chant with the pulse of the rain, the rolling thunder, the crack and snap and sharp report of something breaking.

            Charlotte wakes she’s not sure when. It’s dark, humid. Her mind slowly floats back to her, surfacing, and she pushes the blankets down, squinting against the light. She sees her ceiling, and something about its perfect ordinariness strikes her as profoundly heartbreaking. Then a cloud floats overhead. But it’s not a cloud. She purses her lips and exhales from deep in her chest. Her breath puffs out, drifting up and away. She rubs her eyes, then pulls herself up with one arm on the back of the couch, swinging her feet over onto the floor –

            And into an inch of water. She looks down, incredulous. Is she still dreaming? The nightmare from last night, chapter two, the sequel’s on the water to up the stakes. But no, she’s awake. And a calm pool of still water lies serenely across the first floor of her house like a float of Grand Marnier. She sloshes to the window in her boots, blankets wrapped around her shoulders, and wipes away the condensation. Her mountain is underwater. She is on an island. The uncanny sea laps at the side of the house. She sees ripples, small waves, extending out to where a fog bank swallows the horizon. The tops of trees poke out from the placid surface, shrubs on some nightmare mirror. The mountains rise from the water like an archipelago, Mount Agnes its fulcrum. She looks around the room. The last few charred bits of log float near the coffee table, the fireplace flooded.

            Charlotte goes upstairs to the bedroom, pulls a suitcase down from the closet. She sets it on the bed and pulls open her drawers, throwing underwear, socks, thermals, sweaters into the suitcase. She has to put it on the floor and kneel on it to get it latched. Into a backpack she drops her toothbrush, toothpaste, a roll of toilet paper. She layers: t-shirt, long underwear, sweater, jacket. She pulls the stocking hat down over her ears again. It’s the second week of July. She pulls on wool socks, laces her boots tight against the water.

            She steps out the front door and looks across the flat plane of the new inland sea. It’s beautiful despite itself. Sunlight casts fireworks upon the surface. Charlotte stands for a moment, notes the sky darkening to the west, the wall of the next storm front gathering, planning, plotting, scheming. Then she’s dragging her suitcase through the water, trudging uphill once more to the barn, higher ground, her last safe place.



BIO

Jacob Strunk has been short-listed for both a Student Academy Award and the Pushcart Prize in fiction, as well as the Glimmer Train short story award and a New Rivers Press book prize. His films have screened in competition and by invitation across the world, and his genre-bending fiction has appeared in print for over twenty years, most recently in Coffin BellFive on the Fifth, and his collection Screaming in Tongues, published in early 2023. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and teaches film and media in Los Angeles, where he lives with a few framed movie posters and the ghost of his cat, Stephen.









Bat Summer

by Rachel Paz Ruggera


When they hit the mist net, they seem to be floating. Tangled, their fleshy wings crumpled and held tight against their bodies—flightless. Bats are the only mammals capable of flight. Not the hopping, drifting, falling from tree to tree of a sugar glider or flying squirrel, but true flight. Batman would carefully untangle one from the net as it thrashed and squeaked in his hands. Holding it up to the light, it would flash its fangs and tear at his leather glove as he bared his teeth in a smile of his own.

I first started working with Batman, as all the interns affectionately called him, in my junior year of college. My philosophy professor was the one who introduced us. We happened to be talking about our summer plans when she mentioned her unusual pastime of walking through the cemetery-turned-wildlife-sanctuary a few blocks from her house at night carrying around a bat detector and doing citizen science work with a professor from a nearby university. 

It was the perfect coincidence. I had been looking for some sort of field work experience at the time. Anyone who had any career plans at all was, and I was swept along in this same wave of ambition. On the first night that I arrived at the cemetery, it was nearly dusk, the perfect time to walk transects around the ponds, mosquito repellent liberally applied and headlamp strapped to my forehead making a funny indentation.

This is where I first met Batman. Among the imposing, stone crypts as big as traditional style housing on a college campus, holding the stately remains of renowned writers, governmental officials, and historical figures from the Revolutionary War. 

Batman was known for being constantly on the move. I remember him walking up and down the paths crisscrossing the cemetery grounds, a cup of convenience store coffee in hand, without a flashlight, without a map. Not because he never got lost, he got lost plenty of times as he would reluctantly admit, but because this was how he worked best, on the fly and constantly adapting the plan.

I have never met anyone as enamored by bats as he was. His excitement was infectious, a quiet hum in the air that traveled through the group of high schoolers, college students, and citizen scientists as one by one our heads were drawn up to tree-level where the first bats of the night were zipping by. I thought they would look like birds when they flew, elegantly soaring, but they’re much more like moths fluttering and staggering in the dark.

That’s what I was. A bat hopelessly tangled in a net I couldn’t even see, strung up from tree to tree with thousands of gossamer threads, that I would spend the next year struggling to untangle myself from.

I realize I’m searching for the perfect metaphor to find meaning in this story.

***

Take four years of a college science curriculum, and you will learn how to take yourself out of your writing. The author will be impersonal, unbiased, and keep their opinions from marring the scientific integrity of their work. All claims will be backed up by evidence, corroborated with the literature, and thoroughly reviewed. You will learn that the highest authority that exists is a panel of old, white men in academia. 

I was twenty years old, female, and an ambiguous shade of not-white. He was a professor, published in scientific journals, respected by his peers, an expert in his field. I had no evidence.

Let me tell you my story anyway.

***

It was late summer. We were sitting outside the barn, huddled in our coats and scarves after the relentless heat of the day. The grass was wet with dew forming in the few hours left before dawn, and the cuffs of my jeans were damp from pacing back and forth.

In that long moment of silence, a bat flew into our net with a resounding thud. I got up to put it in a brown paper lunch bag and carry it back to the processing table. He held it up to the light spilling out from the barn door. That’s when I saw its wings. The metal band clipped onto the bat’s forearm was digging into its skin, slicing an angry, red gash into its flesh.

I remember the sharp focus he had when he handled the bat. It may have been past two in the morning, my legs stiff from sitting in a lawn chair bent over a clipboard the whole night, but my mind was suddenly clear. In the circle of light cast by his headlamp, I could see him cradle the bat in his two cupped hands. He didn’t take his eyes off of it as he directed me in a low and even voice to his toolbox, to find the pliers, to wedge the blade between the bone of the wing and the metal band and pry. Then slowly, millimeter by millimeter, the band loosened until I could pull it off with two fingers. It was rusted and caked with blood. We had gotten it off in one piece. Without breaking the wing.

I like to pretend I know what I’m doing. I like to play the part of the scientist. But that night, I was completely out of my depth. No one had said it out loud, but we could all see the truth. The bat would either get an infection from the open wound gouged in its wing and die, or we’d try to remove the band and break the fragile, toothpick bone of its forearm and it would die anyway. I could see it in the hesitance and bated breath of the other field tech. In the quiet tension that had replaced the sleepy-mind-wandering downtime only moments before.

The three of us looked at the bloody band, at the bat in his hands, still beating both wings, and let out a collective sigh of relief. There would be no death tonight.

In my mind, I can see this moment take a different turn. I can see the different pathways branching and the probability of each outcome and all these probabilities at the tip of each branch being multiplied together to get the result of this night. In other words, I can picture him walking to the back of the barn, turning off his headlamp, grasping the head in one hand and the body in the other, and pulling back until the sides of both closed fists meet.

But I must constantly remind myself of which path was taken, of what really was the truth, and that no matter how unlikely it seemed, I saw that bat cling to his open palm as he raised his arm to the black sky, then suddenly the bat was gone too, melted back into the night.

Whenever I find myself thinking that I must hate him, I come back to this night. The focus, the intention, the care, the exhilaration of holding another life in my hands. The waver between uncertainty and assurance in my own capabilities. The beauty of the bat leaping from an open palm. And yet he was there too.

***

My dad called me yesterday to tell me he saw a mouse run out of my closet. Whatever it was my mom sent him upstairs to find was completely forgotten with the quick scurry of a four-legged thing, a flash of pink tail and whiskers.

It’s comforting to know that while I’ve been gone, something living has moved back in. Reclaimed the dusty corners and moldy cardboard boxes, the cluttered drawers with a lifetime of old schoolwork, the empty spaces I’ve made with my leaving. But the real surprise wasn’t the mouse. I can’t remember the last time my dad picked up the phone to ask how was my day, what classes am I taking this semester, what are my plans for Thanksgiving?

So what does he do when he hears the news—when he’s so desperately worried about his only child? What does he do but call to say there was a mouse in my closet?

***

I watch for him. Every time I walk past the tables outside the dining hall, some part of me expects him to be there, waiting for me. I watch for his car—dark blue and speckled with dents and scrapes along the sides. When I see a car that looks familiar, I have to peek into the window to make sure it’s not him. Every time my phone buzzes, it’s him, asking about my day, when we’re going to meet next, and can I call him to talk now? He took every minute of my free time to the point where I would drop a class and not tell him at first, just so I could have that hour to myself. He’d tell me to drop classes because they seemed too hard for me. He chipped away at every ounce of my resolve until I’d just say yes to avoid an argument, to avoid the questions, is everything okay? what’s going on with you? you know you can talk to me, right? 

You can talk to me right? 

You can talk to me. Talk to me. Talk.

Are you fascinated by a good story? 

Am I telling you a story? 

Am I a story? 

Bats are the only mammals that can fly. 

Bats are the only mammals that can fly. 

Bats are the only mammals that can fly, can fly, can fly away. 

We were alone together in his car, driving back to the city at two in the morning. I was barely awake but he wouldn’t stop talking, telling me how special I was, how we had this connection, unlike any of his other students, we had so much in common. Teachers were supposed to be good and kind and trustworthy. Teachers were not supposed to put their hand on your thigh and lean over in a dark car while driving you home.

It was tangled in the net, wings held tight against its body. 

Flightless.

***

After I told someone for the first time, it felt like time had stopped moving. Or maybe during the past year was when it had stopped, and now the clocks were finally ticking again. I walked across campus with my head down, staring at my shoes as they carried me further from the biology department. My eyes were red and bloodshot. I hate how easy it is to tell when I’ve been crying.

The mallards sound like they’re laughing

from behind the trees.

I left campus and kept on walking through the residential areas, past off-campus housing, the ancient looking seminary with its pristine brick walls and spires. I didn’t know exactly where I was going until I got there.

Laughing at me for my somber mood

on this day that was freely given to us.

I looked around at the empty park benches, the murky pond with freshly painted three-story homes surrounding it, the cormorants basking in the low-hanging sun, and I thought to myself, of course, I’ve been here before.

On this day, where catbirds

fight to be heard over car alarms.

Two years ago now, in early fall. I’ll always remember this place. This is where I go when I don’t want to be anywhere anymore.

Where the rumble of someone rolling out

their trash bin tries to imitate the thunder.

My roommate asked if I wanted to go grocery shopping this weekend. I didn’t understand the question, it didn’t feel like I would still be here this weekend, or the next, or even tomorrow. I was suspended in this one moment. I didn’t even have the energy to get up from this park bench.

Can’t they see the time for beautiful things

is over?

I’m telling you this not so you’ll pity me or hate him. I would rather tell you any other story, yet this one seems to keep repeating itself. In fact, I can’t seem to tell you any other story until I get this one down. Until I’ve given it some semblance of order by writing it and given myself some fragment of peace by claiming it as my own.

The trees agree with me, their trunks almost black,

still wet from rain and appropriately gloomy.

How do I understand my memory of him? How can we hold so many memories within us? Some of them contradict each other. Some of them overlap and blend and transform.  

It is time for the bleak mid-winter.

It is time for icy sidewalks that catch you at your worst.

How do I understand that people are not always good? That I am not always good? That I am a victim and everything that entails but not only that.

It is time for bare branches, gnarled and knobby

like the arthritic joints of an old man’s hands.

Surely I can’t be both. Surely the old gray-beard-poets contained multitudes, but who am I to try to be everything I am all at once? Do I even dare?

It is time for the mallards to fly away

to wherever it is they go when the pond freezes over.

My performance is over. I’ve retold my story too many times. I could rattle it off like a script, complete with exposition, rising action, a dramatic climax. I’m tired. I’m done talking. Haven’t I done enough.

Yet here they remain,

laughing at me and my foolishness.

I want this to be the last time. Let me sit alone in the woods and listen to birdsong.

They have always known how to tell me

the truth when my mind will not.

***

I am afraid that all this summer was, everything that happened, was meaningless. What’s the moral of this story? I’ve been searching this whole time and I can’t seem to find it. What have I lost? What was gained? Maybe I’ve misplaced it. Maybe it’s time to go looking elsewhere.

I go to the woods to be alone. Not even here is it completely silent. I can hear the muffled white noise of cars behind the trees and the distinct groaning of the Green Line shuffling along its track. There’s the crunch of dead leaves as people walk by chatting about their innermost lives or else nothing important at all. There are the dogs, off-leash at last, with noses glued to the ground as their owners call to them. I go to the woods to be alone and find that I am surrounded by so much life. I wander until the skin over my knuckles is red and cracked from staying out too long in the cold.

I am constantly surprised at the impossible kindness in people. I wonder how life can be horrible in one moment and wonderful in the next. I’m learning how to notice the good things when they come around. I have a lot to learn.  

I study the world to find meaning in it. I’m beginning to think this is also why I write. To find meaning in what would otherwise be nothing more than sleepless nights, skipped meals, and resentment. I question myself if some things are better left unsaid. I question myself all the time. But I know there are also things that can’t be contained within the body. Maybe some stories are like pain leaving the body. I have told my story many times. That’s why I feel so much lighter when I put down my pen, stand from my desk, and open the door. The telling makes room for something else. (I’m beginning to find out what that is.)



BIO

Rachel Paz Ruggera is a research technician in a developmental biology lab and holds a BS in Biology from Boston College. Her work is forthcoming in Atticus Review and Outrageous Fortune.







The Sinking


NOTE: “The Sinking” is an excerpt from Evelyn Herwitz’s debut novel, Line of Flight. In 1915 Simone Levitsky, recently widowed, sets sail on the Lusitania on a desperate, dangerous search for her estranged daughter, Camilla, who has run off to France with her beau to volunteer in the Great War. Simone writes her account to her granddaughter, Zoé.

by Evelyn Herwitz


How is it possible that a line of ink becomes a thought, that these swirls and dips of black on white convey the blood and anguish, the terror, the pain, the profound grief and stupefaction of that terrible Friday, May 7, 1915? Nearly four years later, my hand still shakes as I recall the horrors I witnessed, horrors that invade my dreams to this day. Yet, there is no avoiding it any longer, no sparing the truth. Writing to you, dear Zoé, seems the only way I know to expunge the disaster from my soul.

The Lusitanias foghorn woke us early that morning, blasting once a minute by Papa’s gold watch. Far from a reassurance that Captain Turner was taking all precautions as we approached the coast, however, the warning only unsettled me all the more. Outside our porthole, the water was veiled by a milky scrim of mist, as if we were sailing through a sea of ghosts. Only when I saw Professor Rockwell at breakfast, when Colin assured me that the fog provided an invisibility cloak from U-boats, was I able to breathe more freely. My cabin-mate, Amanda, however, remained unconvinced, peppering him and Mr. Berdichevsky with questions about the apparent absence of any naval escort, working herself into such a lather that I could no longer tolerate her company.

By late morning, the mist began to dissipate and the foghorn fell silent. As the skies brightened, so did my mood, heartened by the brilliant green Irish coast and indigo seas, smooth as glass. We glided through waters like a skater on ice. There were no other ships in sight, but the lack of a naval escort seemed perfectly normal on such a pristine day. Everyone was in a jovial mood, strolling the Shelter Deck in the brilliant sunlight, dressed in finery as our journey approached its end. Pink was the favored shade.

I was relieved that the Professor wisely chose not to revisit our prior conversation about your mother’s flight to Paris and whether I would accept his help to find Camilla. Following a pleasant lunch at first sitting (Amanda was holed up in our cabin, unable to stomach more food, despite calm seas), we resumed our rounds on the Shelter Deck, while Colin explained the many variants of avian life now apparent near land.

Shortly after two o’clock, by Papa’s watch, a cluster had gathered by the rail and were pointing at something. Hoping for porpoises, we hurried to join them.

At first I thought the frothy trail heading toward our ship was the trace of a curious whale.

Colin gripped my hand. “Good God,” he murmured, “they’ve gone and done it.”

The torpedo struck like a thunderclap, followed by a muffled explosion belowdecks. A geyser of water and debris flew skyward toward the starboard bow, pelting the decks above. The ship rumbled and trembled, listing toward open ocean. I nearly fell. Colin caught me. “Life preservers. Now.” He tugged me toward the stairs down to the Main Deck.

As we pushed our way through the screaming crowd, another explosion, deep within the ship’s bowels, caused me nearly to lose my footing again. My heart slammed my ribs. By now, the Lusitania was tilting more heavily to starboard. Descending the two flights to our cabins on the Main Deck as other passengers shoved upwards, I felt like a salmon swimming cockeyed, in the wrong direction.

To my surprise, however, I was not frightened so much as intensely alert. As we edged past our fellow passengers, every facial scar, every mole, every excessive streak of rouge stood out in sharp relief. A floral stew of perfumes and colognes mixed with sweat and coal dust and salt air and the aroma of breaded fish from the First Class Dining Saloon. When we reached my cabin, Colin had to yank open the door.

Inside, lying on her bed as if nothing had happened, was Amanda. She looked up, blankly. Her mouth opened, then closed, but no words came.

“Amanda, we must go! The ship’s been hit!” I yelled, shaking her while Colin grabbed our life vests from the closet. She merely stared. “Put this on,” he barked. “I’ll be right back.”

My icy fingers fumbled. I had barely secured the ties when Colin returned, neatly suited in his preserver. Amanda had curled into a fetal position on her bunk, moaning softly.

“What do we do? We can’t just leave her here.”

“I’ll carry her.” Colin tried to pull Amanda to her feet, but she collapsed again on the bed. “Close the porthole,” he ordered. I did as I was told. Colin managed to seat her upright, and I supported her as he deftly secured her into the preserver. She moaned again, but was compliant enough. We were losing precious seconds. I wanted to smack her. Colin scooped her up in his arms, like some fragile doll in a clumsy yellow vest, and nodded toward the door. I shoved it open, and we teetered back to the stairs.

By now, the ship was so tilted that maintaining balance was a strenuous effort. More Third Class passengers thronged the stairway, yelling, crying, cursing, surging in both directions. All the passageways were dark. Colin forced us through, pushing me from behind as he cradled Amanda, who did absolutely nothing to help herself.

Somehow, we found our way up the three flights to the Promenade Deck, level with the lifeboats, but the ship was so canted that the boats swung too far inward on the port side where we emerged. There was much shouting and pushing and shoving as passengers and crew tried to force the boats outward over the railing. The public address system was dead, and no one seemed to be in charge.

In the midst of this chaos, one lifeboat, filled with passengers, suddenly swung back and smashed against the ship’s inner wall, tossing those aboard like matchsticks and crushing others who weren’t limber enough to jump out of the way. People shrieked. Blood spattered everywhere. Mrs. Cooper, our mealtime mate, lay crumpled in a heap upon the deck, her little boy dying in her shattered arms.

If this weren’t hellish enough, a second boat crashed to the slick deck and lurched toward the screaming throng. Right in its path stood little Jenny, frozen, crying for her mother. I don’t know how, but I ran. I grabbed her, knocking her pink rubber ball from her grasp. It bounced madly off the deck and wall, right toward the careening boat. Howling, she tried to wriggle free to rescue it, but I hugged her to my life vest, teetering to stay balanced. Miraculously, the boat swiveled and jammed to a halt, barely a foot away—the little pink ball squashed beneath its prow.

The poor child sobbed, shivering in my arms as I carried her back toward Colin. His face was drained of color and sweat dribbled down his broad forehead. The reality of what I had just done registered only in my trembling muscles and pounding heart. Neither of us spoke. I stroked Jenny’s hair as she rested her head on my shoulder. He jostled Amanda to rebalance her in his arms. She remained totally oblivious, staring, wide-eyed, at nothing. Together with our burdens, we slid and stumbled through the frenzied crowd, round to the starboard side.

Here the scene was equally frantic, as the ship was rapidly sinking. We listed so far to starboard that the lifeboats swung away from the rail at least seven feet. Some jumped the distance, others missed and fell, shrieking, into the water. One boat, full of passengers, swayed and jerked as it was lowered, only to loosen and plummet into the sea atop all the hapless souls struggling to stay afloat. Bloodied waters slapped the wreckage, staining splintered boards crimson. I sheltered Jenny’s eyes.

“This way!” shouted Colin, shoving me toward a lifeboat still filling with passengers. As we pushed through the crowd, I recognized Mr. Vanderbilt from his photographs in the papers. Dressed in gray suit and polka-dotted tie, he stood to the side, calmly handing out life vests and helping stray children put them on, smiling as if doling out prizes at a Sunday picnic. Nearby, a woman cried hysterically, asking everyone if they had seen her little boy. The lifeboat, Number 15, was near capacity, but Colin forced our way through the crush to the railing.

“Women and children, first! Come along, Ma’am,” barked one of the ship’s officers, reaching to pry Jenny from my arms. She clung to my neck with the ferocity of a tiger cub. I glanced desperately at Colin, who urged me forward.

“It’s all right, Jenny, I’ll be right there,” I whispered in her ear. She looked up, pupils wide with terror. I forced a smile and kissed her downy forehead. Before I could offer another word of reassurance, however, the officer wrenched her from my arms and tossed her, screeching, across the watery gap, into waiting arms on the boat. Then he grabbed my hand. I looked back at Colin, still lugging Amanda, who barely stirred. I hated her more in that moment than I have ever hated anyone.

“Go on,” he said. “I’ll find you.”

“Colin!”

“There’s no time. We’ll be fine.”

“Jump!” ordered the officer, hoisting me up to the rail. I looked back, again, at Colin. He smiled grimly and nodded. Jenny screamed for her mother. I gathered my skirts, took a deep breath and leaped with all my might into the arms of the catcher on the boat. “That’s the last one. Lower her down!” shouted the officer.

The boat jerked as the ropes released us over the side. I stumbled over legs and squeezed down between a heavyset woman in a ridiculous fur coat and diamond necklace, and a pregnant woman crying for her husband. Jenny clambered into my lap and streamed urine all over my skirt. “Where’s Mummy?” she whimpered. “We’ll find her,” I lied. I held her close, panting, my heart throbbing in my ears. Above us, the Lusitanias four towering black smokestacks listed heavily. Number 15 had barely twenty feet to drop before we struck water with a heavy splash, but as the oarsmen tried to row, something snagged.

“It’s the Marconi wire!” a man shouted. “Cut loose, cut loose!”

Horrorstruck, Colin watched from above, still cradling Amanda, overshadowed by the looming black smokestacks, like a doomed passenger on an elevator to Hell. “Get out of the boat!” he yelled. “You’ll go down with the ship!” A man’s body floated nearby, face down, blood swirling from a gash in his arm. Jenny burrowed her head in my neck. My legs turned to consommé. I looked up at Colin and shook my head, no.

With a sudden jerk, our boat drifted free. One of the crew had cut the wire with a knife. My fellow passengers cheered as the oarsmen rowed hard to clear the ship. A huge knot in my throat stifled my voice. The best I could do was summon a smile for Colin, to give him courage. He touched two fingers to his lips and waved. Moments later, he dropped Amanda into the water and jumped in after.

Of perhaps two dozen lifeboats, I counted only five others, packed with passengers. The rest had crashed or swamped. All around us floated deck chairs, shattered boards, useless life vests, oars, wooden crates, books, bottles, luggage, hats, a child’s doll. A hencoop with a bedraggled, clucking mother hen and five peeping chicks, clinging to wire mesh, twirled past. Dear Zoé, the horror of it all, hundreds of people, flailing about, waving their hands and crying for help! Such desperation! The lifeless, drifting children were the most heartbreaking. Barely an hour earlier, they had been playing shuffleboard or skipping rope.

Shivering swimmers tried to grab our gunwales, but we were already low in the water and could not take them on. The crew had to butt them away with oars, lest we all drown. Their eyes pleaded with sheer terror, their blue lips quivered, speechless, as they floated backwards. A heavy-set balding man, submerged to his chest, gray mustache plastered to his cheeks, begged for mercy. He offered to pay for a seat, clinging to the side of the boat with such ferocity that we tipped sideways. An oarsman had to pry off his white knuckled fist, finger by finger. People jeered and applauded as he bobbed away, cursing and weeping like a pathetic walrus. It was sickening, cruel, but there was no way to save everyone.

The crew rowed us farther out, dodging the wreckage and the drowning, to avoid the sinking ship’s suction. I scanned the waters in vain for any trace of Colin. I told myself over and over that he was a strong swimmer; he’d said so himself. He had his life vest. There were plenty of debris to hold onto. Amanda was undoubtedly dead. I feared that Jenny’s mother was probably lost, as well. There was nothing I could do but hug the child for reassurance—hers and mine. We all watched, mesmerized, as the Lusitania continued her relentless slide to the ocean floor.

Bow first, she sliced the waves like a dagger. A small army of passengers still crowded the deck along the rail, struggling upward en masse toward the stern as the prow submerged. Some jumped. Others stepped off into the sea. Those who remained to the end simply drifted away like petals. One by one, the massive smokestacks swallowed saltwater and all that was afloat nearby, then belched blasts of coal dust and steam. A blackened body shot from one funnel like a cannon ball, then plunged headfirst into the waves.

“What was that?” asked Jenny, wide-eyed.

“A flying fish,” I said. She accepted my ridiculous explanation without question.

In a final salute, iron and steel groaned as the ship’s mighty propellers rose high in the air, glittering golden in the sharp sunlight. Then, with the most unearthly, protracted moan, the Lusitania was gone. A huge plateau of water rose in her place, washing debris and lost souls outward in her wake and nearly capsizing our boat. Waves splashed over the gunwales as we rocked violently to and fro. Jenny screamed for her mother. I pressed my cheek to her forehead and whispered more lies to soothe her cries into whimpers.

Slowly, the swell dispersed. Where once sailed our mighty ship, all that remained was a massive, swirling vortex of jade and white froth.

“Where did the boat go?” whispered Jenny.

“Into the sea.” There was no point in pretending, at least about that.

“Where’s Mummy?”

“We’ll find her, Jenny, we’ll find her soon.”

She clasped my neck so tightly, I gasped for air. My shoes and stockings were soaked through, and my toes had long gone numb. This was no time, however, for self-pity. We were among the few lucky ones in a lifeboat. Gradually, Jenny’s grasp relaxed, and she slipped into the blissful sleep of childhood. Overhead, herring gulls circled, mewling. One alighted on a floating deckchair and preened its feathers. Indigo seas shimmered.

As the ocean calmed and our boat drifted around the huge floating island of wreckage and bodies, the field of waving hands thinned and grew still. Seagulls wheeled and screeched. I thought I heard hymns. I wondered if I were delusional, until I realized that the singing voices came from one of the lifeboats across the way. Oddly, we had not made contact with any of the other boats, perhaps out of a shared sense of guilt. It was as if we who had survived were all complicit in the act of saving ourselves at the expense of the drowned.

A woman’s body floated past. She was wearing an emerald green dress trimmed with bedraggled peacock feathers, and her long auburn hair streamed about her face like Medusa’s serpents. Her skin was ashen blue. Her glassy eyes stared blankly at the heavens. A seagull swooped down and landed on her breast. It hesitated a moment, head cocked, then plucked an eyeball from its socket, freckling her cheeks crimson. “Bloody bastard!” yelled the oarsman. He tried to smack the gull with his oar, but it flapped away, easily evading any punishment. The pregnant woman groaned, louder. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to steady my stomach. Jenny stirred in my lap, then resettled.

“Look!” The woman in fur pointed a bejeweled finger toward the horizon. A plume of black smoke rose from a fast-moving steamer. “What took them so long?” muttered someone else. “Where in hell is the friggin’ Navy?” snarled a third. Our hopes sank as the steamer continued on its way and soon disappeared from view. “Outrageous!” exclaimed the woman in fur. Water calmly slapped the sides of our boat.

Next to me, the pregnant woman groaned once more, louder this time. “Oh my God,” she cried, “I think I’m in labor!”

“Good Lord,” muttered the woman in fur. “What next?”

A woman near the prow turned around. “I’m a midwife. How far apart are your contractions?”

“I, I don’t know. My water broke when the torpedo struck. This is my first. Oh, God! Where is my husband? Where is Robert?”

Her body shuddered beneath my fingers. Thank goodness I had pinned Papa’s watch to my waist that morning! As I timed the woman’s contractions, the gentle tick-tick-tick brought his sweet smile to mind, and my strength rebounded.

“Let me through,” said the midwife, trying to rise. The boat rocked heavily.

“We’re all going to drown!” shrieked the woman in fur.

“If you keep it up, you’re the first one overboard,” I snapped. She gaped at me, jowls fluttering. Others made way so the midwife could climb over to us. By now, the pregnant woman’s contractions were coming every three minutes. The oarsman passed his knife. I wanted to hand off Jenny, but I was afraid to wake her from her deep slumber.

“Madam,” said the midwife to the woman in fur. “We could use your coat to provide some privacy.”

“Do you have any idea how much this mink is worth?”

I glared at her. “No one cares.”

She arched her brows, looking from me to the midwife to the moaning pregnant woman and back to me. “Go on,” growled the oarsman. After what seemed an endless struggle to extricate her plump arms, she handed the mink to the midwife with a snort. “Any damage and you’ll have to replace it.”

It was all so ludicrous. I would have laughed were it not for the poor woman’s intensifying pain. Another passenger helped me hold up the precious coat to shield her as the midwife conducted her examination. Jenny stirred and blinked, then fell back to sleep.

The woman’s wretched cries rang out across the water as rippling shadows grew longer. Still there were no rescue boats in sight. “What in the name of God is taking them so long?” someone groaned.

Jenny sat up. She rubbed her eyes and looked about, confused, then reached out to explore the mink’s soft fur.

“Don’t touch that!” snapped the owner. Jenny pulled back her hand and began to wail.

I stamped the stupid woman’s foot. “Ow! How dare you!” she sputtered.

“How dare you think only of your foolish coat! Thank God you’re still alive and keep quiet.” Her lips parted and closed like a fish, but she said nothing.

Behind the mink coat, the pregnant woman began to shriek. Jenny cowered in my lap, whimpering. My arm shook from holding the heavy fur. Thankfully, a woman behind me tapped my shoulder and offered to take it.

“Oh, God, I’m going to die!” gasped the pregnant woman.

“What’s that?” whispered Jenny, pointing. A few yards away, a triangular fin traced a path amidst the debris. My stomach turned. Could there be sharks in these waters? What about Colin? I clutched Papa’s watch, but its steady ticking could not quell my rising panic. Then the creature’s gray back surfaced, and a spray of mist rose from its blowhole, painting a rainbow.

“It’s a porpoise,” I said, exhaling with relief. We marveled at the shimmering colors. The mink’s owner harrumphed, but she looked away when I glared at her with one eyebrow raised—the stern look that nearly always silenced Camilla (at least, until your grandfather died).

The young woman heaved and cried. We all tensed with each contraction. I wondered what the porpoise must be thinking, swimming among the drowned. Had it dodged the torpedo on its deadly course? Had it watched the Lucy sink to the ocean floor? Did it feel sorrow, or was it as anxious to be rid of us humans, intruders in its watery world, as we were to be rescued?

“Breathe with me,” coached the midwife.

The sun moved inexorably closer to the horizon. Jenny bored her head into my aching shoulder. It suddenly struck me that Shabbos would soon arrive. I tried to block out the chaos by humming Lecha Dodi, to no avail. For all the times I’d grumbled about preparing Friday night dinner before sundown, all the tedious rituals, now, in this hour of blood and destruction and the battle of birth, how I ached for the candles’ glow in our silver candlesticks, the white linen tablecloth set with our best china, the smell of my fresh baked challah, the peace that would settle over our home as your grandfather left for shul. Unable to avoid the mother’s agony, I felt as if I were trapped, once again, in interminable labor, turning myself inside out to force Camilla into the world. When her tiny body was placed in my arms, I was so depleted that I barely noticed. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a mother.

“I can see the head,” said the midwife. “Push!”

With one last bloodcurdling scream, the woman obeyed. We all held our breaths. Seagulls circled overhead. The lifeboat creaked as passengers shifted uneasily. Then, at last—a newborn’s wail.

“It’s a girl!” announced the midwife. Our wooden ark rocked with applause and huzzahs. Jenny traced the path of tears down my cheeks with her pinky. The midwife nodded to lower the coat as she handed the infant, swaddled in her shawl, to the mother, who shivered in her own sweat. Blood puddled on the floor of the boat. The midwife tossed the placenta over the side. A gull swooped, snapping it up. Numbly, I handed the coat back to its owner, who snatched it from me, checking for stains. If she found any, however, she at least didn’t have the chutzpah to say anything. The new mother cradled her baby and sobbed.

Jenny stared in wonder at the newborn. Then she looked at me with huge violet eyes. “Where’s Mummy?”

“We’ll find her soon, Jenny. We’ll find her.” The words grabbed at my throat.

“Over there!” someone yelled. On the horizon, blue-black against the fading sky, wisps of smoke curled heavenward. As we all strained to watch, the puffs grew more distinct, and beneath them emerged dark shapes—an armada of fishing boats, trawlers, others that I could not identify. At last, our rescuers had arrived.

There were ten boats in all. My fellow survivors cheered and cried, but I was unable to summon any enthusiasm. I was suffused with exhaustion. Jenny embraced me like a vise, her leg clamped against my thighs.

As the boats chugged closer, the crew members scanned the watery killing field in stunned silence. “Over here,” one of our oarsmen shouted, waving his arm. “We’ve a newborn!”

A red bearded sailor on the closest trawler pointed in our direction. I could just make out the name Manx, painted in white on its rusty black bow. As the trawler pulled up alongside us, one of the crew caught our vessel with a long boat hook. A grizzled man in a navy-blue wool cap reached over to grab hands and hoist passengers aboard. Jenny clung to me when it came our turn, but he plucked her from my arms with reassuring words. Soon she was back in my lap as we sat on the deck, wrapped in gray woolen blankets. The crew brought the shivering new mother and her infant into the cabin, where she could rest near the ship’s stove. My hem and shoes were soaked with her blood. I feared she might not survive the night.

Crowded as we were, the Manx felt luxurious. It smelled of fish and coal dust and grease and guts—but, inexplicably, it was the most intoxicating aroma. I nodded off to a dreamless sleep.

I don’t know how long we sailed back to the harbor. Snippets of conversation drifted in and out of my consciousness. At one point, I thought I heard someone say there were thousands of bodies in the water. I thought I heard Colin, calling my name. The ship’s horn blared, and I awoke with a terrible shudder. Overhead, stars twinkled in the blue-back night. Cliffs loomed like fortress walls along the Irish coastline.

Gently, I slipped the sleeping Jenny from my lap and struggled to my feet, legs tingling with pins and needles. The landscape softened as we entered what appeared to be a large inlet. Along the shoreline, a string of golden lights glimmered. This was Queenstown, I later learned. Land never looked more welcoming. As the Manx slowed on approach to the harbor, I realized that the lights were actually lanterns held by townspeople who lined the quay. I pressed a fist to my lips, for I knew if I started to weep, I could not stop.

Jenny grasped my hand as we stepped off the gangway, but my legs nearly collapsed beneath me. I had become so accustomed to rocking over the ocean, compensating for the rise and fall of the deck, that land now felt too hard, too solid. A crew member grabbed me under both arms until I regained some semblance of balance, although my mind continued to play tricks, as if I were still dipping and rising. He handed me off to a tall man in flannel trousers and blue suspenders.

“What do ye go by, little darlin’?”

I looked at him, dazed, then remembered. It was as if I were naming a stranger. Then I realized that Jenny was nowhere near. “Wait!” I panicked. “There’s a little girl with black curls. I can’t leave her.”

“Would that be the wee one?”

I stared in the direction he indicated, more confused than ever. Another trawler had arrived, and crew members were carrying bodies, stacking them like cordwood alongside the pier. A ragtag crowd of survivors huddled nearby. One man sobbed over his wife’s body. Then I saw little Jenny. She was hugging her mother.

“Mummy, Mummy, that’s the nice lady!” She pointed my way. I wanted to move, but my legs would not obey.

Jenny’s mother limped to me, carrying my former charge in her arms. One sleeve was missing from her dress, and her head was wrapped in a blood-stained rag, her eyes red and swollen. “I thought I’d lost her. I can never repay you,” she said, choking on each word.

I yearned to stroke Jenny’s hair once more—but she was no longer mine. I forced a smile. “She was no trouble at all. She’s a very brave little girl.” My voice cracked. Jenny buried her sweet face in her mother’s neck. We said goodnight. As they were led from the pier with a group of other survivors, the lamplight cast long shadows.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Mr. Berdichevsky, his face ghostly pale. He had yet to find his wife and wept when he saw me. I tried to comfort him, but my words rang hollow. Our conversation seemed to float in the air between us. He told me he had seen men carrying someone who looked like the Professor, weakened but still alive, from one of the rescue boats, though he knew not where. I should have been relieved, but parting from Jenny left me depleted. All I wanted to do was sleep. My escort had to support me as we walked the short distance to the Rob Roy Hotel.

We were greeted by the proprietress, who offered lemonade and dry biscuits with apologies that this was all they could muster on short notice. I couldn’t stomach either and requested a glass of water. She showed me upstairs to a narrow room with whitewashed walls that overlooked the harbor below. There were two small beds, a little table and chair, and a washstand in the corner. Above the beds hung wooden crucifixes. White lace curtains luffed in a gentle night breeze, but the air was damp and clung to my skin. My roommate, a plump woman who snored like a foghorn, was already asleep. I recognized her from another table in the Third Class dining room.

I moved in a strange dream. The proprietress mentioned that Cunard would enable us to buy new outfits at some local clothiers. I lay down in my undergarments, expecting to fall into a deep slumber, but sleep would not come—only a horrific rush of images: the pleading eyes and white knuckles of the walrus man, the shattered bodies of Mrs. Cooper and her dying son, the wretched seagull. I tried to think of your mother and my parents, but all of them, all of them were lost to me.

The last thing I recall was the chime of the hotel’s parlor clock, striking five, and a chorus of birdsong. Perversely, the sun had risen, as always, as if this were just another dawn.



BIO

Evelyn Herwitz has told stories professionally as a public radio and award-winning print journalist, as a marketing and communications specialist, and as an author of an environmental history, Trees at Risk: Reclaiming an Urban Forest (2001). Now devoted to writing fiction, she is a graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Generator in Boston. Her WWI short story “Nachtmusik” appeared in Chautauqua. “The Sinking” is excerpted from her debut novel, Line of Flight. Learn more at evelynherwitz.com.







WHEN THE WARM DAY DIES

By Nolo Segundo


When the warm day dies
And the cool night sets in,
Then I’ll be there, beside
You my love, feeling the
Heat of a beating heart,
My arms wrapped round
Your empty shoulders as
I whisper silent words of
Love and longing in your
Lonely, unadorned ear….



THE TIME OF NOSTALGIA


We went to visit our old neighbor
after they moved her to a nursing home,
an old English lady of ninety-one,
still with that accent of east-end London
and the sweet pleasantness of the kind.

She was too old, too alone to live alone.
She would forget to turn off the gas range
or how to turn on the thermostat or TV,
She had trouble following a simple talk,
but remembered the Blitz, 75 years past,
as if the Nazi bastards were still at the door,
and London was in turmoil: as though Hell
had crashed through the gates of Heaven.

So her family moved her, leaving empty
the house next door, empty of our friend
of 30 some years, empty of her lilting
English accent and her sharp sense of
good old fashioned English humor…
and it seemed like someone had died.

After a few weeks we went to visit her,
my wife and I, taking some sweets and
a small plant—oh yes, and our sadness
too—though we made sure to leave it
outside, unattended to for the moment.

We entered a very large and rambling
sort of building, with pleasant lawns
and locked doors and intercoms for
some voice to decide if you can enter.
It was like sort of a prison, you think,
but a very nice and very clean prison.
Our neighbor was in a special wing,
called rather romantically, ‘Cedar Cove’
and as we entered through yet another
set of stout doors, we greeted her and
she smiled back, but very much as
one might greet a total stranger….



ON EATING AN ORANGE AND SEEING GOD


I miss the big navels when they are not in season,
but almost any orange will do when I really want to see God.

But it must be done right, this seeing, this apprehension of the
Lord of the Universe, Lord of All the Worlds, both seen and
unseen….

First I feel how firm the orange is, rolling it in my hands,
the hands of an artist, the hands of a poet, and now the stiff
and cracked hands of an old man—
then I slice it in half and look at its flesh, its brightness,
its moistness, its color—
if the insides beckon, urging my mouth to bite,
I first cut each half into half and then slowly, carefully—
as all rituals demand—I put one of the cut pieces between
my longing lips and gradually, with a sort of grace, bite
into the flesh of the sacrificial fruit.

I feel the juice flow down my throat and recall the taste of
every orange I ever had, even in my childhood—or so it
seems, with this little miracle of eating an orange.

As I finish absorbing, still slowly and gracefully, its flesh,
the last bit of what had been one of the myriad wonders
of the world, I look at the ragged pieces of orange peel
and I see poetry—or God—it’s really the same thing,
isn’t it?



BIO

Nolo Segundo, pen name of L.j. Carber, 77, became a published poet in his 8th decade in over 190 literary journals in 15 counties on 4 continents. A retired teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia], he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and thrice for Best of the Net. Cyberwit.net has published 3 collections: The Enormity of Existence (2020); Of Ether and Earth (2021); and Soul Songs (2022). These titles reflect the awareness he gained when he had an NDE whilst nearly drowning in a Vermont river: That he has—IS—a consciousness that predates birth and survives death, what poets since Plato have called the soul.






Minor League Authors

by Eric D. Lehman


Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
 – Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”


I had written almost every day for more than a decade before someone paid me for it. A European magazine, desperate for content, spotted two of my travel essays on a website and offered me 300 British pounds for them. I eagerly jumped at this offer, feeling ecstatic and somehow justified in my ambitions. Isn’t this how it happened? After all, I had spent my youth filled with a deep and abiding ambition to create words that reached people, to be a respected author like my bookish heroes, to create literature. And it was not a frivolous ambition. I had bent all my energy towards this goal, spending far more than ten thousand hours of preparation, reading ten thousand books and writing over a million words, including two hundred poems, a hundred stories, and four full-length manuscripts. I had earned this payday, and more besides.

However, getting foreign money in the early years of the 21st century was not so easy. I had to set up a special account, talk to my bank several times, and continually badger the magazine editor to pay up. Meanwhile, two copies of the magazine arrived at my door, with my original articles altered completely. Finally, nearly a year later, the money was deposited, but it felt tainted now, flawed and impure. It was as if some forbidden fruit had finally come within reach, but when I took a bite, tasted bitter. Moreover, it was another four years before anyone paid me for my work again.

That feeling of triumph mixed with a rising sense of disquiet was one I would get to know well during the following decade. In those years, my friends and I operated on what we called the Bull Durham theory of authorhood. In the film, written by former baseball player Ron Shelton and considered to be one of the best sports movies of all time, catcher Crash Davis is close to breaking the home run record in the minor leagues. When superfan and adjunct English professor Annie Savoy congratulates him, he scoffs, telling her that it is a “dubious honor” to have a record in the minor leagues. At an author event in 2009, someone said one of my books was a “home run” and I said, “Yes, a home run in the minor leagues.” So, I often felt like the Crash Davis of Connecticut authors, able to keep getting hits with small publishers, mid-range websites, and local magazines.

Even major league authors struggle to earn enough money to survive, and only a few hundred make enough to be called rich. Still, a major league writer might afford to just be a writer, and not to teach, or live on a spouse’s income, or work as a postal carrier. They might be published by large media conglomerates, but more importantly than that, they are popular, they sell lots of copies, they get lots of grants and awards, they travel in higher circles: New York, Hollywood, London. As far as royalties and advances, we minor leaguers make almost nothing, and never have. My wife Amy and I supported our author habits by teaching at the University of Bridgeport, at first part-time, then full-time, then tenure track, then tenured, a process that took us both two decades. That was trivial compared to the process of becoming a writer, which lasted a lifetime.

Many major leaguers may not in fact write “better” than some of their minor league compatriots, but the percentage of competent and even beautiful writers in the major leagues is certainly much higher. A few singles made a big difference in your batting average – enough to send you up to the show. Art doesn’t work in quite the same way as sports, though. Just being in the major leagues is no guarantee that the writing will last; many minor leaguers have gone on to be rediscovered, and as many major leaguers have been quickly forgotten.

It took me a while to adjust to this way of thinking. Growing up, my favorite baseball movie had been The Natural, and I had thought I might be Roy Hobbs, the best writer to ever play the game. I believed that some innate talent would carry me to the league championship. Sometime in my late 20s or early 30s I realized that it rarely worked like that. The Bull Durham theory not only made more sense, but it also resonated more deeply, since even as a child I had always had a feeling of being on the periphery, never at the center, never in the thick of art or of life.

That is not unusual. It comes at first from being out of our depth, and later from swimming well without finding the shore. Writing is hard work, much harder than non-writers realize, and most of it is on the front end, learning how to do it properly. “I want to be an artist,” a woman told one of our publishers. “But writing a book seems like a lot of work.” This person asked them how to hire a ghost writer, so she could live the literary life without the decades of struggle to learn how to write. That was one way to solve the problem.

Money or influential connections were others. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on the point of view, my wife Amy and I were both solidly middle class. We did not have patrons; we did not study with any elder writers who could lend us an agent or publisher. We had to build a career from home plate to home plate, step by step. But we did have one advantage many writers do not: we had each other. And slowly but surely, we found other minor league authors, editors, and booksellers to befriend, many flowers born to bloom unseen, or at least seen by fewer eyes, than the ones that made the bestseller lists.

And the truth was that almost every author was a minor league author, even those we thought of as major leaguers. At one of our “author parties” at our house, former Connecticut Poet Laureate Dick Allen told us that, finally, in his seventies he had reached the point where journals solicited poems from him. “It’s taken me fifty years,” he said, his flyaway gray eyebrows raised in a sort of half-amused, half-frustrated expression. I got to know that look well during those years, from a hundred writers across the state and beyond.

Most of my friends embraced the ideals and the lives of minor league authors. “I’ll be the third base coach,” singer and author Jim Lampos told me once, happily. For him, maybe, it was about building a team. But the person who taught me the most about being a minor leaguer was environmentalist, historian, and poet David K. Leff. When he was younger, he had actually toured many of America’s small-time baseball stadiums and had even sketched out a book on the subject. So, like me, he often talked about going to “the show,” the majors, and about the joys and sorrows of minor league life.

We had met when I invited him to give a presentation for the Hamden Historical Society and had discovered that he knew Dick Allen and other mutual friends. He had also attended a recent presentation Allen and I had participated in for U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall’s birthday, energetically moving around the room, taking photos. I thought I could remember him, but couldn’t be sure, and he certainly remembered me. “Your speech was the best,” he told me. It was one of those coincidences of intersection that made for a good story, but later I found out that in his case it was not so surprising. We would meet for liver and onions at a rural diner and inevitably someone would walk in, spot David, shake hands, and exchange news. He seemed to know all the other Connecticut writers, and mentioned them, major or minor league, casual acquaintances or close friends, as if they were all worthy of Nobel Prizes.

“After all, the Prize Committee makes some dynamite choices,” he said, cracking one of his many trademark puns.

At the Hamden event, I had bought The Last Undiscovered Place, and for the first time, I found a “local author” whose book I was astounded by. It was Walden, but “inside out,” about community, culture, nature, and public life combined. The reader could see one small place through a multi-lensed panopticon, from every angle, making the book impossible to classify, mixing reportage, memoir, history, and a dozen other disciplines.

“How many drafts?” I asked, thinking that no one could possibly write more versions than I did.

“Eight or nine.” His beard cracked with a smile. “I read it out loud to catch the repetitions, you know, the things you don’t catch with your eyes.”

Well, I thought, this guy is serious about his work. Soon I found out how serious, learning about his regimented, precise method, with time parceled out into the days and weeks. His research always included multiple interviews, visits to every site he talked about, and notecards for every reference. I couldn’t decide whether I was intimidated or inspired.

“I’ve always worked here, in isolation,” he said when I asked him about his process. “I can edit or do other work at the coffee shop. But the first draft, the bloodletting, takes place right in my office.”

When I visited his home, I found out why. David lived in an 1847 Greek Revival house on the Collinsville Green, writing every day in a former drawing room with views of a sugar maple and the white clapboard Congregational Church. It was a luminous space, surrounded by books and artifacts collected from a lifetime of hiking and canoeing. The daily journal he had kept since May 29, 1978, stacked impressively along one wall. He sat rigidly at a three-board pine table in a flannel shirt and jeans, glasses squared on his nose, hair and beard shot through with silver, sipping a hot mug of coffee. Then the nerve in his neck would begin to pinch, and he would stand up and walk around, wincing with the pain, but somehow cracking a joke instead of a curse.

Along with his daily struggle with pain, I found out that he wrote The Last Undiscovered Place while grappling with divorce and single fatherhood, sometimes waking up at 2:30 a.m. to find time to write. It took him six years to write this first complete book, and in my opinion the result had been well worth it, the best “local history” –if that label could even be applied– that I have ever read. It was a home run, even if a small crowd watched it sail over the wall.

By time I met David he had been forced into retirement by the nerve damage, but he had worked as a handyman, janitor, and pot washer to put himself through the University of Massachusetts before becoming a lawyer and finding work in the Connecticut General Assembly. “Some of us were in the vault in the cellar of the State Capitol with one hanging light bulb,” he said. “No kidding. But I loved it.” Then he became the Deputy Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, writing most of our first “green plan” and saving hectares of open space when he negotiated the largest land conservation deal in the history of the state. In retirement, he continued to work for the public as best he could, serving as the historian for the town of Canton, acting as moderator for town meetings, and continuing to serve in an administrative capacity for the local fire department.

“I think volunteerism is at the very axis of what it is to be an American from the Minutemen at Concord and Lexington to the guy who coaches Little League,” he told me, without a hint of shoulder-shrugging irony.

“Well,” I said. “Writing is kind of like volunteer work.”

“You have to write for the love of it,” he agreed. “Because it is certainly not for the money.”

I don’t know if I was more ambitious than David, but I always believed that someday that would change. I was excited by the attention my books were getting and thought that this would inevitably lead to more money and fame. In those years, every radio program I spoke on, every local access cable television show that hosted me, every newspaper article mentioning my appearances or work…I loved it all. When a network television affiliate showcased me, or when a regional magazine ran a feature story, I admit I felt a thrill. Weren’t these the fruits of authorhood? A photographer traveling to our house to take shots for the front page of a newspaper, a reporter meeting me in a bookstore for an interview, a television personality giving us an hour of time, a mayor shaking my hand for a publicity photo. It was all happening.

One of those early books was Becoming Tom Thumb, the first thorough biography of diminutive 19th century performer Charles Stratton. Shortly after it was released, an English producer contacted me and told me that he and his production company had read it and were using it to plan a documentary on Charles and his manager P.T. Barnum. Would I like to participate? You bet I would. So, I met the producer when he came scouting the locations, and a few months later on a cold winter day, they returned to film in Bridgeport and several other American towns. The host of the documentary was the former chair of the BBC, Michael Grade, a man who had done nearly everything in British television. He had recently been made a life peer and sat in the House of Lords, though I didn’t know that until later. He had jumped at the chance to host this because his own family came from “circus people.” The director set up in the wood-paneled parlor of one of the old houses owned by the university, and Michael…Lord Grade…interviewed me for three hours, while Amy watched proudly from a chair nearby.

The following day, I drove to Middleborough, Massachusetts to the house Charles Stratton and his wife, Lavinia Warren, had shared in the 1870s. No film crew had peeked inside for decades, and I was excited to see the house itself, beyond the fact that I would be appearing in a film-length BBC documentary. I waited in my car nearby as snowflakes began to swirl. About an hour later the film crew showed up, just as the snow began to really fall. As a precaution, I booked a room at a nearby hotel, and later the crew joined me there – no one was getting out of town that night. But we had a documentary to film! So, even as the snow began piling up on our cars and the front lawn, we started filming. I did some unscripted exterior shots with Michael and then, as so often happens in the “industry,” I waited for an hour while they did more scripted exterior work. Finally, the director scoped the interior, and Michael and I talked to the family who owned the place at the time. The owner’s sister, who was a theater major, took us on a lively tour of the house. Of course, we did several takes for each bit. The director had made sure that as the “Tom Thumb expert,” I had not seen any of the wonderful details before so that my “surprise” and enthusiasm would show up on tape. Built into the house was the miniature stove, miniature tub, and a staircase built at a sort of compromise height for the Strattons and their servants. The family had also found a pair of Lavinia’s shoes in the back of a cabinet and had re-purchased a Tom Thumb miniature piano and a pair of lawn bowling balls given to him by an Australian club. I reacted appropriately to each revelation, and then off camera, I spent a moment in the room Charles died in. I talked a little to his ghost, then, telling him that I hoped my book had done him justice.

Filming had taken a long time, and a foot of snow had gathered along the country lanes. We drove through the darkening evening to the hotel, taking a half hour to go four miles. But since the hotel had no restaurant, we had to venture out again, slipping and sliding another three miles to a nearly empty bistro. It was not a palace, but we were hungry, and sat down to a hearty dinner as snow drifted and piled outside. Michael regaled us with stories, at one point telling us that in the 1970s, a friend had called him to consult about a bad situation facing his client, who had agreed to act in a film with a largely unknown American director. The production had run out of money and the director offered a percentage of the take rather than a flat fee. “I told him it was a bad idea,” Michael said. “But the actor stuck with it, because he liked the script.”

As Michael slyly revealed, the actor was Alec Guinness, the movie was Star Wars, and he made a mint. The first check alone was five million pounds, an amount equal to the rest of all the money held by his small bank in Sussex.

“I was always glad Alec didn’t take my advice on that occasion…,” Michael finished dryly.

The crew was already gone when I woke up the next morning, on their way to New York to film more scenes. Driving home across the long leagues of Interstate 90, blustery wind sweeping snow around my car, I thought for sure I had made it to the major leagues. At the very least, I told myself, I could parlay this into a deal with a larger publisher. But despite several awards, the book never sold out its first printing, and my subsequent proposals to major presses were rejected. That early excitement would return –briefly– every time I was consulted in the years following by major league venues like the Atlantic Monthly, the Wall Street Journal, or the History Channel. The next one was the one that would send me up to the show. I just knew it.

Unlike me, David often seemed to revel in being a minor league author. It’s not that he didn’t want to sell copies – he worked constantly at that, giving dozens of presentations and readings every year. But he had no real interest in fame, probably because he had already seen the dark side of it. Shortly before I met him, a certain state agency found David Leff practicing law, and sued him for his disability retirement money. It was the wrong David Leff, actually a lawyer of the same name in New Haven. Apparently unwilling to admit the mistake, they sued him anyway, charging that his writing constituted work and that his nerve damage was faked. His own book, Deep Travel, was used against him in the hearings, as they tried to demonstrate that his brief canoe trips on the Concord River meant he wasn’t really injured. He came out of his house one morning to find the workmen he had hired to restore it sitting on the front step reading an article about the ongoing lawsuit on the front page of the newspaper. It was humiliating, to say the least. He received hate mail and threats, becoming “a poster child for the excesses of the system,” as he put it. Worse, he didn’t have the money to fight the deep pockets of the state and had to sign a compromise document. Years later, when his primary tormentor retired, representatives of the state agency that plagued him apologized privately. But no newspaper covered that.

He did not let the bad experience with the media and the state make him bitter or turn him into a misanthrope. “Make the most of where you are most of the time,” he said. “There’s so much joy in life.” When you met David, it was obvious he lived that maxim fully. I didn’t trust the world as much as he did, but I did trust him. Someone who has seen both sides of fame was someone I needed to hear from, to balance out the ambitions of my own grasping soul.

Authors, even minor league authors, have a weird sort of celebrity. Most of it is second-hand, through the work of art, through words. The exception, of course, is during author readings and presentations, which had been part of the lifestyle I had witnessed and envied. And at first, despite performance anxiety, it was fun. Amy and I gave an average of thirty presentations or readings a year, some unpaid, some paid, some to five people, some to a hundred. We gave presentations at libraries, bookstores, schools, museums, casinos, town halls, town greens, senior centers, and conference centers. We gave presentations to business groups and women’s groups, to historical societies and secret societies.

Amy often recited her poetry, and I gave occasional readings of fiction or creative nonfiction, but most of the events were presentations for history books, either those I wrote myself or ones we wrote together. We gave over a hundred presentations just on the history of Connecticut food. We would arrive early, shake hands with the organizer, and set up the projector and laptop. Our books were stacked on a small table with printed sheets denoting prices and special sales. We would test the podium and crackling microphone, perhaps framed by an emergency exit, and greet the guests one by one as they arrived, making small talk and trying to charm them into buying our work. Once, we drove an hour through driving snow to lecture five people, one of whom fell asleep and snored.

In general, bookstores were supportive of minor league authors and their struggles to get on the shelf. But a few were not. At a store on the gold coast of Fairfield County, the owner sitting at the front desk openly insulted us when we offered our “sell sheets” from regional publisher Homebound Publications. “We don’t carry self-published authors.” I tried to explain that it was a real press, but she wouldn’t listen, despite the fact that the store carried two of my history books, and I had just signed them. “We have a certain clientele here,” she said. Rich people? Families? I wasn’t sure, but I got the message. This was not a place for minor leaguers like us. Of course, turning away local authors is probably not the best business strategy. Who buys more books than writers?

Bookstores sometimes invited you for signings that were unaccompanied by readings or presentations. These were usually not productive events, and many times I spent two hours chatting with curious patrons to sell one or two books. Often, these events were not advertised on social media or local papers the way presentations were. In most big chain stores, there is little connection to the community, and little concern about the store or the local culture on the part of the workers. Perhaps that is why they kept dying during those years, one bookstore failing after another. That also happened to quite a few “local” shops who didn’t carry local authors or make their inventory unique and specific to the place. Bookstores always worked best as linchpins for a particular neighborhood, town, or region.

At one disheartening session I signed zero books, sitting helplessly behind a table at the entrance to the chain store while guests ignored me, or worse, talked to me. One woman asked me for a chiropractor recommendation, as if I was a search engine. “I had a dream about the Beast,” one man told me, as if I was a confessor. A family stopped by, looked at my pile of books, and realized they had made a mistake. “Have a good day, buddy. Hope you sell a lot,” the father said. An old, old man sat down nearby, talking loudly on his phone, and to me. “I’m 96 years old,” he said, and then, loudly enough for everyone to hear, told me a disgusting joke. Shortly afterwards a woman trapped me at the table to tell me about underground cities built by the trillionaires who were tapping our phones. She was also terribly angry that her husband who fought in World War II was not mentioned in a recent book.

I nodded. “That can be frustrating.”

Afterwards, Amy quoted Bull Durham, as she often did in these situations: “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.”

However, after a few years of being published writers with minor league reputations, we began to get a few actual fans. “I have all your books,” one woman said to us while we were signing after a presentation, pointing to the dozen on the table. “Except this one.” She promptly bought it. “I know who you are,” one librarian told me, blushing, when I introduced myself. “Your work is lovely,” another told Amy. One dark winter day, feeling drained by my classes, I pressed the answering machine button in my Bridgeport office and a phone message from an anonymous woman told me that she had finished Becoming Tom Thumb and that it was the best book she ever read. That was enough to keep me going for a little while.

We were literary encounters for these folks, and that was a strange thought. We also began to meet more and more writers simply through the virtue of being authors ourselves. Once, walking across the vaulted neon hall at Mohegan Sun during the Big Book Club Getaway, Amy and I spotted a black-haired woman with a copy of A History of Connecticut Food.

“Would you like us to sign that?” we asked, having just signed several after a panel discussion.

She let us do it, and as we asked her name, she seemed surprised that we didn’t know it. “Debbie,” she said, smiling broadly.

“Are you an author, too?” we asked.

“Oh, I’ve written a few,” she said, laughing a little and heading to the cashier to pay for her armload of books. We looked at the main author table for a “Debbie.” Turned out that she was the headliner for the event, a number-one New York Times bestselling author with over 200 million copies of her books in print. Embarrassed, we slunk across the thick carpets toward the cling-clang of slot machines to try our luck there instead.

These frequent but brief encounters often ended ambiguously, and sometimes the most we could hope for was not to annoy the major league author. I succeeded with one best-selling novelist and did not with two well-known historians. Amy was somewhat more successful, and usually charmed the poets she read alongside. After a presentation in Stratford, we ate lunch with Robert Frost’s granddaughter, elderly but lucid and sharp; she bought one of Amy’s poetry collections.

“Ernest Hemingway used to think of other writers as competitors,” I mentioned to David once, as we walked along the Farmington River in Collinsville. “He sized up everyone he met, dead or alive, and tried to outbox them.”

“Really?” David seemed surprised. “To motivate himself?”

“Yes. But Amy thinks that this is a crazy attitude.”

“She is a wise woman. You would do well to stick with her.”

“That’s the plan,” I said. “That’s the plan.”

“Do you think that way?” He pointed to a large oak. “I mean, would you want to wrestle Ernest Hemingway?”

“I used to.” I followed the line of his arm to see a red-tailed hawk perched on a branch. “But not anymore.”

Minor league careers can live or die by book reviews, and I was shocked to find that reviewers and critics did always not read your work. If they had a grudge to settle or an ego trip that had nothing to do with you, you could sometimes dismiss it. “You’ve hit the big time now,” Jim Lampos told me when I asked what to do about a supposedly professional reviewer who slammed my book without reading beyond the introduction. “That’s the price of fame.” However, in this internet age even anonymous individuals could give you bad reviews, though often it was quite clear who they were, and even clearer that the book was not their real target. Bad reviews only really hurt if they were accurate, which seemed almost never. Instead, they annoyed you and awoke a sense of injustice, which was nearly as bad. You always had to be careful not to become a righteous victim. What you wished for as an author was a fair review, good or bad. Maybe the book was actually awful.

Another problem arose from the opposite situation – occasionally people liked your work so much that they passed it off as their own. An article by a major critic for the New York Times materialized two months after one of our books, detailing the exact argument Amy and I had made, but without any reference to our work. A popular television show on a major network did the same. Our friend, Chef Bun Lai, told us this was absurdly common in the food industry. “I’ve seen my recipes on a dozen New York restaurant menus,” he said with a good-natured laugh. “You just have to let it go.”

One year Amy and I found out that one of our history books had been pirated by an unknown company that used artificial intelligence to rework certain areas and republish it under various fake names and fake titles. When I asked around, I found out that others had also suffered this fate. Minor league authors were apparently the easiest to steal from. One friend had his magazine articles republished under someone else’s name willy-nilly on the internet. Worse, there was almost no legal recourse against this piracy of our words and ideas. Was this the future of authorhood? As anonymous content providers? Or would robots put us out of our jobs entirely?

Major leaguers have all these struggles to deal with, and more. But at least for them there is actual money at stake. Celebrity may suck, but it pays the bills. Or so I thought in those days, anyway. What good was my picture on the front page of Connecticut newspapers if only a couple dozen people bought my books each time? Why was I adding to my trouble for the little bit of pleasure and cash it gave?

Hate mail occasionally arrived, and I always respected if not liked those who at least signed their names. But other messages were unsigned, anonymous, cowardly. One postcard even arrived with typed paper pasted to it, like a ransom note. We weren’t popular enough to get death threats, I guess, so that was a plus. However, we knew plenty of others who did. Once, we were enjoying a nice Italian dinner with a major league author and scholar who we had invited to speak at the university. She appeared on cable television and talk radio frequently and spoke on divisive political topics.

“You must get a lot of hate mail,” I said.

“Oh yes,” she said after finishing a bite. “A lot of racist stuff, in particular, and other terrible threats. I try not to look at it.”

 “I don’t know how you deal with it,” I said. “I get very anxious with far less hate than you probably get.”

“Oh, I think the anxiety of being in the public eye is unavoidable,” she said. “I try to focus on the final good, the cause.”

I thought about this. What was my cause? Literature? History? What was I doing that was so important? Did I have a purpose? I thought that perhaps it would become clearer as I sold more books, got more media attention, and found my audience. Likewise, as my minor league fame grew, I thought that the author events would gradually get bigger, with more and more fans showing up and more books being sold. That was not the case. One summer Amy and I stood on the stage at the Mohegan Sun Cabaret, presenting to a crowd of a hundred, complete with popstar headset microphones, a mixing board, and giant video screen. A month later we gave a presentation in the cramped cellar of a tiny library to four people, two of whom were my parents.

You could always count on an old man sleeping in a corner, a student taking notes for extra credit, a couple who thanks you profusely but does not buy a book. It could be demoralizing if you weren’t careful. There are days when you just want to give up, stop trying, sit back with a martini and let oblivion come. Seven years into our book tours, we gave what would be our last presentation on Literary Connecticut. We talked about the significance of stories, the connection of writing to place, and finally, the importance of supporting our own local writers. The twenty people attending seemed to love the lecture, asking numerous questions and applauding at the end. But no one supported the writers in front of them by buying a book. In a sandwich shop afterwards, eating a desultory lunch, we listened to Frank Sinatra’s voice filter through the sound system: “Here’s to the losers, bless ‘em all.”

That evening we drove to Collinsville and were greeted by David’s wide smile splitting his salty beard. Standing in his small, comfortable kitchen, I immediately began to complain about the fact that no one bought the books.

“That’s why I charge them up front.” He popped open a bottle of beer. “I may lose some opportunities that way, but our time is valuable. You are giving them knowledge. Did you get paid by the library?”

“Yes, a little.” I thought about it. “And I guess there was an article in the newspaper about it, so word about the book got out to people, even if those people didn’t come.”

“Well, there you go.”

“I know, but it is still depressing. Every time we fail like this…”

“Is it you that is failing?”

“It makes me feel like a hack.”

“Focus on the craft,” he told me. “The rewards will come, or they won’t. It is the work itself that matters.”

David’s wife Mary returned home from her work at the library, and the four of us shared a wonderful dinner, glasses of wine, and a vibrant conversation. That made for a good day, and Amy and I decided that, rather than freighting each presentation with expectation and ambition, we would simply make each an opportunity for exploration and for meeting friends. We might try a just-opened Korean restaurant or order fried oysters at an old favorite. We might buy tickets for a museum or a play, or we might call around to find friends who could meet us for drinks. Once, we arranged a reading to coincide with our publisher’s 34th birthday party.

Another way to cope was to have a few loyal fans. The antidote to fifty enemies is one friend, as Aristotle says. One librarian invited us for presentations at multiple libraries as her career bounced her around the state. A local pharmacy owner kept our books on a shelf for years, adding each new one as it came out, the only books in the store. One fan drove an hour to see us a second time, another followed us from venue to venue for different presentations and readings. These were the fans that made the work worth it, and gratitude fills my heart every time I think of them. For a minor league author, every loyal fan is important, in a way that they can never be for an international bestseller. We tried to spend time with each person who bought a book, to value their time in return for the value they placed on our words.

And of course, many of those fans were our fellow authors. One day near the end of the pandemic, we sat in David’s garden, red poppies and water iris in bloom, drinking together, eating from the same plates. It was a hot day but comfortable there in the shade of the trees with a north wind blowing. I asked about the strange green fire hydrant in his front yard, and he told us an intricate story about its origins and endurance. He talked about the long journey the water made from the reservoir and about winter days shoveling out the hydrant in case of possible fires. He talked about how unique it was, its long years of service, and its unheralded importance in the life of the small town.

Eventually the talk turned to literature, as it always did, and I mentioned that few had bought or reviewed my latest novel.

“The writing goes on. It matters to the writers and the people who read it,” said David. “I’m happy being a minor league author.”

He was right, as usual. Everything I had gained – the small shelf of books, the friends I had made – these were privileges, and I felt lucky to have any of it at all. Success is a privilege, and so is quitting. Who cared about joining the major leagues? After a couple years of isolation and video events, I just wanted to visit a library again, to sell a few hundred or a few thousand books, to sit across from my friends at a local brewery and discuss our latest projects. I no longer wanted to go to the show; I just wanted to keep playing for a few more seasons. Two-hundred-forty-seven home runs in the minor leagues might be a dubious honor. But it would be an honor nevertheless.

A few months later, Bethel’s tiny Byrd’s Books held one of its first post-pandemic live events, a Sunday poetry reading that included David and Amy, among many others. Amy was recovering from a bout of Covid, and David was suffering from terrible pain caused by his ever-present nerve injury, unable to stay in one position or sleep for more than thirty minutes at a time. His fifth spinal surgery was scheduled for that Friday.

From the podium in the little bookstore, owner Alice Hutchinson welcomed everyone and introduced each poet. Amy chose one poem from each of her six collections, her chestnut hair luminous in the afternoon light. David read from his forthcoming Homebound Publications collection, Blue Marble Gazetteer. His second poem included “salty” dialogue, and I worried for him and for all the poets and risk-takers of language in these times. And I worried about his surgery, though I tried to maintain a brave face whenever we locked eyes across the room.

After the reading, Mary, Amy, David, and I sat at outdoor tavern tables across the street from statues of Abraham Lincoln and P.T. Barnum, enjoying the cool spring air together. We sipped drinks and ordered food while David regaled us with tales of their recent adventures, including a funny story about a visit to the emergency room the previous Saturday night. When he disappeared into the restroom, Mary thanked us and told us that this was the most cheerful he had been in weeks. “He is in terrible pain.”

“Well, hopefully the surgery will work.”

When he returned, we talked about our plans for the future. “Thanks for your help with the chapters of the Great Mountain Forest book,” he told me, referring to his work-in-progress about this small area of Connecticut from ancient times to the present. “I made the changes you suggested.”

“It’s going to be good.”

He waved my compliment away. “I’m excited about the project. But now I’m getting into modern times, where the actual people I’m talking about, or their children, are still alive. It’s tough to know how to handle that.”

“You always want to be respectful of people.”

“But be honest.”

“I also have to be mindful of what I put my efforts into. If I choose this, I can’t do something else. It might take me two more years.” He shifted in his seat uncomfortably and stood up to lessen the pain. “But if I become the state poet laureate, then this will go on the back burner, and I will put my efforts into that.” He laughed. “That’s a big if.”

“I think you really have a good chance at that,” Amy told him.

“If not at the Nobel Prize,” I joked.

“Well, I’m not that interested in accolades, but you never know,” he chuckled. “They make some dynamite choices.”

Two weeks later at his memorial service on the Collinsville Green, hundreds of people gathered on the lawns of the 19th century houses and milled about the closed-off street: uniformed volunteer firefighters and black-clad beat poets, environmentalists and politicians, rabbis and librarians. I sat on the corner of his lawn by the fire hydrant with Amy and a few other minor league authors. Everyone faced a podium set up in front of a huge red fire truck and the white peak of the Congregational Church. The murmur of the crowd blended with the distant melody of the Farmington River, rushing through the valley below.

Swallows caught insects above the chimneys and a cat meowed somewhere in the gardens on the hill. Bright green trees and white puffy clouds seemed to refute the somber occasion as David’s family emerged from the house and a rabbi began the ceremony. Two Connecticut poet laureates stood up to read his work, and I realized that he would never reach that position now, his application sitting fallow in some bare office room. Speaker after speaker read eulogies, with descriptions like “Man of Letters” and “Renaissance Man” echoing again and again. Indeed, the echo of the man himself was in every word and in every face. I felt like I could turn around and see him puttering around in his beloved garden, but when I did glance over the fence, I saw only flowers.

The sun began to set through the maple trees, the hot day cooled, and the seemingly inevitable rain held off. Mary stood up to read a poem, somehow managing to repeat her husband’s pun about visiting ancient cemeteries during the pandemic lockdown, “where everyone was safely six feet distanced.” The bells of the Congregational Church pealed, and we walked away from the Green, heading to a tavern for a late dinner, to a night of conversation and laughter that resembled David’s own rough vision of paradise.

Well, Eric, I could hear him saying, it is the work itself that matters. Literature goes on, and our little streams flow into it. What is literature after all, but the work of thousands of ordinary writers reaching for extraordinary words? We are all minor league authors – I was going to say, “even the best of us.” But perhaps I should say, especially the best of us. Not because there is quality hidden in the bullrushes, but because literature –true literature, good literature– springs from hope.



BIO

Eric D. Lehman is the author of 22 books of fiction, travel, and history, including 9 Lupine Road, New England Nature, Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London, and Becoming Tom Thumb: Charles Stratton, P.T. Barnum, and the Dawn of American Celebrity, which won the Henry Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society of America and was chosen as one of the American Library Association’s outstanding university press books of the year. His novel 9 Lupine Road was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award, and my novella, Shadows of Paris, was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award, a silver medalist in the Foreword Review’s Independent Book Awards, and won the novella of the year from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.








Red and White

by L.S. Engler


            After four days of his consistent, morose brooding, Red Rosie told the Bear that his money was no longer welcome in her bar. He was a grizzled man, which was nothing strange in these parts, but he was also quiet and stand-offish, hunched over his pints with consternation. His heavy jacket was matted with filth, inspiring the other patrons to give him a wide berth, and his hair was a wild, tangled nest with the last twigs and leaves of autumn still clinging to it, despite the heavy snow outside. He didn’t speak much when Red Rosie’s asked after him, but she had a feeling he was softening up once she stopped taking his money off the bar. He was bad for business, buying only a single drink, loitering until last call, and putting off the bigger spenders.

            Even with her refusal to serve him, the Bear still showed up, sitting there to thaw out from the cold. After a full week, Red Rosie finally decided she had to do something about it. She leaned forward on the bar and settled an even gaze on her grizzly guest. “Do I get to be blessed with your name yet, traveler?” she asked. “I’ve gotten to know your surly face so well these past few days, I think I should have a name to go along with it.”

            He grunted his response, as usual, a single sound that said an awful lot. “You know,” she said, “I’m not going to accept that as an answer any more. You can speak, can’t you?”

            A jeer drifted from one of the dark tables across the tavern, filled to bursting with rowdy men. “Leave him off, Rosie! Don’t waste your time!”

            Drunken laughter followed, and she ignored it, a practice she’d perfected to a fine art.  She was only interested in this sullen brute at that moment, determined to coax out some words.

            “When’s the last time you’ve had yourself a bath, anyhow?”  Red Rosie hoped to tread on some nerve or shame with the question, or even just make a point of conversation. “You’re so ripe, I’m worried your stench might start spoiling my beer.”

            When her gentle jabs failed, she leaned back, folding her arms over her chest. She chewed her lip, a bad habit from girlhood that snuck up on her when her brain was working particularly hard. She couldn’t let any nut go uncracked, no matter how hairy or smelly or strange that nut might be.

            “Let’s work out a deal,” Red Rosie said, hands moving to her hips. “I’ll keep wetting your whistle and allowing you to take up valuable space at my counter, but you’ve got to let my sister clean you up. No offense, sir, but you stink as bad as a shithouse in summertime, and my other patrons aren’t too keen on that. Understand? Sound like a deal?”

            She waited for the answer with a barely contained patience. That steady gaze of hers had worked its way into many men and women, and every one of them so far had been broken. She was not about to let this stranger be an exception. It seemed the whole thing would go on for quite some time, but he finally looked up at her, his eyes surprisingly bright and young. For the first time in her life, Red Rosie felt the urge to back down. He still said nothing, only looked at her with his own expectant, patient eyes, like the world could be crumbling down around them and he’d still be holding her in his unwavering gaze.

            “My sister,” Red Rosie prompted, cocking her head toward the door to the kitchen. “I’m sure you’ve seen her around, though maybe not, she’s quiet as a bloody mouse. They call her Snow White, on account on of the fact that if she were to lie down out there on a pile of freshly fallen snow stark naked, you couldn’t find her, because that porcelain skin just blends right in. I’ll have her draw up a nice warm bath, throw in some soap for good measure, and, who knows?  Maybe if you’re nice, she’ll even help you out and scrub your back.”

            She threw in a salacious wink, which was probably lost in those blank, innocent eyes.  Following it with a sigh, Red Rosie turned, ready to mark it up as her first defeat. But as she turned, he spoke, a deep, rumbling voice that she could barely hear.

            “I think I’d like that very much,” he said. “Thank you.”

            “Well, bless my soul,” Red Rosie turned back again with a triumphant laugh. “It can talk after all! Hey, Snow! Get on over here and help me out.”

            Snow White emerged from the kitchen, a meek and timid counter to her bright and boisterous sister. Her large eyes took in the gentle giant at their bar, and she shied back, hands folded to her chest for protection. When Red Rosie explained the situation, though, she complied dutifully, rushing away to find the largest wash basin she could find. “There you are, then,” said Red Rosie. “We’ll have you clean as a whistle in a right jiffy.”

            It took much more than a right jiffy, though. It was nearly an hour and three tubs of water later that the bearish guest had all that grime and dirt cleaned away. Snow White had taken it upon herself to give his clothes a good scrubbing, too, and they were hanging over the fire to dry as Red Rosie shooed the last patron out and closed the tavern for the night. She was surprised to see that her mother up at such a late hour, as well, knitting away at some socks in her old, trusted rocking chair, perhaps too intrigued by these events to retire quite yet.

            “Rosie, dear,” her mother said, “be a doll and fetch a large blanket from the wardrobe for our guest. He’s pruned five times over in that water. It’s about time we got him out.”

            She obliged, finding the biggest blanket they owned and draping it over his shoulders as Snow White helped him out of the tub. They led him to a low bench before the hearthfire then handed him a bowl of hot stew. He hunched over it, not yet eating as his glassy eyes fixed on the dancing flames. Even cleaned up, he still appeared bearish, his long shaggy hair drying, his beard looking fully and inexplicably wilder. Red Rosie pulled up a chair, turning it backwards and straddling it so she could lean forward and peer at him curiously.

            “You clean up nice,” she said. “I told you Snow would do a fine job. Take one of the rooms tonight, too. The beds are comfortable enough, and you look like you could use a good night’s rest in a comfy bed. You’ll stay, won’t you?”

            He didn’t respond, still staring at the flames. Red Rosie looked to her sister, who merely shrugged. She sighed. “You really don’t speak much, do you?” she asked. “Why not?”

            “Not much to say, I suppose,” he murmured, after a moment, when Red Rosie was just about to give up on expecting an answer. He stirred his stew and finally took a careful bite, chewing it thoughtfully before speaking again. “You have been so kind to me. Thank you.  I am not accustomed to such treatment.”

            “Think nothing of it,” Red Rosie smiled, relieved by the magnitude of words coming out of him now, eager for more, “though you must tell us a little about yourself. Seems a fair price for our hospitality, if you ask me.”

            “Not much to tell,” he said. “Just a poor dolt down on his luck. I wander during the warmer months, but travel becomes difficult in such cold, snowy winters. I see you have some books on the shelves. Do you read?”

            Red Rosie glanced over her shoulder to the small bookshelf in question. Some of the volumes were gathering dust, but there were others so well worn and loved they were on the verge of falling apart.  “That’s more Snow White’s thing than mine,” she admitted.  “I’m much too restless to sit long enough to last a paragraph.”

            “What of the games?” he asked.  “I see you have a chess set.”

            A wild grin blossomed on Red Rosie’s face. “Now you’re speaking my language. I love a challenge, but my sister’s too soft.  She always gives up too easily.”

            “Or perhaps,” gentle Snow White suggested with a soft smile, “I merely let you win.  She’s a terribly sore loser, you see.”

            “If that’s what helps you sleep at night, dear sister,” Red Rosie said sweetly, batting her eyelashes, but she laughed, turning her attention back to the Bear.  “How about this, then?  You pay me back by treating me to a few games.”

            “Oh!” Snow White brightened. “And letting me read you a tale from one of Father’s old books! Rosie’s heard them all so many times. It would be lovely to have them land on new ears.”

            “I’m fairly sure I’m getting the better of these deals,” their guest said, his smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. Red Rosie set up a game of checkers while Snow White agonized over the best story to share, deciding on one of her favorites regarding pesky gnomes.

            Their new friend refused a bed, but accepted a cot before the fire, and when they awoke in the morning, they found him already gone. It wasn’t long before they saw him again, though. He was back to his usual spot at the bar that very same night. He easily accepted another invitation to stay, to play more games and hear more tales. And again, the next morning, he was gone, leaving behind two perfect roses, one bright red and the other as white as snow.

            This continued through the winter, and they became good friends with their guest, who still would not give his name. They decided to simply call him Gentle Bear. When the weather warmed, he appeared less frequently, and then altogether disappeared. They kept hoping he would show up again, unexpectedly, but the full spring had arrived and they realized that, like a bear out of hibernation, he had gone forward on a new path. They could scarcely blame him, either. Warm weather opened roadways to countless destinations; they, too, might escape one day, but not while they had their mother to care for. Duty tethered them to that small tavern on the side of the long forest road. Love kept them from breaking free.

            Still, the world grew a little larger for them, no longer trapped by heavy snowfall and biting cold. Snow White liked to gather wildflowers, filling the dark tavern with bursts of fragrant colors. Red Rosie liked to find woodchucks and deer, sometimes foxes and wolves, and follow them to babbling streams to watch them drink and rest, where she would dip her toes in the cold water, dreaming of life beyond the woods. Quite often, the two of them would feel playful and start to hunt for the gnomes of their father’s old tales.

            According to the stories, gnomes lived deep in the bowels of the earth. During the winter, the ground was so hard and frozen that they kept to their underground kingdoms of gold and diamonds, but when the springtime sun thawed the soil, they would emerge to cause mischief or perhaps leave gems and riches for curious little girls to discover. They had grown old enough to dismiss the gnomes as figments of their father’s bold imagination, but they kept it up as a game, laughing as they pointed out glimmers of potential coins or gaps in the tree roots that could be portals to the gnomish underworld. But for all their play, the last thing they ever expected to find in those woods one day was an actual gnome.

            Yet that was exactly what they found.

            A large fallen tree blocked one of the many winding paths through the woods, and there a strange little man stood cursing and struggling with his long beard tangled up in the branches. Red Rosie held out an arm to stop her sister. They held their breaths and tried to be still, but the old gnome still noticed them and shook an angry fist their way.

            “Oi there!” he yelled, his voice crass and rough and unfriendly. “Don’t think you can just stand there like I can’t see you. I can! Gawking like you’ve never seen a gnome before. Think it’s funny, do ya? An old man with his whiskers all caught up in a bloody dead tree? Well, har de har har, laugh it up, lassies, he he he. I suppose it would be too bloody much to expect you to quit your gawking and help me out already, wouldn’t it?”

            Red Rosie snorted, stepping out of the shadow of the trees with her hands on her hips. “Is that any way to speak to your potential rescuers?” she asked. “Our papa always warned us about bad little gnomes that steal young lasses away, dragging them under the earth to imprison them as brides. How do we know you’re not a vile little creature like that, hmm? What with all that hollering and cursing!”

            “Hush, Rosie!” Snow White whispered. “You’ll only make it worse. Here.” She pulled from her pocket the small shining sheers she used to snip roses from their thorny stems. “Don’t worry, sir gnome, I’ll help you out.”   
 
            “Snow, let’s go!” Red Rosie said, but it was too late. Despite her fear, Snow White had snipped the gnome’s long grey beard free from its tangle.

            “Oh, no!” the gnome cried in despair, in misery. “What have you done?”

            Rhe gnome grabbed for the shorn end of his whiskers. “My beard!” he wailed, his voice high pitched and his face tomato-red. “My beautiful beard, you’ve ruined it, you foolish, idiotic, simple girl! How could you?”

            Red Rosie fumed with a spark of anger, and Snow White could only wring her hands in distress at this unexpected turn. She was on the verge of apology when the gnome suddenly and completely disappeared from sight, a faint pop filling their ears. They were stunned in place for a long time before Red Rosie finally turned away. “Come on,” she said. “We’d best be getting home, and quickly, too.”

            The strange encounter stuck with the sisters for a while, turning sweet Snow White melancholy with regret and leaving Red Rosie irritable and quick to rant about anything from burned biscuits to muddy footprints on the tavern floor. Noticing how troubled they were, their mother sent them out to fetch water from the nearby pond, thinking the fresh air would do them good, but it was not their usual cheerful jaunt. They were far too occupied with avoiding the gnome holes and hiding spots they had previously sought so eagerly.

            “Perhaps we only imagined it,” Snow white said softly, as the familiar peace of the forest surrounded her and started to soothe her again. “All those years, and we never saw a gnome, so why would we see one now?”

            “We didn’t both imagine the same thing, Snow,” Red Rosie reasoned, “unless we had some bad mushrooms or some such nonsense. I’ve thought that, too. It does seem a bit odd. It was probably just some mean old man, and him being so small is part of the reason he’s also so bloody mean.”

            “But it didn’t look like just a small man,” Snow White insisted. “Little old men don’t just disappear into thin air, either.”

            It was then that they heard it again, a great storm of curses drifting up from the otherwise peaceful pond. Recognizing the shrill complaints of the old gnome, they considered just turning back, but they had already seen him, flailing and hollering at the edge of the water. A gigantic fish had gotten a hold of his beard, trying to pull him in. Red Rosie would have laughed at the sight if it weren’t for the fact that Snow White had already began to approach the gnome to help.

            “No! Snow, wait!”

            Again, she was too late. Snow White was already there, snipping off the end of the gnome’s beard to free him. The fish dove under the water with nothing but a mouthful of hair, while the gnome tumbled back into the mud, waving his arms in a fury.

            “You again!” he snarled. “You awful, terrible girl! As if before wasn’t enough, now you’ve gone and ruined me beard all over again, you vile, vicious creature!”

            “But that fish was ready to pull you in!” Snow White protested. “To drown you or worse! I was only trying to help! Here…”

            She held out her hand, but he slapped it away. “Haven’t you helped enough?” he moaned. “Begone! Torment me no more!”

            The old gnome disappeared in a pop again, leaving the two sisters as astounded as before. “Well, I never!” Snow White gushed, a rare wrinkle of consternation on her brow. “You’d think with all the trouble that beard causes him, he’d be grateful for the trim.”

            “There’s just no reasoning with some folk,” Red Rosie said, smiling despite herself as she realized how absurd the whole situation was. “Come on, then. Let’s just get our water and head home. Do be careful, though, Snow. I wouldn’t want some fish to snag you up by the skirt and try to pull you in as well, dear sister!”

            Though they laughed about it on the way home, something about the encounter left Rosie feeling troubled. In all her years, they’d never seen these gnomes of her father’s tales, yet now they’d seen one twice in a short amount of time. It made her heart surge in her chest to think there truly were things great and magical in the world, but it made her dread that there might be something sinister to it, as well. She avoided traveling far beyond the tavern if she could help it after that, and only ventured far if Snow White persisted on going. She didn’t seem to be plagued by the same fear as her sister, which Red Rosie attributed to Snow’s unflappable naiveté.

            “I’m certain they’ve always been there,” Snow White said, smiling sweetly, though distantly. “We’ve only just now started to notice them, that’s all.”

            “But why, after all these years?” asked Red Rosie. “What’s changed?”

            Snow White didn’t have an answer and went about her business without sparing it another thought. And just as Red Rosie was starting to get comfortable again with the normalcy of her life, they encountered the gnome for a third time. Their mother had asked them to bring bread across the way to Farmer Hood in exchange for some of his fresh spring berries, and they skirted the fields on the edge of the forest when an eagle caught Red Rosie’s keen eye. For a moment, she was enraptured by the fantastical notion that it was no mere bird, but some grand dragon soaring overhead, returning to his secret treasure horde in the hills.

            The eagle took a dive toward the nearby outcropping of rocks, and that familiar screech tore Red Rosie from her daydream. Snow White clutched her arm and pointed. “Rosie, look! That eagle has the mean old gnome!”

            Red Rosie looked, to see the eagle attempted to emerge back into the sky with a flurry of wings and flailing limbs. Releasing his usual string of curses, the gnome held tight to a branch while the eagle pulled and yanked. “We have to help him!” Snow White said, already dropping her basket and rushing forward.

            Red Rosie wanted to stop her; she wanted to just leave the bitter old gnome to his fate, but she couldn’t. No amount of crass words or insulting tirades would dissuade Snow White from helping someone truly in need, and Red Rosie couldn’t let Snow White handle it all her own. She hitched up her skirts and ran after her sister, taking a hold on the old gnome’s leg and pulling him back to earth with all her might.

            Never in a million years had Red Rosie expected an eagle to be so strong. She may as well have been fighting with that dragon of her imagination. Eventually, though, the struggle came to an end with the eagle screeching away into the sky, clutching nothing but a tattered tear of the gnome’s jacket in its large talons. They all tumbled back onto the ground in a surprised, messy pile, a tangle of limbs and bruises.

            It didn’t take long for the gnome to extract himself, scrambling away from the sisters, already complaining. “What on this wide green earth caused me to be cursed with you two?” he raved. “Just look at what you’ve done to me now! My best coat! It’s been torn to shreds! This coat belonged to my grandfather. It’s an heirloom–”

            “What is wrong with you?” Red Rosie exploded, her temper flaring as brightly as her wild red curls. “You are easily the most ungrateful, insufferable, miserable little twerp I have ever encountered, which is saying an awful lot.”

            She may have continued, but Snow White suddenly screamed, a terrible sound that made Red Rosie’s heart nearly stop. The scream was followed by a great, bellowing roar from the gaping maw of a large golden bear rearing up on his hind legs. As he fell back down to all four paws and glared at them, the sisters were frozen in place by fear, and the gnome backed up against one of the rocks.

            “No, no, no!” he wailed desperately. “Leave me be, great bear, please! I am but an old gnome, nothing but wiry meat and bones! Eat these vibrant young women instead, so tender and juicy and plump!”

            Red Rosie clung to her sister, trembling with fear and indignation both, as the bear let out another ferocious roar. Snow White released a terrified scream as it lifted its large, matted paw and swung it so fiercely that it sent the gnome soaring as high as the eagle, arching toward the dense thicket of the woods, where he would likely scamper off and hopefully, if they were lucky, never be heard from again.

            “What do we do now?” Snow White whispered frantically into Red Rosie’s ear as the bear slowly turned around to face them. Her heart beating so fast she could barely hear anything else, Red Rosie could only think of one thing. She stepped forward, one hand held out to protect Snow White as she glared intently into the bear’s face. Fearlessly, she hoped.

            “Stop right there,” she demanded, praying that her voice conveyed some sense of command despite her terror. “Don’t underestimate us, bear. I have a knife. You may be bigger, but size may work in my favor, for I am quick and I know just where to stab you if you try to hurt me or my sister.”

            The bear looked at her, tilting his head. Something about those surprisingly gentle eyes seemed familiar, hidden underneath his shaggy blonde fur. There was a spark of something there, something almost human. Something she slowly began to recognize.

            Snow White must have noticed, too.

            “Rosie,” she whispered. “Do you…?”

            “Yes,” she gasped out. “Yes, I do.”

            The bear lingered for a moment, as if to make sure, to beg them to understand, and then he stalked away, disappearing into the woods without a single glance back. Snow White and Red Rosie stood there in the field, standing still for the longest time, trying to catch their breath and sort out the strange tight feeling in their chests. It seemed as though it had been so long since they’d seen their friend, and yet, despite his changes, they couldn’t help but still recognize him.

            Returning to their work seemed an odd affair after such an encounter, so menial and mundane. It felt like they were merely going through the motions without really being there. But they got it done and life went on, though they could never shake the familiar gaze of that golden bear. Would he come back? Had they merely imagined it? It was possible, but they didn’t believe that was actually the case.

            Following their encounter, they had no more strange meetings with old gnomes, as if some spell had been broken. The spring turned to summer without event, and the summer made way for fall in the same fashion. Every single day passed with Red Rosie turning her eyes toward the woods, straining as she tried to see past the trees for some sign of a golden bear lurking there, keeping the gnomes away. Once, she thought maybe she’d spotted him, but closer inspection revealed just a patch of goldenrods radiant in a sliver of bright sunlight.

            The cold of winter crept in too quickly, a hound biting at the heels of colorful, temperate autumn. It was inevitable, and Red Rosie felt an odd peacefulness to it. The world was ready to slow down for a while, wrapping itself in a blanket of snow. It was a time of warm fireplaces and thick stews, of weeks without a new face in the tavern, of Snow White reading out loud and refusing games of chess, of Red Rosie wondering if this spring, she might actually find dragons out there in the small world beyond their inn.

            As she leaned in to finish stoking the fire in the main hearth of the tavern, Red Rosie heard the door open, a gush of cold winter air rushing in and making her shiver. “Be with you in a moment,” she called, working until she was content with the size of the fire, a cheerful roar that would inspire instant warmth and cheer. She turned to find a familiar shape filling the seat at the center of the bar, hunched over in a shaggy coat of golden blonde fur.

            “You,” she breathed out, practically a sigh. “It’s you. You’re back.”

            The gentle bear turned his head and met her with a gentle smile. “You know I never really left,” he said mildly. “How about a drink, then?”

            It took a moment for her to respond, but, when she did, it was with a beaming grin and the feeling that this winter would not seem so cold and harsh at all, but rather it might be much too short. “Only for a game of checkers later,” she said, finding a mug, “and I think that, this time, you’re the one who will be telling the stories.”



BIO

L.S. Engler writes from outside of Chicago, though she grew up discovering adventure in the farmlands of Michigan. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies, including Bards and Sages Quarterly, the Schuylkill Valley Journal, and the Saturday Evening Post. She loves almost all things nerdy, perhaps a little too much, and hopes to one day get that whole novel thing going some day.







The Bees, the Rain and the Dark

by Josh Humphrey

My daughters are scared of the bees
            haunt the woodshed,
            float     unpredictable
                       like so much bad luck.
They are my payment for the eighties,
            when we killed the fireflies
            with our baseball bats
            just to see their pure light
                       smeared
                       uncontained neon.
This time is one of murder hornets.
            not one of accidental
                       light.

I am afraid of the storms,
            how they are
            beyond            words,
            rage like          old Gods,
            how the ferocious rain
                       makes fast rivers
                       in the garage.
The lightning will find the ancient tree
            every time,
            make it dance
                       until it drops.
The soft rain with gentle hands is gone,
            how it never forgot a name
                        or a face.

We are all afraid of the darkness –
            the basement is made
            of scrape and claw,
            murmuring      pipe.
Our old dog sits at the top of the stairs
            head cocked    tail low,
            afraid
                        but waiting nonetheless.
The deep corners of the yard hold
            that night of    screaming
            when I could not find
            the animal in   the trap.

It is what we get for messy life,
            endless reminder
            that we are      circles
            to close.
A day is long enough to remember twice
            everything you tried
                        to forget.



Newark Danced with Me Tonight

Newark danced with me tonight,
Miles Davis on the radio and I
floated over the Clay Street Bridge,
hit the ramp to 280 and was flying,
adding my lights to the thousand,
trying to put stars in starless sky.

Newark danced with me tonight
and I was safe behind my wheel
because my brother was not
and that is a cost already paid
and I am suddenly 48 and the girls
are no longer girls, but it is okay.

Newark danced with me tonight.
We had Freddie Freeloader on
the radio and we fell into place,
every second window blazing with
life.  The moon behind the church
was every God we needed.

Newark danced with me tonight.
Even though I am still such loosely
contained grief and I count my steps
even and my watch is telling me
to breathe and in the morning I will
have to do this in the awful reverse.

Newark danced with me tonight,
with me in my invisible middle age.
Even gone, Miles Davis played
his golden trumpet empty and I
understood how the world works
for the eternity of exit 13 to exit 5B.



BIO

Josh Humphrey’s poetry has appeared in some other places, including Lullwater Review, Paterson Literary Review, Lips, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Soundings East, Naugatuck River Review, Streetlight and Oberon. It is forthcoming in Twin Bill and the Aeolian Harp Anthology. Currently, he works as a Library Director in his hometown of Kearny, New Jersey, a job that inspires much writing. He is a lover of books, records and chocolates.










The Pond

by Hannah McIntyre


     “Something’s been at the fish again,” Jane placed her husband’s coat on its peg.

     “Can you let me sit down for five minutes? I’ve just got back from work,” Craig said.

     Jane followed him into the living room, “Please, I’ve waited all day for you to sort it out. You said you would-”

     “Fine, I’ll do it now if it’ll stop you harping on about it,” he didn’t look at her when he spoke.

     Jane smiled a small triumphant smile but made sure her husband didn’t see. She stepped aside to allow him to walk past her and out the back door, he still clipped her shoulder with his broad frame. Neither said anything.

     She watched Craig’s shoes leave grubby marks on the tile path leading down the narrow garden through the kitchen window. Exotic plants which he had brought back from business trips abroad adorned the flowerbeds and climbed the fences. At the end of the garden, a vast pond filled the space, complete with a deck and garden furniture. Craig was always fussing with something in the garden, especially his fish. Jane always thought it best not to interfere. They would go down there together sometimes on a summer evening, but it was hard for her to recall when they had done this last.

     Jane gripped the edge of the sink as he knelt down beside the decapitated heads strewn along the ground around the pond. Cold fisheyes stared toward the fading sun and toothless mouths hung agape. One of Craig’s hands held a bucket steady, while the other mechanically grabbed and dropped gored body parts. His hand disappeared into a mass of orange roe, peeled from the bodies of fish. Even from a distance, Jane could see that the eggs were slick with blood. Hot acid bubbled up her throat. Jane hung over the sink as dizziness blurred her vision. Out there, slender bones protruded from savaged flesh, guts hung like ribbons atop blades of grass. Jane spat out a mouthful of watery sick into the sink.

     She heard the back door open as Craig re-entered, she ducked her head lower into the sink.

     “Too much for you?” He laughed and opened the fridge beside her. The glass shelf thundered as Craig rolled out a beer.

     He turned towards where she leant over the sink, the cool porcelain soothed her burning skin. “It’s fine now. It must’ve been a cat,” he said. “I’ll get some net to put over the pond at the weekend.”

     Craig reached around Jane’s waist to where her plastic pill organiser sat in the corner of the worktop. “What’s going on over here?” He shook the box, so the pills rattled.

     “I didn’t know they were there,” The high register of her voice unconvincingly feigned surprise. “I looked all morning and couldn’t find them.” Jane stared out the window avoiding her husband’s eyes. As the light disappeared beyond the glass, everything went dark.

     “These are for you, so you can keep your head on straight. You have to remember to take them,” Craig glared at her until she closed her eyes.

     “But I did. I’ve been taking them. I promise.” Jane fidgeted as she spoke, twisting the ring upon her finger, round, and round, then stopped.

     Craig shook his head as he opened the microwave door and inserted a plate of food. He allowed the door to slam shut again. Jane flinched.

     The next morning, Craig woke early for work. Jane heard his alarm blare on and off from six as he snoozed it over and over. When he finally got up, he performed a yoga routine during which he accidentally kicked her foot. He then took a phone call from the edge of their bed. Jane pulled the covers over her head, counting her breaths until the numbers floated before her as clear shapes. The door scuffed along the carpet as Craig shoved it open, he didn’t bother to pull it closed again.

     Wrapped up in the covers of the bed, Jane held her breath until she heard the front door shut behind him. The house was quiet save for the sound of Craig’s van chugging as he reversed out of the drive.

     Jane sat up and reflexively glanced over to where until recently a mirror had hung on the wall. A rectangle of clean, unfaded paint now stood in its stead. In one of the corners, a jagged sliver of glass remained attached to a solitary screw in the wall.

     With one hand Jane tugged the heavy curtains aside, allowing light to creep into the room. The garden lay still beyond the window, bathed in amber tones. A pigeon landed amongst the verdant greenery, cocking its head at the vibrant plants looming above it. Dew evaporated off leaves in swathes of steam, a mimicry of the rainforests from which the plants originated, as Craig often reminded her. The water of the pond reflected a dappled blue as the water moved choppily to and fro.

     Jane looked harder at the pond certain that her eyes were deceiving her.

     The water moved as if waves in the sea. Lurching and sloshing over the sides of the pond, it flooded the surrounding flower beds. A fish flew through the air, the white koi turned crimson with blood. It landed not far from the patio doors.

     It was here.

     Jane hurried toward the garden determined to handle the matter herself.

     Water continued to surge from the pond as she turned the back door key in the lock. There was a click as the door released and swung open, the water was suddenly still.

     Stood at the edge of the pond, Jane peered in. Beneath the surface of the frothy water, something huge and dark moved slowly. It was shadowy and shapeless, a black blob that moved with the exaggerated ripples of the water.

     Whatever it was, it filled Jane with dread.

     Just a few metres away was a thing devious enough to slaughter fish and evade detection. Jane turned away in disbelief, before turning back again to be sure. Unmistakably it was there, clear in the daylight. A shifting, turning, massive thing at the bottom of the pond.

     Jane returned moments later, clutching a rake, her head buzzing with overlapping thoughts. With an almost steady hand, she dipped the rake into the water and pushed it underneath the creature. She pushed down hard; the wretched thing requiring the whole weight of her body to force it from the depths of the pond.

     A dome formed as its body tried to break the surface of the water. Its hideous features became more visible as it rose higher.

     Jane stifled a scream as a human head appeared from the depths of the pond. Its fishy eyes pleaded for no more. Jane shuddered and stopped, leaving the creature suspended in the no-man’s land between the air and water. Its head swung around limply.

     Body odour and salt burned Jane’s nose, rendering her weak. The stench rolled off it like the waves to which it belonged. Endlessly long, black hair, clasped like pondweed around the pond-woman’s body and her eyes were almost sealed shut with purple bruises. One of Craig’s dirty socks unceremoniously parted her thin, cracked lips.

     Jane wanted to drop the rake. She thought she could let the woman fall back into the water, forgotten. This whole thing could be dismissed as a figment of madness, she could pretend.

     She caught a glimpse of her own face in the pond’s reflection, her green bruises made the two look like sisters.

     Jane pushed harder on the handle and hoisted the poor thing out of the water, dropping her onto the ground next to the pond. She collapsed into the mud beside the creature, her body heaved with broken sobs as she tried to comprehend what lay in front of her.

     The woman from the pond weakly thrashed on the ground. Below her waist, her shimmering, fishy tail was attached by a rusted chain and clamp to the bottom of the pond. A weeping wound around the tight clasp on her tail proved that escape was something she had attempted many times before. The merwoman was crudely dressed in what appeared to be one of Jane’s old silk nightdresses, a skimpy thing she had bought to make an impression upon her husband. He had never been very excited when Jane had worn it. Clearly, he preferred it on his whore. The lacy bra cups were dirtied, and one was ripped clean away exposing the mermaid’s breast. Deep bitemarks covered the inflamed nipple, Jane winced as her eyes fell upon it, remembering how it felt. Large, bloody patches covered the hem of the negligee. The wearer scrabbled to pull it down, afraid to receive more of the assaults which she had grown accustomed to expect. The women stared at each other in horror, unable to believe the existence of the other.

     Craig appeared suddenly at the opposite end of the garden path.

     “Do you know where my golf clubs are? I’m playing a round after work tonight,” he strode toward them, seemingly unaware of the mermaid on the lawn.

     Cracked words spilled from Jane’s mouth. Tears ran down her face as she pulled herself up from the mud, her voice grew louder with each insult. She became animated, waving her hands in supplication. Her palm brushed against the other woman who recoiled in terror. Jane’s fingers slid along the wet, slimy skin of the other.

     Craig’s face clouded with confusion as he looked hard at the spot his wife pointed to, “But there’s nothing there.”

     Jane picked up the rake from where it lay partially hidden in the undergrowth. She lunged toward Craig with the tool. All the screaming fell silent.



BIO

Hannah McIntyre is an aspiring novelist who has had short stories published in both Emerging Worlds and From Arthur’s Seat. Her creative non-fiction work has also been featured in All Your Stories. Hannah honed her craft in her undergraduate Creative Writing studies undertaken at Lancaster University and is now studying for a Creative Writing Masters degree at the University of Edinburgh.







KEYHOLE MAW

by Diane Webster


The keyhole maws like a cave opening
until the spelunker’s key wiggles, jiggles,
slides backside down into the gap
dodging stalactites jutting
into jigsaw-puzzle-like jags
until fit tightens at extremity;
the key rotates to free its form-fitting grip,
and a tunnel opens into a cavern
unlocking a room to wander treasures
until exploration halts, and the key
reverses, shimmies out
leaving a keyhole gaping again.



STONE NEST


Beside the river the stone’s footprint
betrays its passing to the hunter
who kneels and presses his hand
into the imprint letting his fingertips
trace how long ago it had passed,
how much it weighed,
how long this had been home.

He searches the trail ahead for tossed
skid marks or broken shards,
but only this sole indenture
pocks the nearest horizon.

The river’s runoff rumbles
over sisters, brothers, cousins
perhaps this stone itself
holding its breath until the shore
carves farther east around the bend,
and dry land welcomes the stone
into its nest again.



CLOCK TICKS


Like a clock
in silence –
tick, tick, tick.
Waiting for the alarm
to go off; waiting
for the alarm
not to go off.

Wanting the clock
to stop ticking!
But what if it does?
Listening to
tick, tick, tick.



STORY PROBLEM


At the same time
two crows leap
from the same branch
of the same dead tree.

One flies east; one flies west.
One flies at 12 miles per hour;
one flies at 15 miles per hour.
One flies into a head wind
blowing at 20 miles per hour;
one flies with the tail wind
of 20 miles per hour.
In 31 minutes how far
will each crow be from the other?

Who cares?
One crow spots a deer carcass
alongside the road and swoops
down for a snack.
One crow dips its wing
and spirals into the sky
then dives down to land
lightly on a fence post.
It faces the wind and pretends
to fly like a dog
poking its head out a car window.



WARY EDGES


Feral cats
like homeless people
slink around the edges.

Wary of eye-to-eye
contact they lie low
in you-don’t-really-
see-me mode.

Comfortable only
in their own clowders
of tents, cardboard boxes,
sleeping bags coiled
together like curled up cats
lying in cinnamon roll buns
ready for the baking
when the sun rises.




BIO

Diane Webster‘s work has appeared in El Portal, North Dakota Quarterly, New English Review, Verdad and other literary magazines. She had a micro-chap published by Origami Poetry Press in 2022, 2023 and 2024. One of Diane’s poems was nominated for Best of the Net in 2022. Diane retired in 2022 after 40 years in the newspaper industry.







Gather Sainted Jellyfish, ‘Tis The August Bloom

by Cor de Wulf


Hugging her knees, Anja buries her feet deeper in the sand. Out past the lighthouse, a gentle tide rolls shoreward, the sea’s fury calmed by an unusually mild day. Seeing the light still turning atop the tower, she wonders if De Haven is on another of his benders and makes a mental note to pay a visit on her way home, just to see that the old lighthouse keeper hasn’t fallen into anything more serious than one of his stupors. Sober and not, old De Haven has always been kind to her, his docile nature an antidote, however transitory, to Karel’s limitless venom. Envying De Haven’s seclusion, how it satisfies him in every way that hers does not, she wipes her eyes. These days, there is little that doesn’t bring her to tears.

Blinking, she notices that several jellyfish have washed ashore. When another wave crawls up the beach, more are ferried up with the foam, hinting at the numbers infesting the bay, sheltering in the strangely warm waters. Picturing them out in the shallows—membranous bells aglow with sunlight, thin-spun tentacles billowing in the current—she wonders if they know how close they are to being pitched up onto dry land, to being abandoned in a world they’re not suited to. As more of them are brought up with the surf, she wonders if any creature is truly suited to this world; certainly, she is not—something of which Karel is always quick to remind her, more and more frequently in their boy’s presence. With Karel’s crusade to break what remains of her beleaguered spirit, young Dani has grown more distant, his water-pale eyes becoming almost as empty as his father’s. She knows she’s losing the battle against all the things she cannot spare her boy, all the things that Karel is planning for him—things meant to change him for ever.

Staring out to sea, she tries to recall a gentler time, that time before Karel: the time of Jeroen. A guileless boy, he called her Anjike, a lover’s name that, on his lips, tasted of so much promise. She pictures a distant hot day, another bloom offering up its sacrifices to melt into the footprints she and Jeroen left in the wet sand. He called them Medusas, the lilt of it making her young face blush as he told her everything he knew about jellyfish: boneless, brainless, strange beings sensing their world through nerve endings and synaptic pulses; wired not to think, only to react; phantasms pulled by tide and hunger, ethereal beings that mesmerize then devour, mouth and anus one organ; solitary creatures gathering in yearly blooms, those enormous swarms briefly seized by some primal instinct for the safety of an inestimable multitude—all attributes, she laughs dolefully, shared by Karel. If he only shared their same lifespan, measured in months. But not Karel: he’s as suited to this world as I am not. And now, he means to prove it to me.

Wiping at her eyes again, she is still trying to accept that today is the day Karel is packing her away to Castricum aan Zee, to the sanatorium that will house her until his and Dani’s return. Her will no longer her own, she too is to be devoured by the medusae: having provoked her unraveling, Karel has declared her incompetent to hold sway over his son, has prescribed corrective treatments. He has decided that, stunted by her coddling, his boy now needs his father’s intervention, needs the company of men, needs to learn what the world is made of—and too, what it is, when necessary, to unmake it.

But Anja clings to Dani like a buoy, her only victory, her one contribution to a callous world undeserving of her son—the only worthwhile thing to come from a marriage so swiftly dissipated that she wonders if it was ever real, a marriage that never brought a fraction of the warmth she found with the gentle Jeroen before he disappeared. But we were happy for a short while, Karel and I, weren’t we—before it went so terribly wrong with the world?

When the breeze shifts, Anja glimpses in the corner of her eye movement down the beach: the postmaster’s boy—spindly, freckled face pinched against the sun’s glare—shuffles towards her, bare feet kicking up sand. She knows his name but, like so many things of late, she can’t recall it. Clearly unaware of the stranded jellies in his path, she is wondering why she feels no impulse to cry out a warning when he begins to shriek. Jerking upright as though shaken from a dream, horrified by the suffering brought on by her dereliction, her shame sears white hot, like the medusa’s sting. Head down, the boy’s squeals piercing her brain, she bolts for her shortcut through the dunes, forgetting entirely about checking in on the kindly old De Haven.



BIO

Cor de Wulf divides their life between the Pacific Northwest, Normandy, and the Zuid-Limburg region of the Netherlands. Their short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Club Plum, Every Day Fiction, Ink in Thirds, and Blood Tree Literature, which awarded De Wulf’s work first prize in its 2024 RE:BUILD contest. De Wulf has also recently completed their first novel.







The Shopping List

by P.A. Farrell


“Get some help if you need it” is swirling around in his head and lowly murmurs from his chapped lips as he approaches the store.

The cold wind, signaling a change of seasons, is pushing shoppers through the open arms of the market’s automatic doors. Once inside they disperse like so many insects.

Small clusters of shoppers, faces aglow and pink-blushed from the raw wind, form around bright, inviting displays of holiday merchandise, special foods and anything that will entice money from their pockets.

He is standing alone, his face a blank mask flecked with spots of beard. His mouth moves silently, uttering words only he hears. Why is he here? What does he want? No one notices. They bend their shoulders like football players and rush forward, attacking the next aisle. Carts bump into him—no explanation or comment. Short coughs and sighs of relief fill the air as the people melt in colorful streaks down the aisles, disappearing behind racks of food.

A thin man in his fifties, wearing a bicycle helmet. He is the only shopper not moving past this one display. His helmet is tightly strapped beneath his chin: someone wants him home safe. No shopping basket or cart. Only a single, clear plastic bag from the overhead rack clutched in his long hand.

The display is of fruits and small, delectable treats. He stands before it and raises a phone to his ear and says, “Apricots, you want apricots? OK, only four. Right, only four? Yeah, four.” He has the order, but he remains fixed in his spot. His eyes shift back and forth, seeking, but what?

Just then, as I select fruit, he turns toward me. I can see telltale facial features that tell me he has mental challenges driving his indecision that I don’t. Gingerly picking up one piece of fruit, he half turns to me and asks, “Is this an apricot?” He’s picked up a peach.

“No,” I answer in the kindest voice I can muster. “It’s not an apricot. These are peaches.” I point toward the apricots.

“I’m a little disabled. Can you help me?” He purses his lips, lower one forward, eyes fixed on the fruit display. It’s a request no one could refuse. An odor of mothballs surrounds him.

“You’re doing fine.” I begin picking up apricots and telling him how to select them. I point out bruises and spots. He watches intently until he has four for his plastic bag. I tell him to be sure to keep the fruit in the refrigerator.

He lifts the phone—the call, it seems, had continued while we spoke—and speaks. “You have to keep them in the fridge when I get home.”

“My name’s Tommy,” he says almost casually as he looks at the fruit. I tell him my name, and he repeats it back to me. Then he turns and walks away with his plastic bag and fruit, still on the phone. “No, I got four. A nice lady helped.”

Quickly, he is lost in the blur of aisles and people struggling with burdened shopping carts which continue to bump and push him with little regard for his direction or intention. He seems absorbed in figuring out where to pay, unaware of the disturbances around him.

That simple “I’m a little disabled” repeats in my head. No shame, just a statement of fact. I’m wondering if his mother was responsible for helping him with his self-esteem on that issue and if she was on the phone as he shopped, wanting him safe.



BIO

P. A. Farrell is a psychologist and published author with McGraw-Hill, Springer Publishing, Cafe Lit, Ravens Perch, Humans of the World, and Scarlet Leaf Review, writes for Medium.com, and has published self-help books. She lives on the East Coast of the U.S.







COMPOST OF MY CHILDREN’S CHILDREN

by J.A. Lane


Gathering amongst my body
(camping out in a sense)
are images that’ll remain until my
flesh, bones, and blues become the
compost within the garden of my children’s children.

Steadily able, probably more-than at this moment,
daydreaming of the promised life of
rejoicing and praising and singing,
all while imagining the growth of my
children’s children and their garden.



GRAVITATING TOWARD THE MELANCHOLY FONDNESS I ONCE SHARED WITH A STRANGER NAMED GILDA


I got lost.
Somewhere between the
yippies! and the trees
I was awakened to
the scent of an hours old cigarette.
There, within the
night dives, I tried
to peek at the fortune of her shimmer.
Gilda smiled like I always knew she could.
I am found.



THE LAST DRAG FROM 12/18/1978


permeates and bathes
the night lungs in a warmth you haven’t
felt in what some think of as decades; but you call
them years. The momentary respite is long enough to think
it’ll keep on and on and on. Your eyes open to nothing
but snow; just a man in the cold,
waiting for life.



BIO

J. A. Lane is a writer whose short stories, plays, and poems focus on exploring moments in time that often examine the depths of the human condition. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.







The Land of Mist and Snow
Winter Coat
Footprint
Ice Storm
No Lifeguard on Duty
Shield
Solstice
Winterreise
Montrose Beach
Rogers Park



ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kevin Nance is a freelance photographer, arts journalist and poet in Lexington, Kentucky. His photography has been exhibited in galleries, libraries and hospitals in Lexington, Chicago, Portland, and other cities, and published in book form in “Even if: Photographs and Haiku” (University of Kentucky Arts in Healthcare, 2020). His writing and photography have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Poets & Writers Magazine and other publications. As an arts journalist, he currently contributes regularly to the Lexington Herald-Leader, Ace Magazine and UnderMain.

https://kevinnance.tumblr.com/

How to Read 100 Books in a Year

by CL Glanzing


Reading one hundred books in a year is probably not that unusual. And yet, when I mention it to friends or colleagues, they look surprised.

Why?

I could never do that.

Now you’re just showing off.

Well, contemporary wisdom (i.e. Instagram) states that your 30s are the time for unlearning all the conformity you learnt in your 20s and returning to the feral weirdo you were as a child.

If you asked me where I could be found between the ages of 4 and 10, the answer would probably be reading a book. Under my bed. Under a chair. Upside-down on the monkeybars – now there was a trick that required discipline.

As an only (lonely) child with a Montessori school background, I was used to entertaining myself. And what better adventures could I possibly experience than the ones flickering in my mind? Ghosts, dragons, elves, mysteries, children living off the land or surviving in the woods. Books were easier to operate than a VCR.

Then, I transitioned into an ordinary, American-style Elementary school with schedules and designated snack-time, and books in a completely separate wing of the building.

I discovered quickly that reading carried no social capital. No one cared that I could read. In fact, two teachers told me to slow down – and not make the other kids feel bad. My fifth grade teacher took Hatchet by Gary Paulsen out of my hands on the playground and demanded that I go engage with the other kids.

One year, I decided to read all the books nominated for a YA award. I was terrible at sports, but having a little reading goal set a thrill inside me. I was competing against myself. It was the ultimate game of solitaire. I wasn’t looking for praise or validation, but when I finished all thirty nominated books, I genuinely felt alone in accomplishment. I’m sure that people who collect belly button lint must feel the same way.

So my hobby, along with so many other childhood hobbies, dwindled. I only read books assigned by school or university courses. I would still buy books, ones I thought would look intellectual and interesting on my shelves, and never crack the spines. During one particularly stressful exam period, I just opened fiction books at random – the middle of the fucking book – and read until I fell asleep. I couldn’t commit.

In January 2020, I decided to cauterise my festering reading habits and engage in some serious exposure therapy: 20 books in 2020. Incredibly, I achieved this goal and it was due to two factors: a pandemic and moving to a country with free libraries. Like for most people, lockdown was confrontational about how I spend my time. What do you do with the hours you should be commuting, socialising – doing literally anything outside your apartment?

But the greatest gift I received was access to a public library. ‘You know these books are free, right?’ I want to shout as I grab library patrons by the lapels.

I have actually only bought one book this entire year.

It would be impossible for me to afford to purchase 100 books per year. Let alone house them, or reconcile the environmental impact. (Would I recycle them? Pass them on? Self-entomb using them as bricks?)

I have never been more aware that access to books is a privilege. Literacy itself is a privilege.

If you don’t have a library card, I strongly urge you to get one (even if you don’t think you’ll use it) just to bump up the recorded number of users. Local authorities are so quick to close libraries thinking it’s an easy way to save money. But we have a duty to keep them funded. Libraries provide free information for those who may not be able to afford access to books, audiobooks, or the internet.

Does borrowing from libraries still support authors? Absolutely. Publishers like to allege that library sales impede their profitability (which is convenient when publishers set prices and royalties). But libraries often pay two or three times the retail cost of a book, and have a demand to buy multiple copies if it’s popular. Some libraries even have a pay-per-use system where authors get royalties for every check-out. And who says you might not go and buy the book later if you really like it? Bookshops and libraries are not mutually exclusive ideas.

But enough about that.

After I managed to read 20 books in a year, of course I needed to up the ante. 40 books. Then 60 books. And then, here we are, 100 books.

The truth is that I could not have read so many books without the work of some truly extraordinary authors. Their words inspired me, delighted me, comforted me, and made me feel grateful to be alive.

My tastes may not be for everyone, but looking back over my 15 favourite reads (or re-reads) of 2023, I realise how haunted this list is.

Firstly, haunted locations – chilling places full of mysterious atmosphere, poignant memories, or inexplicable tragedies.

The Field by Robert Seethaler showed me the entire history of a small Austrian town, told by the residents of their local cemetery, with tender poetry akin to Spoon River Anthology. Then there are the desolate, apocalyptic landscapes. I starved and despaired with a man and his son in The Road by Cormac McCarthy and then I starved and despaired again with a group of forgotten women in I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. Books like these make us wonder: How could this happen? And then, worse, Could this happen to me? What would I do?

When I’m in a reading slump, I reread Shirely Jackson, inarguably one of the greatest writers in history (excuse me while I blow a kiss to her framed portrait on my desk). Dark Tales is a masterclass in horror short story writing. I re-read The Haunting of Hill House, which happens to be one of my favourite books ever. And then I had the privilege of reading this book’s modern reincarnation in Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt. A love letter to Jackson with all the horrifying fears that queer and trans people face on a daily basis.

Then there were the haunted spaces of transformation. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield brought me to tears with her superb writing, beautiful metaphors, and a love threatened by a supernatural transformation. Perfect for fans of The Southern Reach Trilogy or Love and Other Thought Experiments. Not all haunted spaces are inherently malevolent though, as can be seen in Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which is a truly joyful exploration of a surreal environment. Sister Maiden Monster by Lucy A Snyder made me mutter out loud, “fucking genius” several times. Zombies, octopodes, pandemics, cosmic beings, and queerness. What more could I want?

Secondly, there are haunted characters – people stalked by their past and difficult choices, unable to cope with their present surroundings. I adore these psychology-driven works, perhaps because they make the mess inside of my own head seem just as comprehensible. 

You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian was un-put-downable. Wonderfully grotesque character examinations in a stellar collection of short stories. You would think she couldn’t outdo Cat Person, but she can. On a train journey, I listened to the audiobook version of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and heard the author himself narrate vignettes of intergenerational trauma, immigrant identities, and queer first love, as tears ran down my face under my N95 mask.

Mrs March by Virginia Feito has already received so much praise this year, there’s little I can add to it, except saying that it is worth the hype – like The Driver’s Seat meets Mrs. Dalloway. There’s nothing I love more than a messy, female protagonist. And I got her in spades with Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. A feral scream of female rage that I encourage all women to read – whether you have children or are childfree. I enjoyed seeing women blossoming in callous wildernesses. Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy gave me a haunted protagonist trying to save a dying species. The New Wilderness by Diane Cook is another favourite re-read, telling the complicated, resentful story of a mother and daughter surviving in a national park as part of a climate change experiment.

You may think that 15 treasured books out of 100 (15%) are low odds, and make the process hardly worth the outcome. But you would be wrong.

I wish everyone in the world were as privileged as me to be able to read 100 books. And experience 100 different lives in a year.

So if you want to twist my arm and ask me for some digestible pearls of wisdom – CL, how can I also read 100 books in a year? Here we go:

  1. Get a library card.
  2. If you want to buy a book, try to prioritise buying from independent shops or sellers that keep high streets alive and ensure that authors are paid fairly. Fun tip: treat it as a date location. Trust me on this. It’s better than a movie or a drink in a loud bar. Take your paramour or your spouse. Walk around the stacks and discuss the book-jackets. Then buy them a book.
  3. Stop reading the books you think you should be reading. I will never read Jane Austen. I have never read Dickens. The phrase “but it’s won so many awards” will never entice me. Read what actually grabs you. What punches you in the gut. There are no guilty pleasures. If you only want to read vampire smut or nonfiction botanical encyclopaedias – that is fine. Anyone that judges your reading tastes clearly has to work on themselves, and learn how to say, ‘hmm, that’s not for me, but I’m glad you enjoy it.’
  4. If you don’t know what you like: read widely. Try a new genre. You might find a new author that speaks to you. Experiment until you find “your thing”. I know so many people that thought they didn’t like reading until they found the right genre.
  5. Join a bookgroup. Even a small one. Even a virtual one. It will give you the monthly consistency of reading at least one book.
  6. There is nothing wrong with listening to audiobooksinstead of reading with your eyes.
  7. Normalise talking about books. Ask your family and friends and colleagues what they’re reading. Ask them what they like about it.
  8. Stuck in a reading rut? Re-read a book that you liked in the past. It will remind you what you’re looking for, and you might even read it with new eyes. To quote T.S. Eliot, we might “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I am grateful that I have reignited my bibliophila and rediscovered an activity that I adored as a child. I know that I will continue devouring books for the rest of my life.

And what about 2024? Will I read 100 books again?

Maybe. We’ll see how it goes. 

BIO

CL Glanzing is an international nomad, currently living in the UK. Her work has been published in Luna Station Quarterly, The Writing Disorder, The Quarterl(ly) Journal, Jet Fuel Review, Uncharted Magazine, Meniscus Literary Journal, Minds Shine Bright Anthology, and received nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She is currently pursuing her dream of living in a haunted lighthouse.







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